Church would have missed them, but their places could have been supplied. The Church would have been there though they had been wanting, and the Lord who Himself gives the apostles and prophets and evangelists would have raised up others for His work. But without Christ there would be no Church, and no ministry at all; everything that we call Christian is absolutely dependent on Him. From this side, again, therefore, we see the unique place which Christ filled in the faith of Paul.

This exclusive and divine significance of Christ is even more conspicuous when we look at the two great religious controversies which engaged the apostle's mind in his earlier and later years, and brought his faith to articulate and conscious expression. The first is that which has left its most vivid record in the Epistle to the Galatians, and which is described from a greater distance and with less passion, perhaps less appreciation of all that was involved, in the fifteenth chapter of Acts. What was really at stake was the essence of Christianity. All who were Christians, Paul and his Pharisaic opponents alike, in some sense believed in Christ; the question was whether for perfect Christianity anything else was required. The Pharisaic Christians said Yes. The Gentile faith in Christ was very well as a beginning; but if these foreign believers were to be completely Christian and to inherit the blessings of the Messianic kingdom on the same footing with them, their faith in Christ must be supplemented by circumcision and the keeping of the Mosaic law. Paul said No. Christ is the whole of Christianity-Christ crucified and risen. He is the whole of it on the external side, regarded as the revelation and action of God for the salvation of sinful men; and faith in Christ-that abandonment of the soul to Him in which Paul as a Christian lived and moved and had his being-is the whole of it on the internal side. Anything that compromises this simple

and absolute truth, anything that proposes to supplement Christ on the one side or faith on the other, is treason to the gospel. It strikes at the root of Christianity, at the absolute sufficiency of grace in God and of faith in man to solve the problem of salvation; it denies the glory of Christ and destroys the hope of sinners. This is how Paul conceived it, and it is this, and not any personal intolerance of opposition, which prompts the solemn vehemence of Gal. 1: Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. The interest of the words for us is the force with which they bring out the absolute and unshared place which Christ filled in the religion of Paul. His faith in Christ was such that it admitted of no other object; Christ completely filled his religious horizon; his whole being, as a spiritual man with a life toward God, depended upon and was determined by Christ alone. And for this view, which he was perhaps the first to think out in clearness and simplicity, Paul was able to command the assent of the apostles who had been admitted to the intimacy of Jesus. James, Cephas, and John gave him and his fellow-worker Barnabas the right hand of fellowship.

It is essentially the same religious question which is raised in another form in the second great controversy of the apostle's life-that to which we are introduced in the Epistle to the Colossians. The law appears here also, but the real danger now is not that of supplementing Christ by ritual observances, but that of dispensing with Him, to a greater or less extent, in favour of angelic mediators. Paul's attitude in this new situation is precisely what it was in Galatians. Christ is all, is the burden of his argument. We do not need to look anywhere but to Him for that knowledge and presence of God on which salvation depends; in Him are all the

treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden away; in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Once more it may be repeated that we are not dealing with the truth or falsehood of these views, with the possibility or impossibility of justifying them, but only with the fact. This is how Paul unquestionably thought of Jesus: this is indubitably the place which Jesus filled in his religious life. It is not putting it too strongly to say that He had for Paul the religious value of God. To suppose that Paul could have classified Him, and put Him in a series along with other great men who have contributed to the spiritual elevation of the race, is to leride his sincerity and passion. In the religion of the apostle, Jesus held a place which no human being could share. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last.

Although we are not concerned with the Christology of the apostle, in the strict sense of the term, but only with the significance which Christ had for his faith, it will exhibit that significance more clearly, and so contribute to our purpose, if we look at the principal ways in which he seems to have conceived Christ. In a sense, this is entering the region of doctrine rather than of faith, but it is not with a doctrinal purpose; what we wish is to see through the doctrine what Christ was in the life of Paul. There are three distinguishable forms in which Christ is present to the mind of the apostle, and in different ways the same religious conclusion can be drawn from all.

(1) The simplest way to conceive Christ is that which regards Him as an individual historical person, practically contemporary with Paul himself; one who had lived and died in Palestine, and been familiarly known to many who were yet alive. No doubt Paul often thought of Him in this light; it would be impossible for any one

in those days to think otherwise. But there was always one immense qualification of this 'purely historical' view. Paul never thought of Christ, and could not think of Him, except as risen and exalted. Christianity may exist without any speculative Christology, but it never has existed and never can exist without faith in a living Saviour. It is quite possible that there was a stage in his Christian life when Paul had asked no theological questions about Jesus of Nazareth whom God had made by His exaltation both Lord and Christ. It is quite possible that he received the Holy Spirit and the apostolic commission and preached the gospel with divine power and blessing, before he had asked any question about the nature of Christ, or His original relation to God or to the human race, or about the mode in which the historical personality originated in which he now recognized the only Lord and Saviour. It is not his speculative Christology, if we are to call it such, which secures for Christ His place in Paul's religious life; Christ holds that place by another title, before the speculative Christology appears. The importance of that Christology lies not so immediately in itself as in the testimony it bears to the immense stimulation of intelligence by the new faith. If we look, for example, at the Epistles to the Thessalonians, we find no trace of Christology in the technical sense. There is an entire absence of speculative construction or interpretation of the Person of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is simply the historical person, known to Paul's contemporaries, who had been put to death by the Jews, and whom God had raised from the dead. There is not a word about preexistence, or the incarnation, or an eternal relation to to God, or a universal relation to men. Yet the person who is thus simply conceived is one on whom Christians are absolutely dependent; as all men live and move and have their being in God, so Christians live and move

and have their being in Christ. The Church of the Thessalonians is a church in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ; the grace and peace which are the sum and the fruit of all the divine blessings it enjoys come to it from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thess. I1; 2 Thess. 11f). And this co-ordination of Christ with the Father, this elevation into the sphere of the divine in which Christ and the Father work harmoniously the salvation of men, is not a formality of salutation: it pervades the epistles throughout. Every function of the Christian life is determined by it; the place of Christ in the faith and life of Christians can only be characterised as the place of God, not of man. St. Paul has confidence in the Lord toward the Thessalonians (II. 3); he charges and entreats them in the Lord Jesus Christ (II. 3 12); they stand in the Lord (1. 3); he gives them commandments through the Lord Jesus (1. 4'); church rulers are those who are over them in the Lord (1.5 12); the Christian rule of life is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning them (1. 51); the Christian departed are the dead in Christ (1. 4 1o); all benediction is summed up in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ (1.5 28; II. I 12, 3 18); Jesus and the Father are co-ordinated as the object of prayer (1. 3"), and prayer is directly addressed to the Lord, i.e. Christ (1. 3 12). Our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we are to obtain salvation at the great day, is He who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep we should live together with Him (1. 51o). It is as though all that God does for us He does in and through Christ, so that Christ confronts us as Saviour in divine. glory and omnipotence. We may trust Him as God is trusted, live in Him as we live in God, and appeal to Him to save us as only God can save; and this is the essentially Christian relation to Him. It is what we found before in the primitive preaching of Acts; it is