If we go out of the city of Rome by the gate near the English cemetary, with its many associations, we come eventually to the church of St. Paul Without the Walls, a costly structure, enormous and empty. The church is supposed to mark the site of Paul's tomb. Whether this is true of not, it does mark the attempt to entomb his spirit. On its wall Paul is described as DOCTOR GENTIUM, the theologian of the Gentiles. That inscription truthfully expresses the position which has been given to Paul by the Christian hierarchy. It has been maintained that primarily he was interested in subtle intellectual and philosophical distinctions, and that his letters set out a complicated theological scheme, the understanding of which is necessary to salvation. Bitter are the battles which have been fought over the meaning to be given to such words as justification, adoption, atonement, the last of which, by the way, is never used by Paul.
These subtleties of intellectualization have been discarded by many of us; to others they still have a vital meaning. I shall not discuss whether or not these concepts are correct. But to those of us who have thrown away our former theological notions I do say that in throwing them away we must not discard Paul and his message. Because, whatever the value of the theological ideas which have been erected on the alleged foundation of Paul's letters, I am very sure that he himself never entertained them nor any others like them. His method was quite different. Paul had seen himself, seen the hopeless mechanicality of his condition. He had also experienced the new birth, and found himself "in Christ" a new creature. This change of state was the only thing that Paul was interested in; it was to the new state that he wanted to draw his readers. He was a missionary, not a theologian.
In order to demonstrate that Paul's message was not doctrinal and theological, I purpose now to consider some of the words which Paul uses more or less frequently and which have been made the basis of complicated systems of which Paul himself had not the slightest conception. What I shall have to say is not a mere reflection of personal idiosyncracy but is based on conclusions which have been reached by scholars who have made a careful study of the papyri and contemporary monuments and inscriptions. For I think that a great part of the terrible error into which the church has fallen has been due to mistranslation. The early translators made the mistake of going to literary rather than vernacular sources for the meaning of Paul's words. For this reason I think that it is a good thing to use a good modern translation like Weymouth in conjunction with the Revised Version. In my quotations from the New Testament I use Weymouth or Moffatt or the Revised Version or sometimes my own translation, however the meaning might be best brought out.
Our next considerations will unfortunately but necessarily be somewhat negative in character. That is, we shall try to show what Paul did not say. Afterwards we shall approach the subject from a more positive angle. That is, we shall try to examine what he did mean by "being in Christ," by faith "in Christ," which after all is the sum total of his message.
The five words which I have selected for consideration are the following:
Redemption
Adoption
Justification
Reconciliation
Forgiveness.
Each of these words has been given a very formal, definite theological meaning. If we look at the Westminster catechism, we can find them all defined with scrupulous exactitude, and, I may add, with a signification which Paul never so much as hints at, a meaning which they could not possibly have borne to Paul or his readers. These words and perhaps some others have been called the Ladder of Salvation, Steps to Salvation. There have been serious diputes as to which of the processes was the highest, which was the most sacred, which came first, whether there could be forgiving without reconciliation, whether justification came after redemption. But as a matter of fact those distinctions never entered into Paul's mind at all. In his meaning and to the understanding of his readers, the five words were simply five pictures of the state of man before God; as a slave, as an adopted son, as an accused person, as a commercial debtor, as a rebellious and warring enemy. None of these words are technical theological terms. No one of them is a complete or adequate picture in itself, but taken together they give some idea of the state in which Paul found himself and of the change which had come over him.