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answering to the capacities of our souls can be looked for than the Christ-Type already embodied in the Risen Jesus.

Now, in the application of these terms to Christ, Paul, it is alleged by certain writers, has clothed his Christology in the garb of Jewish thought. Reference is made to Philo, whose doctrines had at this time penetrated into the schools of the Rabbis and moulded their theology. After the manner of Plato's speculations, Philo distinguishes between an "earthly" and a "heavenly" man, the latter being the pre-existent idea, the former its imperfect realisation in the individual human being. The theology of the Synagogue, combining this idea with the belief that widely prevailed that the Messiah existed in heaven until the time of His appearing on earth, conceived of the Christ to come as the Heavenly Man; and Paul, it is said, sharing this idea, transferred it to Christ, and taught that He existed as the Heavenly Man in a previous state before He was born into the world. The hinge of the question is the meaning we are to assign to I Cor. xv. 45-47, where he speaks of the Second Adam as "the Man who is from heaven." The passage is confessedly one of the most difficult in Paul's writings; it seems most in accordance with the context to take the words "from heaven" (ek Toû oúpavov) as pointing to the nature and origin of the Second Adam, or rather to the nature and origin of the spiritual body with which He is now clothed, for the whole discussion in the passage has reference to His body. "The first man was of the earth"; and his body, composed of earth, was liable to death. "The Second Adam" was of a heavenly nature (¿§ ovpavoû); and His body, partaking of the same element, is immortal, and the seed of a life in believers that is immortal. Other interpreters of note, such as Gess, Hofmann, and Meyer, view the words "from heaven as referring to the second coming of Christ in

glory, when believers shall receive the resurrection body. The uncertainty of the sense of the words, and the variety of interpretation they admit of, is a valid reason for our refusing to accept as Paul's this doctrine of the preexistent Heavenly Man, to which there is no further reference in his Epistles. It may well be that he borrowed from the systems with which he was familiar the terms in which he expressed his thought, for that thought had points of affinity with the speculations of the schools. These terms would naturally occur in thinking of the truth that was revealed in Christ. But the truth itself was not derived from these speculations. It was an intuition which he owed to his spiritual understanding of his Master. The Person of the Risen One, seen as the complete expression of the Divine idea of man, was recognised by him as that Second Adam of whom philosophy vaguely talked, as the New Spiritual Head and Progenitor of the human race, from whom was derivable all that entered into God's great gift to men of life eternal, even as sin and death had come to all from their natural Head, the first Adam.

There may seem to be, indeed, a lack of propriety in the application of the term "Second Adam" to Christ, when we think of the dissimilarity between Him and Adam.1 They are alike, indeed, in this, that both were parents of orders of beings that take after those from whom they are severally descended. But in all other respects the parallel assumes the form of contrast, the most striking that can be

1 Nösgen, indeed, thinks that the term "Second Adam" applied by Paul to Christ expresses Soteriological rather than Christological truth, that he means by it to describe simply Christ's function as the Author of eternal life in men, and not any peculiarity in His Person qualifying Him to discharge that function. (See his Christus der Menschen u. Gottessohn, pp. 110-115). There is nothing, however, to warrant this limitation, and we cannot separate the effect of the working of Christ from its cause in the distinctive content of Christ's Person.

imagined. The "first" man was natural; Christ is spiritual. The first was "from the earth"; Christ was from heaven." The first was a "living soul," a being animated by a merely natural life, sensuous in his constitution; Christ is a "Lifeproducing" Spirit. If in spite of these differences Christ is still spoken of as a Man, the Second Man, it is to remind us that it is the spiritual that is the truly human, and that human nature is properly beheld in Him who was the Spiritual Man and Son of God, and not in the other in whom it existed only in an incomplete and imperfect form. In 1 Cor. xv. 45, 46, Paul seems to teach that there were two stages in the creation of the being that was to answer to the Divine idea. The initial stage was reached when the man stood forth, perfect in his physical organisation, with the possibilities of higher functions latent in him; the second, and final one, when he received a fresh accession of spiritual endowment for the realisation of these possibilities, and true manhood was seen to consist in union with God and in the exercise of a spiritual nature through an organ adapted to it.

Whether the ascent from the lower to the higher might have been made by man himself, and the spiritual in this way evolved by a natural process in the course of obedience to the Divine Will; or whether, even had man not fallen, the Incarnation would still have been necessary to reveal the Archetypal Man, is a question on which much has been written on both sides. Many have held strongly the latter view,—that the idea of the incarnation corresponds with the very perfection of man as he was constituted at the first, and not merely with the restoration of man who had missed his end; that even, therefore, though sin had never entered, the Son of God would have come in order to raise man to the perfection that answered to the idea of his creation in the Divine mind. There is much to be said in

favour of this view, especially when account is taken of the

teaching of the Epistle to the Colossians, which will be considered at a later stage.1 Paul's Gospel, however, deals not with the ideal relations between God and man, but with the actual relations consequent on sin and death. It begins not with the Incarnation, but with the suffering and death of Jesus as necessitated by the actual condition of the race. The interest of the question is mainly speculative. The entrance of sin through our sensuous nature has rendered a normal development from the natural to the spiritual impossible; and by the supernatural act of God, a Personality has appeared who fully answers to God's idea of human nature, and who, like him who was the partial fulfilment of that idea, is a Public and Central Person, and is exalted to be the author, in all who attach themselves to Him, of a life that in its essential features and destiny answers to His own.

It is indeed a radical part of the Pauline idea of the Second Adam that it is in Christ as Risen from the dead it is fully realised. It is the Man that has passed victorious through death, and has entered on a new life clothed in a body that is the appropriate organ of a spiritual nature, who is to be regarded as having lived the life and fulfilled

1 Among modern theologians who hold that the Incarnation was necessary apart from sin, may be mentioned Bishop Westcott, in his Essay on the "Gospel of Creation" in his exposition of 1 John; and Edwards (The God-Man, pp. 82-89); also Dorner (Doctrine of Person of Christ, vol. ii. p. 82, Eng. tr., and Christian Doctrine, ii. p. 218). Gess, on the other hand (Christi Person u. Werk, vol. iii. p. 476), argues strongly against this view. "The testimonies of Christ and the Apostles," he says, "tell us that the Father's love sent the Son, and that the Son was willing to be sent to seek that which was lost. That God's love must have sent the Son as Man even had man pursued the right path, we are unable to maintain, because we are not in a position to say that it was not possible for man by other means to have attained to the goal of his being, i.e. to love God with all his powers, and to render to God the service of his life." Gess has not, however, in my opinion, shaken the force of Dorner's striking argument on speculative grounds in favour of the view that the Incarnation is rooted in God's plan of creation,

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the destiny of man. 'If in Adam all die, while in Christ all shall be made alive,"1 this Life-giving Power belongs to Him who rose from the dead, and who is now in possession of a humanity that has been redeemed in its integrity from sin and death, and transfigured in all its parts. He is in this way fitted to be the seed in His people of a life similarly complete in its taking up into itself all the elements of our present life, changed and transfigured, into a form that will be the counterpart of the Glorified Manhood of Christ Himself.2

But for another reason also, death and resurrection had to intervene before Christ could be revealed as the Second Adam. As long as He was in the flesh, this significance of His Person was concealed from men. Belonging to a particular nation, appearing at a special period in the world's history, holding definite relations as an individual Man to certain other men, manifesting Himself in special ways and forms of activity called forth by the circumstances in which He was placed, He exhibited a particularism as regards the outward aspects of His Personality that hindered men perceiving what was universal, essential, and of worldwide significance in His human nature and in the ideals that were embodied in His life. There was needed a change in the outward form of His Being; and that change came when, laying aside the flesh at death, He rose again in the power of a Glorified Humanity, and entered on those universal relations to mankind that disclosed the higher, the ideal

1 I Cor. xv. 22.

2 The popular idea that the resurrection body will be the same organism that the spirit of man has had during life, has no warrant in Paul's writings. The spiritual body must be wholly different. The apostle's idea of it was formed in the vision he had on the way to Damascus, when the Lord came to him from heaven-the place of light— in a body of "glory," relieved from ordinary conditions that limit our material bodies to one spot. On Paul's doctrine of the Resurrection Body see the wise and careful statement of Professor Salmond in his Christian Doctrine of Immortality, pp. 568–572.

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