THE THEOLOGY OF PAUL AND OF JOHN COMPARED.

By PROFESSOR GEORGE B. STEVENS, PH.D., D.D.

Yale University.

General mental characteristics of the two APostles.--Their conception of

specific doctrines compared. I. The idea of God; 2. The person of Christ,
3. The work of Christ, 4. The doctrine of sin; g. The method of salva-
tion , 6. The doctrine of faith.-Sumnmary.

Paul and John represent the two most distinctive types of

apostolic doctrine. Their marked differences in personality and
in methods of thought make a comparison of the types which
they represent at once a difficult and a fascinating task. Paul is
the representative Christian schoolman of his time. He is prac-
ticed in analysis and argument. John illustrates rather the med-
itative and intuitive order of mind. Paul is always seeking to
argue out the truth and to prove it from the Old Testament and
from experience. John simply sees the truth and declares it, as
if confident that those who have an eye for it will also see and
accept it. Paul's method is more inductive; John's more deduc-
tive. The former is illustrated in the piling up of proofs of the
doctrine of justification by faith in Romans. The undeniable
corruption of the heathen world, the equal depravity of the
Jews, and the multiform testimony of the Old Testament, are
proofs which combine to show that salvation can only be by
grace, never by merit. For John, however, the work of salva-
tion seems to flow naturally from the very nature of God as
love. Paul is more analytic, John more synthetic. Although
Paul's religious conceptions are capable of combination and sim-
plification, the apostle has kept them, to a great extent, apart
and has dealt with them separately. His doctrines of faith, of
works, of sin, and of the law, are sufficient illustrations. All
John's religious ideas are, on the contrary, comprehended in a
few elementary principles, which are never lost sight of. The
166
 THEOLOGY OF PAUL AND OF JOHN COMPARED. 167

whole life of Christ flows out from his nature as the eternal
Light of the world. The whole gospel, with all its various
duties and obligations, is grounded in the nature of God as light
and love. Sin is simply darkness, or the absence and opposite
of love. Salvation is not conceived of as a process by which,
upon certain terms, acquittal from a sentence of condemnation
is secured (as with Paul), but as a welcoming of the light, and
walking in it; in short, as a life of fellowship with God.
With these hints respecting certain generic differences in the
modes of religious thought which the two apostles illustrate, let
us briefly review the principal doctrines which they have in com-
mon, and note such points of difference and of likeness as may
present themselves.
I. The Idea of God.-Both apostles have an intense sense
(characteristic of the Jewish mind) of the direct efficiency of
God in all things. For both the will of God is sovereign, and
definite particular events are regarded as necessarily happening
in order that specific Old Testament predictions may be fulfilled.
In both writers we observe the Jewish mode of thought respecting
God and the way in which he makes known his will in the Old
Testament and accomplishes his purposes of mercy. But in
Paul the Jewish type of thought is much more pervading and
determining. In him God is conceived of in a more legal way
than in John. He is a Judge on the throne of the world. The
problem of religion is, how man may appear before him so as to
be accepted and acquitted. To John God appears rather as the
Being in whom all perfections are met. The problem of relig-
ion is, whether men will desire and strive to be like him. For
Paul, God is certainly essentially gracious as well as essentially
just, yet he has nowhere comprehended the ethical perfections
of God in a single conception such as John's,-God is light, or,
God is love.
There is unquestionably a fundamental unity between Paul's
and John's doctrine of God. In the teaching of both writers,
creation, revelation and redemption are accordant with the
divine nature and flow out from it, but this conception is much
more explicitly presented in John than in Paul. When the sep-
168 THE BIBLICAL WORLD.

arate elements of Paul's doctrine are gathered up and combined,

it is obvious that holy love would best define for him the moral
nature of God, but, owing to his more Jewish, legal method of
thought, he has less closely unified the divine attributes than
has John. Paul emphasizes more the will of God, John more
his nature. Paul thinks it enough to ground events in the
choices or acts of God; John goes further and grounds them
in his essence. I have no question that these standpoints ulti-
mately meet and blend. Paul's view, when carried back to the
farthest point to which thought can reach, conducts us to the
conception of John. It is, however, significant that Paul, with
all his argument and reasoning only came into a distant view of
those loftiest heights of contemplation concerning God, where
John habitually dwells as if they were the natural home of his
spirit. With keen and just discrimination, therefore, did the
ancient church accord to John the name thzeologian,since he, of
all others, has penetrated most profoundly into the depths of the
divine nature.
2. The Person of Ch/zrist.-Both writers emphasize the prefx-
istence of Christ and his exaltation to heavenly glory. Both
emphasize his relation to the universe at large in the work of
revelation and redemption. Both ascribe creation mediately to
him. For Paul, all fulness of divine life and power dwell in
Christ, and the scope of his redeeming love is as wide as the
universe. But while this lofty character and work are by Paul
ascribed to Christ, it will be noticed that he contemplates the
Saviour chiefly in his historic manifestation. He designates him
generally by titles which refer to him as a historic person, such
as " Christ." It remains for John to seek out some term which
shall designate his essential, eternal nature. This term is the
Logos, by which the apostle would express the nature of one
who sustains an inner, changeless relation to God which under-
lies the incarnation and saving work of the Redeemer. John
seems to advance beyond the idea of a voluntary humiliation of
the Son of God for man's salvation, and to conceive of the
incarnation as a certain special method of manifestation which
the Logos adopted quite in accordance with his nature. He is
 THEOLOGY OF PAUL AND OF JOHN COMPARED. 169

the perpetual medium of revelation; the bringer of life and

light to men. It is true that it is almost impossible to deter-
mine where the line runs in the prologue between the acts of the
Logos before and after the incarnation. Probably the apostle
intended no such line to be sharply drawn. He conceives the
revelation of the Logos in humanity merely as a historic illus-
tration of his eternal nature and action. The historic is set on
the background of the eternal, and after the description of the
historic manifestation of the Logos is clearly introduced, the
thought still recurs, now and again, to the universal truths which
that manifestation illustrates. In the opening verses (1-4) the
absolute nature and action of the Logos are described, ending
with the statement, "and the life was the light of men." Then
the description enters the sphere of history and the shining of
the light of the Logos in the world's darkness is depicted (verse
5), and then comes John's witness in preparation for the coming
of the true Light (verses 6, 8). This light now appears, but the
description of it assumes universal terms. He was coming into
the world and lighting every man. He was from the beginning
in the world which he had made (verses 9-Io). The Logos is
for John the universal principle and agent of revelation. He
has been perpetually operative in the world. In every time he
has touched the lives of men, and his revelation of himself in
the incarnation is grounded in what he essentially is, and in
those relations which he has ever borne to the world which he
has made and in which he has dwelt. While, therefore, both
apostles have the same general conception of the exaltation of
Christ's person, John develops more distinctly than Paul the idea
of the eternal personal preexistence of the Son, and of his per-
petual activity since the beginning of time in revealing the
divine light to men, and in blessing and saving those who
received it.
3. The Work of Christ.-Both apostles agree in ascribing a
sacrificial significance to the saving mission of Christ. For
Paul his death on the cross is the central point of his work, and
for John he is the Lamb of God whose death takes away the
world's sin, and the propitiation for the sins of the world.
I 70 THE BIBLICAL WORLD.

But John appears to conceive of the idea of sacrifice more com-

prehensively than Paul. For Paul, Christ's death is a ransom-
price by which men are redeemed. Some kind of equivalence
is assumed to exist between the Saviour's sufferings and the
penalty due to human sin. The sufferings of Christ in some
way meet the ends of the remitted punishment. They vindicate
God's holy displeasure against sin as fully as the punishment of
sin would do, and thus they stand in stead of that punishment,
and make it morally possible for God to withhold the penalty of
sin from all who trust in the Redeemer.
This Pauline method of thought respecting redemption
clearly has its roots in the Old Testament and in Jewish thought.
As in the sacrificial system, the animal which is slain in sacrifice
is regarded as a victim which suffers vicariously in the place of
the sinful man, so the Saviour is regarded as suffering in the
sinner's stead, and as bearing in some real sense the penal conse-
quences of the world's sin. Christ's death is vicarious in the
sense that his sufferings are substituted for sin's punishment, and
they serve the ends of that punishment by vindicating the right-
eousness of God as fully as the punishment of sin would have
done.
While John is much less explicit than Paul in his references
to the method of redemption, he appears to contemplate the
Saviour's sacrificial work as an example of the operation of a
universal law. He likens his death to the dying of the grain of
wheat, which must itself perish in order that the germ within it
may unfold and the larger product appear. Men, too, are to
give their lives for one another as Christ gave his life for them.
Such expressions of John seem to rest upon the idea that the
law of self-giving, of dying in order to fuller life, is impressed
upon the whole universe, and is, perhaps, founded in the very
nature of God. "God so loved the world that he gave," seems
to be the key-note of this Johannine conception of sacrifice.
Love is essentially vicarious, and the universe is built on the
principle of sacrifice. Lower forms of life are perpetually giv-
ing themselves to sustain higher forms; they die and rise again
in a larger and richer life. John seems to conceive of Christ's
 THEOLOGY OF P'A UL AND OF JOHN COMPARED. 17I

giving of his life not so much as an act of suffering and death

as a process of self-giving, and the appropriation of its benefits
is by him described as a partaking of Christ's body and blood.
John's expressions upon the subject are mystical, and their pre-
cise meaning difficult to grasp and define. But they illustrate a
mode of thought which it is extremely interesting to follow out,
and one which has fascinated many of the profoundest minds of
Christendom. The few hints which he has given us in his writ-
ings form but scanty material for a doctrine of the atonement,
but I am persuaded that his idea of vicariousness is rooted in
his idea of God as love. In love as the giving, sympathizing,
burden-bearing quality of God's nature lies the starting-point of
John's thought respecting the method of redemption. The idea
of outward substitution and transfer, which is still observed in
Paul, is lost in John because the whole subject is carried to a
higher stand-point and seen in a higher light. The essential
vicariousness of love is the principle which, in John, carries the
notion of substitution up out of the sphere of outward, legal
relations and places it in the very bosom of God. Satisfaction
does not represent an act of appeasing God's righteousness ab
extra, but a process within the divine perfection whereby love-
which is God's perfect moral nature-finds its satisfaction in
giving and suffering for others.
The stand-points of Paul and John are not really inconsistent.
The Johannine idea of God, if made the premiss of Paul's argu-
ment, would lead him along the path which conducts to John's
conceptions of salvation. It is Paul's more legal method of
thought concerning God and his less perfectly unified conception
of the divine nature which makes him seem to follow a different
track of thought from John. But in the last analysis the two
types of doctrine meet and blend. Paul teaches that in the suf
fering and death of Christ God exhibited his righteousness so
that he might be just in justifying the believer. But when we
inquire, what is God's righteousness, and how does God exhibit it,
we can find no rational answer except that God's righteousness
is the self-respect of perfect love, and that all the perfections of
God are exhibited by their exercise. God satisfies his perfections
172 THE BIBLICAL WORLD.

only by revealing them and by realizing in the universe the ends

which accord with them. If God is love the doctrine of Paul as
well as of John carries us in all reflection upon the atonement out
of the realm of temporal substitution and satisfaction into the
realm of those truths which are essential and eternal in God.
4. The Doctrine ofSin.-In the main features of the doctrine
there is an obvious agreement between Paul and John. Sin is for
both universal and guilty. Paul connects sin in its origin and
diffusion with the transgression of Adam, while John-so far as
he intimates any view of sin's origin-appears to ascribe its intro-
duction into the world to Satan. Both ideas rest upon the narra-
tive of the fall in Genesis, and coincide so far as the idea of the
primal source of temptation is concerned. The forms in which
the two writers speak of sin are, in some cases, similar; in some,
different. Both represent sin as a bondage or slavery in contrast
to the true freedom which is the boon of the Christian man. Both
depict it as a state of moral death-the opposite of the true life
of the soul. But Paul's characteristic conception of sin is that
of a world-ruling power or personified principle which makes
men its captives, shuts them up in prison, and pronounces con-
demnation upon them. John, in accordance with a peculiar
dualistic method of thought, is more accustomed to speak of sin
as darkness in contrast to light, or as hate as contrasted with
love. The true life consists in walking in the light, while the sin-
ful life consists in walking in darkness. Light is for John the
symbol of goodness or God-likeness; darkness the synonym of
evil or unlikeness to God.
The contrast between flesh and spirit which has so important
a connection with Paul's doctrine of sin is quite incidentally pre-
sented in John, and does not carry the same associations which it
has in Paul. In Paul's writings "the flesh" is the sphere of sin's
manifestation, and thus comes to be used in an ethical sense and
almost to be identified with sin itself. "The spirit" in man is
what we should call his religious nature, in which he is allied to
God-the highest element of his personality which leads him to
aspire after holiness. Between the flesh and the spirit there goes
on in the natural man a constant conflict with the result that the
 THEOLOGY OF PAUL AND OF JOHN COMPARED. 173

flesh keeps its supremacy. It is only when Christ is received in

faith that the victory of the spirit is achieved. John has essen-
tially the same doctrine, but he does not develop it in this form.
"Flesh" and "spirit" represent for him two contrasted orders of
being-the sphere of the lower or outward to which we are related
by our natural life-and the higher realm of reason and spirit
with which our begetting from God sets us in relation.
5. The Method of Salvation.-In describing the way of salva-
tion Paul's great words are justfication and righteousness; John's
are, birthfrom God and life. In no other particular are the char-
acteristic differences of the two apostles so clearly illustrated.
Paul, in accordance with his Jewish training and as a result of his
controversies with Pharisaic opponents, wrought out the doctrine
of salvation in juridical forms. God is a judge whose sentence
of condemnation is out against sinful man. Christ by his death
provides for the annulling of the sentence. Faith is the condi-
tion on which this effect could be secured. That condition being
such, the claim is cancelled and a decree of acquittal is issued.
Righteousness for Paul is the status of a man so acquitted. The
process by which the result is reached is called justification. Not
that all this is conceived of by Paul as a mere court-process. It
has its ethical counterpart in the spiritual transformation of the
justified man, but the legal idea determines the form of the doc-
trine. With John the case is quite different. He has relinquished
the forms of Jewish legalism. No controversy with Judaizing
opponents requires him to meet them upon the plane of their own
conceptions. Salvation is not thought of as the result of a divine
declaration, but as the result of a divine impartation of life. It
is not described as a legal status, but as a condition or character.
But even here, sharp as the formal difference is, there is an
underlying unity. Both apostles have at the heart of their teach-
ing the same profound mysticism. For both the Christian life is
realized in union with Christ. To be in Christ, to abide in him,
to feed upon him, are terms which represent equally the profound-
est thoughts of both writers. Both coincide perfectly in making
the divine grace the source of salvation and a self-renouncing
acceptance of that grace as the condition of appropriating it.
174 THE BIBLICAL WORLD.

6. The Doctrine of Faith.--In this article the apostles closely

coincide. For both faith is more than mere belief; it involves
personal relation and fellowship. With Paul it is associated with
such ideas as are expressed in the phrase "in Christ," "dying
with Christ," and "newness of life." With John it is associated
with "abiding in Christ," "living through Christ," and "eating
the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man." In both,
therefore, there is a pronounced mystical element. Faith is life-
union with Christ. It is no mere possession of truths which lie
dead and cold in the mind; it is a vital alliance with Christ, the
hiding of our life with him in God. By both apostles equally is
faith regarded as the very opposite of a meritorious achievement
which saves by its inherent excellence. It is the correlative of
grace, and therefore involves the explicit renunciation of merit
before God. Faith has its power and value, not in itself as an
exercise of the human powers, but in its object, Christ, to which
it links us. The saving power of faith lies in the fact that it joins
our life to Christ. It is, therefore, not so much an achievement
as an acceptance.
It does not follow, however, that faith is a mere passive
receptivity. The very nature of faith, as an acceptance of a divine
life, involves the possession of a new moral energy. Faith works
by love. In faith a new life-force is received and new powers
stir within the Christian man. It would be equally out of harmony
with Paul and with John to regard faith as a mere act standing at
the beginning of the religious life but isolated from it. Faith
penetrates the whole Christian life; it is an active, energetic prin-
ciple. If it carries us out of ourselves, it does so in order that
it may bring us under the power of new spiritual forces which
shall inspire and ennoble our whole nature, and impart an unwonted
energy to our every faculty.
From the brief comparative sketch which we have given of
the teachings of Paul and of John it will be evident that the lat-
ter furnishes us to a much smaller degree than the former with
the elements of a system of thought. Paul has to a great extent
put together for us the various elements of his teaching so as to
give them a certain completeness of form. John has given us
 THEOLOGY OF PAUL AND OF JOHN COMPARED. 175

only single truths, a series of glimpses into great depths which

he has made no effort to explore in detail. We can hardly speak
of a Johannine system at all, and we are left to correlate as best
we can the disjecta membra of doctrine which John has left us in
his writings. The two great Christian teachers, however, in many
ways supplement each other, and both illustrate and enforce with
peculiar power the great truths of God's love and grace which
constitute the changeless substance of the Gospel of Christ.