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that he got elsewhere; but Christ Himself, through all that wealth of moral and religious good which He communicated to His servant and made part of his inmost possession, supplied Paul with the ideas under which the latter regarded the Lord.1 It was no mere intellectual conception that ruled the apostle's mind, no philosophical theorem resting on the authority of the schools. It was a conception of His nature that was most intimately related to his own experience of the redeeming power of Christ, and was as certain to him as were the facts of his own soul, its truth resting on the imperial authority inherent in every proposition regarding realities that are accessible to human experience.

The Christ of experience whom Paul brings before us, is at the same time connected in the closest possible way with the historic Personality of Jesus. It is true, indeed, that he takes account of only one event in the Gospel history, viewing, as Baur says, the life of Jesus entirely in the light of the Death on the Cross. That event, however, had for the apostle a supreme significance,3 for it communicated to the Heavenly activity of the Risen Christ its power to save men from sin and death. His Christology is accordingly an interpretation of the historic Jesus, and more particularly of His Death, from the view-point of one who believed that He had not only died, but had risen

1 We are not to infer, however, that this "revelation of Jesus Christ" was equivalent to the communication to the mind of the apostle of the articles of the Christian faith. These were the result of reflection, but the material of his reflection was the impressions received in the life of faith. "It is manifest," says Paret, "that in his doctrinal conceptions Paul in the main elaborates the experience of his own inner life. His doctrine is a part of his person."

2 Baur's Paulus, p. 290.

3 This point of view is taken by all writers of the N. T.; it is shared by the evangelists themselves who narrate the story of Christ's life. How otherwise can we account for the length and particularity of the narrative of the passion and death of Christ, compared with the brief outline of the life they give, except on the supposition that the Death was in their view the supremely important event in Christ's course?

again, and who had entered on the experience of a Life that flowed from the Crucified and Risen One. The Resurrection was to Paul the disclosure of the nature of Christ. It was not only the crowning stage in the development of the Life that had been lived on earth, its natural consummation, but as such it was also the revelation of the inner nature of Christ and of the forces of His personal life that were concealed, as well as hindered in their proper exercise on others, as long as He was in the flesh. He came forth when He rose again, revealed in His proper Being, and freed from all that had prevented the universal significance and worth of His Person being seen and recognised.1 It is, therefore, when viewed as Risen and Glorified that Jesus is properly understood, and His worth for the human race estimated aright. The nature of a thing, as Aristotle reminds us, is understood only when its process of development is over; and on this principle Paul habitually takes his stand on the Resurrection of Christ, where the last stage in that wonderful history was reached, and shows us from the light that thence falls on what went before, what it all means, what the issue of it all was for Christ and the work He had come into the world to do. Not till He had passed through death to the Resurrection-life was He fitted to become the Redeemer and Restorer of man to his ideal state, a Second Adam to the human race, the Power of a new life, moral and spiritual, to His brethren.

The conception of Christ as the Second Adam which is the nerve of the Pauline Christology, possesses this

1 "Weil sich das wahre göttliche Wesen Jesu erst durch den Tod und die auferstehung vollkommen offenbarte, so hebt auch erst mit diesen Thatsachen und durch sie eine tiefere Erkenntniss des Wesens Christi an. Die Synoptiker, welche die Grenze und Schranke ihrer Darstellung an diesen Begebenheiten haben, haben eben damit auch die Schranke ihrer Lehre von dem Wesen Christi. Es ist Christi ewiges Wesen verhüllt vom Fleisch, von der cap: der Menschensohn verdeckt den Gottessohn" (Grau, Entwickelungs-Geschichte der N. Tlichen. Schrifthums, ii. 14).

peculiarity that it is, as Sabatier puts it, "a blending of history and faith"; it is an interpretation of the historic Jesus from the view-point of the Resurrection, and drawn from the apostle's own experience of the working of the Spirit of the Risen Christ on his inner life. And the object of these lectures will be to expound this interpretation, to exhibit the significance to the apostle of the Person of Christ in the light of this conception of the Second Adam, to the truth of which his experience as a Christian man bore witness. But before entering on our task, it may be useful in what remains of this lecture to distinguish this from other Christological conceptions that we owe to apostolic inspiration, as well as from that which is the product of dogmatic theology.

III

In the New Testament we find other two classic interpretations of the historic Jesus besides that of Paul, other two leading types of Christological doctrine. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christ is presented to us as the Eternal High Priest of the human race, who is sat down at the Right Hand of God, reigning in His Glorified manhood. The standpoint of the author is the Exaltation of Christ; it is the theology of the Ascension and Exaltation that he sets forth. He wrote to Christians who had been brought up Jews, and who had associated the stability of their Christian standing and their freedom of access to God with the permanence of the temple service, and the stated performance of the offices of the Levitical Priesthood. When they perceived these institutions passing away, they naturally enough fell into doubt as to there being now any legitimate way of approach to God, any certainty that God had fellowship with them or they with God. The author

writes to point them to Christ and His Glorified Humanity as the new and living way to the Father, to assure them of an access to God in prayer and worship that is of a nature fitted to inspire perfect confidence in the worshipper. There seems to be little or nothing in the outward events of Jesus' life on earth to suggest the work or office of a priest, or to warrant the author conceiving of Christ under this scheme of thought. But with great skill and tenderness he dwells on the temptation and sufferings of Jesus as intended to perfect Him in the qualities of character needed in One, who, after death, was to reign over men and to act on their behalf as their High Priest and Representative in the presence of God. This truth, then, that Christ is the Eternal High Priest of men, is the contribution which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews makes to the Christ-idea; it is a truth that sets in a light of its own the perfection of the religious state and standing of believers, and the correspondence between Christ and what He is become, on the one hand, and the needs of human nature, on the other. It is a truth which, while religious in its character, is based on historic fact, and is an interpretation of the historic Christ seen with the eye of faith in His relation to human need.

And so with the Johannine view of the Person of Christ. The Gospel of John, whatever of historical value it may possess, is strictly speaking a doctrinal treatise; it is history written to illustrate a truth of faith, the truth that in Christ we have the Perfect and Final Revelation of God. The point of view here is neither the Resurrection, as with Paul, nor the Ascension, as with the author of the Hebrews, but the Incarnation. John is the theologian of the Incarnation; his concern is to show that Jesus is the Word or Logos of God, the perfect embodiment of the Divine mind and character; and for this purpose he sets Jesus before us as He walked about among men in Jerusalem

and Galilee, and bids us mark that this highest and best of men is the Son of God, and His character the revelation of the perfections of the Heavenly Father.

These are the leading ideas of the Christ of the apostles; He is the Second Adam, the true High Priest, and the Logos-the Redeemer of men, the Fulfiller of all symbolic worship, the Revealer of God. As the Second Adam, He is the Christ of sinful mortal men, and appeals to the universal need, moral and spiritual, of the human race, in contrast to the National Deliverer that answered to the Jewish ideal of Messiahship. As the High Priest after the order of Melchisedec, He is declared to be the true abiding Representative of Man in the Heavenly Places, clothed with a function that is in vivid antithesis to the temporary and imperfect priesthood of those who, under provisional systems of worship, acted with God for their fellowmen. While as the Logos He is the manifestation of the Father in a human life and history, satisfying the desire for a true and living knowledge of God in a way that was impossible under systems of speculation in which the Logos was no more than an abstract idea. In this threefold conception, as Redeemer, Perfecter, Revealer, we have a presentation of the Person of Christ that is liberated from all admixture of particularistic elements which betrayed the radical imperfection of the Jewish, Hebrew, and Greek ideas of Christhood, and that commends Him to our faith, as able out of the riches of His life to meet the various needs of men as religious beings.

It is, moreover, to be observed that while each is distinct from the others, all three alike are based on history, and while, strictly speaking, religious conceptions, they are interpretations of the historic Christ. They are, in short, different aspects of the one Christ interpreted by the Christian consciousness, and by the experience of the Good it finds in Him. Apostolic Christology, then, is the doctrine

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