Читать книгу St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. II - Gore Charles - Страница 4

But the obvious reply of the Jewish objector to St. Paul's assertion of the absolute and apparently arbitrary freedom of God's election is that it is unfair. It convicts God of unrighteousness. To this objection (ver. 14), which St. Paul deprecates with horror, he replies not by any large consideration of divine justice, but still by keeping the Jew to his own scriptures. The God revealed in scripture must be to the objector still the just God. He cannot call God unjust if His method as it now appears is that to which He called attention long ago. Look back, then, at the past records. Did God disclose Himself as bound to show mercy on Moses the Israelite, or to harden and judicially condemn Pharaoh the Egyptian? No, He declares to Moses His unrestricted freedom to exhibit His compassion on whom He will (Exod. xxxiii. 19). Men cannot by any choice or efforts of their own produce an exhibition of divine favour such as was shown to Moses the leader of Israel: the absolute initiative must come from God, and in taking that initiative He declares Himself absolutely free. In the same way God implicitly asserts His sovereign freedom when He brings Pharaoh out upon the stage of history as an example of the way in which He hardens men's hearts with a hardening which is the prelude to overthrow, that men all over the world may see and tremble at the divine power. It is not because Pharaoh is an Egyptian that he is hardened. He is hardened, as Moses has compassion shown him, simply because it is the will of God so to do in his case.

But the objector comes forward again (ver. 19): 'If this is the arbitrary method of God – if we are simply powerless puppets in the hands of an absolute and arbitrary will, to be saved or be destroyed – at any rate He has no reason to complain of us. If all the power is His, so is the responsibility.' Now St. Paul has it in his hand to show that there remains to man a very real power to retain his position, and consequently a very real responsibility and room for being blamed or praised: for if we cannot create our vocation, we can and we are required to correspond with it in a reverent and docile faith; and it was exactly here that the Jews had failed, in spite of all their prophets had taught them. But he keeps back this answer awhile, because he finds the attitude of such an objector toward God in itself so reprehensible. Such an one has not given consideration to what the relation of man to God really is – the creature to the creator. His critical, complaining attitude is nothing better than foolish.

Thus he takes his antagonist back upon the old prophetic metaphor of the potter and his clay, with which Isaiah and Jeremiah had rebuked the arrogance and impatience of men long ago: 'Shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He hath no understanding; and shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou31?' He follows, however, most closely upon the later writer of the Book of Wisdom: 'For a potter, kneading soft earth, laboriously mouldeth each several vessel for our service: nay, out of the same clay doth fashion both the vessels that minister to clean uses, and those of a contrary sort. All in like manner; but what shall be the use of each vessel of either sort, the craftsman himself is the judge32.' The thought was often in St. Paul's mind of the inequality of lots in the world and the Church. There are more and less honourable limbs in the body politic: there are vessels for honourable and vessels for dishonourable purposes in the great social economy33. So it is with the races of men. They are all of one blood – of the one lump. But some have high and others low vocations, and the right to determine of what sort the lot shall be in each case lies absolutely with the Divine Potter. It is childish to dispute His title. And not only so: when the potter, whom Jeremiah was ordered to observe, found a vessel he was making marred under his hand, 'he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it34.' Accordingly, when the chosen material (i.e. the Jews) would not mould to the high purpose for which the Potter was fashioning it, who shall complain if He diverted it to lower uses or threw it away to destruction, and produced out of His stores other vessels which He had already prepared and destined for glorious functions (that is to say, the Gentile Christians)? But the case is even stronger than this. Who indeed shall complain if, when the vessels originally destined for the higher uses prove fit for nothing but destruction, the Divine Potter – though willing, now as in the case of Pharaoh, to let His wrath fall and to manifest His power – yet shows almost unlimited forbearance with them (as in fact God did with the Jews); and when at last He does let His wrath fall, only does so in order to manifest anew the resourcefulness of His mercy35 upon a new and larger Israel, gathered not from among the Jews only, but from among all nations, to be the object of His compassionate regard?

Indeed, the prophet Hosea (ii. 23, i. 10) foresaw this choice of a yet unrecognized people to be God's people. Isaiah again (x. 22) anticipated no more than a remnant surviving of all the multitudes of Israel, because of the sharpness and conclusiveness of the divine judgement upon them. And (i. 9) it is only to the compassion of God that he attributes their exemption by means of the faithful remnant from entire annihilation, like that of the Cities of the Plain.

What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that hath mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might shew in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.

Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he still find fault? For who withstandeth his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus? Or hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the same lump to make one part a vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy, which he afore prepared unto glory, even us, whom he also called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles? As he saith also in Hosea,

And Isaiah crieth concerning Israel, If the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that shall be saved: for the Lord will execute his word upon the earth, finishing it and cutting it short. And, as Isaiah hath said before,

What has been already said will have been enough to guard against the main sources of mistake in reading this section. St. Paul might have much to say about God's righteousness in general, and large ways of vindicating it. But here he holds fast to the single aspect of righteousness according to which it means that God has been true to the original principles of His covenant. The God who chose Abraham and Moses is the God who is now, and rightly on His own declared principles of government, rejecting the greater part of the people of Abraham and Moses. This – faithfulness to His own declared principles – is what St. Paul here means by His righteousness. And as it was God's declared principle to retain His own liberty to show mercy on men according to His free will, inside or outside the chosen people, so on the other hand He retained His liberty to exhibit His judgement of hardening according to His will inside or outside the chosen people. He who brought Pharaoh the Egyptian upon the stage of history36, as an example of hardening judgement, is within His right in doing the same now with (the mass of) the people of His choice. The liberty asserted for God is wholly consistent with His being found, in fact, to have 'hardened' those only who have deserved hardening by their own wilfulness. It was for such a moral cause that God hardened the hearts of the Jews, that 'seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not hear37.' We can feel no doubt that some similar moral cause underlay the hardening of Pharaoh. But this is not St. Paul's present point. All his argument is directed to asserting God's liberty to show mercy or harden, irrespectively of considerations of race, when and where He in His sovereign moral will chooses.

We should notice that St. Paul's method is here, as elsewhere, what is called ideal or abstract, in the sense that he makes abstraction of a particular point of view; and, apparently indifferent to being misunderstood, substantiates his argument upon the particular aspect which he has taken apart from the whole matter in hand, till it is done with, and then other points can be taken in their turn. And he does not, as a modern writer would do, painfully correlate the various aspects of the subject38.

By means of the famous simile of the potter St. Paul asserts two principles about God: (1) that God is free, and condescends to give no account to His creatures, in absolutely determining the high or low vocations of men. To one man or nation He gives five talents, to another two, to another one. He makes vessels to honourable and vessels to (comparatively) dishonourable uses. He makes men Jews or Assyrians, Englishmen or Hottentots, at His absolute discretion. (2) That God is absolutely free, when the human material which He is moulding for His purposes proves intractable, to repudiate and reject what has, by its refusal to mould, become a 'vessel of wrath' fit 'to be taken and destroyed.' And it is only by a voluntary limitation of this freedom that He exhibits long toleration with the intractable and obstinate, and is longsuffering with them even when His wrath is ready and waiting to show itself. These are the two distinct points in the simile of the potter. We must distinguish carefully between the 'vessels destined for dishonour' – the 'less honourable limbs' of humanity – and the 'vessels of wrath,' or 'vessels fitted for destruction,' i.e. those which have proved themselves unfit for the vocation to which they were destined and have to be rejected. We note that St. Paul does not say that God fitted vessels for destruction, but that He bore long with those which had so become fitted. St. Paul never gives us any real justification – if we look at his language carefully – for the idea of any predestination to rejection, as distinct from predestination to higher or lower purposes. And the New Testament is full of assurances that a predestination to a low vocation in this world may be a predestination to high glory in eternity, if the humble calling is faithfully followed.

It ought not to be denied, however, that in all this passage St. Paul's feet, as he moves along his argument, are dogged by the metaphysical difficulty of finding room for human free-will inside the universal scope of the divine action and the prescience of the divine wisdom. This is a perennial difficulty. But St. Paul does not touch it. He does not even touch the question of whether God does actually (in our sense) foreknow the final destiny of every individual, and how he will act on each occasion39; he does not touch the question how or how far human wilfulness can be allowed to disturb the divine order. In the Pharisaic schools he would certainly have been brought up, as Josephus tells us, both to 'attribute everything to fate and God,' and also to recognize that it 'lay with men for the most part to do right or wrong': to believe that 'everything was foreseen,' and also that 'free-will was given'; or, as Josephus elsewhere puts it (as if it made no difference), to believe 'that some things, but not all, are the work of fate, and other things are in men's own power and need not happen40.' That is to say, he would have been educated to believe both in predestination and in freedom, without any special attempt to reconcile the two. We can tell for certain that this inherited belief was further moralized in St. Paul's case by his enlarged view of the divine purpose as working through high and low estates alike, for the final good of all men; and by his deepened perception of the correspondence with God's purpose, which, in the exercise of our freedom, is required of us. But, so far as we know, St. Paul left the strictly metaphysical question exactly where he found it – as an imperfectly reconciled antithesis. And there perhaps we men shall always have to leave it, or at least till we come to know even as we are known.

In the quotations from the Old Testament, with which the section concludes, we notice that St. Paul varies the original application of the passages from Hosea. In the prophet they refer to the recovery of dejected and dishonoured Israel, while the apostle applies them to the exaltation of the Gentiles from their low estate. As is often the case, while other passages in the prophets were there to prove exactly what he wanted41, St. Paul takes the words which come into his mind with a considerable latitude of application, and without any critical argument. Thus, if he makes somewhat free with the particular texts, it is in order to vindicate the real teaching of the Old Testament. He has, if not exact criticism, what is much better, profound spiritual insight.

The passages quoted from Isaiah are characteristic and central. This great prophet first clearly perceived that most striking law of human history – that progress comes, not mostly through the majority of a nation, but through the faithful remnant. It is the few best through whom alone God can freely work. It is the best who in the long run determine the moral level of the nation, and either keep the mass of men around them from corruption, or, if that is impossible, provide a fresh point of departure and hope in a society now inevitably, as a whole, hastening to decay and judgement. 'As a terebinth, and as an oak, whose stock remaineth, when they are felled; so the holy seed is the stock thereof42.'