has not been raised then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain."^776 His death becomes available
only through his resurrection. Paul puts the two facts together in the comprehensive statement:
"Christ delivered up for our trespasses, and raised for our justification."^777 He is a conditional
universalist; he teaches the universal need of salvation, and the divine intention and provision for
a universal salvation, but the actual salvation of each man depends upon his faith or personal
acceptance and appropriation of Christ. His doctrinal system, then, turns on the great antithesis of
sin and grace. Before Christ and out of Christ is the reign of sin and death; after Christ and in Christ
is the reign of righteousness and life.
We now proceed to an outline of the leading features of his theology as set forth in the order
of the Epistle to the Romans, the most methodical and complete of his writings. Its central thought
is: The Gospel of Christ, a power of God for the salvation of all men, Jew and Gentile.^778- The Universal Need of Salvation.—It arises from the fall of Adam and the whole human
race, which was included in him as the tree is included in the seed, so that his one act of disobedience
brought sin and death upon the whole posterity. Paul proves the depravity of Gentiles and Jews
without exception to the extent that they are absolutely unable to attain to righteousness and to save
themselves. "There is none righteous, no, not one." They are all under the dominion of sin and
under the sentence of condemnation.^779 He recognizes indeed, even among the heathen, the remaining
good elements of reason and conscience,^780 which are the connecting links for the regenerating
work of divine grace; but for this very reason they are inexcusable, as they sin against better
knowledge. There is a conflict between the higher and the lower nature in man (the νοῦς, which
tends to God who gave it, and the σάρξ, which tends to sin), and this conflict is stimulated and
brought to a crisis by the law of God; but this conflict, owing to the weakness of our carnal, fallen,
depraved nature, ends in defeat and despair till the renewing grace of Christ emancipates us from
the curse and bondage of sin and gives us liberty and victory. In the seventh chapter of the Romans,
Paul gives from his personal experience a most remarkable and truthful description of the religious
history of man from the natural or heathen state of carnal security (without the law, Rom. 7:7–9)
to the Jewish state under the law which calls out sin from its hidden recess, reveals its true character,
and awakens the sense of the wretchedness of slavery under sin (7:10–25), but in this very way
prepares the way for the Christian state of freedom (7:24 and Rom. 8).^781
(^776) 1 Cor. 15:13.
(^777) Rom. 4: 23. The first διά is retrospective, the second prospective: for the destruction of sin and for the procurement of
righteousness.
(^778) Rom. 1:17: δύναμις̑ θεοῦ εἰς σωτηρίαν παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι , Ἰουδαίῳ τε [πρῶτον]καὶ Ἕλληνι. Other pregnant passages
in which Paul summarizes his dogmatics and ethics, are Rom. 1:16, 17:3: 21-26; 4:25; 11:32; 1 Cor. 15:22; Gal. 3:22; Tit. 3:3-7.
(^779) Rom. 1:18; 3:20. First the depravity of the heathen, then that of the Jews (2:1, comp. 2:17).
(^780) Rom. 1:18-21; 2:14-16; comp. Acts 17:28.
(^781) The Augustinian application of this conflict to the regenerate state, involves Rom. 7 in contradiction with Rom. 6 and 8,
and obliterates the distinction between the regenerate and the unregenerate state. Augustine understood that chapter better in his
earlier years, before the Pelagian controversy drove him to such an extreme view of total depravity as destroys all freedom and
responsibility. We see here the difference between an inspired apostle and an enlightened theologian. The chief object of Rom.
7 is to show that the law cannot sanctify any more than it can justify (Rom. 3), and that the legal conflict with the sinful flesh
ends in total failure. Paul always uses here νοῦς for the higher principle in man (including reason and conscience); while in
Rom. 8, where he speaks of the regenerate man, he uses πνεῦμα, which is the νοῦς sanctified and enlightened by the Holy Spirit.
In 8:25 he indeed alludes to the regenerate state by way of anticipation and as an immediate answer to the preceding cry for
redemption; but from this expression of thanks he once more points back with ἆρα οὖν to the previous state of bondage before
he enters more fully with ἆρα νῦν into the state of freedom.
A.D. 1-100.