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of Acts; but its primitive character cannot be mistaken. Still, there are distinct tokens of the specifically Christian estimate of Jesus' Person. Thus, the Spirit of God is named 'the Spirit of Christ' (!"); and although the title 'Son of God' is not employed, we find in 1' the full-toned phrase 'the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,' with a clear implication of His special Sonship. The statement (.3^) that angels and authorities and powers are subject to Him is a declaration not merely of His exalted state, but of His participation in the Divine power, whose instruments angels are. The doxology in 4" — equivalent to that applied to God in 5" — is most naturally interpreted of Christ; and in 315 a phrase which in Is 8" refers to Jehovah is used of our Lord expressly.

III. Chbistology of St. Paui,. — The field of inquiry for the purposes of this article will include not only the four great Epistles of the earlier period (Rom., 1 and 2 Cor., and Gal.), but also the Epistles of the Imprison-ment. We shall use them with equal confidence, although now and then it may be necessary to mark a difference of accent in the later Epistles. But if, as appears to be the case, Ro 9' contains a definite affirma-tion of the Godhead of Christ, we should have to treat with suspicion theories which imply that the Christology of Phil, and Col. is conspicuously higher than what preceded.

Much interest attaches to the question of the genesis of St. Paul's view of Christ. Holsten, following the lead of F. C. Baur, argued for many years that the Apostle's Christ-ology took shape purely as the result of a logical process in his mind. Faced by the death upon the cross, as an event in which he felt the will of God for man's salvation to be revealed, St. Paul yielded to what was really an intellectual compulsion to abandon the Jewish theology which he had been taught, and to substitute for it the conception of Jesus Christ we are famihar with in his writings. Others have held more recently that Saul the Pharisee was already in possession of a complex of ideas as to a superhuman Messiah — conceived as revealer of God and heavenly King — which owed much to mythical elements drawn from Oriental faiths; and that the subjective experiences of his conversion led him simply to identify the Jesus whom he seemed to behold in Divine'glory with this antecedent notion of Messiah, and in consequence to assert such things of Him as that He existed before the world and shared in its creation. Hence we may infer the Christ of St. Paul has nothing particular to do with the Jesus of history (Bruckner). To make but one criticism, both these related theories manifestly presup-

gose that St. Paul's vision of Christ on the way to Damascus ad no objective reality. But if we find it an incredible supposition that a mere illusory process in the Apostle's fancy should have instantly revolutionized his life, or that he could have persuaded the primitive Christian society to accept, or even tolerate, a view of Christ so engendered, we shall naturally seek for some more solid basis and justi-fication of his beliefs. And this, with the utmost certainty, we find in his actual relations to the glorified Lord, not merely at his conversion, though most memorably then, but also in bis personal hfe as believer and Apostle. ' It is this feature, its being borrowed from his own r«hgious experi-ence, that distinguishes Paul's idea of Christ from a philo-sophical conception' (Somerville).

The system of St. Paul's thought is entirely Christo-centric; not only so, his conception of Christ is entirely soteriological. From the saving efficacy of the death of Christ, as the fundamental certainty, he moves on to an interpretation of the Divine-human personality. He who died for all must stand in a unique relation to mankind. The work and the Person always go together in his mind. His creed in its simplest form is that 'Jesus is Lord' (1 Co 123, Ro 10'; cf.Ph 2"); and although starting, like the other writers of the NT, from the belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, he at once transcends the current Messianic idea, and grasps the significance of Jesus, not for the Jews only, but for the whole world. Nowhere does he employ the title 'Son of Man,' and for him the 'Kingdom of God' is virtually merged in the Person of Jesus Christ.

1. It may be taken as certain that St. Paul was

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acquainted with the Evangelical tradition as to Jesus' earthly life. He appeals to the words of the Lord as of supreme authority. Yet no allusion is made to His miracles or to His ways and habits among men. His human birth, His sinlessness. His institution of the Holy Supper, His death by crucifixion and His resurrection on the third day — these and a few more details are reported. The truth is that St. Paul's mind dwelt chiefly on the decisive acts of redemption, and the blessings won thereby; hence it is not surprising that he should say little or nothing as to Jesus' human development. At the same time the real humanity of our Lord is to him an axiom. Jesus was made of a woman, of the seed of David according to the flesh. There is nothing incon-sistent with this in the remarkable expression (Ro 8') that God sent His own Son 'in the likeness of sinful flesh'; which simply means that the sinful flesh of man is the pattern on which Christ's sinless (2 Co 521) flesh was formed; in Him alone we see the flesh in perfect relation to the spirit. Moreover, human nature, as He wore it on earth, was a form of being intrinsically and unavoidably inadequate to His true essence. Originally He belonged to a higher world, and left it by a voluntary act; indeed, on the whole, it may be said that what St. Paul puts in place of a full-drawn picture of Jesus' earthly activities is the great act of the Incarnation. The fact that He should have lived as man at all is more wonderful than any of His words or deeds.

2. In addition to a body of flesh and blood, the unique constitution of Jesus' Person included spirit, ' the spirit of holiness' (Ro 1*, on which cf. Denney's note in EGT), which completely dominated His nature, and was not merely the power energizing in His life in the flesh, but the active principle of His resurrection from the dead. To this spiritual being St. Paul would probably have re-ferred for an ultimate explanation of what he meant by Christ's pre-existence.

3. The main reason for St. Paul's comparative silence as to Jesus' earthly career is that the Person with whom he was directly in relation, habitually and from the flrst, was the risen Lord of glory. This is the starting- point of his Christology, and it determines it to the last. The attitude is no doubt common to the NT writers, but it has been accentuated in St. Paul's case by his singular history, and his passionate faculty of faith. All redeeming influences, whether they concern the individual or the world, and bear on sin or death or principalities or powers, flow directly from the risen Christ. This pre-occupation with Christ as glorified is expressed forcibly in 2 Co 5", ' Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more.' The present majesty of the Lord is something other and better than the earthly life now past. Yet again — the counter-stroke always follows — the Exalted One is also the Crucified, who has in Him for ever and ever the redemptorial efficacy of His death.

We can hardly put the fact too strongly, that for St. Paul's mind it was after the Resurrection that the mani-fested Being of Christ took on its full greatness. The classical passage on this is Ro 1*: ' appointed (ordeclared) Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.' The implication is that Divine power, acting through the medium of the Resurrection, set Christ free from the limitations of life on earth, limitations which had permitted to His Divine Sonship only a reduced and depotentiated expression here. In His exaltation that Sonship is displayed fully. With this we may compare Ph 2» and Ro 14», the latter being a somewhat remarkable statement: 'For to this end Christ died, and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.' In these and all parallel passages the two ideas are com-bined: first, that Christ has ascended up to be Lord of the world, assuming this place for the first time at the Resurrection, and still retaining His humanity; secondly, that there was In Him from the beginning