(4) But the question remains, What is the relation of the Christian to the Law, or to law in general? Much of the paradox of St. Paul’s teaching gathers round this point. In all religion, of course, from the point of view of ethics, there is something paradoxical. It belongs to religion, as such, to transcend the ethical point of view, yet to con- serve and promote, indeed to be the only effective means of conserving and promoting, ethical in- terests. Hence moralists are the most severe, if at times the most inept, critics of religion, and St. Paul’s idealism and his paradoxes together pro- voked and still provoke infinite comment. Yet his position is quite clear. On the one hand, the Christian has nothing more to do with law in any way. ‘I through law died to law that I might live to God.’ An exhaustive experiment of living under law convinced him that there was neither life nor righteousness to be found that way, and he was done with law for ever. ‘I am crucified with Christ ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’ The old end of life is not renounced ; his aim is still righteousness; but the old means are renounced. Righteousness is not to be achieved out of his own resources, and brought to God for His approval; it is to be the work of Christ dwelling in him through His Spirit. Law was weak through the flesh, and could not do what was wanted; but the Spirit is stronger than the flesh, and can secure in spite of it what the law failed to secure; in us (Christians), as we walk not after the flesh but after the spirit, ‘the just demand (τὸ δικαίωμα) of the law’ is fulfilled, Ro 8. Sin has not dominion over us, for we are not under law (the working of which has been explained above under 2 (γ)), but under grace ; law only enslaves to sin; but grace gives the quickening spirit and liberates.
Hence in the Christian religion, as St. Paul understood it, nothing statutory could have any place. To give a legal authority to any formal precept, ethical or ritual, is to shut the door of hope, and open again the door of despair. It is to contemn the Spirit, which is Christ’s gift, and the cross, by which He won it, and to renounce the
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liberty with which He has made us free. St. Paul was not an antinomian (for the just demand of the law is to be fulfilled in all Christians), but he was certainly an anomian. He recognizes no law in the Church but the law of the spirit of the life in Christ Jesus, and while that is both law and im- pulse it is essentially personal, and can never be reduced to statutory form. He can speak of Christianity indeed (to which circumcision is no- thing and uncireumcision is nothing) as ‘the Bote of the commandments of God,’ 1 Co 7"; but all legalism is eliminated when the law is described as having its fulfilment in love, Ro 13, Gal δ᾽", and ‘the law of Christ’ is explained as ‘bearing each other’s burdens,’ Gal 6°. Legalism, in short, and Christianity (life in the Spirit) are to St. Paul mutually exclusive ideas ; and though in a formally constituted society, i.e. in sense a cor- pein in the eye of the law, a legal creed and a egal organization might become necessary, the idea that the existence of Christianity depended upon them could only have seemed to him a fatal contradiction of all that Christianity meant.
(e) At the close of his third mission, St. Paul came again to Jerusalem. He had with him the collection from the Gentile Churches, and was most eager to maintain brotherly relations between the Gentile and the Jewish sections of Christendom, though he had grave misgivings as to what might happen. Cf. Ac 21!7"-,2Co 8 and 9, Ro 15>". The opposition to his ‘lawless’ Christianity, which had followed him in all his churches and been combated in his four great Epistles, had been busy in Jeru- salem also. The native Christians there were devoted in their attachment to the law in its national aspects (πάντες ζηλωταὶ τοῦ νόμου, Ac 215). They had been sedulously instructed (κατηχή- θησαν) that St. Paul was teaching the Jews who lived abroad to apostatize from the law, neither circumcising their children nor keeping the tradi- tional customs. This was undoubtedly the logic of St. Paul’s gospel, though there is no evidence, apart from this unscrupulous assertion, that St. Paul ever sought to denationalize his countrymen ; and it is a fair question whether St. James and his elders did not ask him to do something which would leave an essentially false impression when they asked him to associate himself with certain men in a vow, that all might know that none of the things which they had been drilled to believe about him were true, and that he himself also in his conduct was an observer of the law (v.*). Probably, in yielding to this request, St. Paul was carrying to an extreme the conciliatory principles of 1 Co 9%; but the tumult which ended in his imprisonment and transference to Rome prevented any further development of the controversy about law between the apostle and the Jewish Christian