PAUL THE APOSTLE
a juster righteousness, which lies deep in the heart of Scripture and in the nature of G The same in its contents, the law takes quite another hold upon the conscience now that the Lawgiver is beheld as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. ‘Love’ becomes its ‘ fulfilling ’—‘ faith operative through love’ (Ro 13", Gal 5%): thus ‘the righteous demand of the law is fulfilled in those that walk according to the Spirit,’—those ‘in’ whose ‘hearts’ ‘God's love has been poured out through the Holy Spirit’ (Ro 5° 8*). See, further, art. Law (in NT).
The manifestation of God in Christ makes | i the συνείδησις of Ro 2", etc., is the same power
repentance imperative, and determines its nature and direction. Of repentance (μετάνοια) Paul had much to say in his missionary preaching (Ac 13% 17” 20% 26”; comp. Ro 2*); in the Epp. it is implied in such terms as ‘turning to God from idols,’ ‘ coming to know God’ ; on the other hand, in ‘dying to sin,’ ‘crucifying the flesh,’ ‘ putting off the old man’ (1 Th 1°, Gal 4° 5%, Ro 6? #2), ἘῸΝ 43 5°, ete.). It is tacitly assumed as a condition precedent to justification and sanctification, which are inconceivable without the confession and renunciation of sin; it is indeed a constituent of saving faith.
Christian prayer corresponds to the character of the Christian od (Eph 315), in its confidence (παρρησία), intelligence, constancy, universal range, its accompaniment of thanksgiving (Eph 3%, 1 Co 1415. Col 42,1 Th 57-38, etc.), in its dependence on the mediation of Christ and on the sympathetic aid of the Holy Spirit (Eph 3%, Ro 855: 5); it is the prayer of sons to a Father.
2. Doctrine of Man.—Over against the apostle’s conception of God lies his conception of Man—the individual and the race.
(a) The Constitution of Mankind.—The OT belief is Paul’s, that man—the ἀνήρ more immediately— is the ‘image and glory of God’ (i Co 117). The Gentile consciousness is witness to the fact that ‘we are his offspring’ (Ac 17%-”). ‘The Son of his love’ is God’s perfect image (Col 1°); Chris- tian men are such in so far as they are renewed ‘after the Creator’s image’ and become His chil- dren (Col 319, Eph 4% δ᾽). In all men the reason (νοῦς), unless ‘reprobate,’ discerns God in creation and is ‘bondman to God’s law’ (Ro 119. 30. %8 725), so that they are ‘without excuse’ for sin. With the OT, Paul attirms the race-unity and moral solid- arity of mankind—in Adam on the one hand, in Christ on the other (Ro 5'-*!); as against Judaism, he repudiates any real difference between Jew and Gentule, either in sin or salvability (Ro 3).
‘The woman is the glory of the man,’ who is her ‘head.’ She is relatively subordinate, and Paul does not ‘ allow’ her ‘ to teach nor to have dominion’ in church or house,—though intrinsically the man’s equal, since ‘in Christ Jesus there can be no male and female’ any more than ‘Jew and Greek’ (1 Co 11%", 1 Ti 215, Gal 3%). The prohibition of 1Co 1455 5. to exercise any spiritual gift in public appears to have been due to circumstances ; otherwise it would be in conflict with 115. The “wo sexes are necessary to each other ‘im the Lord’ (1 Co1l"+*); both shared in the guilt of the Fall— the woman, as Paul seems to put it, ‘being de- ceived’ (2Co 115, 1 Ti 2!) hh sinning through weakness, whereas Adam’s sin was a deliberate and responsible ‘ transgression’ and ‘disobedience’ (Ro 5), culpable and decisive in the highest degree.
(4) Spirit and Flesh.—Paul’s doctrine of human nature is that of the OT. Man is constituted of flesh and spirit—allied by the former to the perishable material creation, by the latter to God and the world unseen. ‘The body’ is flesh in the concrete, the man’s individual form ; ‘the soul’ with Paul, as throughout Scripture, is ποῦ a tertium quid
PAUL THE APOSTLE
between spirit and flesh, but rather their unity, the living self behind the bodily form of each man, (See, however, in favour of Trichotomy, Ellicott, Destiny of the Creature, and on 1 Th δ; Heard, Tripartite Nature of Man; Delitzsch, Bibl. Psu- chology). ‘Soul’ is a word relatively infrequent in Paul ; the ‘heart’ takes its place as the seat of the manifold thoughts and feelings,—which Ψυχὴ concentrates into the self, the conscious Ego. “Πνεῦμα is the principle, Ψυχὴ the subject, and Καρδία the organ of life’ (Cremer). The νοῦς of Ro 139 73-2 ete., is the πνεῦμα operative as a faculty of knowledge directed toward Divine things, while
introverted, the ethical self-consciousness.
‘Flesh’ and ‘spirit’ hold in Paulinism a more specific religious sense based upon, but distinguish- auile from, their psychological meaning: the former term regularly denotes the sinful nature of man, the latter its opponent in the influence of God operating in and through His Spirit (see e.g. Ro 8111 Gal 5°), This raises the question whether Paul referred sin to man’s constitution, groundin; it in his physical system and in the (supposed) evi intrinsic to matter, as Baur, Holsten, and others argue, who make sin to be, in its essence, sensuous- ness or sensuality. Pfleiderer sees in Paul’s doctrine of σὰρξ proof of his Hellenism ; Sabatier finds two discrepant Pauline theories of Sin—the Rabbinical view of Ro 5, deriving it from the fall of Adam; and the psychological view of Ro 7, where it arises from the inevitable collision be- tween physical desire and ethical law (‘ L’origine du Péché’ in Append. to L’Apétre Paul*). But the αὐτὸς ἐγώ of Ro7 is a child of his race, one ‘sold under sin’ and compromised beforehand, in whom sin ‘revives’ at the impact of the law, having been therefore already latent. On the other hand, Paul’s prominent doctrines of the sinlessness of Christ, of the resurrection of the body and its sanctity as the temple of the Holy Spirit, forbid the notion, which in fact he combats in Col and the Past. Epp., of an inherent sinfulness attaching to physical nature. In 2 Co 7' he speaks of ‘defilement of flesh and of spirit’ (and a possible cleansing of both); Gal δ᾽19:31 enumerates non-physical sins among ‘works of the flesh.’ The ne plus ultra of human sin, described in 2 Th 2%, is a self-deifying pride— atheism, or anti-theism, full-blown. The use of ‘flesh’ for ‘sin’ and ‘carnal’ for ‘sinful’ is a synecdoché; the more conspicuous and prevalent kind of sin stands for the whole.