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was the Son of God. He alone was God's dear Child, the image of His Father, partaker with Him of a life of love and holiness.1

At the same time, Paul teaches that as long as He was in the flesh, Jesus was the Son of God in weakness, and that it was not till He was raised from the dead that He was determined to be Son of God "in power." While He was in the flesh he was under the law, in appearance a servant rather than a son, submitting to all the legal ordinances of the Jews. Not that there was anything of the servile spirit in the obedience that was thus conditioned. As He partook of the flesh without its sin, so He was under the law without partaking of that spirit of slavish subjection which the legal system engendered in those in whom the spirit of sonship was absent.2

His goodness was none the

1 Three stages of Sonship are recognised in Paul's Epistles: 1. The natural sonship, of no account with Paul because a potentiality rather than an actual fact; 2. the Spiritual, or real sonship, by faith in Christ "the Son"; 3. The perfected form of it in glory. The third is so great an advance even on the second, that it is spoken of as the "adoption " (Rom. viii. 23), which we as yet "wait for." It would be wrong to infer from the last named passage that we have not already received this "adoption of children "; we know from Gal. iv. 6, 7 that we have. It would be equally wrong to infer from the passage just mentioned that we are not in a certain sense children by nature and before we believe. "Adoption" is a legal term, and is borrowed from the ceremony common among the ancient Romans and Greeks (not among the Jews) of investing in the rights or privileges of a son one who was no blood connection of the family, and might have been a slave in it. It would be wrong, however, to press the metaphor in the interpretation of the spiritual fact. "Adoption" in the kingdom of God is consistent with a previous filial relationship of an inferior sort, and means, as we see from the double 'adoption" in the Christian life, the investment in fuller privileges and powers, in a sonship worthy of the name, of persons who had been sons in an imperfect degree. See the interesting paper on "Allusions to Roman Law in St. Paul's Epistles," by Ball, in Contemporary Review, August 1891.

2 "Christ had not to make, in His own Person, the transition from His religion to that of redemption, from His relation of servant to that of Son, but without any such change He developed Himself so that God was always manifest to Him as Love, and He bore Himself ever to God

less spontaneous that it manifested itself in obedience to legal enactments. But the freedom which belongs to a spiritual Being from outward arrangements and ordinances that are carnal in their character was thereby concealed. And, moreover, He was, from His connection with the flesh, subject to weakness and death, under the power of that to which in His proper nature He was superior. Hence it was the Resurrection that manifested the real Glory and Power of Sonship. He then left behind Him all that impaired the freedom of His activity as a Son of God and the completeness of His spiritual resemblance to His Father, entering on a condition in which He was raised above weakness and death, and invested in all the prerogatives that belong to Divine Sonship in its perfected form.

According to the teaching of our apostle, then, the constitution of the Person of Christ presents a radical contrast to that of all other men, in virtue of which He occupies a position that no other can share with Him. But let us mark wherein the difference and contrast consist. It is no exact or intelligible account of it to say that "He is God and Man in two distinct natures and one Person," while we are human beings only. The antithesis between the Divine and Human that is implied in this definition of His Person is not applicable to the matter, and does not give a true account of the difference between Christ and us. For, on the one hand, He is not represented as Divine in a sense that isolates or places Him out of relation to others as One possessed of qualities that cannot be communicated or transferred to them.

And in the second place, it is ascribing to those with whom He is contrasted more than is true to say that, in our natural state, we are perfect and complete men, for

as to His Father, as a trustful Son of God by means of the love imprinted on His personality from the first" (Schweizer, Christl. Glaubenslehre, II. i. 11).

we are defective in what constitutes proper manhood, in the higher life of the Spirit and Divine Sonship.1 The real contrast is to be found here, that while Christ is the Spiritual Man and Son of God, we are carnal, and at best servants of God, than while He perfectly fulfils the idea of a human personality, we entirely fail, being only potentially what He was in very truth. God made man capax Dei, capable of His own life, and of manifesting His own perfection. But Christ alone expresses the Divine thought, and stands out in contrast to all others in the very constitution of His inner life which was determined by the Divine Spirit to be the Life of God's true Son on earth. There is then a constitutional difference between Christ and all other men; but the ground of that difference is not so much metaphysical as religious, although there is a metaphysical element in the case too, as will appear in another lecture. We are not to find His Divinity in anything outside of His human life, but in the Divine Perfection of that human life itself, in the perfection of His love and holiness. He is more than Man, He is Divine; but His Divinity, in so far as it is apprehensible by us, is that of which human nature is capable, without which it is an imperfect and fragmentary thing, and infinitely less than what God made it to be-a Divinity which He communicates to as many as receive Him and in Him become children of God. From this peculiarity in the Person of Christ there flows a twofold distinction from others, in the light of which His supreme significance for the moral and religious life of mankind is apparent. On the one hand, He is the Image of God in humanity, the pure and perfect revelation of Divinity in a human life. We can know God only through the medium of the best and worthiest qualities of

1 The incompleteness of man in his present state, compared with the completeness of Christ's being, is finely set forth in the suggestive book, But How, if the Gospels are Historic? (pp. 149-159).

our own nature:1 and he who carries our humanity to its true height becomes thereby the organ by whom God can communicate Himself and reveal to us all that we are able to know of His nature. And in virtue of His human the embodiment of the highest

perfection Christ is to us truth we can know about God as a spiritual Being. We learn from the goodness of Christ how we are to think of Him whose invisible qualities He translated into the language of human dispositions and actions. What of God became human in Him, was His Spiritual Being, His Love and Truth and Grace, not such natural or metaphysical attributes as His Omnipotence or Omniscience which cannot be expressed in a man. Only that can be in man and was in Christ, which man was made capable of sharing with God. This is limited to the Spiritual or Personal qualities. Christ is the Revelation of the Love and Holiness of God.2

It must be observed, however, that Paul does not dwell much on this aspect of Christ, on His being personally the human representation of God. In one passage, indeed, he speaks of the "light of the knowledge of the glory of God" made visible in the face of Jesus Christ His Son, where it is evident that the Perfected humanity of Christ is viewed as the mirror in which we are to see reflected the glory of the Divine character. And the idea of Christ's Lordship, which, as will appear more fully by and by, is so prominent in Paul's conception, is based on the truth that He is the Son of God, and as such the Revealer of His mind 1 "For man, man alone, is the adequate medium through which God can reveal Himself” (Rothe, Ethik, ii. p. 140).

2 This does not mean that Christ had not supernatural knowledge and power, but these were given to Him by God and exercised by Him as man. 3 2 Cor. iv. 6.

* In his Commentary on this passage, Calvin says: “In Christo suam justitiam, bonitatem, sapientiam, virtutem, se denique totum nobis (Deus) exhibet. Cavendum ergo, ne alibi eum quæramus; nam extra Christum, quicquid se Dei nomine venditabit, idolum erit."

and will. But while it is fundamental with the apostle that Christ is the revelation of the Grace of God, the exhibition of the Divine character, it is not so much to the personal life of Jesus that he makes his appeal in proof of this, as to the gracious ends accomplished by God through the death on the Cross. To this I shall return in my next lecture. For the present it is enough to remark, what is indeed obvious to everyone familiar with the Epistles, that the idea of Christ as personally the Image of God does not receive in the thought of the apostle anything like the place that is given to the other aspect of His Person, under which He is viewed, not in relation to God as His Image, but in relation to mankind as its Pattern or Archetype.

II

Here we come to the characteristic feature of the Christology of the apostle. In virtue of the constitution of His Person as now unfolded, Christ is the ARCHETYPAL Man, the Revelation of the Divine idea of human nature, the Second Man,1 the Prototype of a new race differing from that descended from the first man in its realising the capacity for the Divine and Spiritual that must otherwise remain a capacity only in the nature we are born with,—a race of men who are Spiritual (xaтà πveûμa) in the law of their being, children in their relation to God, immortal in their destiny, in contrast with those who have the first Adam alone for their progenitor, who are carnal (karà σáρka), under condemnation, doomed to die. As Head of a new Mankind He is called also the "Heavenly" Man 2 to describe His origin and nature. He is also called the "Last" Man,3 to intimate that He is the perfected Form of Manhood, that nothing higher or more Divine, or more fully 2 I Cor. xv. 49.

1 1 Cor. xv. 47.

31 Cor. xv. 45.

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