Certainly with regard to Paul himself there should be no debate;
Paul certainly was not indifferent to doctrine; on the contrary, doctrine
was the very basis of his life. His devotion to doctrine did not, it is true,
make him incapable of a magnificent tolerance. One notable example of
such tolerance is to be found during his imprisonment at Rome, as attested
by the Epistle to the Philippians. Apparently certain Christian
teachers at Rome had been jealous of Paul’s greatness. As long as he
had been at liberty they had been obliged to take a secondary place;
but now that he was in prison, they seized the supremacy. They sought
to raise up affliction for Paul in his bonds; they preached Christ even of
envy and strife. In short, the rival preachers made of the preaching of
the gospel a means to the gratification of low personal ambition; it
seems to have been about as mean a piece of business as could well be
conceived. But Paul was not disturbed. “Whether in presence, or in
truth,” he said, “Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and
will rejoice” (Phil. i. 18). The way in which the preaching was being
carried on was wrong, but the message itself was true; and Paul was
far more interested in the content of the message than in the manner of
its presentation. It is impossible to conceive a finer piece of broadminded
tolerance.
But the tolerance of Paul was not indiscriminate. He displayed no
tolerance, for example, in Galatia. There, too, there were rival preachers.
But Paul had no tolerance for them. “But though we,” he said, “or
an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that
which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Gal. i. 8).
What is the reason for the difference in the apostle’s attitude in the two
cases? What is the reason for the broad tolerance in Rome, and the
fierce anathemas in Galatia? The answer is perfectly plain. In Rome,
Paul was tolerant, because there the content of the message that was
being proclaimed by the rival teachers was true; in Galatia he was intolerant,
because there the content of the rival message was false. In
neither case did personalities have anything to do with Paul’s attitude.
No doubt the motives of the Judaizers in Galatia were far from pure,
and in an incidental way Paul does point out their impurity. But that
was not the ground of his opposition. The Judaizers no doubt were
morally far from perfect, but Paul’s opposition to them would have
been exactly the same if they had all been angels from heaven. His opposition
was based altogether upon the falsity of their teaching; they
were substituting for the one true gospel a false gospel which was no
gospel at all. It never occurred to Paul that a gospel might be true for
one man and not for another; the blight of pragmatism had never fallen
upon his soul. Paul was convinced of the objective truth of the gospel
message, and devotion to that truth was the great passion of his life.
17 Christianity for Paul was not only a life, but also a doctrine, and logically
the doctrine came first.1
But what was the difference between the teaching of Paul and the
teaching of the Judaizers? What was it that gave rise to the stupendous
polemic of the Epistle to the Galatians? To the modern Church the difference
would have seemed to be a mere theological subtlety. About
many things the Judaizers were in perfect agreement with Paul. The
Judaizers believed that Jesus was the Messiah; there is not a shadow of
evidence that they objected to Paul’s lofty view of the person of Christ.
Without the slightest doubt, they believed that Jesus had really risen
from the dead. They believed, moreover, that faith in Christ was necessary
to salvation. But the trouble was, they believed that something
else was also necessary; they believed that what Christ had done
needed to be pieced out by the believer’s own effort to keep the Law.
From the modern point of view the difference would have seemed to
be very slight. Paul as well as the Judaizers believed that the keeping of
the law of God, in its deepest import, is inseparably connected with
faith. The difference concerned only the logical—not even, perhaps, the
temporal—order of three steps. Paul said that a man (1) first believes
on Christ, (2) then is justified before God, (3) then immediately proceeds
to keep God’s law. The Judaizers said that a man (1) believes on
Christ and (2) keeps the law of God the best he can, and then (3) is justified.
The difference would seem to modern “practical” Christians to
be a highly subtle and intangible matter, hardly worthy of consideration
at all in view of the large measure of agreement in the practical
realm. What a splendid cleaning up of the Gentile cities it would have
been if the Judaizers had succeeded in extending to those cities the observance
of the Mosaic law, even including the unfortunate ceremonial
observances! Surely Paul ought to have made common cause with
teachers who were so nearly in agreement with him; surely he ought to
have applied to them the great principle of Christian unity.
As a matter of fact, however, Paul did nothing of the kind; and only
because he (and others) did nothing of the kind does the Christian
Church exist today. Paul saw very clearly that the differences between
the Judaizers and himself was the differences between two entirely distinct
types of religion; it was the differences between a religion of merit
and a religion of grace. If Christ provides only a part of our salvation,
leaving us to provide the rest, then we are still hopeless under the load
of sin. For no matter how small the gap which must be bridged before
salvation can be attained, the awakened conscience sees clearly that
our wretched attempt at goodness is insufficient even to bridge that
gap. The guilty soul enters again into the hopeless reckoning with God,
to determine whether we have really done our part. And thus we
groan again under the old bondage of the law. Such an attempt to piece
out the work of Christ by our own merit, Paul saw clearly, is the very
essence of unbelief; Christ will do everything or nothing, and the only
hope is to throw ourselves unreservedly on His mercy and trust Him
for all.
Paul certainly was right. The differences which divided him from the
Judaizers was no mere theological subtlety, but concerned the very
heart and core of the religion of Christ.
“Just as I am without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me”
—that was what Paul was contending for in Galatia; that hymn would
never have been written if the Judaizers had won. And without the
thing which that hymn expresses there is no Christianity at all.
J. Gresham Machen.
Christianaity and Liberalsim.
pp. 16-18
