a book, a name which he might use as a philosophic symbol or plaything, we might set a higher value upon the Philonic or other explanations which are sometimes offered of the Christology of the Epistle to the Colossians; but when we consider what Christ really was to the apostle, such explanations become meaningless. Paul was not a philosopher like Philo, baffled by the difficulty of connecting the spiritual God and the material universe, and finding the solution of his ever-recurring problem in the idea of the Logos, an idea which in some unexplained, not to say incomprehensible, way he was led to identify with Christ. The relation of God to the world had no more difficulty for him than for Amos or Isaiah; the God in whom he believed was not the philosophical abstraction of Philo, but the living God of the Bible, who made the world and who acted in it as He pleased. Paul did not transfer to Christ the attributes of the Logos, he did not make Him divine or halfdivine, that he might provide an answer to speculative difficulties about the relation of God to the world of matter. The process in his mind was the very reverse. He was conscious in his experience as a Christian that what he came in contact with in Christ was nothing less than the eternal truth and love of God; it was the very reality which God is, the revelation of His eternal being in a human person, the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2). It does not matter whether 'bodily' means 'incarnate as man,' or 'in organic unity and completeness' as opposed to partial or imperfect revelation. The point is that Paul was conscious of meeting God in Christ. Here, he felt, he touched the last reality in the universe, the ens realissimum, the ultimate truth through which and by relation to which all things must be defined and understood. Paul does not, in writing to the Colossians, invest Christ in a character and greatness which

have no relation to His true nature, merely to stop a hole in his philosophy. On the contrary, the presence of God in Christ-His presence in the eternal truth of His being and character-is for Paul the primary certainty; and that certainty carries with it for him the requirement of a specifically Christian view of the universe. He would not be true to Christ, as Christ had revealed Himself to him in experience, unless he had the courage to Christianise all his thoughts of God, and the world. And this is what he is doing in the Epistle to the Colossians. He is not directly deifying Christ, he is Christianising the universe. He is not exhibiting Christ as divine or quasi-divine, by investing Him in the wavering and uncertain glories of the Alexandrian Logos; he is casting upon all creation and redemption the steadfast and unwavering light of that divine presence of which he was assured in Christ, and for which the Alexandrians had groped in vain. There is nothing in Paul more original, nothing in which his mind is more profoundly stimulated and his faith in Christ more vitally active, than the Epistle to the Colossians; and no greater injustice could be done him than to explain the significance which he here assigns to Christ by pointing to the alien and formal influence of a feeble dualistic philosophy, or to strike out of the epistle, as some would do, the very sentences which are the key to the whole. If there is anything in Paul's writings which is his very own, born of his own experience, his own reflection, the necessities of his own thought, it is the conception of Christ as an eternal or divine person characteristic of this epistle.

Here again, therefore, we find our previous observation of the New Testament confirmed. Christ has a place in the faith of Christians which is without parallel elsewhere. But while we must not fail to recognise this,

'See Von Soden, Hand Commentar, iii. 32 f.

we need not misunderstand it. It is misunderstood, for example, by Wernle when he says that the consciousness of God must have been weakened in Paul before he could have said of Christ the things which he says in Colossians.' Christ, in other words, practically displaces God in this epistle; the Jewish sneer is almost justified which represents Christians as teaching that there is no God, but that Jesus is His Son. But Christ does not displace God; it is in Christ alone that Paul gets that assurance of God, and of his eternal truth and love, in which he lives, and in the light of which he cannot but interpret all things. Nothing that he says justifies the Jewish sneer: what it does justify is the truly evangelical remark of Dr. Chalmers-'I find that without a hold of Christ there is no hold of God at all.' In truth, what we have in Colossians is only another assertion of the absolute significance of Christ for Christian faith. It is consciously pursued, no doubt, in its consequences further than elsewhere, but it is the same thing. A person of absolute significance-an eternal person-a person to whom in one way or another the idea of finality attaches: all these are indistinguishable. If we say that Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, we represent His absolute significance in one way; it is eternity for the imagination. If we say that He is the final Judge of all, on whose decision their destiny depends, we represent His absolute significance in another way; it is eternity for the conscience. But imagination and conscience have not rights in human nature which can be denied to the intelligence or speculative faculty; and it is to this last, and not merely to imagination and conscience, that Paul interprets in Colossians the abso

'Die Anfänge unserer Religion, 205: Die paulinische Gnosis geht hier von einem sehr lebendigen Gefühl des Christlichen aus, aber zugleich von einem gänzlich toten Gottesbegriff.’

Hanna's Life, ii. 448.

lute significance of the Lord. It is not our business at this point to consider whether or not he can be justified. in doing so by appeal to Jesus Himself, but it seemed necessary to say what has been said because the question of justification cannot be fairly raised until there is agreement upon what he has actually done.

In several passages of Paul's writings there is a conception of Christ which to most readers will seem akin to that which we have been discussing, but which is in truth much more difficult to apprehend-the conception of Him as pre-existent. The one difficulty which haunts theological thinking everywhere, the difficulty or rather the impossibility of defining the relation of time to eternity, is peculiarly felt here. Is an eternal person rightly or adequately thought of as a person existing before all things, or is the idea of pre-existence an imperfect means of representing eternity in the form of timean idea, therefore, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies and contradictions? When Paul speaks of the pre-existence of Christ, is he carrying out in this inadequate form his own conviction, based on experience, that Christ is a person in whom the eternal truth of God has come into the world, and who, therefore, belongs to God's eternal being? Or is he simply applying to Him the common Jewish belief that the Messiah existed with God before He appeared among men? It is not easy to say: even if we admit the inadequacy of an idea like pre-existence to represent the eternal significance of Christ, and see no reason to doubt that current Jewish beliefs made this inadequate representation easier to the apostle, we must admit that in the most characteristic passages in which he uses it (2 Cor. 89; Phil. 25 ff) it has been thoroughly Christianised. Judged by the Christian knowledge of God's revelation in Christ, the act by which the eternal person, conceived as pre

existent, enters into the world of time, is a characteristically divine act. It is one in which the eternal truth of the divine nature-that God's name is Redeemer from of old, and that He humbles Himself to bear us and our burdens (Isa. 63 16; Ps. 68 19)-is conspicuously revealed. In itself, the idea of pre-existence is harder to understand and to appreciate than that of eternal reality and worth; but even those who find it, abstractly considered, least congenial, must admit that in its Pauline applications it is in thorough harmony with the mind of Christ. Our interest in it here, however, need not carry us further; its application to Christ, and to Him alone, is only a final indication of the incomparable place He fills in the faith of Paul.

What has now been said is conclusive, and yet it makes practically no reference to the one signal proof Paul's writings afford of the unique and incommunicable place Christ held in his faith. That proof is afforded by what the apostle teaches of the meaning and power of Christ's death. This is not the place to enter into an exposition of this: it is sufficient to refer to the fact. He died for us, that whether we wake or sleep we might live together with Him (1 Thess. 5 10). Paul delivers to men first of all that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures; this is the divinely laid foundation of the gospel (1 Cor. 15). He died for all, so then all died their death was somehow involved and comprehended in His; Him, who knew no sin, God made to be sin on our behalf, that we might be made the rightcousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5 14-21). In His crucifixion He became a curse for us (Gal. 3 13). God set Him forth as a propitiation, through faith, in His blood; when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son (Rom. 3 25, 5 10). In Him we have our redemption, through His blood, even the forgiveness