accompanied by keen sorrow in view of sin. Yet it is not the sorrow, but the change of life following on a change of heart, which constitutes repentance. A man repents when he begins to regard his sin as Christ regards it and acts accordingly. It is a sharing of Christ's view of evil, and the determination to break with it. But repentance, though it be the beginning of the new life, does not cease with advance in it. It is an ever recurring act of the believer's experience. Every rejection of a lower life as unworthy is of the nature of repentance, and Christian progress consists in the perpetual rejection of lower ways, and the continual recognition and acceptance of higher ways. But repentance, though it is in a sense "the first step upwards out of unrighteousness towards Christian character,"1 must not be regarded as a self-originating movement on the part of the natural man. It also is a work of God, prompted and inspired by the Holy Spirit. The man who repents is already in the grip of Christ. He has a vision of the good, and the acts of confession and decision which are essential elements in repentance are the immediate effects of the revelation of Christ, and of the influence of the Holy Spirit upon the heart. Here, as elsewhere, the earliest impulse comes from the divine side. "We love Him because He first loved us." It has been remarked that, while repentance is a frequent topic of our Lord's teaching, it has no prominent place in Pauline doctrine.2 But though it is true that the apostle does not dwell upon it to the same extent as Christ, as a separate element in conversion, it is undoubtedly implied by him as an essential condition of participation in 1Stalker, The Ethic of Jesus, p. 175. 2 Wendt, Lehre Jesu, and Bruce, Conception of Christianity, p. 404. K salvation. Referring in his address to the elders of Ephesus to his own activity, extending over three years in the Asiatic capital, Paul says that he had testified to both Jews and Greeks "repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ."1 We may assume, therefore, that, though in the presentation of his doctrine in the epistles repentance is not frequently referred to, his preaching "always returned to these two great topics, which would be remembered by his hearers when all details were forgotten-repentance and faith." If repentance looks back and forsakes, faith looks forward and accepts. In general it is the heartfelt recognition of the living God as revealed in the character and work of Christ. In the teaching of Paul, not less than in that of our Lord, faith is the great watchword. Though fundamentally both mean by the word the same thing, it has for the apostle a more definite, or at least more technical, signification. In his recent work, The Essence of Christianity, Harnack 2 maintains that Christ did not enter as an element into his own preaching. "It is faith in God, the Father alone, not in the Son which Jesus declared." That statement could hardly, as it seems to us, be supported by an examination of Christ's teaching; but, in any case, there is no doubt that Christ was the object of the apostle's preaching. Faith is the outgoing of the whole man towards Christ, a fact rendered all the more significant when we remember that, for the apostle, faith is fundamental and the chief agent in the creation of character. "It is for Paul," says Prof. Bruce, "as for the author of the Epistle to 1Cp. Stalker, The Ethic of Jesus, p. 175. *See Stalker, p. 176; also Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums, p. 91. the Hebrews, the mother of heroic achievements, and can not only please God, but enable men to make their lives morally sublime."1 As our object is merely to show that Paul recognizes man's part in appropriating energy or power, by which he receives and makes his own the new life in Christ, it will not be necessary to enter upon a full discussion of justification by faith or to analyze minutely the various shades of meaning which the term "faith" has in the apostle's writings. In his Neutestamentliche Theologie, Baur has distinguished at least five different shades of meaning in Paul's use of the word "faith," ranging from mental assent to moral appropriation and practical energy. For our purpose it will be sufficient to notice three. (1) Sometimes faith means simply the theoretical acceptance or intellectual conviction of the facts of salvation as in Rom. iv. 25, or in the declaration that God raised up His Son from the dead. But even in case there is always a moral element which depends not upon the knowledge of merely historical fact but upon the personal confidence in God's character and purpose. This confidence is not simply an assent of the mind. With the heart," says Paul, man believes." What Paul dreads and protests against in his epistles both to the Romans and Galatians is that proud self-satisfied temper of legalism which assumed that mere theoretic acceptance or verbal assent was enough to make a Christian, the mere mental acknowledgment of the terms of the ancient covenant. He is everywhere contending for a new content of the word "faith" which will exhibit itself in overt practical life. 1 St. Paul's Conception of Christianity, p. 225. (2) And hence it comes to mean for him, moral trust— the whole-hearted appropriation of Christ and all that Christ offers to man "In whom persuasion and belief Have ripened into faith, and faith become For, in Paul's view, faith in Christ means union with Christ. The believer distrusts himself and finds his new life in his Lord. What Christ has done, he gratefully accepts as his own. "Any one who examines Paul's doctrine and religion as a whole must admit that his heart-felt and ultimate intention when using the term 'faith' was to denote that pure faculty of receptivity which abandons the guidance of self and simply receives the proffered salvation, accepting justification as a gift' (dwpear); thence follows the further idea that faith is the confidence in the possession of righteousness and secure reliance upon the owrnpia to follow in the future."1 Faith is thus for the Christian the vision of the ideal. It is the acceptance of Christ's life as his life, and the assurance that as he makes this life his own, the Redeemer's righteousness, grace and beauty are imputed to him. The man is no longer commanded by an authority without but is dominated by a Master within, whose utterance is indistinguishable from the voice and sanction of his own soul. "We are justified by faith," Paul exclaims. The apostle feels, what all deeply religious souls have ever felt in their greatest moments, that "the outer and the inner light for him are one." It seems to him as if his mind and the mind of Christ were wholly reconciled. "I live, yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." No other account can he give 1 Joh. Weiss, Paul and Jesus, p. 109. of his experience than that his own spirit and that of his Lord are made one in the unity of faith.1 "A little while there was of Thee-and-me, And then no more there was of me-and-Thee." "The new and significant peculiarity," says Pfleiderer, "in Paul's conception of faith, is the mystical union with Christ, the self-identification with Him in a fellowship of life and death. It is in this unreserved self-forgetting surrender of the whole man to the Saviour, in which the revelation of the divine love, as well as the embodiment of the ideal for man is beheld as a personal life, that the believer feels himself to be a new creature. All this is expressed in the fine saying, "It is no longer I that live but Christ that liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." Thus it is that faith justifies. This self-renouncing trust God accepts for the righteousness we long after. Justification is no mere fiat of God, no mere arbitrary pronouncement; nor, on the other hand, is it a legal fiction. God reckons the true perfection of life as already ours, because in identifying ourselves with Christ we have entered upon the way of its increasing realization. In the union of the soul with Christ and the consequent participation of His life, there is the pledge and promise of the completion in the believer's life of the righteousness which is already by anticipation accorded to him. Man is in a sense already what he aspires to be. What we believe in we are. There must be something in us of that moral beauty which we 3 1Cp. Authority in Religion, J. H. Leckie, p. 104. 2 Das Urchristenthum, p. 244. 'Cp. Stevens, Pauline Theology, p. 288. |