Romans 14:23

23. And Rather, but. He whose obscure faith in Christ allows him to believe meat a criminal matter, and so both doubts and eats, is not happy, but self-condemned. His conscience and conduct are at war, and he is wretched, though not perhaps as bad as he thinks himself. Yet his case is bad. He has intended to do wrong. And even though the objective act was not intrinsically wrong, its rightness was an accident; the unhappy man has really in his heart purposed to violate the law of right. Dr. Hodge pertinently says, “It is wrong to do any thing which we think to be wrong. The converse of this proposition is not true. It is not always right to do what we think to be right.”

Damned Is here used in its old English sense, condemned; that is, condemned by himself and condemned by God; not necessarily eternally ruined.

Eateth not of faith He eats not according to the clear free faith of the strong man, for that would have banished his doubt and reconciled his conscience and conduct. He eats not according to his own feeble faith, for that authorizes the doubt by which he is self-condemned. He acts from no Christian or moral faith or principle at all, but from an unholy impulse.

Not of faith is sin The Christian’s whole true life is a life of faith which faith authorizes every innocent act. Whatever comes not from that is transgression. The Augustinian argument (noticed by Alford, and in Lange’s Commentary on the passage) drawn from this clause, showing the non-salvability of infidels and heathen, has no force. We do not, nevertheless, obviate it by the methods of the commentators just named. The faith described in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews was a faith of those who never knew Christ, yet was a faith intrinsically equivalent to a faith in Christ. Faith, through all the dispensation of mankind, (and in some sense every man is by himself a dispensation,) is intrinsically and essentially the same principle. (See note on Romans 2:6.) And whatever is not of this faith is sin, and whose hath not this faith is eternally damned.

There is a formidable authority of manuscripts in favour of inserting here the doxology which stands at the end of the Epistle. This is obviously a most unsuitable place, as there is nothing here in the train of thought to awaken so lofty a strain. The most natural solution of the fact of its being here placed is that the customary reading of the Epistle in the Churches (see page 5) ended here, (the remainder of the Epistle being held of a less edifying character and so not read,) with the closing doxology superadded. A few manuscripts have the doxology in both places, and a few others entirely omit it.

Upon the fact of its prevalent insertion here, Renan, following in the train of adverse German criticism, founds the assumption that the Epistle properly terminates here, and that the after parts are but partially genuine. But as he feels obliged to admit the genuineness of several passages in this portion of the Epistle, his picking and culling other parts for opinions become so capricious and artificial that his whole criticism breaks down.

He furnishes a theory of his own, that Romans is truly an Encyclical Epistle. That is, the body of it was written for and sent to several of the principal Churches, with different Introduction and Conclusion in each, suited to its particular Church, and that “the editors” have appended several different conclusions to the existing copy. But these “editors,” we have given reason to believe, are imaginary beings. (See p. 5.) If they existed soon after the writing of the Epistle, both they and their readers would have seen the mistake; if long after, they could never have called in the various copies scattered through the Christian world, so but that a variety of introductions as well as terminations would have been extant at the present day.

Renan says there are properly four endings of the Epistle, namely, at Romans 15:33; Romans 16:20; Romans 16:24 and Romans 16:27. But Renan is too parsimonious. If a doxology or a benediction closing up a topic, with, perhaps, an Amen, is an ending of the Epistle, there are no less than seven such endings. And this calls to view the fact that Romans is not only the most climactic and triumphal, (see note Romans 8:39,) but the most doxological of all Paul’s Epistles. God the Creator wakes a doxology at Romans 1:25; Christ the Redeemer at Romans 9:5; God the divine Governor at Romans 11:36. A benediction upon his entire audience of Roman readers is pronounced at Romans 15:33; upon his circle of saluted brethren at Romans 16:20; and upon the double circle of saluters and saluted at Romans 16:24. Then, with all suitableness, the whole is closed with the grand doxology of Romans 16:26-27. This survey of the whole entirely dispenses with all the theories of “separate pieces of parchment,” “various times of writing,” “fourfold endings,” “encyclical epistles,” etc., which commentators, critics, and sceptics have so needlessly invented.