(¢) We may now proceed to notice more particu- larly what St. Paul teaches about Law, bearing in mind that it was through the Mosaic law that he obtained the experience out of which he speaks, but that he speaks for the benefit of men who may have had a similar experience although they had never heard of Moses; in other words, that even where he is formally discussing the Law, it is Law itself, in all that is characteristic of it as legal, which he is really concerned with.
(1) As regards its place in_ history, it is an entirely subordinate thing. The great spiritual powers which have had dominance in the life of man are Sin and Grace; in comparison with them, Law isa minor matter. Sin entered the world (εἰσῆλθεν,
LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT)
Ro 5"), and so did Grace, but Law only παρεισῆλθεν τε entered as an accessory, or in a subordinate capacity (Ro 5”). To a Jew, the most important figure in religion was Moses; St. Paul argues that the importance of Moses in the spiritual history of humanity is an entirely inferior thing when com- pared to that of Adam or of Christ. This is the purport also of the argument in Gal 3%", where he aims at showing that the Promise—i.e. the Chris- tian religion as it was announced to Abraham, and in a sense imparted to him—was not con- ditioned by the Law, which came 400 years after- wards, and that not by the immediate act of God, but ‘ordained through angels, by the hand of a mediator.’ It is aot so clear whether St. Paul regarded Law, or the reign of Law, either in its more statutory form as in Israel, or in its vaguer form as present to conscience among the Gentiles, as a positive preparation for the gospel. The figures of the prison-house and the παιδαγωγός in Gal 3% hardly amount to this. As Lightfoot remarks, ‘the tempting explanation of παιδαγωγός els Χριστόν, ‘‘one to conduct us to the school of Christ,” ought probably to be abandoned.’ Eis Χριστόν really means ‘until Christ came.’ During the pre-Christian stage of our life we were ‘shut up and kept in ward under the law’; it was our prison and our moral guardian, but St. Paul does not regard it as leading us to Christ. The παιδα- ywybs was a slave who had to exercise a certain moral restraint over the boy under his charge ; the law, too, was servile, an inferior type of religion, and all it could do by itself was to attempt a similar restraint.
(2) On the mode in which Law acts in the indi- vidual who lives under it, St. Paul has much to say. (a) It brings the knowledge, especially the full knowledge (ἐπίγνωσι5) of sin, Ro 3° 4%, and esp. 77 1 had not known sin, but through the law,’ ete. The description of spiritual experience in Ro 77 is not to be mechanically interpreted ; it belongs to what may be called ‘ideal biography.’ It is neither the experience of the regenerate nor of the unregenerate man, but the experience, if one might say so, of the unregenerate man seen through regenerate eyes, interpreted by a regenerate mind ; it is individual experience, but universalized ; it is not a deposition for a law court, but some kind of essential eternal truth. It contains much of St. Paul’s doctrine of the law—a doctrine resting on experience of his own. ‘The starting-point is purely ideal. ‘I was alive without the Jaw (xwpls νόμου) once.’ This is not a date which can be fixed in any one’s life. There is not really a golden age, a happy time to which we ean look teak when we had no conscience, and therefore no bad conscience. It is, however, the assumed starting-point of the spiritual life for St. Paul. It lasts till its peace is invaded by the Law. When the commandment comes, sin wakes up to life, and the man dies. The prohibition of the Law reveals to man_ his antagonism to it. The Law comes to him, from without, and it 7s without: man and the law, the very moment the law appears as such, are dis- covered to be in some kind of antagonism to each other ; conscience first exists as a bad conscience.
(8) The law not only brings the full conscious- ness of sin, it also brings its doom. The law works wrath, Ro 4°, There is a ‘curse of the law’ which comes upon all who violate it. To know that one has broken the law is to know that he is subject to this curse. The doom of death stares him in the face. St. Paul nowhere gives an analysis of θάνατος, or κατάρα, or κατάκριμα, or any of the words he uses in this connexion, and it is merely mis- leading to introduce such distinetions as physical, spiritual, and eternal death to interpret his mean- ing. That death which is the doom or curse of
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19
the law is one awful indivisible thing, which only a despairing conscience can realize, and which is too overwhelming to be the subject of ‘such dis- tinctions. It includes in every case the feeling that God, whose the Law is, is against those who have broken it.
_(y) The Law, according to St. Paul, stimulates sin, and was given for that very purpose. ‘The Law came in beside, that the trespass might abound,’ Ro 5%. The Law was added τῶν παραβάσεων χάριν, Gal 317: where ‘ because of transgressions’ must be interpreted on the analogy of Ro δ᾽) wa πλεονάσῃ τὸ παράπτωμα. Cf. also Ro 713 ‘that sin through the commandment,’ ὁ.6. through the law in one of the injunctions or prohibitions composing it, ‘might become exceeding sinful.’ This is one of the most daring points in St. Paul’s doctrine, yet it rests or the familiar psychological fact that prohibition provokes resistance. When the law —any law whatever—says ‘Do not,’ there is something in man which is inclined to say ‘I will.’ The peculiarity is that St. Paul represents God as availing Himself of this characteristie of human nature in order (indirectly) to prepare man for salvation. When he says that the purpose for which Law came in was that the trespass might abound, the purpose is conceived as God’s. It is as though God saw that the only way to get man to accept His righteousness was to make him despair of his own, and the way to make him despair of his own was to subject him to a dis- cipline under which the sin that was in him would reveal its exceeding sinfulness, its irresistible tyrannical strength, and annihilate all his hopes. It is in this connexion of ideas that St. Paul says the law is the strength of sin, 1 Co 15%. No doubt it was at this point that his doctrine would seem most impious to a pious Jew. The Law, his adversary would naturally assume, was given to be kept. It was given to guide man in the way of life, to be a light to his feet and a lamp to his path. It was a kind of insanity—so it would seem to him—to represent it as given to stimulate sin, to counteract its own nature, defeat its own pur- pose, and lead to its own supersession by a new religion. But, in reality, Law is used in two different senses by the parties to this controversy. The Jewish interlocutor whom we have supposed is thinking of the whole OT revelation, which is not necessarily legal at all; St. Paul is thinking of it πος ΤΑΙ as legal, as that system of statutes and traditions to which it had been reduced in the Pharisaie circles in which he had been brought up and he is interpreting God’s purpose in giving the law through his own experience—surely an ex- perience in which the hand and purpose of God could be traced—under those conditions. If ex- perience proved anything, it proved that God could mean nothing by the law (as St. Paul had known it) except to make a full revelation of sin. It was not meant to bring salvation, it was meant to bring despair.