Romans 6 - Introduction

FIRST PART. SUPPLEMENTARY. CHAPS. 6-8. SANCTIFICATION.

BY faith in the expiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ the believer has obtained a sentence of justification, in virtue of which he stands reconciled to God. Can anything more be needed for his salvation? It seems not. The didactic treatise, intended to expound salvation, seems thus to have reached its close. Why then a new part?

The attentive reader will not have forgotten that in the first part of chap. 5 the apostle directed our attention to a day of wrath, the day of the judgment to come, and that he dealt with the question by anticipation, whether the justification now acquired would hold good in that final and decisive hour. To settle this question, he brought in a means of salvation of which he had not yet spoken: participation in the life of Christ; and it was on this fact, announced beforehand (Romans 5:9-10), that he based the assurance of the validity of our justification even in the day of supreme trial. When uttering those words, Paul marked out in advance the new domain on which he enters from this time forward, that of sanctification.

To treat this matter is not to pass beyond the limits traced in the outset by the general thesis expressed Romans 1:17: “The just shall live by faith.” For in the expression shall live, ζήσεται, there is comprehended not only the grace of righteousness, but also that of the new life, or of holiness. To live is not merely to regain peace with God through justification; it is to dwell in the light of His holiness, and to act in permanent communion with Him. In the cure of the soul, pardon is only the crisis of convalescence; the restoration of health is sanctification. Holiness is true life.

What is the exact relation between these two divine blessings which constitute salvation in its real nature: justification and holiness? To put this question is at the same time to inquire into the true relation between the following part, chaps. 6-8, and the portion of the Epistle already studied. The understanding of this central point is the key to the Epistle to the Romans, and even to the whole Gospel.

1. In the view of many, the relation between these two blessings of grace ought to be expressed by a but. “No doubt you are justified by faith; but beware, see that you break with the sin which has been forgiven you; apply yourselves to holiness; if not, you shall fall into condemnation again.” This somewhat prevalent conception of the relation between justification and sanctification seems to us to find instinctive expression in the words of Th. Schott: “Here we enter upon the domain of the preservation of salvation.” According to this view, salvation consists essentially of justification, and sanctification appears solely as the condition of not losing it.

2. Other expositors make what follows, in relation to what precedes, a therefore, if one may so speak: “You are justified freely; therefore, impelled by faith and gratitude, engage yourselves now to renounce evil, and do what is well-pleasing to God.” This mode of understanding the relation between justification and holiness is probably that followed by most of the readers of our Epistle at the present day.

3. According to others, Reuss and Sabatier for example, the connection sought would require to be expressed by a for, or in fact: If faith justifies you, as I have just shown, it is because in fact, by the mystical and personal union which it establishes between Christ and us, it alone has the power to sanctify us. The gift of pardon flows, on this view, from that of holiness and not the reverse; or, to speak the truth, these blessings of grace are confounded with one another. “Paul knows nothing,” says Sabatier expressly, “of the subtle distinction which has given rise to so many disputes between declaring righteous and making righteous, justum dicere and justum facere. ” So thought also Professor Beck of Tübingen. This is the opinion which was elevated by the Council of Trent to the rank of a dogma in the Catholic Church.

4. Finally, in these last days a bold thinker, M. Lüdemann, has explained the connection sought after a wholly new fashion. The appropriate form for expressing the connection is, according to him: or rather. This author will have it that the first four Chapter s of our Epistle expound a wholly juridical theory of justification, of purely Jewish origin, and not yet expressing the real view of the apostle. It is a simple accommodation by which he seeks to gain his Judeo-Christian readers. His true theory is of Hellenic origin; it is distinguished from the first by its truly moral character. It is the one which is expounded chaps. 5-8. Sin no longer appears as an offence to be effaced by an arbitrary pardon; it is an objective power which can only be broken by the personal union of the believer with Christ dead and risen. By the second theory, therefore, Paul rectifies and even retracts the first. The notion of justification is suppressed, as in the preceding view, at least from the standpoint of Paul himself; all that God has to do to save us is to sanctify us.

We do not think that any of these four solutions exactly reproduces the apostolic view; the two last even contradict it flatly.

1. Sanctification is more and better than a restrictive and purely negative condition of the maintenance of the state of justification once acquired. It is a new state into which it is needful to penetrate and advance, in order thus to gain the complete salvation. One may see, Romans 10:10, how the apostle distinguished precisely between the two notions of justification and salvation.

2. Neither is it altogether exact to represent sanctification as a consequence to be drawn from justification. The connection between the two facts is still more intimate. Holiness is not an obligation which the believer deduces from his faith; it is a fact implied in justification itself, or rather one which proceeds, as well as justification, from the object of justifying faith, that is, Christ dead and risen. The believer appropriates this Christ as his righteousness first, and then as his holiness (1 Corinthians 1:30). The bond of union which connects these two graces is not therefore logical or subjective; it is so profoundly impressed on the believer's heart only because it has an anterior reality in the very person of Christ, whose holiness, while serving to justify us, is at the same time the principle of our sanctification. Reuss justly observes in this relation, that from the apostle's point of view, we have not to say to the Christian: “Thou shalt sin no more;” but we must rather say: “The Christian sins no more.”

3. As to the third view, which finds in sanctification the efficient cause of pardon and justification, it is the antipodes of Paul's view. Why, if he had understood the relation between the two in this way, would he not have commenced his didactic treatise with the part relating to sanctification (vi.-viii.), instead of laying as its foundation the exposition of justification (i.-v.)? Besides, is not the then (Romans 6:1): “What shall we say then? ” enough to show the contradiction between this view and the apostle's conception? He must have said: “ For (or in fact) what shall we say?” Finally, is it not evident that the whole deduction of chap. 6 assumes that of chap. 3, and not the reverse? If the opinion which the works of Reuss have contributed to accredit in the Church of France were well founded, we must acknowledge the justness of the charge which this writer brings against the apostle of “not having followed a rigorously logical course, a really systematic order.” But it is a hundred to one when a reader does not find the Apostle Paul logical, that he is not understanding his thought; and this is certainly the case with the critic whom we are combating. The apostle knew the human heart too well to think of founding faith in reconciliation on the moral labors of man. We need to be set free from ourselves, not to be thrown back on ourselves. If we had to rest the assurance of our justification, little or much, on our own sanctification, since this is always imperfect, our heart would never be wholly made free Godward, absolutely set at large and penetrated with that filial confidence which is itself the necessary condition of all true moral progress. The normal attitude Godward is therefore this: first rest in God through justification; thereafter, work with Him, in His fellowship, or sanctification. The opinion before us, by reversing this relation, puts, to use the common expression, the cart before the horse. It can only issue in replacing the church under the law, or in freeing it in a manner far from salutary, by setting before it a degraded standard of Christian holiness.

4. The fourth view, while equally at variance with the doctrine of the gospel, compromises, besides, the loyalty of the apostle's character. Who can persuade himself, when reading seriously the first part of the Epistle relating to justification by faith, that all he demonstrates there with so much pains, and even with so great an expenditure of biblical proofs (iii. and iv.), is a view which he does not adopt himself, and which he proposes afterward to set aside, to substitute in its room one wholly different? To what category morally are we to assign this process of substitution presented (Romans 6:1) in the deceptive form of a conclusion (then) and so ably disguised that the first who discovers it turns out to be a professor of the nineteenth century? Or perhaps the apostle himself did not suspect the difference between the two orders of thought, Jewish and Greek, to which he yielded his mind at one and the same time? The antagonism of the two theories perhaps so thoroughly escaped him that he could, without suspecting it, retract the one while establishing the other. Such a confusion of ideas cannot be attributed to the man who conceived and composed an “Epistle to the Romans.”

Sanctification, therefore, is neither a condition nor a corollary of justification: nor is it its cause, and still less its negation. The real connection between justification and Christian holiness, as conceived by St. Paul, appears to us to be this: justification by faith is the means, and sanctification the end. The more precisely we distinguish these two divine gifts, the better we apprehend the real bond which unites them. God is the only good; the creature, therefore, cannot do good except in Him. Consequently, to put man into a condition to sanctify himself, it is necessary to begin by reconciling him to God, and replacing him in Him. For this purpose, the wall which separates him from God, the divine condemnation which is due to him as a sinner, must be broken down. This obstacle once removed by justification, and reconciliation accomplished, the heart of man opens without reserve to the divine favor which is restored to him; and, on the other hand, the communication of it from above, interrupted by the state of condemnation, resumes its course. The Holy Spirit, whom God could not bestow on a being at war with Him, comes to seal on his heart the new relation established on justification, and to do the work of a real and free inward sanctification. Such was the end which God had in view from the first; for holiness is salvation in its very essence. Justification is to be regarded as the strait gate, through which we enter on the narrow way of sanctification, which leads to glory.

And now the profound connection between the two parts of the Epistle, and more especially between the two chaps. 5 and 6, becomes manifest. It may be expressed thus: Even as we are not justified each by himself, but all by one, by Jesus Christ our Lord (comp. Romans 5:11; Romans 5:17; Romans 5:21); so neither are we sanctified each in himself, but all in one, in Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 6:23, Romans 8:39).

The course of thought in the following part is this: In the first section the apostle unfolds the new principle of sanctification contained in the very object of justifying faith, Jesus Christ, and shows the consequences of this principle, both as to sin and as to law (Romans 6:1 to Romans 7:6).

In the second, he casts a glance backward, in order to compare the action of this new principle with the action of the old, the law (Romans 7:7-25).

In the third, he points to the Holy Spirit as the divine agent who causes the new principle, or the life of Christ, to penetrate the life of the believer, and who by transforming him fits him to enjoy the future glory, and to realize at length his eternal destiny (Romans 8:1-39).

In three words, then: holiness in Christ (Romans 6:1 to Romans 7:6), without law (Romans 7:7-25), by the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:1-39). The great contrast on which the thought of the apostle moves here is not, as in the previous part, that between wrath and justification; but the contrast between sin and holiness. For the matter in question is no longer to efface sin, as guilt, but to overcome it as a power or disease.

The apostle was necessarily led to this discussion by the development of his original theme. A new religious conception, which offers itself to man with the claim of conducting him to his high destiny, cannot dispense with the demonstration that it possesses the force necessary to secure his moral life. To explain this part, therefore, it is not necessary to assume a polemic or apologetic intention in relation to a so-called Jewish-Christianity reigning in the Church of Rome (Mangold), or to some Jewish-Christian influence which had begun to work there (Weizsäcker). If Paul here compares the moral effects of the gospel (chap. 6) with those of the law (vii.), it is because he is positively and necessarily under obligation to demonstrate the right of the former to replace the latter in the moral direction of mankind. It is with Judaism, as a preparatory revelation, that he has to do, not with Jewish-Christianity, as in the Epistle to the Galatians. Here his point of view is vastly wider. As he had discussed (chap. 3) the question of the value of the law in relation to justification, he could not but take up the same subject again in connection with the work of sanctification (vii.). Besides, the tone of chap. 6 is essentially didactic; the polemical tendency does not come out till chap. 7, to give place again in viii. to positive teaching, without the slightest trace of an apologetic or polemic intention.

It is equally plain how palpably erroneous is the view of those who would make the idea of Christian universalism the subject of the whole Epistle, and the principle of his plan and method. The contrast between universalism and particularism has not the slightest place in this part, which would thus be in this exposition wholly beside the subject.

How bold was the apostle's undertaking, to found the moral life of mankind on a purely spiritual basis, without the smallest atom of legal element! Even to this hour, after eighteen centuries, how many excellent spirits hesitate to welcome such an experiment! But Paul had had a convincing personal experience, on the one hand, of the powerlessness of the law to sanctify as well as to justify; and, on the other, of the entire sufficiency of the gospel to accomplish both tasks. This experience he expounds under the guidance of the Spirit, while generalizing it. Hence the personal turn which his exposition takes here in particular (comp. Romans 7:7 to Romans 8:2).