Thus far we have tried to clear away some of the difficulties which tend to impede an understanding of the Aposle Paul's letters; we have tried to examine what was his real aim and method; and we have taken a cursory glance at the whole group of his epistles. Now without further preliminaries, we can proceed with our specific subject, the Epistle to the Romans. I want to look at the epistle directly, and try to see it as a whole. I am sure that if we do this, we shall find in it not merely a series of more or less unrelated formulations some of which indeed are very dear and precious to us, but we shall find in it a definite structure which will give the epistle a new or heightened meaning as a whole, or even disclose some form of living organism, which can and will grow in us if we let it. I am convinced with Paul that the word is living seed and will bear fruit if we receive it into our being and nourish it there, instead of slicing it up for the microscopic investigating slides of our mind.
The problem that we have before us, you will appreciate more if, as I have suggested, you have ever tried to make an analysis of the Epistle to the Romans. That has been attempted many times, and the results are rather surprising, for when the usual method of rhetorical analysis is applied, the different parts of the epistle somehow do not seem to fit into each other or follow each other in what we recognize as logical sequence. I noticed recently in the American Friend, issue of December 4, 1930, a sermon on one of the verses of the epistles, preached by Alfred Joseph McCartney, in Washington, October 19, 1930; and he starts in this way:
"The letter of Paul to the Romans makes hard reading. It is quite a compliment to the intellectual and spiritual calibre of that group of Christians in Rome to whom the letter is addressed that they were expected to have the patience to read it through and to understand what it was all about. Have you ever attempted to read a substantial portion of it at a single sitting? The reader is likely to arrive at a state of mental exhaustion before he gets very far into the letter in his effort to hold on to the trend of the argument."
I think that pretty well expresses the popular attitude toward the Epistle to the Romans. A good many who at times seem to be rather fond of the Bible object to the Epistle to the Romans. They find it hard reading. They find it disjointed. I think this is1 not because the epistle is difficult or incoherent but because we are not thinking in the same tempo, we are not thinking on the same plane, we are not using the method of the Apostle Paul at all. We are trying to make this letter fit a pattern which Paul did not use, and of course we have trouble. We are simply trying to do what we used to do when we were in school and went to rhetoric class. Sometimes we had to analyze an essay. We found the introduction, the body of the essay and the conclusion and we reduced it to a more or less logical succession of ideas. Our trouble is that this letter is constructed in such a way that it is impossible to apply that method of analysis to it. It is conceived in simultaneity, not succession. Of course, when I say that the letter was not written in logical succession, I do not mean that it is not orderly. There is a higher order than logic.
You will remember that I said that Paul's letters were always "occasional," that is, they were not abstract or general treatises, like the so-called General Epistles for instance, but they were real letters written to meet some specific condition which had arisen. Thus in the case of the Epistle to the Galatians there was the problem of the Judaizers. In the case of the letter to the Romans, there is this difference. Here was no occasion forced upon the Apostle or adventitiously encountered by him, but he actually made the occasion. In view of the contemplated transfer of the scene of his actualizations, he took the occasion to sum up, as well as he could, his experience, his essential, or if you prefer it, his spiritual position. This was no dead thing to Paul, but a very living thing, life itself. He could no more dissect it and lay it out in neat laboratory order or intellectual sequence, than he could dissect himself. His aim was not to enable others to analyze his experience, but to present it as a live thing, and as vividly as possible, to the sole end that when others came in contact with it, they too might be urged to share in his experience, or rather, to experience it for themselves. It is for this reason that it cannot be made to conform to the ordinary rules of rhetorical analysis or literary composition.
I do not say that it is impossible for a trained mind to extract and segregate its intellectual content from the epistle, but when this is done we shall find that what is vital and characteristic in Paul's message has been omitted. The letter has not even a logical thesis as its subject. What Paul was trying to do was to stimulate people to live in Christ. He was not trying, as theologians say, to establish the thesis that the righteousness of God is revealed in Christ by faith apart from the law. Paul did put emphasis upon that thesis, but only because most of his readers were conditioned by their bringing up in the law, and he had to overcome that conditioning. But this was incidental to his real aim. To say that his efforts to meet conditions local in time and space constitute the substance of his message is to take the intellectual part for the living whole. It is to say that Paul has not written scripture, for the substance of scripture is eternal.
1 PtS-32 has 'it'.