Book One: On the Sacred and Apocryphal Books
Chapter Three: The Objection from the Words of St. Paul is Refuted, that the Letter kills and the Spirit gives Life.
The Apostle Paul, they say, “in expressive words distinguishes the letter from the spirit, and openly casts the former back on the Old Testament, which he even says kills, and the latter he confirms is proper to the New Testament, and says it gives life. “Not the letter,” he says II Corinthians ch.3, “has made us fitting ministers of the New Testament, but the spirit. For the letter kills but the spirit makes alive.” Therefore just as the Old Testament belongs to the Jews and pertains not at all to Christian men, so neither will the divine Scriptures, which are nothing other than letters, pertain to Christian men.”
To this argument we will easily make reply, and first that if things are so and nothing of the sacred letter pertains to us, why does Christ himself say John ch.5 “Search the Scriptures”? Why did Paul write so many letters? Why in I Timothy ch.4 does he admonish his disciple to pay attention to reading? But no doubt the Apostle Paul did not wish the Sacred Scripture to be understood by the letter that kills, nor an internal locution of the Spirit to be understood by the spirit that makes alive. The letter and spirit of Paul are nothing other than the law and grace of John. The letter, says John ch.1, was given by Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. And St. Augustine Against Faustus bk.15 ch.8 says: “The same law that was given by Moses was made grace and truth by Jesus Christ when spirit was added to the letter, so that the justice of the law might begin to be fulfilled, which unfulfilled was making them also guilty of sin.” But that Paul meant the law by the letter can be understood from his following words. For when he had said, “not the letter but the spirit has made us fitting ministers of the New Testament, for the letter kills but the spirit makes alive”, he immediately adds, “What if the ministry of death, set down in letters of stone, was for glory, so that the children of Israel could not look upon the face of Moses, because of the glory of his face, which shone forth; how will the ministry of the spirit not more be for glory?” In which words he has left no place for doubt but that by the letter that kills is to be understood the law written on stone.
But it will be worthwhile to explain briefly why the law given by Moses, why the letter, why what kills, is said to be proper to the Old Testament, lest, while we are refuting the Libertines and Schwenckfeldians, we seem to concede something to the Lutherans.
And a first very easy doubt indeed and almost nothing will be if Moses is compared with Christ and the law with grace. For when Moses brought down to the people the law given by God, he brought down nothing else than letters incised on stone; but Christ neither wrote any letters nor brought letters written by another, but he breathed the spirit of love and grace, which cannot even be written, into the hearts of his own. Therefore rightly is the law of Christ called spirit and grace, the law of Moses the letter.
But as to why the law is said to kill not everyone has the same opinion. Origen Against Celsus bk6, near the end, seems to mean that the letter that kills is the scripture itself when it is expounded according to the proper meaning of the words; but the same is spirit that makes alive if it is expounded mystically and spiritually. “He calls it letter,” he says, “when we receive the divine letters according to the sense, but spirit when according to the understanding.” And more clearly in bk.7 before the middle: “We assert,” he says, “that the law is double, namely one according to the letter and one according to opinion, as our ancestors have taught. Already the one that is taken as it is written is called not so much by us as by God through one of the Prophets a law that is not good and precepts that are not good. Which our own Paul imitates when he said that the letter kills, which is the same as if he had said that the words kill. Besides, the Spirit, he says, gives life, which means the same as if he had written that we attain life by understanding them.” So Origen, whose opinion, if it is so taken that nothing at all in the divine Scriptures can be expounded as letter contains a refuted error, and the error has long been refuted by the Fathers. See Epiphanius epistle to John and on the heresy of Origen, Chrysostom hom.13 on Genesis, Jerome epistle to Pammachius about the errors of John of Jerusalem and on ch.10 of Daniel. Augustine, City of God bk.13 ch.21, on Genesis bk.8 ch.1. But if Origen’s opinion is taken to be that things figuratively said are not to be explained according to the proper signification of the words, it is indeed true, but does not well fit this place of Paul. For the Apostle, when he says that the letter kills, is not speaking of the figures of the Scriptures, but of those well known precepts that were written on the two stone tables. For he speaks thus: “The letter kills, but the spirit makes alive. But if the ministry of death set down in letters of stone was for glory, etc.” And again in the epistle to the Romans, where he often says that the law kills, he brings no other law forward than this one: “thou shalt not covet”. “And indeed,” if I may use the words of Augustine, book on the Spirit and the Letter, ch. 4, “a thing is not said figuratively on the ground that, when “thou shalt not covet” is said, it is not to be taken according to the sense of the letter. But this is a most open and most healthy precept, which if anyone fulfills, he will have altogether no sin.”
But also St. John Chrysostom on II Corinthians 3 and those who followed him, Theodoret, Theophylact, Oecumenius, a certain commentary attributed to St. Ambrose, and some others teach that the letter that kills is the law that punishes, the spirit that makes alive is the grace that frees from sins. For the law commanded not only adulterers and thieves to be killed but also him who collected wood on the Sabbath, Numbers ch.15. But grace absolved even the most wicked of men, and those contaminated by every kind of offense, through the water of regeneration or the word of reconciliation.
However, this explanation is not altogether satisfying, for the divine law established rewards for the good as well as punishments for the bad, and as is written in Deuteronomy 27: “Cursed be he who does not abide by the words of this law nor completes them in deed.” So is it written also in Leviticus ch.18: “Keep my laws and judgments, which the man will live in who does them.” Why then is the law said to kill and not also to bring life? For if the letter that kills can for this reason deservedly be so called because it kills its transgressors, by parity of reason it can be called the letter that makes alive because it bestows life on those who cultivate it.
Most true, then, and most in harmony with the words of the Apostle is the opinion of St. Augustine, namely that the law without grace is called by the Apostle Paul the letter that kills for two reasons. First that, since it cannot be fulfilled, it in some way makes him to whom it is given a sinner. The law, says the same Apostle in Romans ch.4, works wrath; for where there is no law there is no sin. Second that by its prohibition it increases concupiscence; for as the Apostle rightly says: We strive always for what is forbidden, and we desire what is denied: “Sin,” says the Apostle, “taking occasion by the law worked in me all concupiscence,” Romans ch.7, and St. Augustine On the Spirit and the Letter ch.4 says: “The doctrine which it prescribes, do not covet, is a good and praiseworthy law, but where the Holy Spirit does not help, inspiring good desire in place of bad, that is, pouring forth charity in our hearts, assuredly the law, although good, increases bad desire by prohibiting it, just as a rush of water, if it does not cease to flow into a certain part, is made more vehement by the opposing obstacle, whose mass the water, when it conquers flowing headlong with a greater volume, more violently propels forward. And this is sin deceiving through the law and killing by it when offense too is added, which was no offense where there was no law.”
Wherefore, neither of itself nor by any viciousness proper to itself, but by occasion only, and the occasion taken, not given, does the law kill. For sin, as the Apostle says Romans ch.7, “taking occasion by the law seduced me and by that killed me.” So, is a law that is indeed holy and a command that is holy, just, and good to be made death for me because it is good? “God forbid. But sin, so that it might appear sin, worked death for me through what is good.”
There remains the final question why the law without the proper letter is said to belong to the Old Testament. For the law in the Old Testament did not flourish without grace, without letter, without spirit, since so many at that time flourished as most just men, walking, as Luke ch.1 says of Zachariah and Elizabeth, in all the commands and justifications of God without complaint, nor in the New Testament does the spirit resist without the letter, without grace, without the law, since Christ said in Matthew ch.5, you have heard that it was said by those of old time “thou shalt not kill and he who kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment,” and the rest that follows; and again John ch.3, “unless a man be reborn by water and the Holy Spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God;” and Matthew ch.28, “go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
What is it then that the Apostle says, not the letter but the spirit has made us fitting ministers of the New Testament? By what reason does he exclude the law from the New Testament in which we see so many laws prescribed by Christ himself? But this question is easily solved if we differentiate between what pertains per se and properly to each Testament and what is the proper end of each Testament. The proper end of the Old testament was to bring it about that the human race, corrupted as it were in its root in its first parent, might be admonished about the sickness of its vices and its wounds, and thence conceiving fear and sorrow seek a healer. The law leads to this end. Through the law is the knowledge of sin, says the Apostle Romans ch.3. And again, “I did not know sin save through the law,” Romans ch.7. And St. Augustine says, letter 200 to Asellicus, “it is the mark of law that it convict man of his weakness and compel him to implore the medicine of grace which is in Christ.”
Wherefore per se and properly the Old Testament is contained in laws and letters, and brings in fear and generates to servitude, as Paul says Romans ch.8, Galatians ch.4. But those who are said to have been just and free under the Old Testament were not such by the letter of the Old Testament but by the spirit of the New Testament. “Those holy men,” says St. Augustine, letter 120 to Honoratus, “are in the dispensation of the Old Testament for harmony with the time, but they belonged to the New Testament.” And On Merits and Remission of Sins bk.1 ch.11 he says: “The reign of death was only destroyed in any man by the grace of the Savior, which worked in the ancient saints, who, before Christ came in the flesh, nevertheless pertained to his assisting grace, not to the letter of the law, which could only command and not help.” But the end of the New Testament is not other than to heal, to cure, to set free. But all this is provided by grace. “Unhappy man that I am,” says St. Paul Romans ch.7, “who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And St. Augustine in On the Spirit and the Letter bk.1 ch.29 says: “Through the law was the knowledge of sin, through grace the curing of the soul from the vice of sin.”
Therefore the New Testament per se and properly does not bring the law but grace, and is minister not of the letter but of the spirit alone, and is nothing else than the charity of God diffused in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us, as was so much foretold by the Prophet when Jeremiah in ch.31 says, “Behold the days shall come, says the Lord, and I will make a new covenant with Israel and the house of Judah; not according to the covenant I made with your fathers, in the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, a covenant which they made void and I was lord over them, says the Lord. But this will be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord; I will give my law in their belly and I will write it in their heart.” Therefore if it is a question of that which per se and properly pertains to each Testament, most truly did Paul say II Corinthians ch.3: “Not the letter but the spirit made us fitting ministers of the New Testament.” Nor did John speak less truly in ch.1: “The law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
But although the New Testament per se and properly does not bring laws, yet it contains laws in a double way. For first all those laws that are referred to living well and blessedly are not destroyed by the grace of the New Testament but confirmed; indeed the grace brings strength to human weakness to fulfill them: “Do we destroy the law through faith?” says the Apostle Romans ch.3. “God forbid, but we establish the law.” And later ch.8: “For what was impossible for the law, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and without sin, destroyed sin in the flesh so that the justification of the law might be fulfilled in us.” And St. Augustine On the Spirit and Letter ch.19 says: “The law then was given so that grace might be looked for; grace was given so that the law might be fulfilled. For the law failed to be fulfilled, not by its own vice, but by the vice of the prudence of the flesh. The vice that had to be shown up by the law had to be healed by grace.”
Next Christ also made certain new laws, as about providing and receiving baptism, the Eucharist, and the other sacraments; because although Christ did not for this reason come to us, to burden us as a new Moses with the weight of a new law, but to unburden us who lay under the weight of the law with the help of grace; yet he thought that to the old moral precepts those very salutary laws should be added that, while they lead us to the sacrament and to grace through the sacraments, they not only do not burden us with their weight but lift us up as on wings, as Augustine says in his book On Perfect Justice. But enough has been said about the first objection.
The other objections, that are common to the Schwenkfeldians and Libertines along with the Lutherans and Calvinists, will be more suitably dissolved in the disputation in which we will, with the help of God, discourse of the interpretation of Scripture and the judge of controversies.
Robert Bellarmine’s: Controversies of the Christian Faith – Volume 1: On the Word of God — HOME