of our trespasses (Eph. 17). So it runs through the epistles from beginning to end. There is no other person of whom such things can be said, or who can claim even to have some part of them extended to him when they are said of Christ. They are all for Him and for Him alone. They make it impossible to dispute the fact that Christ held a unique place in Paul's faith, and they make us feel deeply that this unique place was held by Christ in virtue of something which made Paul infinitely his debtor. What has now been said hardly needs to be summarised. Whether the apostle was right or wrong; whether he was impelled by his experience as a Christian, or prompted by reminiscences of pre-Christian, Messianic theology, and extra-Christian Alexandrian philosophy, there is no doubt about the place he gave to Christ. Look at it as we will, it was a place which no man could share. Christ determined everything in the relations of God and men; but this, though it is central, is only the starting-point. All things whatsoever have to be determined by relation to Him; in Him alone is the key to their meaning to be found. All nature,. all history, all revelation and redemption, all that is human and all that is divine, can be understood only through Him. The universe has to be reconstituted with Him as its centre, the principle of its unity, its goal. To understand the world is to discover that it is a Christian world-that spiritual law, the very law in which Christ lived and died—pervades the constitution of nature and the history of man. There is not in the history of the human mind an instance of intellectual boldness to compare with this, and it is the supreme daring of it which convinces us that it is the native birth of Paul's Christian faith. No one ever soared so high on borrowed wings. III CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS When we pass from Paul, it is open to us, in view of the chronological and other uncertainties regarding the books of the New Testament, to take them in almost any order. The Epistle to the Hebrews, while it has affinities with almost all types of Christian thought— with the synoptic gospels and the early chapters of Acts, with Paul and with the Judaism of Alexandria-nevertheless stands alone in the New Testament. It is the most solitary of the primitive Christian books. In its presentation of Christ we might almost say that extremes meet. On the one hand, it is the most humanitarian of apostolic writings. It speaks with a kind of predilection of Jesus, not the Christ; it recalls 'the days of His flesh,' when, with strong crying and tears, He offered prayers and supplications to Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear; it holds Him up to us as a pattern of faith, the ideal subject of religion, who was tempted in all things like as we are, yet without sin; who passed through a curriculum of suffering by which He was made perfect for His calling, and who learned in doing so what it is to obey; who lived the life of faith in God from beginning to end, and is in short the typical believer. All this touches the heart of the reader as it no doubt moved the writer of the epistle, but it does not disclose to us the full significance of Jesus for His own faith. The most humanitarian book of the New Testament can also be fairly described as the most theological. Jesus is not only the pattern of true piety, but everything in the relations of God and men is determined by Him. He is the mediator of a new covenant; to Him we owe the bringing in of a better hope through which we draw near to God. It is the virtue of his priesthood and sacrifice which consecrates us as a worshipping people, and by annulling sin makes it possible for us to live in fellowship with the most holy. The sentence with which the epistle opens gathers up all this and more in one sublime period. 'God having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; having become by so much better than the angels as He hath inherited a more excellent name than they.' The absolute significance of Jesus is here presented from every point of view. Whether we think of God and His self-revelation in Israel's history, or of the final consummation to which all things are tending, or of the creation and maintenance of the world in which we live, or of the atonement for sin which makes access to God possible for us, we must think of Christ. He is the key to the ultimate problems in all these regions. His place and worth in religion are incommensurable with the place and worth of any other beings, human or angelic: the final truth has been revealed; the final, because the perfect, religious relation to God has been established and is maintained through Him. Two of the characteristic words of the epistle serve to bring this out. One is 'better' (xpeíTTO), which the writer uses when he compares Christ and Christianity with other religions and their representative figures; the other is alwvtos, by which he conveys the idea that Christ and Christianity are final, and that there is in truth no ground for comparisons. Thus Christ is 'better' than the angels (1); in Christianity there is the introduction of a 'better' hope (719); Jesus has become surety and mediator of a 'better' covenant, established upon 'better' promises (7 22, 8°); the heavenly sanctuary into which He has entered with His own blood must be purified with 'better' sacrifices than the earthly (9 23); the blood of sprinkling-the blood which Jesus shed-speaks 'better' things than that of Abel (1224). This is as though the writer said to men attracted by the old religion, Do not bring it into comparison with what we owe to Christ; it cannot stand it. But when he uses alvos, eternal, to characterise the new dispensation in its various aspects, he means more. It is not only that the earlier form of religion with which he had to reckon is surpassed by that which looks to Jesus, but that the latter can never be surpassed. It is the eternal, final, perfect form of man's relation to God; in the strict sense of the term it is incomparable; and it depends for its very being on Christ, and on our faith in what He is and has done for us. It is in this conviction that he speaks of the 'eternal' salvation of which Christ is author to all who obey Him (5); of the 'eternal' redemption which He won by His own blood (912); of the 'eternal' spirit-the final revelation of divine love -through which He offered Himself without spot to God (94); of the 'eternal' inheritance promised to those who hear His voice (915); of the 'eternal' covenant established in His blood (13 20). When we recognise what these expressions mean, we see that for the writer of this epistle Christ has the same absolute religious significance which He has for Paul. It is not possible, on the ground of the prominence which he gives to the true humanity and the genuine religious experience of Jesus, to argue that for him Jesus was only another man like himself, a perfect pattern of piety indeed, but no more; in his religion-in all that affected his relation as a sinful man to God-Jesus had a place and work which belonged to Him alone. All that God had done for the salvation of men He had done in Him; nay, all that He could ever do. For beyond that offering of Himself which Jesus had once made through the eternal spirit, there remains no more any sacrifice for sin (102). IV CHRIST IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER The Catholic epistles, which were the last of the early Christian writings to secure a place in the canon, are often taken to represent an average type of Christianity, without the sharp edges or the individuality of view which we find in Paul, John, or the writer to the Hebrews. It this were so, they might be more important as witnesses to the place of Jesus in Christian faith than the writings of the most original intellects in the Church; for, as Mr. Bagehot says of politics, it is the average man who is truly representative. But the writer cannot agree with this estimate of the Catholic epistles. If for critical reasons we leave Second Peter out of account, it would be hard to imagine writings with a more distinct stamp of individuality upon them than James, Jude, and John. Even the First Epistle of Peter, influenced as it undoubtedly is by modes of thought and turns of phrase which have their most characteristic expression in Paul, is a document which no sympathetic reader could ascribe to the apostle of the Gentiles. It is the work of another mind, a mind with distinct qualities and virtues of its own; and in view of the overwhelming attestation of its author |