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 explained by thinking of Israel or by thinking of humanity, but only by thinking of God. The Jesus Christ of the

Israelite after the flesh;

apostle's faith was indeed an 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. 1 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 or 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 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.1 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.

2

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, 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

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

2 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.'

remark of Dr. Chalmers-' I find that without a hold of Christ there is no hold of God at all.'1 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 absolute 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 just been discussing, but which is in truth much more difficult to apprehend-the conception of Him as pre-existent. The one difficulty which haunts

1 Hanna's Life, ii. 448.