The apostle Paul: a sketch of the development of his doctrine

Author's Preface To The English Edition

/ nr % RANSLATION into another tongue is for any ^- book an honourable and a perilous experience. The author of Lapotre Paul is fully conscious both of the honour and the peril. The success of a work .

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which is in any degree original depends not only upon its intrinsic merit, but also, to a great extent, upon a certain instinctive harmony already established between the mind of the author and the requirements of the public to which he addresses himself. No plant is rooted in its native soil by finer and more numerous fibres than is a literary work in the country and society in which it was produced. It is with some anxiety that I inquire whether Uapotre Paul, under the new circumstances in which it is about to appear, will again meet with the inner correspondence and the moral and spiritual sympathy necessary to make it intelligible and to justify its publication.

There are two things, however, which re-assure me. The first is the distinguished patronage under which my work is presented to English readers, the

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care, learning and judgment of those who are responsible for the translation of my work. My further ground of confidence is derived from the hero of the book himself and the universal interest which he inspires. Where should he be studied, loved and venerated, if not in England ? Are not English Christians, in a very special sense, his spiritual children ? Do they not owe to him the character of their religion, the form of their doctrine, even their principles of religious liberty and civil right ? Is not Anglo- Saxon society his work ? Does not his spirit pervade the thousand ramifications of English civilization, extending from individual conduct to the highest scientific activity, from domestic life to the political debates of Parliament ? Who is there, we may ask, not among theologians only, but amongst all earnest and cultured men, who is not interested in every attempt made to understand the apostle better, and to explore the inner workings of his mind ?

Paul as a missionary and shepherd of souls is great indeed. There is nothing in all antiquity to compare with the record of his travels and his triumphs. Feeble in body, living by his toil like a workingman, this weaver of Tarsus enters the vast world of Paganism, another Alexander, to conquer the faith and the reason of mankind. Merely to form such a resolution was heroic. Darkness covered the earth ; the peoples, to use the language of the prophet, were sitting in the valley of the shadow of death. Paul entered, alone at first, into these depths of darkness,

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with the Gospel torch in his hand ; and wherever he went he left in his track from Damascus to Rome a succession of young expanding Churches, the radiant centres of a new life, the fruitful germs of modern society forming already in the midst of the old world. In all this, I repeat, there is something truly heroic.

There is something greater still in the mind that inspired this mighty work, and of which, in truth, the work itself is only the exhibition and luminous transcription in the visible order of things. Not only did Paul conquer the pagan world for Jesus Christ ; he accomplished a task no less necessary, and perhaps even more difficult, in emancipating at the same time infant Christianity from Judaism, under whose guardianship it was in danger of being stifled. Besides removing the centre of gravity of the new Church, by the advance of his mission, from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Ephesus, and from Ephesus to Rome, he also succeeded in disengaging from the swaddling bands of Judaism the spiritual and moral principles which constitute Christianity a progressive and universal religion.

Not that Paul can in any sense claim to be the founder of Christianity, or be compared to Jesus. The apostle gloried, and rightly, in being the servant, and not the master. It is as a servant that he is great. There was nothing creative in Paul's genius. The first impulse came from Jesus. Jesus it is who in our religious life has substituted filial relationship with the Father by means of the Holy Spirit for the viit PREFACE.

legal relationship based upon the Mosaic law and tradition. Jesus established the new covenant ; and in doing this planted His cross, if we may so say, between ancient Judaism and the Gospel, in a way that rendered void all attempts at reconciliation. On the other hand, it is equally certain that His first disciples at Jerusalem endeavoured to repair this breach. They wished to keep the new wine in the old bottles. Next to Stephen, the first martyr, it was Paul who broke the Judaistic spell. To his thinking, the Christian principle only took the place of the Jewish principle by destroying it. His conversion was, in effect, the negation of the power of the law as a means of salvation ; and his theology, centring entirely in the antithesis of faith and works, law and grace, the old things and the new, the time of bondage and the time of freedom, was but the expression in argument and theory of the moral and religious experiences which began in his conversion. Thus the external revolution had its spring in a psychological regeneration ; and it is important to grasp firmly this primary fact, if we would not mistake the meaning of the whole drama.

In reading the epistles of the great apostle, nothing strikes the attentive observer more than this psychological connexion between his doctrinal creed and his inward life. The first is the beautiful fruitage of the second. Of no other doctrine can it be so truly said, that it was lived before it was taught. It may even be affirmed that oiu minds do not properly

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apprehend it, unless we have undergone for ourselves, in some measure, the inward experience it implies. An eminent professor of history of the Sorbonne at Paris related one day that he had remained for years without in the least understanding Paul's theology, and that its meaning was made clear to him by a Christian shoemaker at Lyons. The moral crisis of conversion is, indeed, the first and best initiation into the truths of Paulinism.

But if the doctrine of the apostle Paul is always the outgrowth of his experience, it is easy to infer that it must have had a history, — that, in other words, it was developed in the order of these experiences. It is equally plain that from this historical standpoint alone shall we be able to understand it fully, and to account for the various forms it has assumed at different times and under varying circumstances. To regard it in any other way would be inevitably to pervert its character, by making it a system of abstract philosophy, and by separating it from the parent stem whence it still derives its life and truth. This has been done, it seems to me, alike by the orthodoxy of the past and by the rationalistic criticism of the Tubingen School. They both deny the existence of progress and development in Paul's doctrine ; they sever the delicate nerves, of which we have spoken, that connected his spiritual thought and his spiritual life.

The former theory assumes that he received his doctrinal system from heaven complete in its dialec-

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tical organization and its exegetical demonstrations — a thing absolutely inconceivable, since reasoning always implies effort on the part of the productive intelligence. The second school treats Paul as though, after his conversion, he had lived in solitude like a philosopher, creating by means of speculation and logic the entire doctrinal system that he was afterwards to preach, to expound, and defend before the world. In both instances there is the assumption that his mental and doctrinal development was complete from the outset, and was neither disturbed nor stimulated by new conflicts as they arose, — by the arguments of opponents, and by the experiences of his busy and exciting life.

This is humanly impossible ; and it is historically untrue. It must be clearly understood that Paul was no philosopher of the schools. The purpose or wish to construct a system^ properly so called, was wholly foreign to his mind. He was a missionary, who brought everything to bear upon his work. He learned by teaching. In every crisis of his life he looked for guidance from God. The solution of difficult questions he sought in prayer ; and the answer came sometimes like a flash of light, sometimes as the result of profound meditation, but was always regarded by him as a Divine inspiration. He studied events ; he reflected upon past experiences ; he profited by his travels and his reading. Everything, in short, furnished him with food for thought, and with opportunities for discovering the practical or theo-

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retical issues of the faith that he incessantly preached. Thus his thinking always kept pace with his outward activities ; and till the end there was a constant reaction of the one upon the other. Indisputable proofs of this will be found, we believe, in the present work.

It is on this account that we have combined the exposition of Paul's doctrine with the history of his life. The exegesis of the apostle's writings must always start from the latter, and be guided by it. The only means of understanding them, whether as a whole or in detail, is to explain them by the historical circumstances under which they originated. Thus restored to their place in history, they are no longer treatises in abstract theology ; they are in reality acts of Paul's apostolic life, weapons of warfare or means of instruction, and living manifestations from time to time of the apostle's heart and will, as well as of his genius. So they acquire for us, together with a singular dramatic interest, a truth and life which are absolutely new.

Thp historical standpoint has another advantage, and renders us a further and equally important service. It enables us to solve without prejudice or violence the important problem which modern criticism has raised with regard to the authenticity of Paul's epistles. The critics, as is well known, often argue, from the literary or dogmatic differences they have established amongst them, the impossibility of their being the work of one and the same author. They take their stand upon the group known as

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that of the great epistles — Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans ; and peremptorily set aside all those which are not exactly of the same type. As if amid changing circumstances Paul's manner of writing were not bound to undergo like changes I As if, to begin with, the epistle to the Romans were not very different from the epistle to the Galatians ! It has been forgotten that these four letters all belong to a period of scarcely three years' duration, from 55 to 58 A.D. at latest, and that the apostle's career lasted for nearly thirty years, What a long space of time elapsed, both before and after those momentous years spent at Ephesus and Corinth! How can we infer with any certainty from the four letters of Paul then written what the nature may have been of those he wrote at other periods, relating to other questions? Who would maintain that the apostle, when travelling along with Silvanus and founding the Macedonian or Corinthian Churches, wrote in the same strain to these young communities as subsequently to the Christians of Galatia, at the most exciting stage of his controversy with his Judaizing opponents ? Furthermore, is it probable that, after three or four years' imprisonment, he would indite a letter to his beloved Philippians precisely like those he had formerly written from Ephesus to Corinth, or from Corinth to Rome ? The historical doubts accumulated by the criticism of Ferdinand C. Baur and his disciples find their natural answer in the supposition of historical development in the Pauline system. This assumption docs

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not ignore, on the contrary it explains, the differences which have been pointed out between the various epistles ; nor is it in the least obliged to strain the historical exegesis for the purpose of obtaining an artificial unity and resemblance. By accepting the idea of progress, it makes room for the variations of thought and expression which exist. We perceive, for instance, that in the epistles to the Colossians, Ephesians, and Philippians, the apostle in his moral teaching has happily attained larger views of social and family duties We observe in the same w r ay that from the time of the second letter to the Corinthians, while still anticipating the glorious and speedy coming of Christ, Paul no longer hopes to see it in his lifetime ; already, we find, the foreboding of martyrdom shadows his spirit, and has rendered the visible triumph and glory of Christ a prospect more remote. There is the same development in his Christology. But none of these distinctions really affect the authenticity of the letters, so soon as we discover the chain which links them together, and can trace in them a natural and normal development, continuous from point to point.

This is the definite task that the author of this volume has endeavoured to accomplish. How far he has succeeded in reducing to a progressive series the elements previously set in contrast as mutually exclusive, and in supplying their natural explanation, it is not for him, but for his readers impartially to decide. In writing this book, he has striven to open

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out a path hitherto untrodden in Pauline studies. Others may travel farther along it, and with surer foot ; in this he will be the first to rejoice. In theological science as in practical life he sees servants only, working not for themselves but for truth and for the kingdom of God. And in offering his work to those who may read, or even criticize it, he feels that he cannot say to them anything better than that which Paul said to the Corinthians respecting their preachers : irdvra v/iwv icrriv, elre HavXos, eire "AiroXkws, elre K^a^, elre /coa/ios, elre £cor], ecre Odvcnos, ecre eveo-rcora, ecre jJueXkovra' irdvra v/jlcov, v/nel<> 8e XpiGTOv, XpiGTos he ©eov (i Cor. iii. 22, 23).

AUGUSTE SABATIER.

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*** Besides the Appendix, the English editor has thought fit to insert brief foot-notes, inclosed in square brackets [thus], on some points of controversy. M. Sabatier commands, in the greater part of his exposition, an assent so warm and admiring, that it is with reluctance one records, here and there, a dissent equally decided. He has applied the scientific method of modern historical inquiry to the life and work of the apostle Paul with great skill and penetration, and with a singular charm of treatment, of which the reader will be sensible, even through the medium, necessarily imperfect, of translation. Possibly, through the bias natural to a scholar so versed in historical and psychological criticism, he has leaned too heavily against the older " ecclesiastical theology."

It is unnecessary to bespeak for this gifted representative of French Protestant scholarship a friendly reception upon English soil. We rejoice to claim M. Sabatier, in the words he so aptly quotes from the apostle, amongst the all things that are ours.

G. G. F.

Table Of Contents

PAGE

Preface v-xvi

Introduction i

Book I

The Sources of Paul's System of Thought . 23-94 I. The First Christian Community at Jerusalem. —

Christianity and Judaism . 25

II. Stephen the Precursor of Paul.— Collision between

the Jewish and the Christian Principle . . 39

III. Paul's Conversion. — Triumph of the Christian

over the Jewish Principle 47

IV. The Genesis of Paul's Gospel . ... 71

Book II

First Period, or Period of Missionary Activity 95-134 I. The Missionary Discourses in the Acts. — The two

Epistles to the Thessalonians . . .98

II. Primitive Paulinism 112

III. First Conflicts with the Judaizing Christians. — The

Time of Crisis and. Transition .... 124

BOOK III. Second Period ; or, The Period of the Great

Conflicts 135-21 1

I. The Epistle to the Galatians ... . . .137

II. The First Epistle to the Corinthians . . .156

III. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians . . . 165

IV. The Epistle to the Romans ..... 185

Book IV

Third Period : The Paulinism of Later Times 213-272 I. The Address at Miletus. — Appearance of the Gnostic Asceticism. — New Evolution in Paul's

Theological Doctrine 214

II. The Epistles to Philemon, to the Colossians, and

to the Ephesians 225

III. The Epistle to the Philippians . . . • . 250

IV. The Three Pastoral Epistles 263

Book V

Organic Form of Paul's Theological System 273-340 I. The Person of Christ, the Principle of the Christian

Consciousness . 282

1 1. The Christian Principle in the Sphere of Psychology

(Anthropology) . . . . . . . 286

III. The Christian Principle in the Sphere of Society and History (The Religious Philosophy of

History) 307

IV. The Christian Principle in the Sphere of Metaphysics (Theology) „ . . . . .321

CONTENTS.

ADDITIONAL ESSAY ON THE EPISTLES TO TIMOTHY AND TITUS.

PAGE

"Introduction 343

I. The Pastoral Epistles in Modern Criticism . . 344 II. The Vocabulary and Style 353

III. The Personal Data 362

IV. The Doctrinal Characteristics .... 374 V. The Church System of the Pastorals . . . 390

Introduction

IT is the tendency of all tradition, and of religious tradition more especially, to resolve into type and symbol the persons of those whom it has once enshrined. It is thus that the figures of Christ's first apostles have generally assumed a sacredness and immutability resembling that of their stone statues as we see them ranged in frigid, symmetrical order on the front of our cathedrals. And yet these daring missionaries of the Christian faith were real men, men of their own race and age, each bringing his peculiar temperament and genius to bear upon the work that it had fallen to their lot to accomplish. It should be the aim of history to discover this original and distinctive physiognomy beneath legend and dogma, the individual life in the traditional type, and, in short, the man in the apostle. And such has been the end, whether consciously or unconsciously pursued, of all the work of Biblical criticism and exegesis accomplished during the last fifty years.

Unfortunately, this kind of historical resurrection is impossible for the majority of the apostles, whose work was, as it were, anonymous, and done in common, leaving no personal trace beyond a bare name, and that often uncertain and surrounded by legend. But with the thirteenth and latest apostle, Paul of

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Tarsus, the missionary to the Gentiles, the case is very different. Not only are we in undoubted possession of several of his authentic writings, but his genius and passion have inspired them with an intensity of life which renders them the free and spontaneous revelation of his soul, — one of the most powerful and original that ever came into being. True, the beginning and end of his life are involved in obscurity ; but thanks to his epistles to the Thessalonians, Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, and Philippians on the one hand, and the detailed narrative of the second part of Acts on the other, we have a vivid light thrown upon a period of more than twelve years in the very midst of the apostle's career, in which his personality stands out with wonderful distinctness.

Starting from this luminous centre, we are enabled, by means of historical and psychological induction, to trace the main tenor of his life with a fair amount of certainty. For this purpose, dates and places and external things are of minor importance. It has been our aim to write not a general biography of Paul, but a biography of his mind, and the history of his thought.

I. Progressive Character of Paulinism.

The law of development is so inseparable from the idea of life that we always assume its action, even when we cannot trace it. In the life of Paul it is strikingly obvious. The more we study his writings and theology, the more we feel that it was impossible for a mind so ardent and so laborious speedily to reach its limits and to rest in its final conclusions, and that a system of thought so richly and solidly constructed could not be completed at a stroke. The

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agency of dialectics is equally apparent with that of inspiration. At the same time, we must not think of the apostle as a professed theologian, absorbed in elaborating a speculative system. He was a missionary and a preacher. His mind followed the guidance of circumstances, equally with abstract logic ; it developed organically and spontaneously, in response to the demand for new solutions or deductions made upon it by the course of events. His great soul knew no repose ; the thinker kept pace with the missionary ; mind and will were at equal tension, and within and without were displayed the same ardour and the same energy. The Gospel that he preached to the heathen had to be freed from Judaism, and justified to the Christian understanding by experience and by Old Testament exegesis. The man who spread the name of Jesus from the borders of Palestine to the confines of the West is the same who wrote the epistles to the Romans and Colossians ; and the distance between Jerusalem and Rome is but a type of that much longer road the Gospel traversed from the Sermon on the Mount to the Christianity of these great epistles.

The course of development pursued by the apostle's doctrine lies between these two limits. Taking its departure from the first apostolic preaching, it reaches its goal in the theological system to which we have just referred. The internal progress of his thought corresponds exactly with the external progress of his mission ; and both were alike stormy and full of conflict. This history has more than a merely personal and psychological interest ; it is virtually the history of the revolution which first emancipated Christianity and constituted it an independent religion, beyond the

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sacred inclosure of the Jewish nation. This revolution, as we know, had various phases. Paul did not in his early days see the full bearing of the liberal and individualistic principle that he was introducing into the traditional faith, nor all the consequences of the work he was doing in the heathen world. They only revealed themselves to his understanding progressively. He walked bravely, but only by one step at a time, in the unknown path at the beginning of which, in spite of himself, the very special character of his conversion had placed him from the outset.

We insist on this point, because it is ignored alike by those whose theory of a mechanical and wholesale theopneustia leaves no room for the workings of the apostle's own mind, and by those who make him out to have been a sort of speculative genius, creating a priori and in solitude the system that he was afterwards to preach and defend. Take as an illustration one of the great declarations of Paul : his doctrine of the abolition of the Mosaic law as a system and a means of salvation. It is evident that he reached this position by degrees. At first he was able to content himself with having obtained at the famous conference at Jerusalem (Gal. ii. ; Acts xv.) a dispensation from circumcision for Christians of heathen origin. A few years later this had ceased to satisfy him. His mind being of an essentially dialecticcast, he rose from the concrete fact to the absolute principle. He had not set out by formulating the latter in its abstract generality, but having found from experience that the law was of no avail in the salvation of the Gentiles, it seemed to him no longer essential to the Jews ; and he ended by formulating in his epistle to the Romans his profound and original

INTRODUCTION. 5 theory as to its scope : viz. that its purpose was not to save sinners, but on the contrary to multiply sin, in order to deliver up the guilty conscience more entirely to the grace of God. Examine this theory more closely ; you will soon see traces of the violent conflicts out of which it was evolved. It is not a primitive belief, but a final conclusion — the sum of a long experience, and the end of a fierce controversy. We might further quote passages from the epistle to the Galatians (Gal. i. 10; v. 1 1) which seem to imply changes in Paul's conduct with respect to circumcision and the Christians of Palestine. But what is the use of putting forward uncertain inferences, when we have elsewhere a striking proof of the very clear consciousness the apostle had of the successive modifications and constant progress of his Christian views ? How many times he laments the incapacity of his efforts to grasp all the riches of the Gospel ! " When I was a child," he writes to the Corinthians, " I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I reasoned as a child (comp. I Cor. iii. i) ; now that I am become a man (comp. I Cor. xvi. 13), I have put away childish thoughts." Reference is here made, as the parallel passages show, to the childhood and maturity of the Christian life. Can it be doubted that the mind of the man who wrote these words obeyed the natural laws of all human knowledge, and that there were elementary conceptions which it had already left behind ? In fact, this idea of progress is inherent in Paul's theology, and essential to it. Even his present knowledge, which he regards as that of mature years, does not really satisfy him. In the recollection of progress achieved he only sees a cause and pledge of further progress. The distance separating him from child-

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hood is but an image to him of that which still separates him from the ultimate goal. At no period did his conceptions appear to him either complete or final. " Now we see as in a dim mirror ; one day we shall see face to face. My knowledge is but imperfect and partial ; one day I shall know as I have been known" (i Cor. xiii. u ff.).

The older the apostle grew, the more this natural feeling strengthened in him. This is how he wrote to the Philippians a few years before his death : " I do not imagine that I have reached the goal, nor obtained perfection ; but I am pursuing it. This one thing I do : forgetting the things which are behind me, I strenuously press toward those which are before. I see the goal, and march on to it" (Phil. iii. 12-16). The sequel clearly shows that the progress in question has as least as much reference to his mental development as to his moral perfection. " If you think differently from me in anything," he adds, "God shall make known the truth to you. Meantime, let us walk in unity in the common knowledge which we have already attained."

It would have been astonishing if an idea so natural in itself, and so clearly indicated in the text, had not been pointed out by modern criticism. But we have no such omission to complain of. As soon, in fact, as Paul's life and writings began to be studied from an historical point of view, the idea of a progressive development in his views compelled attention to itself. Usteri clearly suggested the idea, in a work of which the third edition appeared as early as 1831 ; x but at the same time he abandoned it as incapable of de-

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monstration, because the historical connexion of the authentic letters was still undefined, and their chronology unsettled, while the great critical epochs of the apostle's life were wholly unrecognised.

The work of reconstruction could not be resumed with any chance of success, until the task of patient and minute analysis had been first performed. The honour of this achievement belongs to Baur. 1 Thanks to his critieal studies, abundant light has been thrown upon Paul's epistles ; their order of sequence has been recovered, their distinctive features clearly defined, the historical events that occasioned them perfectly established, and their differences marked out not less plainly than their resemblances. In short, the first and essential conditions for tracing out the apostle's mental history were fulfilled.

It is true that Baur's refusal to recognise as authentic anything but the doctrinal type evolved from the great central epistles (Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans) prevented him from completing this task himself. But since then the epistles to the Thessalonians, to Philemon, and to the Philippians have asserted their place by the side of these, not to mention others whose authenticity is now generally admitted, even by the severest critics. Yet the dogmatic differences pointed out by Baur exist all the same. And thus, while maintaining the Pauline origin of these other writings, and recognising at the same time their distinct doctrinal types, modern criticism is shut up more and more to a contradiction, of which the only and inevitable solution is found in the conception of

1 Paulus der Apostel Jesu Christie 2nd ed., 1866 [Eng. trans., 1373]-

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a progressive development in the apostle's system of thought. This solution was still much disputed when the first edition of this book appeared [1870]. But at the present date, though subject to some modification in detail, it has triumphed completely.