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A Man in Christ
This classic study disentagles the Apostle Paul?
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1935
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 10, 2013
This is a fantastic book, written with passion and clarity. In the introduction Dr Stewart states that 'the conviction has grown steadily upon me that union with Christ, rather than justification or election or eschatology, or indeed any of the other great apostolic themes, is the real clue to an understanding of Paul's thought and experience.' This theme is echoed throughout the whole book - in discussing every aspect of Paul's belief system, we see everything begins and ends with his position, as 'A Man in Christ'.
I can't help but be impressed by the author's intellectual honesty - for instance, he doesn't once quote from the 'pastoral letters' (Timothy's and Titus) and when quoting the gospel of John he is quick to emphasise the valid questions of authorship. 70 years on it seems we've moved backward rather than forward on this front. He's also quite happy to stray from mainstream views when he finds them inadequate or misrepresentative of the gospel of Jesus. For instance, his view on the nature of the atonement might not ring too comfortably in evangelical ears: he denies it contains any aspect of 'appeasement of wrath', where wrath is understood in any human sense. In particular, he prefers *hysterion* be translated as expiation rather than propitiation in Romans 3, that the reference to sinners as 'enemies of God' in Romans 11 is also a misinterpretation, and that the 'wrath of God' is almost exclusively eschatological, and represents the necessary 'divine reaction to sin' rather than any personal wrath towards sinners. Indeed his views remind me somewhat of George MacDonald's sermon 'Justice': Jesus did not die to save us from the anger of God - he was called Jesus because he would save the people from their sins.
Overall I fear the few non-mainstream positions taken up by this book have prevented it receiving the mainstream acceptance it truly deserves. Then again, perhaps if more people read C. S. Lewis' essays then he wouldn't be so popular either. This is a complete analysis of the life and teaching of Paul, written for the layman at an academic level (albeit a 70 year old academic level, but time hasn't invalidated much of this books material at all). James Stewart was voted the greatest preacher of the 20th century, and this book is a testimony to why. Definitely recommended to Christian and curious alike.
I can't help but be impressed by the author's intellectual honesty - for instance, he doesn't once quote from the 'pastoral letters' (Timothy's and Titus) and when quoting the gospel of John he is quick to emphasise the valid questions of authorship. 70 years on it seems we've moved backward rather than forward on this front. He's also quite happy to stray from mainstream views when he finds them inadequate or misrepresentative of the gospel of Jesus. For instance, his view on the nature of the atonement might not ring too comfortably in evangelical ears: he denies it contains any aspect of 'appeasement of wrath', where wrath is understood in any human sense. In particular, he prefers *hysterion* be translated as expiation rather than propitiation in Romans 3, that the reference to sinners as 'enemies of God' in Romans 11 is also a misinterpretation, and that the 'wrath of God' is almost exclusively eschatological, and represents the necessary 'divine reaction to sin' rather than any personal wrath towards sinners. Indeed his views remind me somewhat of George MacDonald's sermon 'Justice': Jesus did not die to save us from the anger of God - he was called Jesus because he would save the people from their sins.
Overall I fear the few non-mainstream positions taken up by this book have prevented it receiving the mainstream acceptance it truly deserves. Then again, perhaps if more people read C. S. Lewis' essays then he wouldn't be so popular either. This is a complete analysis of the life and teaching of Paul, written for the layman at an academic level (albeit a 70 year old academic level, but time hasn't invalidated much of this books material at all). James Stewart was voted the greatest preacher of the 20th century, and this book is a testimony to why. Definitely recommended to Christian and curious alike.
May 10, 2023
Maybe a little dry, but rich. A very helpful examination of what Paul believed and taught, and how these ideas have been commonly distorted, sometimes to the point of caricature. Although published in 1935, the issues Stewart tackles here seem surprisingly contemporary.
Thank you Bob, for the great gift!
I’m going to save a handful of highlights here:
Re the idea that Paul set up a theological system:
‘But far more serious than any theories of the kind has been the tendency, on the part of Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, to systematize Paul's teaching into elaborate "plans of salvation," to the details and order of which the experience of believers has been required to conform—the tendency, in other words, to stereotype the grace of God. The Church did not always realize that the very use of the word "Scheme" to describe the saving activity of God in Christ was itself a blunder of the first rank; and although the Christian preachers who set God's unfolded scheme before men's eyes, and begged them to agree to it and accept it and so be saved, were honestly basing their appeal on Holy Scripture and on their favourite texts in Paul, their method was none the less leading them unconsciously into the very danger on which Paul himself laid a warning finger when he said "Quench not the Spirit." The plan, the scheme of salvation, was there, devised by God, waiting for human acceptance; the various elements in it—predestination, repentance, faith, conversion, justification, sanctification, and the like—were set forth, each in its due place; it was shown that this one must come in time before that other, which in turn would lead on after a due interval to the next. This was the ordo salutis, dogmatic Paulinism applied to life, the Church's panacea for the world.
‘Its strength—and it had a great strength—was not only that generations of passionately devoted men gave themselves to its proclamation, with a fervour born of their own love to Christ and of a sense of the urgent danger threatening all who remained outside of Christ. Its strength was the witness which it unceasingly bore to the solemnity of life's issues, to the glorious achievement of Christ's atoning death, and to the majesty of the will of God. But its weakness was that almost inevitably it gave men the impression that here was a rigid system to be intellectually accepted, a doctrine of salvation whose acceptance was indeed prior to, and the condition of, the experience which it described.’
[p 9]
Re the wrath of God:
‘What Paul means by the wrath of God—in its present, non-eschatological sense—is the totality of the divine reaction to sin. Everything that man's rebellion against the moral order brings upon him—suffering for his body, hardening for his heart, blinding for his faculty of inward vision—is included in that reaction. Is this punishment? Yes, certainly; but it is not God's outraged dignity retaliating by a direct, penal act. Rather is it the sinner who punishes himself.’
[p 120]
Re focusing on penal substitution:
‘…to isolate the death of Christ from His resurrection, as some theologies have done, is definitely un-Pauline. Too often there has been a tendency to regard the cross as in itself the assurance of salvation, apart altogether from the earthly ministry that went before it and the resurrection that came after. This is not the point of view of the New Testament, Everything depends on a man's union with a living, present Saviour. In the absence of that union, even the Gospel of the cross loses its saving efficacy." If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins." Atonement remains impersonal and largely irrelevant until we make contact with the One who atones: and contact of a vital kind is possible only if Jesus is risen and living now.’
[p 124]
Re becoming a new creation:
‘What matters supremely is that his life has found a new orientation. He is now "in Christ." He is "looking unto Jesus." And that means three things. It means, first, that the sinner is now looking, not inwards, but outwards— trusting not to any merit in himself, but to something outside of himself altogether, the grace and love of an entirely trustworthy God. It means, second, that he is looking not downwards, but upwards, not down to sin’s alluring shame, but up to the beauty and purity of Christ. It means, third, that he is looking, not backwards, but forwards, "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before." His position may not have altered who much, but his direction has been changed completely; and it is by direction, not position, that God judges.’
[p 138]
Re Paul’s theology being a twist on Judaism:
‘All this shows once again how radically mistaken is the position adopted by many scholars from Baur to Lake, namely, that everything, or almost everything, in Paul's Christology can be traced back to an inherited pre-Christian Messianic dogma. If Paul and his fellow-Christians had gone to work in this way, simply fitting Jesus into an already existing scheme of things, they would have been implicitly confessing that Christianity to them was no more than a Jewish sect. But while the beginnings of Church history speak of two phenomena, a Jewish as well as a Gentile Christianity, the fact remains that it was Christianity, not Judaism. Christian Judaism, as von Dobschutz has done well to point out, would have been a very different entity from Jewish Christianity. To none of the apostles, to Paul least of all, was Jesus a mere plus—something to be added on to a traditional dogmatic, and superimposed rather precariously on an edifice already erected. Jesus meant a new creation. Christianity was not a variety of Judaism that had cleverly made room for Jesus: it was a new thing, down to the very foundations.‘
[p 162]
Re Christ as the meaning of life:
‘But the passages where Paul's thought climbs to its most stupendous heights and reaches a climax are those in which he speaks of Jesus as the origin and the goal of all creation. Men have always found, in the words of Professor R. H. Strachan, that "it is impossible for a Christian who thinks at all to have Christ in his heart and to keep Him out of the universe." To have had a vital and redemptive contact with Jesus is to know, beyond doubt or challenge, that it is along the lines of the pattern of the soul of Jesus that God's world-plan is built. The man whose own life has suddenly leapt into meaning beneath the touch of Jesus, who has seen his own experience transformed from a chaos into a cosmos by some never-to-be-forgotten Damascus encounter, has a right to claim that he has found the clue to the riddle of life and destiny.’
[p 168]
Thank you Bob, for the great gift!
I’m going to save a handful of highlights here:
Re the idea that Paul set up a theological system:
‘But far more serious than any theories of the kind has been the tendency, on the part of Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, to systematize Paul's teaching into elaborate "plans of salvation," to the details and order of which the experience of believers has been required to conform—the tendency, in other words, to stereotype the grace of God. The Church did not always realize that the very use of the word "Scheme" to describe the saving activity of God in Christ was itself a blunder of the first rank; and although the Christian preachers who set God's unfolded scheme before men's eyes, and begged them to agree to it and accept it and so be saved, were honestly basing their appeal on Holy Scripture and on their favourite texts in Paul, their method was none the less leading them unconsciously into the very danger on which Paul himself laid a warning finger when he said "Quench not the Spirit." The plan, the scheme of salvation, was there, devised by God, waiting for human acceptance; the various elements in it—predestination, repentance, faith, conversion, justification, sanctification, and the like—were set forth, each in its due place; it was shown that this one must come in time before that other, which in turn would lead on after a due interval to the next. This was the ordo salutis, dogmatic Paulinism applied to life, the Church's panacea for the world.
‘Its strength—and it had a great strength—was not only that generations of passionately devoted men gave themselves to its proclamation, with a fervour born of their own love to Christ and of a sense of the urgent danger threatening all who remained outside of Christ. Its strength was the witness which it unceasingly bore to the solemnity of life's issues, to the glorious achievement of Christ's atoning death, and to the majesty of the will of God. But its weakness was that almost inevitably it gave men the impression that here was a rigid system to be intellectually accepted, a doctrine of salvation whose acceptance was indeed prior to, and the condition of, the experience which it described.’
[p 9]
Re the wrath of God:
‘What Paul means by the wrath of God—in its present, non-eschatological sense—is the totality of the divine reaction to sin. Everything that man's rebellion against the moral order brings upon him—suffering for his body, hardening for his heart, blinding for his faculty of inward vision—is included in that reaction. Is this punishment? Yes, certainly; but it is not God's outraged dignity retaliating by a direct, penal act. Rather is it the sinner who punishes himself.’
[p 120]
Re focusing on penal substitution:
‘…to isolate the death of Christ from His resurrection, as some theologies have done, is definitely un-Pauline. Too often there has been a tendency to regard the cross as in itself the assurance of salvation, apart altogether from the earthly ministry that went before it and the resurrection that came after. This is not the point of view of the New Testament, Everything depends on a man's union with a living, present Saviour. In the absence of that union, even the Gospel of the cross loses its saving efficacy." If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins." Atonement remains impersonal and largely irrelevant until we make contact with the One who atones: and contact of a vital kind is possible only if Jesus is risen and living now.’
[p 124]
Re becoming a new creation:
‘What matters supremely is that his life has found a new orientation. He is now "in Christ." He is "looking unto Jesus." And that means three things. It means, first, that the sinner is now looking, not inwards, but outwards— trusting not to any merit in himself, but to something outside of himself altogether, the grace and love of an entirely trustworthy God. It means, second, that he is looking not downwards, but upwards, not down to sin’s alluring shame, but up to the beauty and purity of Christ. It means, third, that he is looking, not backwards, but forwards, "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before." His position may not have altered who much, but his direction has been changed completely; and it is by direction, not position, that God judges.’
[p 138]
Re Paul’s theology being a twist on Judaism:
‘All this shows once again how radically mistaken is the position adopted by many scholars from Baur to Lake, namely, that everything, or almost everything, in Paul's Christology can be traced back to an inherited pre-Christian Messianic dogma. If Paul and his fellow-Christians had gone to work in this way, simply fitting Jesus into an already existing scheme of things, they would have been implicitly confessing that Christianity to them was no more than a Jewish sect. But while the beginnings of Church history speak of two phenomena, a Jewish as well as a Gentile Christianity, the fact remains that it was Christianity, not Judaism. Christian Judaism, as von Dobschutz has done well to point out, would have been a very different entity from Jewish Christianity. To none of the apostles, to Paul least of all, was Jesus a mere plus—something to be added on to a traditional dogmatic, and superimposed rather precariously on an edifice already erected. Jesus meant a new creation. Christianity was not a variety of Judaism that had cleverly made room for Jesus: it was a new thing, down to the very foundations.‘
[p 162]
Re Christ as the meaning of life:
‘But the passages where Paul's thought climbs to its most stupendous heights and reaches a climax are those in which he speaks of Jesus as the origin and the goal of all creation. Men have always found, in the words of Professor R. H. Strachan, that "it is impossible for a Christian who thinks at all to have Christ in his heart and to keep Him out of the universe." To have had a vital and redemptive contact with Jesus is to know, beyond doubt or challenge, that it is along the lines of the pattern of the soul of Jesus that God's world-plan is built. The man whose own life has suddenly leapt into meaning beneath the touch of Jesus, who has seen his own experience transformed from a chaos into a cosmos by some never-to-be-forgotten Damascus encounter, has a right to claim that he has found the clue to the riddle of life and destiny.’
[p 168]
October 12, 2016
Now I just want to start by saying that just because one does not agree with everything one says in a book does not mean that book is useless or in error. In fact, it is often the case that a good author can at the same time present material in a way which profoundly changes the way you think about something, but at the same time you don't agree with all of his or her conclusions. For me this was the case when I read A Man in Christ by James S. Stewart.
The most salient feature of the book for me was his chapter on the Apostle Paul's use of the 'in Christ' terminology to depict just how closely tied a believer's fate is to Christ's. Stewart does a masterful job in explaining how Christians, being 'in Christ' are considered to have all benefits of salvation now because of their connection to Christ. So, being 'in Christ' means that because he died and was raised from the dead we are also considered to have died and been raised from the dead. And there are many more benefits of salvation that are in our possession now because of this close connection to Christ. What I really liked about Stewart's treatment of this topic was his discussion of the exact significance of the 'in Christ' language. He seems to get the balance right arguing neither for the mystical view (that we have embarked on a mystical, other dimensional, journey) nor dismissing the 'in Christ' language as just one of Paul's verbal flourishes. Where many conservative Evangelicals will disagree with Stewart is his thesis that the 'in Christ' theme is the organising centre of Paul's soteriology (doctrine of how God saves us). But that really does not matter for even if we think Paul's organising soteriological theme is reconciliation, or justification or whatever, it is clear that Paul's thought on believers being 'in Christ' must be given full consideration and integrated into our own understanding of Paul's soteriology. And that is what Stewart's work forces us to do and that is the strength of his work here.
Another issue has to do with the debate over whether Pauline soteriology envision Christ's death on the cross as being either an expiating (dealing with the sin barrier problem) or a propitiating (dealing with God's wrath towards the sinner) event. Stewart falls on the expiation side of this debate and brings to bear many good observations for his argument that can't be ignored. Since this whole debate per se seems to have grown from the false dichotomy that it can only be expiation or propitiation I don't follow Stewart to the conclusion that expiation is the Pauline view of the role of the cross. I can't see why both expiation and propitiation are represented in Paul's thought. But this does not diminish Stewart's efforts making his point of view well worth reading. You never know, you may learn something. And that is exactly why I love this book. I always learn something worth using in todays debates on Paul's soteriology despite the fact this book was written over seventy decades ago.
In all, I think this is a book that must be read by all who wish to wrestle with Paul's thoughts on how God saves us.
The most salient feature of the book for me was his chapter on the Apostle Paul's use of the 'in Christ' terminology to depict just how closely tied a believer's fate is to Christ's. Stewart does a masterful job in explaining how Christians, being 'in Christ' are considered to have all benefits of salvation now because of their connection to Christ. So, being 'in Christ' means that because he died and was raised from the dead we are also considered to have died and been raised from the dead. And there are many more benefits of salvation that are in our possession now because of this close connection to Christ. What I really liked about Stewart's treatment of this topic was his discussion of the exact significance of the 'in Christ' language. He seems to get the balance right arguing neither for the mystical view (that we have embarked on a mystical, other dimensional, journey) nor dismissing the 'in Christ' language as just one of Paul's verbal flourishes. Where many conservative Evangelicals will disagree with Stewart is his thesis that the 'in Christ' theme is the organising centre of Paul's soteriology (doctrine of how God saves us). But that really does not matter for even if we think Paul's organising soteriological theme is reconciliation, or justification or whatever, it is clear that Paul's thought on believers being 'in Christ' must be given full consideration and integrated into our own understanding of Paul's soteriology. And that is what Stewart's work forces us to do and that is the strength of his work here.
Another issue has to do with the debate over whether Pauline soteriology envision Christ's death on the cross as being either an expiating (dealing with the sin barrier problem) or a propitiating (dealing with God's wrath towards the sinner) event. Stewart falls on the expiation side of this debate and brings to bear many good observations for his argument that can't be ignored. Since this whole debate per se seems to have grown from the false dichotomy that it can only be expiation or propitiation I don't follow Stewart to the conclusion that expiation is the Pauline view of the role of the cross. I can't see why both expiation and propitiation are represented in Paul's thought. But this does not diminish Stewart's efforts making his point of view well worth reading. You never know, you may learn something. And that is exactly why I love this book. I always learn something worth using in todays debates on Paul's soteriology despite the fact this book was written over seventy decades ago.
In all, I think this is a book that must be read by all who wish to wrestle with Paul's thoughts on how God saves us.
December 31, 2024
I can’t imagine a much better introduction to Paul’s theology that is rooted in who he was as a man, and what he experienced. Well worth the time.
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