The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle of St Paul to the RomansMoule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle of St Paul to the Romans
Moule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Bible. Romans -- Commentaries
Then, this paragraph asserts the necessity of the missionary's work
still more urgently than its beauty. True, it suggests many questions
(what great Scripture does not do so?) which we cannot answer yet at
all:--"Why has He left the Gentiles thus? Why is so much, for their
salvation, suspended (in our view) upon the too precarious and too
lingering diligence of the Church? What will the King say at last to
those who never could, by the Church's fault, even hear the blessed
Name, that they might believe in It, and call upon It?" HE knoweth
_the whole_ answer to such questions; not we. Yet here meanwhile
stands out this "thing revealed" (Deut. xxix. 29). In the Lord's
normal order, which is for certain the order of eternal spiritual
right and love, however little we can see all the conditions of the
case, man is to be saved through a personal "calling upon His Name."
And for that "calling" there is need of personal believing. And for
that believing there is need of personal hearing. And in order to that
hearing, God does not speak in articulate thunder from the sky, nor
send visible angels up and down the earth, but bids His Church, His
children, go and tell.
Nothing can be stronger and surer than the practical logic of this
passage. The need of the world, it says to us, is not only
amelioration, elevation, evolution. It is salvation. It is pardon,
acceptance, holiness, and heaven. It is God; it is Christ. And that
need is to be met not by subtle expansions of polity and society. No
"unconscious cerebration" of the human race will regenerate fallen
man. Nor will his awful wound be healed by any drawing on the shadowy
resources of a post-mortal hope. The work is to be done now, in the
Name of Jesus Christ, and _by_ His Name. And His Name, in order to be
known, has to be announced and explained. And that work is to be done
by those who already know it, or it will not be done at all. "There is
none other Name." There is no other method of evangelization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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