fice as the death of One wlio, as sinless, did not deserve to die, and whose (U-iith therefore availed for the f^uilty. God thus reconciles men to Him- self, and it is an act of love. This death of the One for all (v.''") means that 'all have died, and that he died for all in order to have the livinj; live no longer for themselves but for him who died and rose aj,'ain for them.' It is in the light, of such words that we can interpret what St. I'aul intended by this antithesis of v.'-'. The identilica- tion of Himself with sinful men is the clue to the meaning of Christ's death; it is an expression of His love, just as from another siile it shows God's treatment of Him as bound up with sinners, so as to die for them. The result is that sinners are freed from the death which is their due, and raisiul to a po.sition which is detinetl as devotion to Christ or as 'righteousness,' that is, life shared with God, the life to which Christ Himself rose and into which He raises His people. Instead of being con- demned to death, they are now freed from con- demnation and made 'right' with God ; i.e. they are reconciled (v.""'), they are made a new crea- tion (v."), which has a moral purpose in it. This purpose is elsewhere described as 'consecration' (aytacrij,6s], e.g. in I Co 6", where justification is a.ssociated with consecration, as a real and true relation to the living God. In reconciliation or justification there is an implicit purpose of ' holi- ness ' or consecration, in this sense of belonging to God, and of caring to belong to Him, as members of His own community.* liut the sharp point of the paradox in 2 Co 5-' lies in the phrase about the act of God which makes the Christian standing a I'eality. At first sight, the parallel indeed seems unreal. Christ was not reallj' a sinner, in His death for sin. Is our ' righteousness ' of the same kind ? Is it only an estimate ? We may reply, with Sabatier (The Apostle Paul, Eng. tr., p. 330), ' lledemption consists precisely in this, that God sees in Christ that which is in us, — namely, sin ; and in us tliat which is in Christ, — namely, right- eousness. No doubt this is a logical contradiction ; but it is the Divine contradiction of love. The logic of the heart triumphs over that of the intel- lect.' We may also perliaps add this moralizing consideration. When Christ by the will of God identified Himself with sinful men. His sympathy with them only intensified His holiness and goodness ; the more He came into contact with sin, the stronger did His holy love become. So, as we identity ourselves with Him, we come to share His mind towards our sin ; we learn to con- demn it and to side with God against ourselves. When we are brought to cry, ' Who shall deliver me from this body of death ? ' we become God's. It is through the death of Christ that we truly learn our hopeless position as sinners, and the hope enshrined in His sacrilice. What St. Paul else- where describes as ' by faith,' he expresses here by the phrase 'in him.' The vicarious death of Christ implies that God subjected Him to real suHering for our sakes, to the last extremity of desertion and death, and when we identify our- selves with Him, when we trust Him with ourselves, God subjects us to as real an experience of recon- ciliation. Christ's experience of agony and desola- tion at the end was real in its bitterness ; He was not going through a painful official formality when He suH'ered. So our experience of union with God is a real bliss, a direct, personal relation to Himself. What is common to both is the intense and growing reaction against sin which Christ's sacrilice produces in us. What difl'erentiates Christ and men is that our characters are trans-
* The term (aytatyjutiO quite naturally included the further idea of the life whicti answered to this position (cf. 1 Th 53'), just aa fiiKtuocrvin) did (p. 377).
formed by the creative act of One whose character required no change.
The importance of taking 2 Co 5" at this stage in an analysis is two-fold : it is a fresh corrobora- tion of the truth that 'God's righteousness' is a ])()sitive, personal relation to Himself ; and also of the vital connexion between this righteousness and the Person of Jesus Christ. We are hardly sur- prised to discover that the close association of righteousness with a jiersonal experience of Christ* emerges in the last autobiographical refer- ence, in Ph 3''". St. Paul summarizes his Phari- saic prerogatives, a passionate and positive ortho- doxy, ' immaculate according to the standard of legal righteousness,' t zeal, high character, and all the rest, all the KepSfi which he and otiicrs thought contributed materially to salvation. ' I parted with them gladly,' he confesses, 'for the sake of intimacy with Christ Jesus my Lord.' And I gained far more. It was for the sake of ' gaining Christ and being found (when I die) in him, posses- sing no legal righteousness of my own (i.e. no religious standing which a man thinks lie can secure bj' scrupulous obedience to the moral code of the Law) but the righteousness of faith in Christ, the Divine righteousness that rests on faith.' There is only a verbal diti'erence between this last description and the more personally tinged expression ' knowing Christ Jesus my Lord ' — where ' knowing ' means practical reverence and intimacy.? Whether St. Paul speaks of ' right- eousness by faith,' or of Christ being made right- eousness for us, or of our being made righteousness in Him, the same inspiring conviction breaks through the somewhat legal and technical phraseo- logy, viz. that while the reconciliation is a reality apart from our experience of it, it becomes a reality for us only through our personal surrender to the personal will of love which reaches us in the Cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.