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18. πολλοὶ. So early did an antinomian travesty of the Gospel of free grace arise and spread. Similar errors are in view in Rom 16:17-18, where he denounces the utterers of unwholesome χρηστολογία καὶ εὐλογία. The moral disorders at Corinth (1 Corinthians 5, 6) were probably defended on such principles. To this class of error Rom 6:1 probably refers, ἐπιμένωμεν τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ, ἵνα ἡ χάρις πλεονάσῃ: and Eph 5:6, μηδεὶς ὑμᾶς ἀπατάτω κενοῖς λόγοις. There were varieties no doubt under a common moral likeness. Some would hold the tenet prominent later in “Gnosticism,” that matter must be evil, and that the body therefore can never be holy. Others (and these surely are in view in the Roman Epistle, and probably here) would push the truth of free justification into a real isolation from other truth, and so into deadly error; teaching that the πνευματικός is so accepted in Christ that his moral actions matter not to God. Every great period of spiritual upheaval and power is, as by a subtle law, defaced by some such growths of great misbelief. Such were the phenomena, cent. 16, of the Libertines at Geneva, and the Prophets of Zwickau; and in one degree or another such things are continually felt in Christian life and history.
At Philippi, this “school” would be broadly, perhaps bitterly, divided from the Judaists. But the “extremes might meet” so as to account for the mention of both here in a certain connexion. A stern formal legalism has a tendency to slight “the weightier matters of the law,” heart-purity among them. Still, the persons here directly in view (Php 3:18-19) “gloried in their shame”; this must mean a positive and reasoned libertinism.
πολλάκις. Sadly echoing πολλοὶ.
ἔλεγον. “I used to tell you of as.…” As if he would write, πολλάκις ἔλεγον αὐτοὺς τοὐς ἐχθροὺς κτλ. For λέγειν so used cp. e.g. æsch. Eum. 48, οὔτοι γυναῖκας ἀλλὰ Γοργόνας λέγω.—“I used,” in former days, when among you. So very early was the mischief in the air.
νῦν δὲ καὶ κλαίων. “But now actually weeping.” Years had only shewn him more clearly the deplorable mischiefs of the delusion.
For St Paul’s tears, see Act 20:19, δουλεύων τῷ κυρίῳ … μετὰ δακρύων: Act 20:31, οὐκ ἐπαυσάμην μετὰ δακρύων νουθετῶν: 2Co 2:4, ἔγραψα ὑμῖν διὰ πολλῶν δακρύων.—Κλαίειν implies not tears only but lamentation, audible grief, and thus gives a peculiar pathos to a passage like this.—See Appendix M for an extract from a sermon by Adolphe Monod (in his Saint Paul, Cinq Discours), Son Christianisme, ou ses Larmes.
τοὺς ἐχθροὺς τοῦ σταυροῦ. “As the personal enemies of the cross”; deluding themselves and their followers into the horrible belief that the Cross of Atonement, God’s own argument and secret for our holiness, was in effect intended to give security to sin. Possibly the praise of the Cross was much on their lips; but their doctrine and practice made them its most formidable enemies, disgracing it in the world’s eyes.
M. AD. MONOD ON ST PAUL’S TEARS. (CH. Php 3:18)
“WHAT is the Gospel of St Paul? Is it but a refined deism, announcing as its whole doctrine the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, as its whole revelation the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, as its only mediator Jesus Christ living as prophet and dying as martyr? Or is this Gospel a religion unlike all others (une religion tout à part) … proclaiming a God unknown, promising an indescribable deliverance, demanding a radical change, compassionate and terrible at once, … high as heaven, deep as hell? You need not, for your answer, consult the writings of the Apostle; you have but to see him weeping at your feet.”
Saint Paul, Cinq Discours (ed. 1859), p. 62.