Malice (κακία)
Malice is the propensity to inflict injury upon another, or to take pleasure in his misfortunes. In early English it denoted wickedness in general (HDB [Note: DB Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible (5 vols.).] iii. 223), but the modern meaning is found in Shakespeare, e.g. in Othello’s words:
‘Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice’
(Act v. sc. ii. line 342).
κακία changed its connotation in much the same way. In classical Greek it was not a particular fault or vice, but that badness of nature or character (opp. to ἀ ρετή, ‘virtue,’ ‘excellence’) which is the root of all faults. Cicero discusses the point in Tusc. Disp. IV. xv. 34: ‘Hujus igitur virtutis contraria est vitiositas. Sic enim malo quam malitiam appellare eam, quam GrAEci κακίαν appellant. Nam malitia certi cujusdam vitii nomen est; vitiositas omnium.’ In the NT the context generally indicates that κακία is a specific fault or vice. The compound κακοηθεια (‘malicious disposition’) designates but one of the many elements or workings of the reprobate mind (Romans 1:29). Christians recall the time, before ‘the washing of regeneration,’ when they were ‘living in malice (ἐ ν κακί ᾳ) and envy’ (Titus 3:3). κακία is one of the sins which the believer must resolutely put away (Ephesians 4:31, Colossians 3:8); he is not to eat the Christian passover with the leaven of malice (1 Corinthians 5:8); in malice he is to be a babe (14:20). Without apparent cause the Revisers prefer ‘wickedness’ in James 1:21, James 1:1 P 2:1, 16, relegating ‘malice’ to the margin. Only once is the wider meaning unquestionable: the κακία of which Simon the Magian is urged to repe nt is no specific fault, but the deep-seated wickedness of a man who is still in the gall of bitterness (Acts 8:22, Acts 8:23).
James Strahan.
MAN
Introduction .-The fundamental fact for apostolic anthropology is the new value assigned to human nature by Jesus Christ, both through His personal attitude and teaching, and through His life, death, and resurrection. Jesus saw every man thrown into relief against the background of the kingly Fatherhood of God-encompassed by His mercy, answerable to His judgment. For Jesus, the supreme element in human personality was its moral content, as the supreme value in the life of men was human personality itself. This conception of human nature goes back to the Hebrew Scriptures, in which we can trace five principles, summarily stated in modern terms as follows. (a) Human nature is conceived as a unity; there is no dualism of body and soul as in Greek thought, and consequently no asceticism. Man becomes man by the vitalization of a physical organism (for which Hebrew has no word) by a breath-soul (nephesh, rûaḥ); death is their divorce, and they have no separate history. (b) Man depends absolutely on God for his creation and continued existence; his inner life is easily accessible to spiritual influences from without, both for good and for evil. (c) Man is morally responsible for his conduct, because ultimately free to choose; if he chooses to rebel against the declared will of God, he will suffer for his sin. (d) The will of God gives a central place to the realization of social righteousness, the right relation of man to man. (e) In the purposes of God man has consequently a high place, as in the visible world he has a unique dignity. In the period between the OT and the NT, this conception of human nature received two important developments (cf. W. Fairweather, The Background of the Gospels 2, 1911, pp. 283-291). From the MaccabAEan age onwards there is a much more pronounced individualism; along with this there is the extension of human personality into a life beyond death. Both developments are begun in the OT itself; but neither beginning is comparable in importance with the established doctrine of the time of Christ. These two developments, separately and in union, formed a most important contribution to the Christian interpretation of human nature. but its foundation was already laid in the OT, the main ideas of which Jesus liberated from the restraints of Jewish nationalism to incorporate them into a universal faith. He gave them a new religious significance by His conception of the Father. He added the purified ethical content of the prophetic teaching to the current supernaturalism of apocalyptic writers, purged of its vagaries. In His own person, He gave to man an example, a motive, and an approach to God which have made His teaching a religion as well as a philosophy. The result is seen in the Christian doctrine of man, pre-supposed by apostolic evangelism, and adumbrated in apostolic writings. Three types of this may be studied in the pages of the NT, viz. the Pauline and the Johannine (the latter in large measure a development of the former), and what may be called the non-mystical type, as inclusive of the other material (chiefly Hebrews, 1 Peter, James).
1. Pauline anthropology. -Perhaps any formal statement of St. Paul’s conception of human nature is apt to misrepresent him. The data are fragmentary and occasional; the form is, for the most part, unsystematic; the interest of the writer is experiential, and his aims are practical. It is not easy to recover the full content of his thought-world. but we probably come nearest to it when we recognize that he continues the lines of OT thought indicated above, with a deepening of ethical contrast (not to be identified with Greek dualism), and, in particular, with an emphasis on the Spirit of God in Christ as the normal basis of the Christian life. This last is characteristically Pauline, and forms St. Paul’s chief contribution to the present subject. Recognition of the outpouring of the Spirit of God belongs to early Christianity in general, and marks it off from the religious life and thought of contemporary Judaism (cf. W. Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums 2, 1906, p. 458). The specifically Pauline doctrine of life in the Spirit is a legitimate development of OT ideas. but it may well have been quickened by current Hellenistic ideas of a Divine πνε ῦ μα (on which See H. Siebeck, Geschichte der Psychologie, 1884, ii. 130-160). Similar influences may have contributed to the accentuation of the ethical contrast already indicated between the pneumatic and psychic, the inner and the outer man. but the real principle of this Pauline contrast is already implicit in the OT differentiation of rúaḥ (πνε ῦ μα) and nephesh (ψυχή). On this side of Pauline thought, the Greek influences seem often to have been over-emphasized (e.g. by Holtzmann, Neutest. Theologie, 1897, ii. 13 ff.).
(a) St. Paul conceives human life as an integral element in a vast cosmic drama . This conception receives graphic illustration when he compares the suffering apostles with those doomed to death in the arena: ‘We are made a spectacle unto the world, both to angels and men’ (1 Corinthians 4:9). Man plays his part before an audience invisible as well as visible; nor are those whose eyes are turned upon him mere spectators. There is arrayed against the righteous man a multitude of spiritual forces: ‘our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places’ (Ephesians 6:12). At the head of this kingdom of evil is Satan, ‘the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience’ (Ephesians 2:2; cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:9), to whom is to be ascribed the power to work both physical (1 Corinthians 5:5, 2 Corinthians 12:7) and moral (1 Corinthians 7:5; cf. 2 Corinthians 11:3) evil. Similar to this was the general outlook of contemporary Judaism; the distinctive feature in the case of St. Paul was his faith that victorious energies for good were mediated through Christ. This conception of ‘the Lord the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:18) sprang from St. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, by which he was convinced of the continued existence, the Divine authority, and the spiritual power of Christ. Union with Christ, thus conceived (1 Corinthians 6:17), brought the Christian into a new realm of powers and possibilities. No longer dismayed by the spiritual host arrayed against him, hitherto so often victorious over his fleshly weakness, the Christian became conscious ‘in Christ’ that God was for him, and convinced that none could prevail against him, through the practical operation of spiritual energies within him. He must indeed be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ, but that thought could bring no terror to one who was already ‘in Christ.’ The Christian warrior (Ephesians 6:10 f.) shares in the conflict of Christ, whose final victory (1 Corinthians 15:24 f.) is to be the last act of the great cosmic drama. The fact that, at its culmination, God shall be all in all (v. 28) is significant of the whole character of this interpretation of life. There is here no Gnostic dualism; the evil of the world is moral, not physical, in its origin, and the cosmic issues are safe in the hands of the one and only God. The way in which the cosmic forces are imagined and described betrays Jewish origin; but this ought not to prejudice the great principles involved. There can be no doubt that this whole outlook gives to man’s life a meaning and a dignity which are a fit development of the high calling assigned to him in the OT.
(b) Because this cosmic conflict is essentially moral, its peculiar battle-field is the heart of man . There the cosmic drama is repeated in miniature-or rather, there the issues of the world conflict are focused. The cardinal passage is, of course, Romans 7, and this chapter, rather than the 5th, should be the point of departure for any statement of Pauline anthropology. St. Paul is analyzing his own moral and religious experience prior and up to his deliverance by the Spirit of Christ. but he does this in general terms, implying that it is substantially true for all men, since even the Gentiles have the requirements of the Law written in their hearts (2:15). The Jewish Law, ‘whose silent rolls, in their gaily embroidered cover, the child in the synagogue had seen from afar with awe and curiosity’ (Deissmann, Paulus, 1911, p. 64), became eloquent to St. Paul as a unique revelation of man’s duty, imperfect only in the sense that devotion to it could not generate the moral energy necessary to the fulfilment of its high demands. Without such new motive power, man is helpless, for on his physical side he belongs to the realm of fleshly weakness, the antithesis to that of the Spirit to which the Law itself belongs (Romans 7:14). Through thi s weakness, he has been taken captive by Sin, conceived as an external, personalized activity (vv. 8, 23). Yet the νο ῦ ς, or inner man, desires to obey that spiritual Law, for there is a spiritual element (rûaḥ) in human nature (8:16). St. Paul does not contemplate the case of the man who in his inmost heart does not desire to obey that Law, any more than the OT sacrifices provide for deliberate, voluntary sin. He is concerned with his own experience as a zealous Pharisee, eager to find the secret of morality, and discovering instead his own captivity to sin. The body of flesh is found to be, for a reason other than that of Plato’s dualism, the prison-house of the soul. The actual deliverance from this death-bringing captivity St. Paul had found in the new spiritual energies which reinforced his captive will ‘in Christ.’ These gave him a present moral victory over his ‘psychic’ nature, and the promise of the ultimate replacement of this inadequate organism by a ‘pneumatic’ body. Sin thus lost the advantage gained by its insidious use of Law (7:11) and could be overcome by those who were led by the Spirit (8:14, Galatians 5:18). For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17).
Several points should be particularly noticed in this generalized, yet mos t vivid, transcript from experience. In the first place, St. Paul does not, here or elsewhere, regard the ‘flesh’ (σάρξ) as essentially evil, but as essentially weak. It is therefore accessible to the forces of evil, affording to them an obvious base of op erations in their siege of the inner or ‘spiritual’ man. If it be urged that sin is not committed until the inner man yields to the attack of sin, we must remember that the Hebrew psychology (which supplies the real content of St. Paul’s Greek terms) regarded the ‘flesh’ (basar) as a genuine element in human personality, alive psychically as well as physically. The man did sin when the weakest part of his personality, viz. the flesh, yielded to sin. The often alleged dualism of St. Paul thus becomes the conflict between the stronger and the weaker elements in the unity of personality. Secondly, the whole of Christian character and conduct is related to the dominating conception of the Lord the Spirit. Through this conception St. Paul was able to unite two lines of OT development, viz. the experience of continuous fellowship with God which sprang from the realization of ethical ideals, and the doctrine of the intermittent and ‘occasional’ Spirit of God. One of St. Paul’s greatest services to Christian thought has been to unite these two lines, and to unite them in Christ. The Spirit of God, acting through Christ, becomes the normal principle of Christian morality, and, consequently, of permanent fellowship with God. Thirdly, St. Paul gives no indication that actual sin is anything but what the OT religion made it-the rebellion of the human will against the Divine. In Romans 7 he recognizes no ‘original sin,’ no hereditary influence even, as active in producing the captivity from which the Spirit of Christ delivers. That captivity is traced to the deceitful attack made on each successive individual by sin, the external enemy.
(c) From this point of view, we may best approach what St. Paul has to say of the racial history . For this the cardinal passage is Romans 5:12-21 -a passage difficult to interpret, not only because of its abrupt transitions, but even more because, in conventional theology, the later system of Augustinian anthropology has been welded into it. St. Paul is in these verses contrasting Adam and Christ as, in some sense, both unique in their influence on human history; the debatable point is, in what sense? The entrance of death into the world is clearly ascribed to Adam’s sin, just as the entrance of new life is ascribed to Christ’s obedience (v. 17). but when we read that ‘through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners’ (v. 19), we must not assume with Augustine that this refers to the peccatum originale handed down by the inherent concupiscentia of the sexual act; nor must we be influenced unconsciously by the popular science of to-day, so as to imagine that there is a reference to heredity. Here, as in the well-known saying quoted by both Jeremiah (31:29) and Ezekiel (18:2)-‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’-it is not the biological succession of individuals that is in view, but the far-reaching conception of ‘corporate responsibility,’ as the protest of those two prophets makes evident enough. In their assertion of moral individualism St. Paul would have joined heartily; but his recognition of the individual relation of men to God does not prevent him from accepting the fact that the Ishmaelites were cast out in Hagar’s son (Galatians 4:30), and that the Edomites were ‘hated’ in Esau (Romans 9:13). Just as Achan’s sin brought death on his whole family, since it brought them as a group under the ban (Joshua 7:24, Joshua 7:25), so Adam’s sin brought death on the whole human race, since it constituted them ‘sinners’ as a group. As a matter of fact, St. Paul adds that all men have actually sinned, though, prior to the giving of explicit law, their sin was different in kind from Adam’s wilful disobedience (Romans 5:12-14). but St. Paul does not connect this universality of actual sin in the race, which has justified the Divine sentence of death upon it, with the initial sin of Adam, in such a way as to make them effect and cause. Such a connexion may seem obvious to a mind prepossessed by Augustinian anthropology on the one hand, or by popular biological science on the other; but there is no proof that it was obvious to St. Paul. In fact, as we have seen, the evidence of Romans 7 is the other way. Adam’s sin was, indeed, fatal to man, since it brought the Divine penalty of death upon the race; but St. Paul recognizes to the full the individual freedom and responsibility of its individual members, who followed in the footsteps of Adam. It should be noted that contemporary Jewish theology gives no sufficient warrant for ascribing a doctrine of ‘original sin’ to St. Paul’s teachers, but only for ascribing to them the doctrine of the yezer hara, the evil impulse present in Adam and in successive individuals of his race, though not due to his sin (cf. F. C. Porter’s essay on this subject in Biblical and Semitic Studies [Yale Bicentennial Publications], 1901, pp. 93-156). Men acted like Adam because they themselves had the evil heart (4 Ezr. 3:26). In this way, ‘every one of us has been the Adam of his own soul’ (Apoc. Bar. liv. 19). We may reasonably conjecture, in the light of Romans 7, that this substantially represents St. Paul’s position. but he has not definitely said this; in Romans 5 his interest lies in the relation not of Adam to the race, but of Adam to Christ, i.e., in the antithesis of death and life, of the psychic and pneumatic orders of humanity. His point in Romans 5 is fairly summed up in 1 Corinthians 15:22 : ‘As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.’ The Church, as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12, 1 Corinthians 12:27) is a new organism of life within the present general environment of death. The final redemption of the Christian will consist in the quickening of this mortal body of flesh-‘the body of this death’-into a spiritual body (Romans 8:11, 1 Corinthians 15:44), a body like that of the Risen Lord (Philippians 3:21). Thus St. Paul looks forward to escape from the fleshly weakness of the body, not, as a Greek might have done, along the line of the soul’s inherent immortality, but, as a Hebrew of the Hebrews, in the hope of receiving a body more adequate to the needs of the soul. The resurrection of the (spiritually transformed) body will create anew the unity of personality, which physical death destroys. In view of the assertion that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’ (1 Corinthians 15:50), we may perhaps suppose that St. Paul would postulate the original mortality of human nature, with a potential immortality lost through sin (Romans 5:12).
2. Johannine anthropology. -The NT enables us to trace a further development of the Pauline anthropology in that of the Fourth Gospel and the First Epistle of John. ‘John,’ as Deissmann has said, ‘is the oldest and greatest interpreter of St. Paul’; his writings form ‘the most striking monument of the most genuine understanding of Pauline mysticism’ (op. cit. pp. 4, 90). The Johannine development is towards greater affinity with Greek thought, the Logos doctrine (cf. the parallel phenomenon in Philo) being the most notable example of it. This greater adaptation to the thought and experience of a Greek world explains the greater influence of the Johannine presentation of the gospel on the earlier theology of the Church. The more Hebrew anthropology of St. Paul had, in large measure, to wait for those thinkers of the West who culminated in Augustine. St. Paul’s more subjective and individualistic outlook is, indeed, harder to realize than that broad display of great contrasts which gives to the Fourth Gospel part of its fascination for simple souls. In these contrasts we may See the emergence of the opposing realms of Jewish apocalypse (cf. Fairweather, op. cit. p. 295). The sense of a present judgment, however, constituted by the simple presence of Christ, the Light of Life in this dark world (3:19, 12:31), replaces the eschatological outlook of the Synoptics.
(a) The opposition of the world and God is the primary Johannine emphasis. Interest is transferred from the Pauline struggle within the soul (e.g. Romans 7, Galatians 5:17) to the external conflict which gathers around the Person of Christ. The world (a characteristic Johannine term) is the realm of darkness (John 1:5, John 3:19 etc.), sin (7:7), and death (5:24, 1 John 3:14). Christ is the Light of the world (John 8:12), its Saviour from sin (1:29, 3:17), and its Life (3:16, 6:68). His conflict with that darkness which is sin, and issues in death, is continued by His Spirit (16:8). Sin is defined in the characteristic Pauline (Hebrew) way as ‘lawlessness’ (1 John 3:4); it is a voluntary act (John 9:41), and reaches its culmination in the wilful rejection of life in Christ (5:40; cf. 16:9). Thus the conflict remains essentially ethical, though it is more objectively presented. The protagonist on the side of evil is the devil, who stands behind the evil-doer as his spiritual parent (8:44); the world lies in his power (1 John 5:19), and he is its prince (John 12:31, John 14:30, John 16:11).
(b) The spiritual transformation of individual men from lovers of darkness (3:19) to sons of light (12:36) is conceived both biologically as a new birth, and psychologically as a product of faith; no formal attempt is made to correlate these two ways of describing the change, or to solve the problem of the relation of Divine and human factors in conversion. John specializes the Pauline idea of a ‘new creation’ (2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 6:15) into that of a new birth (John 3:3), which springs from a Divine seed (1 John 3:9). This spiritual birth (much more than a mere metaphor) is sharply contrasted with natural birth (John 1:13). The new life it initiates is ascribed to the Spirit of God (3:6), and is nourished sacramentally (3:5, 6:53). The contrast of Spirit and flesh is not, however, dualistic in the Gnostic sense (cf. the rejection of docetic tendencies); it springs, as in St. Paul’s case, from the OT contrast of their respective power and weakness, as seen in their ethical consequences (1 John 2:16). This new birth from the Spirit has its conscious side in the believer’s faith (John 1:12); that there is no contradiction between the two ideas is shown by such a passage as 1 John 5:1 : ‘Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God.’ Such belief primarily concerns the Divine mission of Christ (John 12:44, John 12:17 :8, John 12:21), knowledge of which is imparted through His ‘words’ (6:68), which are themselves Spirit and life (v. 63). It will be seen that faith has a more intellectual content for St. John than for St. Paul, though it does not forfeit its essentially mystical character; belief in the mission of Christ marks a stage of development later than the faith of direct moral surrender to Him. The ethical emphasis is still fundamental in this Johannine conception of faith, as is shown by the recognition that ‘obedience is the organ of spiritual knowledge’ (7:17; cf. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 2nd ser., 1875, pp. 94-105). The intimate relation of character and faith is further suggested by the assertion that ‘Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice’ (18:37), i.e., that there is an intrinsic affinity between truth and the Truth (14:6).
(c) The product of this ‘faith-birth’ is eternal life, a term as central for St. John as ‘righteousness’ is for St. Paul, and one that characteristically marks St. John’s more Greek and less Jewish atmosphere. This eternal life is life like Christ’s (1 John 3:2), and is nourished by such a relation to Him as the allegory of the Vine (John 15) suggests. The peculiar mark of this life is that ‘love’ which St. Paul had described as the greatest amongst abiding realities: ‘We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren’ (1 John 3:14). In such life sin has no place as a fixed habit of character (5:18); sin unto death (2:19, 5:16), in fact, would show that there had been no genuine entrance into life. For single acts of sin confessed there is forgiveness and cleansing (1:9). The issue of sin is death (John 8:24), whereas Christ teaches that ‘if any man keep my word he shall never See death’ (v. 51; cf. 11:25, 26). Except for one passage (5:29), in which the term ‘the resurrection of judgment’ may have become a conventional phrase, resurrection appears to be confined to the believer (6:40), and is intended, as with St. Paul, to restore the full personality. Eternal life is already the believer’s possession (1 John 5:13), and the future life is really the direct development of what is begun here. In this way, faith is the victory that hath overcome the world (5:4).
3. Non-mystical anthropology. -The apostolic writings other than those of the Pauline and Johannine group hardly supply sufficient data to make a detailed statement of their distinctive conceptions of human nature practicable. There are, however, a number of incidental references of considerable interest. The psychology of temptation as given in the Epistle of James (1:13-15) singles out desire as the parent of sin, and makes death the natural issue of sin, in a sequence that should be compared with the fuller Pauline analysis in Romans 1 . The Epistle to the Hebrews teaches that the wilful sin of apostasy after a genuine Christian experience excludes a second repentance; the appended illustration of the fruitless land suggests that those who commit this sin are incapable of repentance (6:4-8; cf. 12:17). The Petrine reference to ‘the spirits in prison’ (1 P 3:19-20, 4:5) has afforded a basis for much speculation on the possibility of moral change after death. Of more importance than these isolated points is the general characteristic that distinguishes Hebrews, 1 Peter, and James from the Pauline (and Johannine) writings, viz. the absence of the idea of faith as involving mystical union with Christ. In the Ep. to the Hebrews, according to the underlying idea of the high priest in the OT, Christ rather represents man before God than brings the energies of God into the world. Faith in His work means confidence to approach God through Him (4:14-16, 10:19, 22). Through Christ, according to this Epistle, the realities of the unseen world (11:1) find their supreme substantiation; whereas, for St. Paul, Christ was primarily the source of new energy to achieve the ideal, a new dynamic within the believer who is mystically united to Him. The more objective conception of faith in the Ep. to the Hebrews (along a different line from that of the Johannine tendency noticed above) is further illustrated by the outlook in 1 Peter, where the example of Christ is specially emphasized (1:15, 2:21, 4:1). This non-mystical Christianity finds its most extreme example in the polemic of St. James against faith without works (2:14-26). The Pauline faith as a mystical energy is here apparently misunderstood and taken to be a bare intellectual assent. The presence within the NT of this more prosaic type of Christian experience is of considerable interest. It reminds us that the non-mystical temperament has its own legitimate place and can make its own characteristic contribution; indeed, the genuine mystic will probably always belong to the minority. This non-mystical background to the Pauline-Johannine anthropology is indeed more than background; it probably represents the general type of Christian ethics in the 1st century. A notable example of this may be seen in the Didache (c. [Note: . circa, about.] a.d. 120). The first five chapters form a manual of instruction for baptismal candidates (cf. § 7, ‘Having first recited all these things’), and are concerned with the moral distinctions of right and wrong in practical life-the ‘Two Ways’-without a touch of Pauline ‘mysticism.’ This may be further illustrated from the Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, at the end of the 1st century: ‘If our mind be fixed through faith towards God; if we seek out those things which are well pleasing and acceptable unto Him; if we accomplish such things as beseem His faultless will, and follow the way of truth, casting off from ourselves all unrighteousness and iniquity,’ we shall be ‘partakers of His promised gifts’ (xxxv. 5). We have only to compare such an attitude with that underlying the moral exhortations of St. Paul in his Letters to the same Church (transformation through the Lord the Spirit) to feel the externalism of the later writer and the inwardness of the earlier. We must not, of course, forget the mysticism of Ignatius, to which must now be added that of the Odes of Solomon, as implying a deeper interpretation of human nature. but the Pauline anthropology can have been little understood, and in the neglect of it lay already some of the seeds of anthropological controversy in the days of Augustine and of the Reformation. Failure to understand the Pauline experience robbed the early Church of an important part of its inheritance.
Conclusion .-An exegetical survey of the apostolic anthropology must frankly recognize the existence of various problems- e.g. the relation of human freedom to Divine control-not only unsolved by the writers, but hardly realized by them. We must not, under the guise of ‘exegesis,’ read our later dogmatic or philosophical solutions into these lacunAE. but neither must we, because of their existence, under-estimate the value of the contribution made by these writers to a doctrine of human nature. Primarily, no doubt, the NT supplies data for all Christian theories rather than dogmatic solutions of the problems which Christian experience raises. but that experience, as recorded in the NT, rests on an acceptance of certain fundamental truths-on the one hand, the worth of human nature and its responsibility to God; on the other, the reality of that spiritual world which men enter through Christ. We are made most effectually to feel the far-reaching power of those truths in their simple majesty when we read the story of His life. but they are not absent from any of the pages of the NT. Indeed, its subtle fascination, its peculiar and unique atmosphere, its constant vision of a land of distances, are largely due to the presence and interaction of these truths. Even the book which reveals most clearly its debt to Jewish supernaturalism, the Apocalypse, begins with the vision of the Risen Lord amongst the golden lampstands of His Churches, and ends with the recognition of individual freedom and its momentous issues (Revelation 22:11). These truths, like their Lord in His incarnation, may seem to have emptied themselves of their universality in taking the form natural to the first Christian generation. But, like Him, they have proved their power as the perennial basis of Christian thinking. Neither the science nor the philosophy of the present day has any quarrel with them. We are happily leaving behind us the naturalism which looked on men as ‘streaks of morning cloud,’ which soon ‘shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past’ (Tyndall’s Belfast Address to British Association, 1874). The modern interest in the psychology of religion, combined with the growing emphasis of philosophy on personality, may well become the prelude to a genuine revival of Paulinism, destined to be not less influential than that of the Reformation.
Literature.-(a) Relevant sections of the chief works on NT Theology, e.g. those of B. Weiss (Eng. tr. [Note: r. translated, translation.], 1882-83), W. Bey. schlag (Eng. tr. [Note: r. translated, translation.], 1895), H. J. Holtzmann (2 1911), J. Bovon (2 1902-05), G. B. Stevens (1899). (b) Biblical Anthropology : J. Laidlaw, The Bible Doctrine of Man 2, 1895; E. H. van Leeuwen, Bijbelsche Anthropologie, 1906; R. S. Franks, Man, Sin, and Salvation (Century Bible Handbooks, 1908); H. Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Doctrine of Man, 1911; M. Scott Fletcher, The Psychology of the NT, 1912. (c) Special discussions of the Pauline doctrine of man, as a whole or in some of its aspects : H. Lüdemann, Die Anthropologie des Apostels Paulus, 1872; J. Gloël, Der heilige Geist in der Heilsverkündigung des Paulus, 1888; T. Simon, Die Psychologie des Apostels Paulus, 1897; C. Clemen, Die christliche Lehre von der Sünde, 1897; H. Gunkel, Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes 2, 1899; E. Sokolowski, Die Begriffe Geist und Leben bei Paulus, 1903; F. R. Tennant, Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin, 1903; H. Wheeler Robinson, ‘Hebrew Psychology in Relation to Pauline Anthropology,’ in Mansfield College Essays, 1909; P. Volz, Der Geist Gottes, 1910; J. Moffatt, Paul and Paulinism (Modern Religious Problems, 1910); G. A. Deissmann, Paulus, 1911, Eng. tr. [Note: r. translated, translation.], 1912.
H. Wheeler Robinson.
MAN OF SIN (2 Thessalonians 2:3; RVm [Note: Vm Revised Version margin.] ‘man of lawlessness,’ substituting the better reading ἀ νομίας for ἁ μαρτίας of TR [Note: R Textus Receptus, Received Text.])
Apart from such apparent references to the subject as 2 Corinthians 6:15, Colossians 2:15, St. Paul’s doctrine of the Antichrist is found in the passage 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, in which he associates ‘the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ’ with a previous ‘falling away’ or apostasy (ἀ ποστασία) and the revelation of ‘the man of lawlessness,’ whom he also designates ‘the son of perdition’ (v. 3), ‘the opponent’ (ἀ ντικείμενος) of God (v. 4), ‘the lawless one’ (ὁ ἄ νομος, v. 3), whose future revelation in his own time, however, is anticipated even now by a working of ‘the mystery of lawlessness’ (v. 7). The revelation of the man of lawlessness, he further says, is delayed by a restraining power which he refers to in v. 6 as an impersonal influence (τ ὸ κατέχον) and in v. 7 as an actual person (ὁ κατέχων). From the days of the early Fathers the interpretations of this passage have been exceedingly various. A good summary of the history of previous opinion is given by H. Alford (Gr. Test. 5, iii. [1871], Proleg., p. 55 ff.), but modern scholars are agreed in holding that the Apostle was speaking of an apocalypse of evil which was only a crowning manifestation of contemporary influences hostile to God and His Kingdom (v. 7), and of a restraining power within the knowledge of the Thessalonians themselves (v. 6). They are also generally agreed in the view that the two magnitudes which underlay the Apostle’s cryptic language in regard to the man of lawlessness and the restrainer are to be found in Judaism and the Roman Empire as represented by its ruler. but at this point opinion divides into two exactly contradictory theories, each of which is able to point to some favouring considerations in the language used by the Apostle.
(1) According to one theory the man of lawlessness is Roman Imperialism with the Emperor at its head, while the restraining power is Judaism (for a clear and able exposition of this view See B. B. Warfield in Expositor, 3rd ser. iv. [1886] 40 ff.). The deification of the Emperors, and especially Caligula’s attempt to set up his statue in the Temple of Jerusalem (cf. E. Schürer, HJP [Note: JP History of the Jewish People (Eng. tr. of GJV).] I. ii. [1890] 98 ff.), certainly afford a very direct explanation of the language of v. 4 as to the blasphemous pretensions of the man of lawlessness. Moreover, the early history of Christianity suggests that it was part of the Divine plan that the new religion should be developed for a time under the protecting shadow of Judaism as a religio licita . The failure of the Roman authorities at first to distinguish the Church from the Synagogue (cf. Acts 18:14-16) did shelter the former in its days of weakness from the persecuting rage of pagan Imperialism that burst upon it as soon as its separateness and its absolute claims were clearly recognized. but the objection to this theory is that it attributes to St. Paul, whose authorship of 2 Thess. may now be assumed with some confidence, an attitude to Judaism and to Rome respectively which finds no counterpart either in the Thessalonian Epistles or in any other of his writings. It was from Judaism, not from the Empire, that the opposition and persecution he had to encounter as the Apostle of Christianity invariably came (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16; cf. Acts, passim). The philosophic historian may See in Judaism the protective sheath of the opening bud of Christianity; but it was not so that St. Paul regarded it. On the contrary, the language in which he describes its treatment of Christ and the gospel, and his denunciation of the wrath of God upon it (1 Thessalonians 2:15 f.), suggest that the ‘mystery of iniquity’ already at work (2 Thessalonians 2:7) was nothing else than the secret ferment of its own anti-Christian spirit. And Rome with its Emperor could hardly be the man of lawlessness to St. Paul, not only because it had not yet begun to persecute the Church, but because he sincerely respected its authority as a power ordained of God (Romans 13:1-7), and did not hesitate to appeal to CAEsar himself against his Jewish enemies (Acts 25:10 f.).
(2) The other and more probable theory, accordingly, takes the man of lawlessness to be anti-Christian Judaism coming to a head in the person of a pseudo-Messiah, and the restraining power to be the Roman Empire personified in the CAEsar himself. It is sometimes objected that under this theory an insuperable difficulty is presented by v. 4, as it would be contrary to the rôle of a Jewish Messiah to sit in the Temple of God and set himself forth as God. but this is to overlook the fact that we have to do here with an apocalyptic picture coloured with the language of an OT apocalypse (cf. Daniel 11:36) and influenced by the Antichrist tradition which had been developing in Judaism ever since the days of Antiochus Epiphanes (See art. [Note: rt. article.] Antichrist, 1). To St. Paul as a Rabbinical scholar the portentous figure of the Jewish Antichrist, Satanic, blasphemous, and God-defying, must have been very familiar. His familiarity with it may be traced not only in the language of v. 4, but in the references to the Beliar-Satan conception which are present in the passage. In v. 9 the coming of the man of lawlessness is said to be ‘according to the working of Satan.’ And E. Nestle has pointed out (ExpT [Note: xpT Expository Times.] xvi. [1904-05] 472) that on the evidence of the LXX [Note: XX Septuagint.] and Aquila ἡ ἀ ποστασία (v. 3) is a rendering of Heb. בְּלִיַעַל, ὁ ἄ νθρω π ος τ ῆ ς ἀ νομίας (v. 3) of אִישׁ בְּלִיַעַל (‘man of Belial’), and ὁ ἀ ντικείμενος (v. 4) of שָׂטָן . The Jewish conception of the Antichrist, not as a mere political figure but as an eschatological monstrosity in the shape of a diabolic opponent of God, St. Paul boldly transfers from the sphere of paganism in which Jewish apocalyptic had placed it, and sets down in the sphere of Judaism itself. Out of Judaism he pictured the Antichrist as coming, though there are features in his representation which imply that the sway of the man of lawlessness would extend far beyond the confines of Judaism-that he would cause an apostasy in the Church (v. 3), that he would break down the restraining power of the Empire (v. 7), that he would draw after him a deluded and perishing world (vv. 10-12). In the persistent malevolence of his own race against Christ and the gospel, the Apostle saw the mystery of iniquity working; but he conceived of that malevolence as culminating at length in the appearance of an Antichrist endowed with Satanic and superhuman qualities, who would deceive men by ‘power and signs and lying wonders’ (v. 9ff.; cf. Mark 13:21-23), and whose hostility to the truth of God which brings salvation would reach its climax in the blasphemous claim to be himself Divine. Then Christ would return to a world now ripe for judgment, slaying the lawless one with the breath of His mouth, and bringing him to nought by the manifestation of His coming (v. 8).
Literature.-Besides the references given in the art. [Note: rt. article.], and the Literature appended to art. [Note: rt. article.] Antichrist, See A. Sabatier, The Apostle Paul, Eng. tr. [Note: r. translated, translation.], 1891, p. 117 ff.; B. Weiss, Biblical Theology of the NT, Eng. tr. [Note: r. translated, translation.], i. [1882] 305 ff.; J. Moffatt, The Historical NT, 1901, p. 142 ff., LNT [Note: NT Introd. to Literature of the New Testament (Moffatt).], 1911, p. 76 ff.
J. C. Lambert.