That is to say, even in the days of His flesh, Jesus was to him intrinsically " the Lord to whom glory belongs as His native right."^ That Paul usually has the ex- alted Christ in mind when speaking of Him as Lord is only thus a portion of the broader fact that, writ- ing when he wrote, and as he wrote, he necessarily had the exalted Christ in mind in the generality of his speech of Him. He was not engaged in writing a his- torical retrospect of the life of the man Jesus on earth, but in proclaiming Jesus as the all-sufficient Saviour of men. That he recognized that this Jesus had entered upon the actual exercise of His universal dominion only on His resurrection and ascension, and in this sense had received it as a reward for His work on earth (Phil 2^, Rom 14®) merely means that, no less than to our Lord Himself, the earthly manifestation
lievers (Col jisseq.)^ but also over all creation (Phil zi^-i^, Col ii6,i7)/» "The title," he adds, "was given to our Lord even in His lifetime (Jno 13^^), but without a full consciousness of its signifi- cance: it was only after the Resurrection that the Apostles took it to express their central belief (Phil a^^^i)." These remarks, however, require revision. Though the term " does not in itself necessarily in- volve divinity " and "Jews may have applied it to their Messiah (Mk J236,37^ Pss Sol 17*^) without meaning that He was God" — and indeed His followers may have applied it to Jesus in its lower connotation during His lifetime and afterwards, — yet its association with the ' Lord ' of the Lxx. gave it also its divine implication from the begin- ning, and in point of fact it is so employed from the first.
^ Cf. T. C. Edwards on i Cor 2^ ; who rightly takes the genitive as genitive of characteristic quality, and explains: "The Lord to whom glory belongs as His native right. . . . Glory is the peculiar attri- bute of Jehovah among all the gods (Ps 29I). The expression is theo- logically important because it implies that Jesus was Lord of Glory, that is Jehovah, and that the Lord of Glory died (cf. Acts i^^)" Passages like i Cor ii^s, "the Lord's death," ii^^, "the body and blood of the Lord," are quite similar in import, owing to the exalted sense of the term * Lord.' Hence Heinrici speaks of " the paradox " in such expressions. Cf. Heinrici-Meyer, ed. 1896, pp. 353 and 363.
The Corroboration of Paul 225
of Jesus was to Paul an estate of humiliation upon which the glory followed.^" But the glory which thus followed the humiliation was to Paul, too, a glory which be- longed of right to Jesus, to whom His lowly life on earth, not His subsequent exaltation, was a strange ex- perience. It was one who was rich, he tells us, who in Jesus became poor that we might through His poverty become rich (2 Cor 8®) ; It was one who was In the form of God who abjured clinging to His essential equality with God and made Himself of no reputation by taking the form of a servant, and stooping even to the death of the cross (Phil 2^'"<^). When Paul speaks of Jesus, therefore, as ' Lord ' it Is not espe- cially of His exaltation that he is thinking, but rather " the whole majesty of Christ lies In this predicate "" for him, and the recognition that Jesus Is ' Lord ' ex- presses for him accordingly the essence of Christianity
10 Cf. on this Meyer on z Cor 4* (E. T. pp. 229-30) : " For Christ in the state of His exaltation is again, as He was before His incarna- tion (corap. Jno 17^), fully k\> [lopcpf] 6eou and ?ffa Oecu (Phil 2^), hence in His glorified corporeality (Phil 3^1) the visible image of the invisible God. ... It is true that in the state of His humiliation He had likewise the divine So^a, which he possessed xard nveufia dytoiffuvyj'S (Rom i*), which also, as bearer of the divine grace and truth (Jno i^*), and through His miracles (Jno 2II), He made known (Jno 14^) ; but its working and revelation were limited by His humili- ation to man's estate, and He had divested Himself of the divine appear- ance (Phil 2'' SSI-) till in the end, furnished through His resurrection with the mighty attestation of His divine Sonship (Rom i*), He en- tered, through His elevation to the right hand of God, into the full communion of the glory of the Father, in which He is now the God- man, the very image and reflection of God, and will one day come to execute judgment and establish the Kingdom." " The whole acknowl- edgment of the heavenly xuptorr)? of Jesus as the <Tuv0povo? of God," says Meyer justly on Rom 10^, " is conditioned by the acknowl- edgment of His previous descent from heaven, the incarnation of the Son of God, 83, Gal 4*, Phil 2^, et al."
^^ The phrase is Meyer's, on 2 Cor 4^.
226 The Designations of Our Lord