LECTURE V

THE HEAVENLY INTERCESSOR AS SEEN AND INTERPRETED BY PAUL

1. Jesus as the Servant

When as critical historians we take our departure from the Pauline Epistles as earliest and most authentic witnesses for the origins of our religion, we discover first of all that the two ordinances of the communion and baptism are the true Urevangelium, and that Paul's Christianity is an interpretation of these. His own religious experience was indeed to his mind a miraculous intervention of God, removing the veil from his eyes so that he, like others who had experienced it be fore him, could see Jesus in his actual condition of glory in Heaven. But even this was not to Paul primary in any other sense than that it gave him a direct authority for his gospel and apostleship, beyond all human teaching. It did not give him a new gospel of his own to preach, hitherto unheard-of, but the same gospel which till now he had been persecuting. What he had experienced had been wrought by God in Peter before him. What he taught now was the doctrine of grace" which as champion of "the law" he had persecuted before. When he refers to it in passages limited to the basic common ground, such as his rebuke of Peter at Antioch, or his declaration to the Corinthians of agreement with all the other witnesses in the common resurrection gospel, he leaves no question of its nature. "We believed on Christ Jesus that we might be forgiven our sins by faith in Christ," the faith

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symbolized by baptism into his name, the faith that he had "died for our sins according to the scriptures," and that he had been "raised again for our justification" as the Intercessor and Reconciler of sinners to God; for so it had also been written of the martyred Servant, that "He maketh intercession for transgressors."

It is true that Paul nowhere makes any direct appeal on his own account to the Isaian passage which he refers to as fundamental to the common gospel, and that we only trace its effect upon his thinking indirectly in such passages as the references to Jesus' sinlessness (II Cor. 5:21; cf. Is. 53:9, 10; I Pt. 2:22), his having been "delivered up for our transgressions (παρεδόθη διὰ τὰ παραπτώματα ἡμῶν) and raised for our justification (dikaiwois) so that "while we were yet sick men" (åσ@evés; cf. Is. 53: 5, 10), "sinners," and "enemies," we were "justified by his blood," "reconciled " (Karnλλάynμer), and "saved from wrath by his life" (κατηλλάγημεν), (Rom. 4: 25-5: 11); or in the famous passage in Phil. 2:5-11 on the "exaltation" of the Servant. This seeming neglect of the prophetic proof-text by Paul is something which calls for explanation together with the still more surprising neglect of the Synoptists.

It is also true that we do not get Paul's gospel at first hand, but only through the perspective of his apologetic. It forms the background of a polemic wherein Jewish-Christian reactionaries occupy the foreground with their objections to Paul's sweeping onslaught on legalism. We are thus under the necessity of looking for the ultimate facts through a double medium, first Paul's controversial application, second, and behind this, his personal religious experience, which compels him to appropriate the faith of his former victims in terms applicable to his own sense of the supreme religious need. In spite of this double refraction (if I

may call it so), when we take as our touchstone the two symbolic ordinances by which those of "this Way" expressed their idea of the hoped-for salvation while Paul was still a persecutor, we need not go far astray. We shall see that the original common gospel was exactly what Paul calls it; a "gospel of reconciliation," glad tidings of peace with God, who had been estranged by the sin of the people, but had now given assurance of forgiveness to all that come to Him in the name of Jesus, participating by baptism in his self-dedicating death. For in baptism, or even before it in special revelations, God opened the eyes of their heart. They saw Jesus in the glory to which he had been raised up. He was now their Advocate with the Father, interceding for their transgression. And the confirmation of this inward sight was the visible outpouring of the Spirit, most of all the gift of tongues, teaching them to cry like new-born children, Abba, Abba, and offering outcries to God intelligible only to Him. The Spirit was thus another Intercessor and Advocate, pleading for them with God, and at the same time by its very presence convicting the world of its injustice to them.1

Paul was compelled to defend this doctrine of forgiveness for Christ's sake (or, as he called it, "justification by faith in Jesus ") against the charge that it "made Christ a minister of sin "; and his defense was that those who were baptized lived no longer unto themselves but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again. They were given a new Spirit, which produced in them more real righteousness than was within their utmost power before. Paul could and did apply to this "new birth," or "new creation," of the Spirit, all the symbols of Jewish poetry concerning the "redemption from Egypt; he used in addition the symbolism of the

1 Cf. Rom. 8: 26-29. See also Jn. 15: 16 ff.; 16: 8 and the article "The 'other' Comforter " in Expositor VIII, 82 (Oct., 1917).

mysteries concerning the dedication of the votary to the Savior-god, whose soldier, slave, or freedman he be comes. Christians are not their own, but bought with a price; they are redeemed with the precious blood of their Leader; their life is no longer their own but Christ that lives in them; they are freedmen, no longer under law, and yet in voluntary obedience to the "law of Christ." All these expressions and more are made needful by the double necessity of reminding his converts of their duty to live as "sons and daughters of the Highest," and his opponents as well that the claim to be not under law" did not mean without law to God, but under law to Christ. But the immeasurable superiority of Paul's teaching to the figures of speech which he borrows from Hellenistic religion is instantly apparent when we think of the poor and empty moral ideal presented to the votary of the mysteries, as compared with that of the Sermon on the Mount. Imagine the difference between being infused with the "mind" or ethical animus of Jesus, and the mind of an Attis, a Dionysus, an Asclepios! "Partaking in the nature of" the divinity, "life in the Spirit," "living in Christ," "living the life that is hid with Christ in God," are all terms that would be intelligible to the Hellenistic religionist, perhaps more so than to the average Jew. But what would they all amount to, beyond mere magic and superstition, if the convert did not know what manner of spirit the spirit of Jesus was? Hence the story of Jesus' blameless life was indispensable. At least the spirit which controlled it and made it an absolutely God-devoted life, "obedient unto death, yea even the death of the cross," must be made unmistakable. The convert must understand that his death with Jesus is a death to sin, his union with the risen life of Jesus a participation in that moral union with the Father which was achieved in the absolute self

dedication of Jesus. He must have in him the mind which was also in Christ Jesus, and which is epitomized in the portrait of the Servant, humbled to the uttermost as a slave for the many,2 undergoing the cross at the behest of God's inscrutable will, in order that God also might exalt him, and make him very high.

Thus the double necessity of maintaining the moral standard of the Church from within, and vindicating it as against its detractors without, led Paul inevitably to lay special stress upon the implications of baptism, and this in turn to emphasis upon the character of Jesus. Later we find this process issuing in Gospels, which like the Gospel of Mark, describe first how the baptism of Jesus results in his ministry of power and goodness in Galilee, then, secondly, his martyrdom in Jerusalem in devotion to the cause of the kingdom. With Paul it was inevitable that ethical teaching of this kind should delineate the character of Jesus in terms of the Isaian description of the martyred Servant, as we have just seen to be the case in his exhortation to the Philippians to "have in them the mind which was also in Christ Jesus."

Looking back at the process by which the figure of Jesus had come to be conceived in terms such as the Isaian description of the martyred Servant even before Paul became a convert, we can see from Paul's own references that the course of events in Jesus' career

2 Maurenbrecher, Von Nazareth nach Golgatha, 1908, p. 174, declares that according to Paul, Jesus was actually a slave. This shows just as unenlightened a use of Paul's expressions in Phil 2: 7, which are based upon Is. 53 (in this case Is. 53: 11, LXX ἐν δουλεύοντα πολλοῖς) as in the case of defenders of the doctrine of Jesus' sinlessness, who imagine Paul enquiring in Nazareth as to his moral conduct in boyhood, instead of recognizing that in II Cor. 5: 21, where he declares that Christ "knew no sin," he is simply using Is. 53: 9, as in I Pt. 2: 22. The strange expression God "made him to be sin may even be a direct quotation of Is. 53: 10; for the Hebrew has literally "when thou shalt make his soul to be sin."