XXIX. Faith as a Power The consciousness of power, energy, strength is one of the most characteristic features of the Christian experience and life, as they are described by Paul. “According to the power that worketh in us” is the range of our achievement, “above all that we ask or think.” (Ephesians 3:20.) So he declares in Php 4:13, “I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me”. The energy is the Divine element in the man, present in him from the beginning, making man originally in the image of God, but weakened, obscured, apparently almost extirpated by sin and misunderstanding of the nature of God (yet never wholly and finally killed), and needing to be reinvigorated by the process that begins with the apprehension of the work and meaning and power of Jesus. The Gospel which Paul preaches is not in word but in power. Hence he hated mere empty talk and vain discussion about even the highest subjects: they distract the attention of men from the real work of life: they tend to degenerate into quibbles of words, and empty logomachy. What he urges and desires and prays for in his converts is that they may be “strengthened with all power, according to the might of His glory . . . bearing fruit unto every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God”. (Colossians 1:10-11.) This power, therefore, is co-extensive with “the knowledge of God”. The power and the knowledge grow together stage by stage: the one cannot increase without the other increasing. What is from one side knowledge of God, is from another side action like that of God. Such knowledge is not abstract theory or mere passive thought. It is not gained by a process of acquisition, like the growing knowledge of mathematics or languages. It is gained instantaneously through the power of God seizing and holding fast the nature of the man. It is in a sense perfect and complete from the first, because the man instantaneously sees God once and for all time, because he grasps instantaneously the nature of God and of his relation to God. Yet in another sense it can grow continuously and indefinitely, not by becoming more complete and rounded in whole than it was at the first, but by expanding on all sides, and filling up more effectively the activities of the man, and enabling him to carry his activity into a wider range of relations with the world around, and thus, as it were, making him realise with growing completeness the relation of the Divine nature to the whole universe, and the way in which the Divine nature fills and interpenetrates and constitutes men and history and everything that is. This knowledge begins from completeness and culminates in completeness: the growth lies in the increase of energy and mastery, because its nature is energy. It begins in the re-creation of a human mind and character: “ye have put off the old man with his doings and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him”. (Colossians 3:9-10.) New creation is everything. Nothing else, neither ritual nor want of ritual, is of the smallest consequence in this rebirth of the human energy “but new creation”. (Galatians 6:15.) This aspect of the knowledge of God is, of course, rightly stated and emphasised by many writers. We would, however, not regard this as a sort of corollary or additional chapter to an account of Paulinism. This constitutes and is Paulinism: this is the essence of the teaching and Gospel of Paul. If we speak of adoption, and justification, and the imputing to man of the righteousness of Christ, all these are merely attempts to explain the nature of the inexplicable and the Divine: they are metaphors, and some have become poor metaphors to us, though they were rich and instructive metaphors to a former age. They have in large degree lost their meaning to us; and the study of Pauline teaching frequently degenerates into a study of past methods and of old attempts at an explanation of Paulinism, Paul had to drive home into his hearers some conception of what he was aiming at; and in the attempt he had to use their ways of looking at the world, and to work on their habits of thought. No one knew so well as he that this was unsatisfactory and imperfect. Hence he always turned from the theoretical side of teaching to the practical: he exhibited to them the knowledge of God in the process of exerting itself actively: “he placarded before them the crucifying of Jesus”; (Galatians 3:1.) “he preached Christ crucified”. (1 Corinthians 1:2-3.) There are two instructive variations of the fundamental truth in the letter to the Galatians: —
5:66:15 For in Christ Jesus neither cir- For neither is circumcision any cumcision availeth anything, thing, nor uncircumcision; but nor uncircumcision; but faith new creation. working through love. The second explains the first definition, and the first explains the second. The whole Epistle was written in one mood of feeling, at one time, and in the same white and fervent heat of passionate enthusiasm; and the two phrases which conclude the two definitions are reiterations of what Paul felt so deeply. In Galatians 6:15, writing with his own hand, he is briefly recapitulating the gist of the whole letter; and just as was customary in placarding laws and ordinances and public documents, (The very wordπρογράθειν, to set forth openly, to placard in public, refers (as Lightfoot rightly remarks) to the custom of publishing documents of this class by a public copy in a conspicuous place before the eyes of all citizens.) he puts in large letters the most important points. So with this point. “Faith working through love” is equivalent to “a new creation”. This energy of the Christian is the Spirit of God working in him. What is sometimes called by Paul faith working in him is at other times expressed as the Spirit of God. These are equivalent terms and ways of making clear the one fundamental power. I do not call it the one fundamental fact; because it is urgently important to remember that there are no facts, no hard stationary situations: there are only acts, processes, force, energy. There is the power of evil, “the flesh,” “the devil,” sweeping away the nature of man from God, and there is the power of faith, i.e. the Spirit, seizing him, renewing his mind, (Romans 12:2.) reinvigorating the Divine element that had been almost killed within him, bringing him towards God, setting him free from the power of sin which ends in death and turning his attention to the things of the Spirit, (Romans 8:2;Romans 8:5.) making him a temple of God in which dwells the Spirit of God. (1 Corinthians 3:16.) In that last metaphor of the temple, the idea of force and growth is lost: it is a very external figure, and has no grip of the inner nature of the process. It was, however, suitable after a fashion to the Corinthians, who were new converts from paganism, and continued from old habit to regard the power of God as something that dwelt in a temple. Paul had to raise their old way of thinking to a higher level, so that they could see more clearly the true nature of the relation between God and man. Through this metaphor he leads up the mind of the Corinthians to the higher, in fact to the highest possible and supreme level: “since you are the temple of God, the Spirit of God dwelleth in you”. Beyond that there is nothing greater: there is nothing more completely and finally true: “the kingdom of God is within you,” for “the Spirit of God dwelleth in you”. The result of this indwelling Spirit of God is to quicken and strengthen the capacity of the man to love. In love the human nature approaches most closely to God, for the love that God entertains towards man is the initial and the final law of the world. “Faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6) is another expression for this result: “the Spirit working through love” is an equivalent statement of the law of Christian life. The apparently supernatural powers which were seen occasionally in specially striking manifestations were the “spiritual gifts” (χαρίσματα τὰπνευματικά.) of which the early writers often speak, and which the Corinthians so eagerly desired and aimed at. They are great and impressive expressions of the one permanent power dwelling in the Christian man; but, being exceptional in their appearance and not absolutely continuous, they are really less true and lofty and lasting, though they appear more striking to the external observer. It is the permanent, and not the occasional, that is the really and fundamentally Divine. As Professor W. P. Paterson (The Apostles’ Teaching, i. p. 82. To Dr. Paterson’s conversations, when we were colleagues in Aberdeen, I owe more than can be adequately expressed.) expresses it, “The Christian life consists, not in occasional spiritual exaltation, but in a walk in the Spirit”. (Galatians 5:25.) Hence Paul, while respecting such powers and occasional manifestations, warns the Corinthians that these are not the greatest things. Even though miracles seem to fail, yet miracles are not the most important expressions of the Spirit and power of God. The continuous expression of that Spirit and power in love is the greatest, the truest, the most lasting. (Corinthians 13:13.) This spirit of God co-operates with the innate sympathy of man for God, and strengthens the natural perception of man in the belief that he is the child of God: this is natural to all men, so long as they give free play to their own nature. (So Paul said to the Athenians,Acts 17:27-29, quoting the words of more than one among the Greek poets.) “The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God.” (To “bear witness” here means to confirm and strengthen the perception that is naturally existent in man.)
Further, the Spirit of God produces in man the power of insight into the nature of God; it is a continuous and growing revelation of God to him; it advances and widens his knowledge of God: “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, keeping the eyes of your heart enlightened that ye may know”: (Ephesians 1:17-18.) “we received the Spirit which is from God . . . the Spirit which searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God . . . that we might know”. (1 Corinthians 2:12;1 Corinthians 2:10;1 Corinthians 2:12.)
It also gives us the power of expressing these “deep things of God”. On this power Paul’s experience induced him to lay special stress in writing to these Corinthians (1 Corinthians 2:13.) who rather prided themselves on their ability to conceive and express philosophically the truth of God. Paul tells them that only through the power of the Spirit can they express the things of the Spirit. Poetic phraseology, the technical terms of philosophy, metaphors drawn by man from the experience of life, all were inadequate and ineffective. Doubtless, Paul would have included in this list of inadequate expressions some of his own metaphors in so far as they were human and external: only in virtue of the enthusiasm and the passionate feeling that surged through them did they become true: in themselves, as mere philosophical terms, they were incomplete and lifeless. “Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth; marrying spiritual ideas to spiritual words.” Philosophical terms are valueless, dead, uncreative. Paul wants spiritual terms to convey his meaning; and the intensity of his emotion gives life to them. In 1 Corinthians 1:23, Paul “preaches Christ crucified . . . the power and the wisdom of God”: the scandal of the crucifixion is called not a fact but a power, the expression of God’s ruling providence. This power and wisdom of God is not merely a force outside of man: it is also in man, expressing itself through the right action of man.
Again, that the idea of force or power is dominative in Paul appears in 2 Timothy 2:15, which has always been misunderstood through failure to perceive that the writer is describing the motive power of an immensely strong instinct in the human mind: see the next Section.
