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St. Paul and the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

C. E. B. Cranfield
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Extract

When the Archbishop of Canterbury writes:

it is insufficient to pick things from the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament interpretation of his morality, without a thorough examination of the whole evidence about the morality of Jesus. We need to see the place which law had in the mission of Jesus; the way in which he did not abolish the law but fulfil it; the meaning of fulfilment, the interpretation of it in St. Paul and others; the nature of the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the significance of divine institutions within the natural order, such as marriage, the family, the state.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 43 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1964

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References

page 43 note 1 Ramsey, A. M., Image Old and New (London, 1963), p. 13fGoogle Scholar.

page 43 note 2 London, 1963, pp. 105–21 (‘The New Morality’).

page 43 note 3 ed. A. R. Vidler (Cambridge, 1963).

page 43 note 4 with an introduction by A. R. Vidler (London, 1963).

page 43 note 5 ed. A. Heron (London, 1963).

page 44 note 1 Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish Religious History (London, 1961), p. 168Google Scholar.

page 44 note 2 Among the most recent publications on this subject the following should be mentioned: the paper, ‘Gospel and Law’ in Barth, K., God, Grace, and Gospel (Edinburgh, 1959), pp. 3–27Google Scholar; Davies, W. D., ‘Law in the NT’ in Buttrick, G. A. (ed.), The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (New York, 1962), III, pp. 95–102Google Scholar; and the valuable chapter, entitled ‘Gospel and Law’, in Niesel, W., Reformed Symbolics: A Comparison of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism (Edinburgh, 1962), pp. 211–224Google Scholar.

page 44 note 3 e.g. Bultmann, R., Theology of the New Testament (London, 1952), I, p. 25gfGoogle Scholar.

page 44 note 4 It may be assumed that ‘law’ is used in this article in one of the senses (i) and (ii) listed above, unless the context indicates otherwise.

page 45 note 1 The Epistle to the Romans (London, 1932), p. 43Google Scholar.

page 45 note 2 When Barrett, C. K. (The Epistle to the Romans (London, 1957), p. 195f)Google Scholar in his translation of Rom. 10.1 inserts the supplement, ‘Scripture or no scripture’, as ‘an attempt to bring out the meaning of the particle (μὲnu;) which opens the paragraph’, he is giving to Paul's sentence a nuance that is altogether foreign to it. This is certainly not Paul's attitude to Scripture, as a glance at chapters 9–11 of Romans in the British and Foreign Bible Society Greek text, in which the Old Testament quotations are printed in bold type, is in itself sufficient to prove. Paul is continually appealing to Scripture, and is certain that it supports his argument; and in io.2i he is going to quote a verse from Isa. 65 which strongly encourages the sentiment he is expressing at this point. The force of the Greek particle μέμ in this sentence is adequately brought out by Blass-Debrunner (Blass, F. and Debrunner, A., A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature, translated and revised by Funk, R. W. (Cambridge, 1961), § 447(4)Google Scholar): ‘so far as it depends on my desire’.

page 46 note 1 In Rom. 5.13 ‘is not registered’ (Barth, K., Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5 (Edinburgh, 1956), p. 26)Google Scholar is perhaps a rather more satisfactory translation of than the RV ‘is not imputed’, since the next verse makes it clear that Paul does not mean to deny that even in the absence of the law sin is punished.

page 46 note 2 That this (pace Bultmann, op. cit., p. 264: ‘this sentence (coming after vv. 10–19) does not, of course, mean that through the law man is led to knowledge of what sin is, but does mean that by it he is led into sinning’) is what Paul means in 3.20 is fairly certain; for there is, as far as I can see, no suggestion at all in this context of the thought of law as ‘occasion’ ἀφoρμή which is introduced by Paul in Rom. 7.5, 7–11. It is a mistake to read into ‘knowledge’ ἐπγνωσις in 3.20 a special meaning that adheres to the use of ‘know’ (γινώσκɛιν andɛἰδέναι) in 7.7.

page 47 note 1 Calvin, J., The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians, translated by Mackenzie, R. (Edinburgh, 1961), p. 141Google Scholar.

page 48 note 1 Cranfield, C. E. B., The Gospel according to Saint Mark (Cambridge, 2nd imp. 1963), p. 243f, 329Google Scholar.

page 48 note 2 op. cit., p. 145.

page 49 note 1 Liddell, H. G. and Scott, R., A Creek-English Lexicon (revised and augmented by Jones, H. S. and McKenzie, R., Oxford, 1940), pp. 1772–1774Google Scholar.

page 49 note 2 Lietzmann's, H. comment on Rom. 13.8 (‘That Paul here, as in 8.4, speaks without trace of embarrassment of “fulfilment of the law” as something worth striving after and seems to have forgotten chapter 7 and 10.4, is characteristic of the unschematic nature of his discourse’—An die Römer (Tübingen, 4th ed. 1933), p. 113Google Scholar (my translation)) surely indicates a certain deficiency of self-criticism.

page 50 note 1 An alternative interpretation takes v. 5 and w. 6–10 to be setting forth the meaning of justification by works of the law and justification by faith, respectively. The strongly supported variant reading, which places oτι (‘that’) after νμoυ (‘law’) instead of after γράΦɛι (‘writeth’—it could also mean ‘describeth’) and so makes possible the AV translation (‘For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, That the man which doeth these things shall live by them’), perhaps reflects someone's desire for a smoother sense along the lines of this interpretation. The fact that a contrast between v. 5 and w. 6–10 is clearly intended, together with an awareness of the way Paul uses the same OT quotation in Gal. 3.12, may well have misled readers of Romans at an early stage. The interpretation which we have adopted in the text gives a perhaps less obvious but a more closely knit sequence of thought. (Should the alternative interpretation be preferred, w. 5–10 would then, as a whole, be an explanation of v. 4 thus: The fact that Christ is the goal of the law means that a righteous status is available for all who believe in Him; for, while justification by works is as Moses indicates (v. 5), justification by faith is in accordance with the passages quoted in w. 6–8 and interpreted in v. gf).

page 50 note 2 Here Paul speaks of the righteousness of God as ‘being witnessed by the law and the prophets’; but the righteousness of God, i.e. the righteous status which is God's gift, is, for Paul, so intimately bound up with the person and work of Christ (in 1 Cor. 1.30 he actually says that Christ ‘was made unto us … righteousness’ from God), that the implication is that Christ is borne witness to by the law and the prophets.

page 51 note 1 Pace Beare, F. W., The Epistle to the Philippians (London, 1959), p. 84Google Scholar, there is no justification in the context for taking the meaning to be that Christ was obedient to the ‘Elemental Spirits’: the explanation that the meaning is ‘obedient to God’ (e.g. Lightfoot, J. B., Saint Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (London, reprinted 1908), p. 113)Google Scholar is surely to be preferred.

page 52 note 1 Barth, K., A Shorter Commentary on Romans (London, 1959), p. 43Google Scholar.

page 52 note 2 In Soundings, ed. Vidler, A. R. (Cambridge, 1963), p. 178Google Scholar.

page 52 note 3 It is not, of course, intended to suggest that there is no human element in the law. In the law, as in the rest of the Bible, God's word is given to us in human words—with all that that involves.

page 52 note 4 op. cit., p. 183.

page 53 note 1 The chapter entitled ‘The Gospel as the Divine Justification of those who believe’ in Barth's Shorter Commentary on Romans should be read as a very necessary antidote to Lampe's essay in Soundings.

page 53 note 2 It should, however, be noted that in Colossians Paul seems to be dealing no with a simple judaizing but with some sort of amalgam of Christian, Jewish and pagan elements.

page 57 note 1 The word which the RV renders in this chapter by ‘ministration’ is διακoνία, which means ‘service’ or ‘ministry’ (cf. 2 Cor. 4.1, and also, e.g., Rom. 11.13, 2 Cor. 5.18, Col. 4.17). In verse 7 Paul's language is elliptical: he does not mean that Moses' ministry was ‘written, and engraven on stones’. We might supply something like ‘which was a ministry of that which was’ before ‘written’ in the RV translation, and substitute ‘was’ for ‘came’ (RV ‘came’ rendersἐγɛνήθν)

page 58 note 1 Barrett, C. K., From First Adam to Last: A Study in Pauline Theology (London, 1962) P. 52, n.IGoogle Scholar.

page 59 note 1 op. cit., p. 52, n.I.

page 59 note 2 op. cit., p. 52.

page 59 note 3 This statement would be equally true, if we understood ‘end’ in the sense of goal rather than termination; but to take τέλoς here in the sense of goal is really not feasible.

page 59 note 4 Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians (trans, by Pringle, J., reprinted Grand Rapids, 1948), II, p. 183Google Scholar.

page 60 note 1 Schweizer, E., in Theologisches Wörlerbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. Kittel, G., continued by Friedrich, G. (Stuttgart, 1933-), VI, p. 416Google Scholar.

page 60 note 2 The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians (London, 1934, and frequently reprinted), p. 115Google Scholar.

page 61 note 1 op. cit., p. i n.

page 61 note 2 op. cit., p. 112.

page 61 note 3 op. cit., p. 114f.

page 61 note 4 Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians (trans, by Pringlej, W. reprinted Grand Rapids, 1955), p. 99fGoogle Scholar.

page 62 note 1 II. vii. 2 (quoted according to Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, J. T. and trans. Battles, F. L. (London, 1961)Google Scholar). This passage is cited by W. Niesel, op. cit., p. 218.

page 63 note 1 See, for example, Duncan, op. cit., pp. 134–6; Bonnard, P., L'Épître de Saint Paul aux Galates (Neuchâtel, 1953), p. 84fGoogle Scholar; and, for a different view, Moule, C. F. D., The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Colossians and to Philemon (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 90–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 63 note 2 op. cit., VII, pp. 670–87.

page 64 note 1 op. cit., p. 97.

page 64 note 2 L'Épître de Saint Paul aux Colossiens (Neuchâtel, 1950), pp. 127–129Google Scholar.

page 65 note 1 Rom. 3.31 would still be positive evidence in our favour, even if B. Gerhardsson's suggestion (Memory and Manuscript: Oral Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Uppsala, 1961), p. 287Google Scholar), that ‘abolish’ and ‘establish’ are to be understood as Rabbinic technical terms, where accepted.

page 65 note 2 For details see p. 52, n.I. Unfortunately the English translation sometimes misrepresents the original.

page 67 note 1 cf. Cranfield, op. cit., p. 319f.

page 68 note 1 Niesel, op. cit., p. 212.

page 68 note 2 In this connexion it is most instructive to note that all the initial statements of §§ 2, 3, 4, and 6 with reference to the law can also be made with reference to the gospel. The gospel reveals sin—the Cross shows us our sin; the gospel enhances sin, giving to our continuing sin the character of wilful rejection of God's love; the gospel increases sin—for when God's claim on man is most clear and pressing, it enrages our sinfulness most, our self-centredness recognising the seriousness with which it is threatened; the gospel declares God's condemnation—it is declared in the Cross even as it is being borne for us. (Incidentally, it would hardly be unfair to say that the arguments advanced by Caird, G. B. (Principalities and Powers: Study in Pauline Theology (Oxford, 1956), pp. 41–43Google Scholar) to prove that Paul regarded law as a ‘demonic agency’ could, for the most part at any rate, equally well be used to prove the demonic character of the gospel!)