ever does. They took what they wanted from the great | quarry and left the rest.

Let us note an example germane to our present subject. The theory that there were in God two sets of contrasted moral attributes, summarized under the names justice and love, the former of which was primary, was not without a certain apparent justification in Pauline ideas. One may plausibly argue that the Epistle to the Romans opens with the picture of these two contrasted qualities in God standing over against each other, and that the justice or the wrath is primary, since the problem is, How may justice be satisfied, in order that mercy may operate? Here are modes of thought which were current in late Judaism, and it is evident that they still retain a strong hold on the apostle's mind. They are now taken up by later thought and developed to their logical consequences; a conflict between mercy and justice was imminent in the bosom of Deity. Justice demanded satisfaction; it would have its vengeance upon sin. Mercy yearned to save men, but was powerless. Just then Christ came forward and bowed his head to the penal stroke. Justice is now appeased and the obstacle to the operation of mercy removed. This scheme is deduced from the twofold assumption of a conflict between justice and love in God and of the primary rights of justice in the case.1 Is it Pauline? Yes, if everything is Pauline the germ or suggestion of which may be found in Paul; if every trace of Pharisaism, every survival of the late Jewish thoughtworld in which he was reared is to be regarded as fundamental to his conception of the gospel. But one thing was overlooked in this argument, namely, how Paul had himself transcended his own contrast of love and justice in his Christian conviction that it was the divine love alone which found a way to satisfy justice, and that the seeming contrast thus dissolves, after all, into unity. Grace is the source of the whole redemptive procedure.

1 The theory is elaborated in Shedd's Theological Essays, p. 265 sq., and Dogmatic Theology, passim, and in Strong's Philosophy and Religion, p. 188 sq., and Systematic Theology, passim.

While in the direct exposition of the process of expiation, justice is described as if holding a certain primacy, yet in Paul's general view, taken as a whole, it is plain that love is the logical prius of the very idea and possibility of expiation. The death of Christ has its motive and ground in the love of God (Rom. v. 8). If attention be fixed solely on one of the special circles of Paul's thought, I grant that the scheme which has been sketched may be deduced from him; but if regard be had to his philosophy of salvation as a whole, it is plain that he does not regard Christ's death as rendering possible the operation of love, and that he does not regard retributive justice as primary in the nature of God. If justice demands satisfaction, love provides the way in which the satisfaction is made. "The element of grace," says Baur, "is so predominant (in Paul's teaching) that everything which the divine righteousness demands in the death of Jesus can itself only be considered as a consequence of the divine grace." 1

We shall hereafter recur to the points which are here suggested. Let me, however, state in advance that the materials of Paul's Epistles should not be used, in my opinion, as they are too often used, with no professed discrimination of the sources of his various arguments and illustrations, and with no consideration of what is primary and what secondary in his system of thought. Paul was the most versatile and many-sided thinker of the apostolic age; his writings are a veritable treasurehouse of Christian thought, but it must be admitted that if his language and modes of argument have been legitimately employed by traditional dogmatics, then he is chiefly responsible for a method and scheme of thinking regarding God and the world whose acceptance for the modern mind is impossible. The men of to-day can no more think in terms of late Jewish theology than they can think in terms of pre-Socratic philosophy. They can no more appropriate the outward forms of Paul's Jewish thought respecting expiation than they can adopt the cosmology or demonology which he derived from the same source.

1 Paulus, II. 167.

No scholar of our time ever thinks of adopting the allegorical method of interpreting the Old Testament because Paul, having learned that method in the Jewish schools, has employed it in some of his arguments. The apostle's great Christian convictions are obviously distinguishable from such methods of illustrating or justifying them as were incidental to his Pharisaic training. In like manner, in general, it is not only legitimate, but necessary, to distinguish-difficult as it may sometimes be to do so― between the specifically Christian and the characteristically Jewish or rabbinic in Paul. This is done, in one way or another, by all thoughtful students, though some might not readily admit the fact. Now, since, in some form, this discrimination is made, and must be made, by all students of the subject, why is it not in every way better that it should be made frankly and critically, in the light of the best attainable historical knowledge of the apostle's education and thought-world?

It is well-nigh universally admitted, and is practically assumed even where it is theoretically denied, that we' must distinguish Paul's "gospel," his Christian doctrine of grace and faith, from the allegorical exegesis and Pharisaic modes of thought by which, not infrequently, he seeks to illustrate and enforce it. The same principle holds good in application to our subject. Behind the juridical apparatus of justification and expiation which was taken over from his Jewish inheritance and training, we must seek those essential ethical truths which constitute the substance of his Christian faith and teaching. Here, too, his own word is applicable, "We have this treasure in earthen vessels." There can be no greater mistake than to confound the treasure with the vehicles of illustration and argument which were supplied by a' rabbinic education.

CHAPTER V

THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS

UNLIKE the Epistles of Paul, this Epistle presents the doctrine of salvation chiefly in terms of sacrifice. Now Christ is a priest, now an offering; his blood is the blood of a sacrificial victim shed to procure the forgiveness of sins. Subjectively considered, salvation is pardon, cleansing from sin, the purification of the conscience. Although there are many important points of contact between Paulinism and our Epistle, yet the differences are more marked than the resemblances.1 For Paul, as we have seen, the death of Christ was due to a necessity springing out of the requirements of the divine righteousness; it was necessary as a satisfaction to God's law; Christ's death was substituted for the death which sin deserved. This circle of ideas is absent from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Here Christ is a pure offering, offered in sacrifice to God, but his death is not viewed as a substitutionary expiation. The absence of this idea is the more remarkable since the author so closely approximates it. Had he shared this conception it is not easy to see why he did not bring it forward in connection with such assertions as that Christ made propitiation (iλáσxeσbai) for the sins of the people (ii. 17), tasted death for every man (ii. 9), and was offered to bear away the sins of many (ix. 28). He, too, assigns reasons for the necessity of Christ's death, but they are not Paul's reasons. Not the satisfaction of the law, the removal of the curse, the endurance of the penalty of sin, but a divine fitness or decorum is assigned as the reason why the author of salvation should be made perfect through sufferings (ii. 10).

1 See Ménégoz, La Théologie de l'Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 181 sq.

Elsewhere he deduces the necessity of Jesus' death from the very fact that he is a priest. It is the calling of a priest to offer sacrifice; hence, "this high priest must also have somewhat to offer" (viii. 3), and that "somewhat" can only be his own life. In another place this necessity is derived from the import of the word dɩaðýíŋ. This word has two meanings, covenant and testament. Our author passes from one meaning to the other in the elaboration of his argument. The first covenant was sealed by a death; in fact, wherever a testament, or will, goes into effect, it does so in consequence of a death; therefore it was needful that the establishment of the New Covenant should be ratified by a death, that is, the death of Christ. How widely different is this from Paul's juristic argument.

It lies outside our present purpose to discuss the relation of our Epistle to contemporary thought.1 It must suffice to say that we have in it an acute and profound exposition of Christianity, on a general Pauline basis, in the spirit and method of the Alexandrian exegesis and philosophy of religion. The influence of Philo on the author's thought and language is especially marked. The relation of the Old Testament system to the New is conceived to be that of shadow to reality, of promise to fulfilment. The earlier covenant belongs to this lower, sensible world (ix. 11; xi. 3), the realm of types and shadows (viii. 5; ix. 23) which Philo called "the visible order"; Christ and his salvation belong to the upper, heavenly world of eternal reality (viii. 1, 2; ix. 1, 24; x. 1), which Philo, in the spirit of Plato's doctrine of archetypal ideas, called the κóoμos vonтós, the intelligible world. By this series of contrasts between higher and lower, shadow and substance, temporal and eternal, the author strikingly illustrates the superiority of Christianity to Judaism, and depicts the absoluteness and finality of the gospel.2 Now the underlying idea here noticed has a certain kinship with Paul's teaching on the same subject. For both writers the

1 This has been done very thoroughly by Ménégoz, op. cit., p. 176 sq., and by Holtzmann in his Neutest. Theol. II. 290 sq.

2 Cf. Denney, The Death of Christ, pp. 207, 208.