The Nature of the Change it Produced in Him and its Effect on His Doctrine.
By Professor Ernest D. Burton,
The University of Chicago.
Taken from THE BIBLICAL WORLD - January 1893
The purpose of this paper is not
to discuss the external features of Saul’s experience in
his approach to Damascus. It does not concern itself with the
question whether there was a veritable appearance to him of
the risen Jesus. Accepting what is scarcely to be denied by any
one, that Saul at this time
passed through a notable crisis in his
life, and ever afterward
believed that he at that time received
indubitable evidence that Christ had risen from the dead, it is
proposed to inquire respecting
the nature of the change wrought in
Saul by this experience.
Rightly to understand this
change, we must understand what sort of a man he was previous to
this experience. Consider, then, his previous character and
history. 1. He was a man of profound
moral earnestness. Whatever faults of character or vices of
life he had, frivolousness was
not one of them. Earnestness did not
begin with his conversion. Paul was always intense. This
appears in all his references to his life before his conversion.
Acts xxiii. 1: “I have lived
before God in all good conscience until
this day”; xxvi. 4: “My manner of life from my youth up, which
was from the beginning among mine own nation, and at
Jerusalem, know all the Jews;
having knowledge of me from the first,
if they be willing to testify,
how that after the straitest sect of
our religion, I lived a
Pharisee.” See also xxii. 3 ff.
2. He was an earnest seeker
after righteousness. It would seem as if our Lord’s blessing
on those who hunger and thirst after righteousness could have
been pronounced on Saul before his conversion. In Phil. iii. 6,
he declares that in his
Pharisaic
days he was, “touching the
righteousness which is in the
law blameless.” Such blamelessness
could only have been the result of earnest and persistent
effort. To this agree also all his references to this period of
his life. Compare Gal. i. 13; Acts xxiii.
1.
3. The method by which he
sought to attain righteousness was a strict obedience to the
law as interpreted by the
Pharisees. This also is implied in Phil.
iii. 6: “As touching the law a Pharisee . . . as touching the
righteousness which is in the
law, found blameless.” Compare also
Acts xxii. 3; xxvi. 5; Gal. i.
14. Now, a
careful study of Paul’s use of
the term law in connection with
righteousness, will show that
what he means by righteousness
by law, or the righteousness
that is in the law, is not
merely a righteousness which
realizes the law’s ideal, but
something both more and less
than that, viz., a righteousness
which is attained, so far as
attained at all, by a
self-reliant effort to obey the
law. As a factor in man’s moral
life, law is constantly the
antithesis of faith. As a
conceivable method of divine
conduct toward men, it is the
antithesis of grace. Law stands
in Paul’s vocabulary for that
method of life according to
which a man sets before himself
what he conceives to be the
demands of God, and gives
himself to the endeavor to
attain right character, and so
to earn divine approval as a
thing deserved at God’s hand.
Righteousness thus acquired, and
in so far as it is thus
acquired, is by its very nature
self-righteousness. And this
holds true whether we conceive
of righteousness simply as right
character and conduct in
themselves, or according to Paul’s more common method
of thinking, as a character or an attitude toward God which
makes us acceptable to God. For law awards a man simply what
he deserves. In so far as it awards him anything else, it is
itself something else than law. It is indeed possible to
conceive of an order of things
which should combine law with faith.
That is, ideally, one might from the first moment of moral
responsibility cast himself on
God for help, and, by divine help always
meeting the requirements of righteousness, present before
the law a perfect character
acquired in dependence on God. But, in
fact, this is a theoretical
possibility only, which had no place
in the Pauline or in the New Testament terminology. To any
one who has given serious study to human nature as it now
is and has been in past days, the reason for the omission of
this theoretical possibility is
not far to seek. The only practical
possibilities, certainly the
only possibilities of which Paul ever
speaks, are, on the one hand, a self-dependent obedience (or
disobedience) to the divine law, coupled with an expectation of
standing before that law on
one’s own self-acquired merits, and,
on the other hand, a reliance on
the divine aid and an acceptance of
the divine grace, which is
called faith. And as between these
alternatives, Paul distinctly
declares that the former was his attitude
before his acceptance of Christ.
Now, it is evident that the
cherishing of this conception of righteousness as something to be
attained only on a basis of law and of merit would inevitably be
a serious obstacle to a hearty acceptance of Jesus, or would
become so the moment the real spirit and teaching of Jesus
were understood. Not only had Jesus unsparingly denounced the
Pharisees, not only had he taught that the only way of
access to. God was not by one’s power or goodness, but through
faith in himself, Jesus; but the very spirit of humility and
lowliness of mind which he exemplified and inculcated were
calculated to repel one who had
not only accepted as a dogma the
Pharisaic idea of self-acquired righteousness, but had become
imbued with the self-sufficient spirit likely to be cultivated
by the holding of this dogma.
4. Saul had,, before he became a
Christian, attained as nearly perfect success in his effort to
become righteous as under this method was possible. On this
point we have his own testimony, given when he had become a
Christian and had come to look back on his former life as a
mistake and a failure. Gal. i. 4: “I advanced in the Jew’s religion
beyond many of mine own age, being more exceedingly zealous
for the traditions of my
fathers’; Phil. iii. 6: “Touching the
righteousness which is in the
law, found blameless.”
5. His persecution of the
Christians was in some sense conscientious.
“I verily
thought with myself that I ought
to do many things contrary to the
name of Jesus of Nazareth”
(Acts xxvi. 9, ff.). Of the same
purport is his word to Timothy:
“I did it ignorantly in
unbelief.” These statements are
of great importance as indicating the
state of Paul’s mind and heart during his career as a
persecutor. They show us a man
of profound moral earnestness
pursuing a course of bitter
persecution of the Christians under the
stress of a sincere conviction
of duty.
But on the other hand, they must
not be pressed beyond their true significance. They stand in
immediate connection with expressions on the apostle’s
part of strong condemnation of
the course which he then pursued,
expressions which prove that, whatever his sincerity at that
time, he afterwards came to see that his conduct was wrong, not
simply according to some objective standard, but as involving
sin on his part. He does not, indeed, undertake to locate the
exact point of his
responsibility; he does not enter into a minute
psychological analysis of his mental and moral state; and we,
at least, cannot determine whether his sin consisted wholly
in previous action, mental or other, by which he had made for
himself an abnormal conscience, which conscience he now could
not do otherwise than obey; or whether there was still in him,
in the midst of his career as a persecutor, something of that
moral obliquity which, vitiating all the mental processes as they
applied to moral questions, could create and maintain a
conviction the falsity and
injustice of which was obscured from
consciousness by the same perversion that created it. He
contents himself with the
paradoxical, but by no means inconsistent,
statement, that he acted
conscientiously, but acted wrongly and
sinfully. 6 .
Despite his success in attaining
the righteousness that is in the
law, despite his
conscientiousness in persecuting
the Christians, Saul was not wholly at
ease. The words of Jesus to him on the road to Damascus:
“It is
hard for thee to kick against the goads,” imply three things:
That Saul was at this time subject to certain influences
tending to turn him from the
course which he had chosen; that he was
resisting those influences; that such resistance involved
some struggle on his part. The precise nature of these
influences it is difficult to
state. That
they came from without is,
indeed, suggested by the figure
of the goad, but that they
penetrated to the sphere of
thought and feeling is not less implied in
the statement that he was with
difficulty resisting them. What Paul
wrote afterward gives us at least, the hint that his
discontent with himself lay in
two directions and sprang from two
sources. The paradoxical nature
of his statement about his career
as a persecutor, already
referred to, strongly suggests that, at
times at least, he could not
exclude the doubt whether he was
altogether right in his
persecutions. The godly lives of those whom he
was persecuting, their heroic endurance of persecution, the
triumphant death of such an one as Stephen, these perhaps formed
some part of the goad against which he was kicking. That he
had as yet any inclination
himself to accept Christ, cannot indeed
be shown; rather all the evidence is to the contrary. He was
an ox pressed by the goad, urging him he knew not whither;
the very intensity of his conscientious conviction that he
was right would lead him to suppress the suggestion he was
wrong long before it had reached
the point of an insinuation that he
himself must become a Christian; the conscientiousness that lay
back of that conviction would forbid him peace of mind while
he suppressed this half latent suggestion.
But whatever doubt there may be
concerning Paul’s precise state of mind with reference to
his conduct as a persecutor,
there can be no doubt that in his life
as a Pharisee he was, at times
at least, and probably with
increasing frequency and
intensity, greatly dissatisfied with his
general moral condition. The
passages in his epistles in which
he speaks with such emphasis and feeling of the unhappy condition
of men under the law must certainly reflect his personal
experience, even if they were
not based wholly upon that
experience. If he had fancied
that he had attained full acceptance
with God; if his state under the law had been one of easy
self-satisfaction, if he had
found the law incapable of producing
discontent with oneself (as Mattheson maintains), Paul could never
honestly have written those burning passages .respecting the
effect of the law, which are familiar to every reader of his
letters to the Galatians and the
Romans (Rom. iii. 20; vii. 5-25;
Gal. ii. 9; iii. 22, 23). His own experience would have given
the lie to every word.
It was then a conscientious and
upright man, ill at ease with himself, who rode from Jerusalem
to Damascus to persecute the Christians; haunted perhaps by
vague doubts which he could not wholly suppress
respecting the
rightfulness of this very
mission, certainly dissatisfied at times
with all his success as a
Pharisee, painfully aware that his highest
success was after all a failure.
7. Up to the time that he met
Jesus in the road leading to Damascus, Saul had not believed
in a Messiah who was to suffer and rise again. It has indeed
been disputed whether the Jews did or did not believe in a
suffering Messiah. That the Jews
of a later time spoke of the “woes
of the Messiah,” is beyond question; but the evidence
outside of the New Testament
seems to fall short of proving that a
suffering Messiah was looked for by the Jews of Jesus’ day. And
if we turn to the New Testament itself, this seems to
establish beyond question that
the doctrine of a suffering Messiah was
not the commonly accepted doctrine. Certainly the idea of
a Messiah rejected by the nation was foreign to their thought.
Peter (Matt. xvi. 16, 22),
having just declared that Jesus is the
Christ, cannot understand that
he is to be rejected and put to
death by his nation. The people say to Jesus (Jno. xii. 34): “We
have heard out of the law that the Christ abideth forever, and
how sayest thou the Son of Man must be lifted up?” “The Christ”
and “being lifted up” are inconsistent predicates to them.
The faith of the disciples that Jesus is the Christ was
completely discomfited by his
death. Till Jesus opens their hearts
to understand the things
prophesied concerning him, it apparently
never occurs to them that his
suffering and death are only
another evidence of his
Messiahship. Paul’s speech at Antioch in
Pisidia (Acts xiii. 27) seems to
be almost a direct assertion that
the Jews of Jesus’ day did not look for a suffering Messiah; in
his speech at Thessalonica (Acts xvii. 3) he sets forth the
doctrine of a Messiah suffering
and raised from the dead not as a
familiar but an unfamiliar
doctrine; and to the Corinthians (1 Cor. i.
23) he speaks of Christ crucified as to the Jews a
stumbling-block. These passages
seem decisive as to the general state of
opinion; and this in turn makes
it evident that the very fact of
the death of Jesus (especially
his death at the hands of the Jewish
leaders, who thus emphatically rejected him) would be to Saul,
the Pharisee, a great obstacle
to the acceptance of him as the
Messiah. Moreover, this obstacle was in his case unrelieved by
any personal acquaintance with Jesus, such as in the case of
Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea, acted to overcome their dogmatic
objections to him. From the point of view of the Pharisaic
dogmatics it was impossible to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The
argument against him was short and easy. The Messiah does
not die, still less does he die rejected by his own nation;
Jesus did die thus rejected;
therefore Jesus is not the Messiah.
With this was necessarily
connected the denial of the
resurrection of Jesus. Such denial
was based not on any hostility
to the doctrine of the resurrection
in itself considered, nor on any unwillingness to admit the
resurrection of the Messiah,
except as this would have involved the
admission of his death; but on the unwillingness to admit that
the impostor Jesus could have received such divine attestation
of his pretended Messiahship. It was a postulate alike of
Jewish and of Christian thinking
that the resurrection of Jesus was
evidence of the validity of his claims, divine attestation that
he was what he claimed to be. This appears on the Jewish side
in the endeavor of the Jews to suppress the evidence of his
resurrection by bribing the
guards to say that his disciples stole
him away; it appears in the fact that those who were convinced
that Jesus was raised from the dead accepted him as Messiah and
Savior, and in the opposition which the unbelieving Jews
constantly manifested to the
proclamation of the resurrection. It
appears on the Christian side in the constant urging of the
resurrection of Jesus as a
reason for accepting Jesus (Acts ii. 24
ff.; iv. 33). This is, indeed, usually accompanied by the
insistence that the Old
Testament had predicted the resurrection
of the Messiah, because the argument thus became doubly
forcible; but it is also
employed without such reference
to the Old Testament Scriptures
(Acts iii. 15). Paul especially
lays constant emphasis on the
resurrection,
using it with Jews in connection
with prophecy (Acts xiii. 33
ff), and with Gentiles without such
connection (Acts xviii. 31), and in his letter to the Roman
Christians referring to the
divine son- ship of Jesus as established by
the fact of the resurrection
(Rom. i. 4). The matter then stood
thus: Denying the doctrine of a suffering Messiah led, since
Jesus had died, to the denial of
his Messiahship. Denial of his
Messiahship necessarily involved
the denial of his resurrection,
since his resurrection would
have been a divine attestation of this
Messianic claim.
8. There is no direct evidence
that Paul felt any hostility to the personal character of Jesus.
His profound moral earnestness, his eager quest after
righteousness, and the readiness
with which he accepted Christ when
once the dogmatic obstacles to faith were broken down, lead us
to believe that he would have been strongly attracted by the
character of Jesus. He had not burned out his soul with
sensualism, nor had he frozen it it up with formalism.
Righteousness, in the sense of
character acceptable to God, was
still for him the great thought of life. He had, indeed, sought
it in a wrong way; his zeal had not been according to knowledge;
but his very consciousness of failure despite the degree of
success which he had attained is evidence that righteousness had
not become a mere empty form, had not been degraded into a
mean and unworthy travesty of the real thing. That there was
an antagonism between the character of Jesus and the ideals of
Saul created by the lowliness of Jesus and the spirit of
self-sufficiency which had
doubtless been cultivated in Saul by the
Pharisaic dogmas, has already
been suggested and must not be
overlooked. But even in this
respect the consciousness of failure
already referred to is evidence
that this antagonism was not in his
case at its highest. It is just here that we are led to believe
there existed the greatest
difference between Saul and his fellow
Pharisees. Many of these seem to have been repelled—at
least not to have been at all attracted—by the character of
Jesus. There is much reason to think that if Saul had known
Jesus he would have become a follower of him while he was still
among men. We may see, then, that there
were four obstacles to Paul’s
acceptance of Jesus, not simply
as the Messiah,, but as his Lord and Savior; two dogmatic or
intellectual, two moral.
(a) He did not believe in a rejected and suffering Messiah, and Jesus had unquestionably
been rejected and had suffered.
(b) He believed in righteousness
by law, and Jesus had continually taught that the only
way of approach to God and acceptance with God was through
faith in himself, Jesus.
(c) In accordance with this last
named belief, he was seeking for righteousness in his own
strength, was depending on
himself rather than on God, was
destitute of that poverty of
spirit which is; the first and indispensable
qualification for Christian
discipleship,
(d) He was resisting the
evidence and the influences
tending to show that his present course
was wrong.
On the other hand, it must be
said that he had certain moral advantages which were calculated
to prepare him to accept Jesus.
(a) His moral earnestness.
(b) His eager desire to be
righteous before God, and his
freedom from vice and empty
formalism.
(c) His dissatisfaction with his
old life; the fact that, despite his blamelessness before the law
he was yet not at peace with himself.
Now to such a man what would be
the effect of such an experience as that which he had on
the way to Damascus? His references to the matter
afterward make it evident that
he believed that he then saw Jesus
Christ, that it was in his own
view of it no mere subjective
experience but an actual
epiphany of the Lord Jesus himself.
First of all, it at once and
instantly overthrew his first
intellectual obstacle to the
acceptance of Jesus. It has been
pointed out above that his denial of the
doctrine of a suffering Messiah led through the step of the
rejection of the Messiahship of
Jesus to the denial of the
resurrection of Jesus. So, in
reverse order,’ to see the risen and glorified
Jesus is to be compelled to
accept the fact of his resurrection. To
accept the fact of his resurrection is to acknowledge his
Messiahship. No dogmatic
objection to the Messiahship of Jesus on
the ground that he, contrary to the true idea of the Messiah,
had died, could stand before the
convincing evidence flashed into
his soul, that the Jesus who claimed to be the Messiah, who
had unquestionably died, whom he had rejected as an imposter,
was now occupying the place of divine power. It doe^ not,
indeed, at once interpret to him
the Old Testament prophecies, does
not enable him to see how the doctrine of a suffering Messiah
is to be got from those Scriptures in which he had hitherto
been unable to find it, but it
does at once compel recognition of
Jesus’ claim to Messiahship. Interpretation of Scripture can
come later. Now his objections are simply battered down
vi et armis, by the superior might of the argument of the visible
appearance of Jesus of Nazareth.
Secondly, and not less
important, it at once demolished
his confidence in the righteousness
that js attainable in law. We have seen that there is reason
to believe that he was already
ill at ease in this matter. But now
in one blow the whole structure of self-acquired righteousness
is overthrown. He is, himself, the consummate flower of
Pharisaism, the highest product
of righteousness attainable under the
system of law, and yet it is
revealed in this revelation of Jesus
Christ that he has been fighting
against God himself. In the very moment
when he was most zealously seeking after righteousness, in
the very moment of this highest success along the line of
legalism he is nevertheless in
rebellion against God,—a rebellion which,
though in a sense unconscious, is not merely formal, but open
and actual.
It should not be overlooked that
the very perfection of Saul’s obedience to the law before his
conversion was an important element in this new conviction. If
his life had been gross and coarse, or empty and hollow, the
demonstration of the futility of righteousness under the law
would have been far less
complete, or might have even failed
altogether.
That Paul at once perceived how
much was involved in this
overthrow of his former view is
by no means probable. In
intellectual matters we may
perceive that the foundation of
our thinking has been shattered
without at once perceiving how
much of the superstructure must go
down with the ruin of the foundation. Still less is the
rearing of a new superstructure
involved in the overthrow of the
foundations of an old one. But
the real
significance of the change which
was involved in this fatal blow .at the very foundations of all
legalistic schemes for attaining righteousness, the importance of
the far-reaching consequences which were to issue from it and
which only needed a suitable occasion to develop them, it is
scarcely possible to
overestimate. In fact, almost all Paul’s
subsequent theology is but the
unfolding of the logical consequences
of the discovery which, as in a flash of lightning, he made when
he was smitten down as he approached Damascus. The
prominence of the doctrine of
the resurrection in his teachings is
of course at once explained by reference to this experience. It
would also of course soon drive him to inquire afresh whether
the Old Testament did indeed teach a suffering and rising
Messiah, and the results of this
study appear in his arguments both in
his speeches in Acts and in his letters. But it is especially in
his doctrine of justification by faith, and of the inability of
the law even to sanctify him who
is already justified, that we see
the clearest results of this
experience. The stages by which he
reached his full doctrine, his
firm conviction that the law cannot
justify, his determined
opposition to the circumcision of the
Gentiles, his rejection of law
even as agency in the building of
character,—when and how each of these became clear to him, it is
impossible for us certainly to determine. But they were all
really implied in this Damascus experience. This particular
phase of the subject deserves
possibly a fuller treatment than it
has ever received, certainly a
larger exposition than the present
brief reference to it.
It remains to ask what effect
the epiphany of Jesus had upon the moral obstacles which stood
in the way of Saul’s acceptance of him as the Messiah and his
Savior. It is evident that the first of
these, the seeking of righteousness by his own strength,
dependence on law as against
faith, could remain after the
demonstration of the futility of
the method only by obstinate
resistance to evident duty. The
same is true of the second obstacle,
viz.: resistance to the
influences tending to show that his present
course was wrong. He had been resisting evidence; here is
overwhelming evidence. He had been deceived by the darkness of
his own soul, but here is light.
His words “What shall I do,
Lord?” seem to show that in fact both obstacles were swept away
at once and instantly. “The heavenly vision” is immediately
effective and a marvellous
change is wrought in the soul of Saul.
This change is manifestly one of profound moral significance. The
spirit of self-dependence bars God out of the soul, and throws
the soul back upon its own inadequate resources.
Self-dependence means
disappointment, failure, despair to every
earnest soul, and no one has
more vividly and faithfully portrayed
to us the pain and anguish of an earnest soul depending on
itself than the apostle Paul
himself. Faith opens the door to
God and brings light and hope where before were failure and
anguish, and the apostle more than any other New Testament
writer has set forth the victory of faith. These two pictures
could only have been drawn by one who had himself passed from
the one experience to the other.
But was the change which took
place in Saul at this time such a change as we now call
conversion? Is it correct in modern terminology to designate
the Damascus event as Saul’s conversion? This of course
depends upon one’s definition of conversion. Probably, however,
we may assume that the term signifies that profound moral
change by which a soul holding
an essentially wrong attitude
toward God and righteousness
comes to take an attitude which is,
fundamentally at least, right. Coming to a closer definition,
probably most persons who use the term conversion at all would
maintain that he should be said to be converted who takes
righteousness, (employing this
term in a broad and inclusive sense,)
as his supreme aim, and faith in Christ as the means of attaining
such righteousness. Doubtless there might be much difference
of opinion if we should still further define the terms
righteousness and faith in
Christ. We may rest however, for our
present purpose in the
definition as now given, and inquire whether
Saul’s “conversion” included these two elements. That it
involved the second there can be no doubt. His own description of
his conversion given in Phil, iii. 4-9 clearly describes it as
an abandonment of the principle
of righteousness and the acceptance
of faith instead thereof; and with this accords all that he
has written in his various
letters both concerning the nature of
the change through which he himself passed, and concerning
the nature of the gospel way of salvation in general.
But was not the first
element,—the choice of
righteousness as his supreme object of endeavor
already present; and if so is
the absence of the second a fatal
defect? Can one of them exist without the other, and if so
which is really essential to a
fundamentally right attitude of
soul? Does the coupling of the spirit of self-dependence, the
endeavor to attain righteousness through the law, to the eager
desire to be righteous, merely
hinder the realization of that desire,
or does it fatally vitiate it,
or even demonstrate that it is already
false and merely specious? Or on the other hand does the
existence of the sincere desire
to be righteous show that faith is
already germinally present,
latent in the desire to be righteous, and
waiting only further
enlightenment to bring it forth into full
exercise? Let it be granted at the outset
that, as the -New Testament teaches, faith is the only
right, in the end the only
successful, method of attaining
righteousness. Granting this, it
seems necessary to make double answer
to our questions. On the one hand if righteousness is really
the supreme desire of the soul, in this desire there is latent
the true method of attaining it, viz., faith. In this desire, if
only it be the supreme choice of the soul, there is contained the
promise and potency of faith, since in this supreme devotion
to righteousness is involved the willingness, even the desire,
to adopt that means which will
lead to its attainment. But on the
other hand the absence of faith, certainly the repudiation of
faith, may be,—must we not say usually is?—the index of the
fact that the desire for
righteousness is not supreme, that the
soul desires righteousness
indeed, but desires it subject to the
condition that it shall be
wrought out in self-dependence. This is
to make not righteousness, but self, supreme. Which of these
supposed cases correctly represents the attitude of Saul in
the days of his Pharisaism? If
the former, if before this time
righteousness had become in very truth the supreme object of his
choice, if he had striven for
righteousness in law only
because under the stress of a
false and misleading education he believed
that this was the divinely appointed way, then his was at
bottom only an intellectual
error,, and that which wrought the
change in him, important for
himself and the world as it was,
was only an access of light, not
a moral transformation of soul.
If on the other hand the
experience of Saul corresponded
to the second supposed case, if eager as was his desire to be
righteous, he had nevertheless
up to this time desired it subject to
the condition that it be
attained in dependence on himself, then
his rejection of faith had been also a rejection of
righteousness and a choice of
self. In that case also his acceptance of
Jesus by faith was at the 'same
time the supreme choice of
righteousness. In the one act he
elected the only right object of
endeavor and the only successful
way of its attainment. Perhaps it is
impossible to decide positively
in which of these two ways we
rightly conceive of Saul’s
experience. Yet the balance of
evidence seems to be in favor of
the second view. All that the
apostle says about the
sinfulness of his Pharisaic life, describing
himself as a blasphemer, and a persecutor, insolently proud,
chief of sinners, implies that
he did not look upon that period of
his life as one of innocent ignorance and latent faith. The
very expression which most mitigates the severity of his
self-condemnation—I did it ignorantly in unbelief—seems
introduced only to explain how
one so hostile to God could at all have
been rescued (1 Tim. i 13-16), and merely shows that he was not
one who with full perception of the nature of his acts
resisted God. No reference which
the apostle makes to the change
itself seems appropriately to
apply to a transformation which,
however important, was at bottom only intellectual. The evidence
from his general conception of the fundamental importance of
faith is indirect but very important. Certainly he always speaks
as if the difference between righteousness by law and
righteousness by faith was for
those to whom he wrote absolutely
fundamental. There are not
lacking passages in which he recognizes
that on the broad plane of a universal divine government,
taking in heathen as well as
those to whom God’s special revelation
had come, the great crucial
question could not be expressed
in terms of faith, i. e., as the word would necessarily be
understood, conscious and
explicit faith. Yet with respect to those
to whom he writes, those to whom God has been revealed in
the law and in the Gospel, the possibility of righteousness or
of right attitude to God without faith in Christ is never so much
as thought of. This could scarcely have been if he had
looked back to a time in his own life, when though in essentially
right attitude toward God and righteousness he had been openly
rejecting and opposing Christ.
We are almost driven to say that
if Saul had before his Damascus
experience made such choice of
righteousness as that his
attitude toward God was already
fundamentally right, and his
conversion a change of opinion
rather than of heart, he himself
never discovered that fact.
While therefore the evidence
falls short of entire
decisiveness, it seems to tend
strongly to the conclusion that
Saul’s conversion was such in
the 'deepest sense' of that
term—a choice of righteousness
and a surrender to God through
faith in Christ; an act
fundamentally changing his
attitude toward God and
fundamentally affecting
his character.
|
|