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. 42); 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. 5 1); 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. 5 1o). 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

what we find in Paul when his theology is at its simplest, and where the Christology of his later epistles gives no indication of its presence.

(2) The impression made upon us is not altered when we pass to that more developed mode of conceiving Christ which is characteristic of the second group of the apostle's writings-the controversial epistles of the third missionary journey, Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans. Of course the non-theological way of presenting Christ is also to be found in these, as in all Paul's letters; he could not but think of Him often simply as the historical person whom God had exalted to be Lord of all. But along with this there is the conception of Christ as a representative, typical, or universal person, who has for a new Christian humanity the same kind of significance which Adam had for the old. Sometimes it is the nature of this Person on which stress is laid; he is a spiritual man, and belongs to heaven, as opposed to Adam, who was a natural (psychical) man, and of the earth earthen (1 Cor. 15 45.). Sometimes the stress is laid not on his nature, but on his action; it can be characterised by the one word obedience, as opposed to the disobedience or transgression of Adam; and like the disobedience of the first man, the obedience of the second is of universal and absolute significance. It is the salvation of the world (Rom. 5 12 ff.). This is the conception which lends itself most readily to what are usually called 'mystical' interpretations of Christ's life and work. What is most important in it is the truth which it embodies of the kinship of Christ with all mankind, and the progressive verification of that truth which comes with the universal preaching of the gospel. Paul was convinced of the representative character of Christ and of all His acts; the death that He died for all has somehow the significance that the death of all would itself

have; in His resurrection we see the first fruits of a new race which shall wear the image of the heavenly man. It may indeed be said that any man is kin to all humanity, but not any man is kin in such a sense that men of all races can find their centre and rallying-point in Him. The progress of Christian missions is the demonstration in point of fact that Christ is the second Adam, and while His true humanity is asserted in this, as it is taken for granted everywhere in the New Testament, it leaves Him still in a place which is His alone. When Paul thinks of Christ as the second Adam, he does not reduce Him to the level of common humanity, as if He were only one more in the mass; on the contrary, the mass is conceived as absorbed and summed up in Him. It is not a way of denying, it is one way more of asserting, His peculiar place.

(3) The same may be said with even greater confidence of Christ as He is presented to us in the later Epistle to the Colossians.' We have here to do not with a historical individual whom God has exalted-not with a representative or universal person who is Man rather than one particular man-but with a person who can only be characterised as eternal and divine. When Jesus is represented as the Christ, it is as though He were explained by reference to the history of Israel; as the second Adam, he can be understood only when the reference is widened to take in the constitution and fortunes of the whole human race; but in the later mind of Paul there is something more profound and far-reaching than either. It is not possible to do justice to Jesus until we realise that in Him we are in contact with the eternal truth and being of God. This is the burden. of the Epistle to the Colossians. What comes to us and acts upon us in Christ is nothing less than the eternal truth of God's being and character; it is not adequately

'See also I Cor. 8°.

explained by thinking of Israel or by thinking of humanity, but only by thinking of God. The Jesus Christ of the apostle's faith was indeed an Israelite after the flesh; He was true and complete man, born of a woman; but the ultimate truth about Him is that in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and that we are complete in Him. There is not anything that can be understood if its relation to Him is ignored. All that we call being, and all that we call redemption, must be referred to Him alone; this is the divine way to comprehend it. In Him were all things created, and it pleased the Father through Him to reconcile all things to Himself (Col. I and 2).

These are overwhelming ideas when we think of Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean carpenter, who had not where to lay His head, and reflect that they have to be associated with Him. The intellectual daring of them is almost inconceivable; imagination fails to realise the pressure under which the mind must have been working when it rose to the height of such assertions. Yet the seriousness and passion of the apostle are unquestionable, and the writer can only express his conviction that the attempts made to explain what may be called the Christology of Colossians by reference to Philo are essentially beside the mark. At the utmost, they help us to understand a casual expression here and there in Paul; they contribute nothing to the substance of his thought. Christ was not a lay figure that Paul could drape as he chose in the finery of Palestinian apocalyptic or of Alexandrian philosophy. He was the living Lord and Saviour, and if we can be sure of anything it is that in what the apostle says of Him there is nothing merely formal, nothing which has the character of literary or speculative borrowing, but that everything rests on experience. If Christ had been to Paul only a name in