We may wonder (i.) why he did not, like the author of Hebrews, employ the sacrificial sections of the Law to illustrate the death of Christ as the means of establishing this righteousness with God ; (ii. ) why he did not conceive the Law as a prepara- tory stage for Christianity or the new law of right- eou.sness, as a later age did; (iii.) why he never reckoned with the Jewish t doctrine of the merits of the Fathers availing to supplement the demerits of living Israel ; and (iv. ) why he was not driven, as Marcion after him, to deny outright the validity of the Law as a Divine institution. Probably he was too much of a Pharisee, with too strong a sense of the purpose of God in history and in Israel, to break so radically with the past. His attitude towards the Law as a means of righteous- ness is thoroughly characteristic of his Pharisaic antecedents and his individual experience. To him, the Law is everything or nothing. He sees it as a rival to Christ and strikes at it in unqualified antitheses. From what he saw of Judaism and of Jewish Christianity, he considered it was essential to prove that the Law not only could not justify, but was never intended to justify, by faith.
• H. Weinel, Blblische Theologie des Neuen Testam^nts^, p. 281.
f E.g, in the contemporary Apocalypse of Baruch, where the works of the righteous avail for other generations (xi v. 7, Ixxxiv. 10 : ' Pray diliu'ently with your whole heart that the Mighty One may be reconciled to you, and that lie may not reckon the multi- tude of your sins, but remember the rectitude of your fathers '). This quantitative doctrine of the zecuth of the fathers, i.e. their righteousness as availing for their descendants, implied that by the grace of God their meritorious goodness was allowed to count in favour of those who were defective in piety, instead of the latter being judged strictly on their own merits (cf. F. O. Hirsch in J E x. 423, and Schechter, Soiiva Aspects of Hahbinic Theology, ch. xii.).
According to his analysis of the tendencies of the contemporary legalism — and there is no historical reason to doubt that his analysis was substantially accurate — the pra<'tical outcome of devotion to the Law, as glorified by Pharisaic ])icty, reallj' resulted in an endeavour to attain righteousness by one's own moral record. This had broken down in his own case, and he argued from tiiat to a general proposition. It was important to do this, for ' when he looked at the Jews who retained their unbelief in face of the gospel, he was convinced . . . [that] it was not imperfection, but the ellort to reach righteousness that kept them away from the gosiiel.' * His criticism of the Law was not a clever, one-sided jeu d'csprit of dialectic ; it wa.s evangel- istic as well as apologetic, an attempt to save others from the imptisxe into which he had himself once strayed in sheer sincerity of purpose. The repudiation of the Law as a method of attaining righteousness sprang from the fact that in his own experience he had felt what he regarded as the fundamental error of Pharisaism. Hence it is possible for J. Weiss to say {Pfiiil and Jesus, Eng. tr., London, 19U9, pp. 82-84) that St. Paul 'saw more deeply into the nature of Pharisaism and rejected it more absolutely than even Jesus Him- self. Jesus constantly referred to the inconsistency between outward behaviour and inward motive ; the formalism and unreality of this pietism aroused His anger. Paul, on the basis of his personal experience and by means of his entirely religious nature, realised that Judaism was distorted as a system and that its attitude towards religion was from the outset perverted ; he regarded as chimeri- cal the theory tliat by means of works men could force God to deal out reward and salvation in ful- filment of a contractual obligation ; moreover, this attitude towartis God, which seemed to regard Him as a contracting party with rights and claims not superior to those of man, was recognised by Paul as impious and as a blasphemous misrepre- sentation of the position of man, in view of his entire dependence upon God. The irreligious aberrations of Pharisaism consisted in this " boast- ing before God," as Paul calls it, or as we may paraphrase it, "in self-glorification upon the ground of past achievement, in making demands of God " ; this mad " going up to heaven " to bring salvation down from thence, and this unseemly " reckoning " with God which is entirely character- istic of all Jewish thought,! are the by-products of a pietism which, like heathenism, professed to exert compulsion upon God ; heathen magic, sacrifice and prayer, was here replaced by the practice of righteousness to which God was unable to refuse reward. Paul himself had shared this passionate zeal for the law, this painful (pyd^eadai, . . . ; it was this experience which enabled Paul not merely to conquer certain outposts of Judaism, but to show that the system must be rejected as absolutely incompatible with the gospel.'
The negative propositions about righteousness not being by the works of the Law are tlierefore the reverse side of St. Paul's positive conviction that justification did originate by faith. They repre- sent him coming to terms with Judaism, stating his new faith as against its old rival. His repudia- tion of legalism finds its strength in his personal conviction of God's grace in Christ. He does not set up, it has to be noted, any antithesis between faith and works, i.e. moral actions. Onlj', the latter are regarded as the outcome of faith, and denied any place in winning a state of acceptance with God. The opposite of his doctrine of right-