Christ after death is to rise with Him.  It implies Resurrection.  Here again Arnold is constrained to admit the validity of Catholic interpretation.  He cannot deny that Paul believed absolutely in the physical, literal, and material fact of Christ’s bodily Resurrection.  But he insists that, while accepting this fact, Paul lays far more stress upon the spiritual interpretation of it.  For Paul, death is living after the flesh; life is mortifying the flesh by the spirit; “resurrection is the rising, within the sphere of our earthly existence, from death in this sense to life in this sense.”

But, though St. Paul so often uses the word Resurrection in this spiritual and mystical sense, it cannot be denied that he uses it also, uses it primarily, in its physical and literal sense.  In that sense, it implies a physical and literal Death of Christ.  And on that Death, what is St. Paul’s teaching?  Not that it was a substitution, or a satisfaction, or an appeasement of wrath or an expiation of guilt—­but that in it and by it “Christ parted with what, to men in general, is the most precious of things—­individual self and selfishness; He pleased not Himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon the Cross this death”; in all this seeking to show His followers that whosoever would cease from sin and follow Righteousness must be prepared to “suffer in the flesh.”

Arnold thus sums up his general contention:  “The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, therefore, as popular theology makes them—­calling, justification, sanctification; they are rather these:  dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ.”  And thus he concludes his controversy with the theologians who have misinterpreted their favourite Apostle:  “It is to Protestantism, and its Puritan Gospel, that the reproaches thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion of the heart into theories of the head about election and justification, rightly attach.  St. Paul himself, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness and ends with finding it; from first to last the practical religious sense never deserts him.  If he could have seen and heard our preachers of predestination and justification, they are just the people he would have called ’diseased about questions and word-battlings.’  He would have told Puritanism that every Sunday when in all its countless chapels it reads him and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart.  The moment it reads him right, a veil will seem to have been taken away from its heart; it will feel as though scales were fallen from its eyes....  The doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it has lain covered; it will edify the Church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations, the applause of less superstitious ages.  All, all, will be too little to pay half the debt which the Church of God owes to this ’least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church of God.’”