not to believe that this Christology of the speeches of Peter must have come from a primitive source.' Perhaps what it is most important to notice is that from the very beginning there really is a Christology. The question which Jesus put to His disciples while He was with them, Whom say ye that I am? was one which they could not help putting to themselves. If we hold that the Son, properly speaking, has no place in the gospel, but only the Father, then the question is a misleading one; it sets the mind off spiritually on a wrong track. This seems, in spite of ambiguities, to be the conviction of scholars like Harnack, who thinks that Christology is a mistake, and would lighten the distressed ship of the gospel by throwing it overboard. He goes so far as to censure the primitive Church for turning aside from its proper duty-teaching men to observe all things that Jesus had commanded-to the apologetic task of proving that Jesus was the Christ. Our present question, we repeat, is not whether Peter and the other early preachers fulfilled their calling well or ill, but what it was that they actually did, and of this there can be no doubt. Their own relation to Jesus, as we see it in Acts, depends finally upon His Resurrection and His gift of the Spirit; and though these may be said in a sense to transcend history, they do not lie beyond experience. Peter had seen the Risen Jesus and received the Holy Spirit: in virtue of these experiences, Jesus had a place in his life and his faith which belonged to Him alone. He was both Lord and Christ, and there was nothing in the religious world of the apostle that was not henceforth determined by Him. It is this religious significance of Jesus, rather than the Christology of Peter, in the strict sense of the term, which it is our purpose to exhibit.

The apostle starts in his preaching from the historical 'Das Wesen des Christentums, 79 f. 'Dogmengeschichte, i. 57 f.

person of Jesus, and appeals to his hearers to confirm what he says: 'Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you by miracles and portents and signs which God wrought through Him, as you yourselves know' (Acts 222). We cannot tell what precisely was the significance to Peter of the wonderful works of Jesus, which are here assumed to be matter of common knowledge; the expression 'a man approved of God' is somewhat indefinite, and need not mean that Jesus was demonstrated by these works to be the Messiah. In point of fact, the characteristic of this primitive Christianity is not the belief that Jesus was the Christ, but the belief that He is the Christ. He was while on earth what all men had seen and known-a man approved of God by His might in word and deed; He is now what the preaching of the apostles declares Him to be-both Lord and Christ. This preaching is not, indeed, independent of the historical life of Jesus. When a man was chosen to take the place of Judas, and to be associated with the eleven as a witness of the Resurrection, he was chosen from the men who have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto the day that He was received up from us' (Acts 1"). The criticism which would have us believe that from the Resurrection onward the Jesus of history was practically displaced by an ideal Christ of faith is beside the mark. The Christ of faith was the Jesus of history, and no one was regarded as qualified to bear witness to the Christ unless he had had the fullest opportunity of knowing Jesus. Nevertheless, Jesus is demonstrated to be the Christ and is preached in that character, not merely or even mainly on the ground of what He had said and done on earth, but on the ground of His exaltation to God's right hand, and His gift of the Holy Spirit. It is in this exaltation and

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in this wonderful outpouring of divine life that He is seen to be what He is, and takes the place in human souls which establishes the Christian religion.

The Christ, of course, is a Jewish title, and it is easy to say impatient or petulant things about it. There are those who profess devotion to Jesus and tell us that they do not care whether He was (or is) the Christ or not; those who thank God, not without complacency, that to them He is far more and far better than the Christ; those who assure us that Christianity is a misnomer, and that our religion should find a more descriptive name. Such superior persons betray a lack of historical discernment, and it is wiser on the whole to accept the world as God has made it than to reconstruct it on lines of our own. The conception of Jesus as the Christ, if we interpret it by the teaching of Peter in the early chapters of Acts, is not one which it is easy to disparage. It embodies at least two great truths about Jesus as the apostle regarded Him. The first is that Jesus is King. That is the very meaning of the term. The Christ is the Lord's Anointed, and the throne on which He has been set in His exaltation is the throne of God Himself. It is a translation of this part of the meaning of the term into less technical language when Peter says elsewhere: 'Jesus Christ, He is Lord of all' (Acts 10). Simple as it is, this assertion of the sovereignty of Jesus covers all that is characteristic in historical Christianity. If it disappeared, all that has ever been known to history as Christianity would disappear along with it. It belonged to Christian faith from the beginning that in it all men should stand on a level with one another, but all should at the same time confront Christ and do homage to Him as King. The second truth covered and guarded by the conception of Jesus as the Christ is this: that He is the Person through whom God's Kingdom comes, and

through whom all God's promises are fulfilled. In this sense the name is a symbol of the continuity of the work of God, and a guarantee of its accomplishment. This is the historical importance of it. 'To Him bear all the prophets witness' (Acts 10"). All prophecy is in essence Messianic. All the hopes which God has inspired in the hearts of men, whether by articulate voices in the Old Testament, or by the providential guidance of the race, or by the very constitution of human nature, must look to Him to be made good. To borrow the language of Paul, 'How many soever are the promises of God, in him is the Yea' (2 Cor. 1 20). They must be fulfilled in Him, or not at all; or rather we should say, They have been fulfilled in Him, and in no other.

The exclusive place which is thus given to Jesus as the Christ is insisted upon from the first. Whether we regard Him as the King to whom all must do homage, or as the central and supreme figure in history, through whom God's final purpose is to be achieved, He stands alone. There cannot be another, who shares as He does the throne of God; there cannot be another to whom all the prophets bear witness, and on whom all the hopes of humanity depend. This is not only implied in the place taken by Jesus in the faith of the apostle; it has come to clear consciousness in the apostle's mind, and is explicitly asserted in his preaching. 'In none other is there salvation; for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved' (Acts 4 12). If we can rely upon these words as representing the mind of Peter-and the writer can see no reason to question them-it is clear that Jesus had in the earliest preaching and the earliest faith of Christians that solitary and incommunicable place which the Church assigns Him still.

It is worth while, however, to bring out more distinctly

the spiritual contents which the apostle found in his Christ. For those to whom he preached there was a hideous contradiction in the very idea that one should be the Christ who had died the accursed death of the Cross, and in so far as Peter's sermons are apologetic they deal with this difficulty. He meets it in two ways. On the one hand, the death of Jesus was divinely necessary; He was delivered up by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God. The evidence of this divine necessity was no doubt found in the Scriptures (Acts 223; 1 Cor. 153); and when we notice that in describing the death of Jesus Peter twice uses the Deuteronomic phrase 'hanged upon a tree,' which to Paul was the symbol of Christ made a curse for us (Acts 530, IO 39; Deut. 2123; Gal. 3 13), it is perhaps not going too far to suggest that the atoning virtue of Christ's death was an idea as well as a power in the primitive Church. But however that may be, it is certain that the difficulties presented by His death to faith in the Messiahship of Jesus were practically annulled by His Resurrection and Exaltation. It was this which made Him both Lord and Christ, and in this character He determined for the apostles and for all believers their whole relation to God. To Him they owed already the gift of the Holy Spirit; and the gift of the Holy Spirit, Peter argues elsewhere, is the sufficient and final proof that men are right with God (Acts 11 15 17, 15). To His coming again, or rather to His coming in His character of the Christ, they looked for times of refreshing, nay for the consummation of human history, 'the times of the restoration of all things whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets which have been from of old' (Acts 3 21). Much stress has been laid on the eschatological aspects of the primitive faith in Jesus as the Christ, and they are not to be ignored; but neither may we ignore the spiritual char