From The Princeton Theological Review, xviii. 1920, pp. 399–459.
Twelve years intervened between Wernle’s assault on “miserable-sinner Christianity” and his retractation, and it is necessary to give some account of the course of the debate through these years. We have already intimated that one of the effects of the publication of Wernle’s book was to uncover a tendency and to create a party. A tendency was uncovered among adherents of the history-of-religion school to represent Paul as claiming for himself or asserting of all Christians either express sinlessness or something very like it, and this tendency rapidly hardened into a party-contention. Men like E. Grafe, H. J. Holtzmann, Paul Schmiedel, E. Teichmann, A. Jülicher, in reviewing Wernle’s book, were quick to express complete or partial agreement with its general position.1 Carl Clemen was perhaps the first, however, to associate himself with it in an independent discussion.
Before the end of the year Clemen had published the Biblical part of his “Christian Doctrine of Sin”—the only part ever published—and he naturally included in it a section on “the dissemination of sin.”2 It had been the Biblical doctrine from the prophets down, he says, that sin is universal among men. But the possibility of overcoming it was always recognized for the future, and indeed was assumed for the past by the Priest Code and the Chronicler, and asserted for the present by Paul3—and he might have added also by the other writers of the New Testament since he interprets most of the post-Pauline writers in this sense (Eph. 1:4; 4:24; 5:1; 1 Pet. 1:15; Jas. 1:4; 1 John 3:6, 9).4 Paul, he asserts,5 not only sets himself up as a model and boasts of his work, but “expressly ascribes perfection to himself”—for which assertion Clemen has, however, no better proof than is afforded by the merely general, and perfectly natural, assertions of 1 Thess. 2:10; 1 Cor. 4:3 f. 2 Cor. 6:3 f. Paul, morever, “nowhere speaks of sins committed by him after his conversion, and nowhere refers to them the sufferings which he so often recalls, as he must have done on his … presuppositions, had he been conscious of any guilt whatever.”6 Apparent confessions of imperfections are only apparent—1 Cor. 15:9; 2 Cor. 5:2 ff.; Rom. 8:22 f. Gal. 2:20.
As for Rom. 7—of course the presents are presents; we must not make the Apostle a comedian dramatizing a distant past: but it was written in a bad hour, when the Apostle was in a gloomy mood—and therefore when he came to write the eighth chapter afterwards, he wrote in on the margin, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord,” words which have crept since into the text. “Looked at as a whole,” therefore, Rom. 7 means—what the moderns make it mean; and “in any case it has nothing to say against the freedom of Paul as a Christian in general from any consciousness of sin.”7 As to Phil. 3:12 ff. it is not to be denied that the efforts to empty it of its confession of imperfection have been imperfectly successful, but “neither is it to be forgotten that we have to do here precisely with the last of Paul’s letters to congregations, and that we find in it elsewhere also a different estimate of the Christian life from Paul’s earlier one; from it therefore we can draw no conclusions for the earlier period.”8 This comment seems to convey an admission that Paul does not always teach his own sinlessness or that of his converts. In his later epistles, at any rate, he has lost the assurance which is attributed to him on the basis of his earlier ones.9
With reference to his converts, it is argued that in presenting himself—and indeed Christ—as their model, Paul recognizes their ability to become like him—and Christ. There are passages, also, it is asserted, in which it is “expressly declared that the Christian no longer sins.”10 Here the stress is laid on 1 Cor. 6:11, Rom. 5:6, 8, and especially of course, on Rom. 6:1 ff.; but also on Gal. 3:27; 5:24, and finally Col. 2:11. “In any case,” the conclusion runs,11 “the transformation which has taken place in Christians through baptism is designated here again by so strong an expression, that it appears impossible to reduce it to a reversal merely of the relative strength of good and evil, to a removal of sin from the center to the periphery, to a certain inner separation from sin—as Lütgert12 has again of late sought to do.” “I admit,” Clemen adds, “that this explanation”—that is, Lütgert’s—“is valid in the case of some passages …; in the most of them, however, Paul speaks so clearly of the overcoming of sin through conversion, that all limitation appears to be excluded.” Of course he should have added, “except the limitation of time”—but it is characteristic of this whole school of writers simply to assume that what is done in the matter of cleansing of Christians is done without any expenditure of time whatever, all at once, completely.