octrinal consequences. This master of historical criticism has left us in his great book on Paul, his Life and Work, an invaluable testimony to the historical truth and cardinal significance of St. Paul’s ‘ gospel of the grace of God.’
Later writers of Baur’s school, such as H. J. Holtzmann and QO. Pfleiderer, acknowledge the genuineness of other Epp. besides the major four— of 1 Thess., Phil., and Bidlemon atleast. They feel the inadequacy of Baur’s negative explanation of St. Paul’s line of thought. The Gentile mission and its astonishing success involve other factors than those of which their master took account. Paul was something more than an inverted Jewish Rabbi ; the uncontested Epp. contain ideas looking beyond the anti-Judean polemic. ‘To the Greeks’ he became ‘as a Greek.’ Hellenism had its part in moulding Saul of Tarsus along with Hebraism (see Hicks, ‘St. Paul and Hellenism,’ Stud. Bibl. ty. i.); and certain prevalent Greek ideas, it is sug-
ested, had entered his mind and set up a hidden erment, so that the Jewish zealot carried under his Rabbinical cloak and orthodox straitness the germs of the revolution he was destined to accom- plish. Pfleiderer writes accordingly of ‘a double root’ of Paulinism in ‘ Pharisaic theology and Hellenistic theosophy,’ of two sides presented by the apostle’s teaching—‘a Christianized Pharisaism’ embodied in the doctrine of justification by faith, and ‘a Christianized Hellenism’ in the doctrine of
118 PAUL THE APOSTLE
PAUL THE APOSTLE
Lord, because He was the Saviour’ (p. 328)—a statement to be reversed with equal or greater truth. Vital as the doctrines of salvation are to St. Paul, his belief in the Lordship of Jesus was anterior to them. What Christ did for men is accounted for by what He is to God. The Ep. to the Romans, the grand exposition of Paul’s Soteri- ology, is the writing of one who was ‘separated unto the gospel of God concerning his Son.’ D. Somerville (St. Paul's Conception of Christ, or the Doctrine of the Second Adam) pursues, on the other hand, with much skill ak, persuasiveness, the line of Sabatier and Beyschlag, finding St. Paul’s fundamental idea in Christ considered as ‘the Archetype of Humanity,’ but conserving His Divine pre-existence and ‘Eternal Nature’ as necessary deductions from, because presuppositions of, His sovereign and creative relations to mankind. With him, too, the Pauline system is anthropo- centric; and the fact that it was the product of personal (human) experience, appears to him to make this inevitable. In Paul’s ‘Son of God’ he sees a title that slopes upward from the human to the Divine.
OT Antecedents and Starting - Point. — The apostle’s doctrine is theocentric, not in reality anthropocentric. What is styled his ‘meta- physics’ holds for Paul the immediate and sover- eign fact of the universe; God, as he conceives Him, is all and in all to his reason and heart alike. So far the dogmatic analysis was right, in pextas with the doctrine of God, and dis- posing under that the notions of law, righteous- ness, sin, which form the basis of St. Paul’s Soteriology. This path of exposition is resumed in the very competent and judicious work of G. B. Stevens of Yale, The Pauline Theology. The vision of the glorified Jesus revealed to Saul the Son of God as his Saviour; but the God whose Son the crucified Jesus is seen to be, was now to be known in a far nearer and happier relation than before. No passage strikes more deeply into St. Paul’s experience than 2 Co 4**: ‘There beamed forth the Ulumination of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. .. itis God who said, Out of dark- ness light shall shine, that shined in our hearts to pre the light of the sili ες of his glory in the ace of Christ.’ It was the God of Israel whose moral splendour dawned upon Saul’s mind through the dazzling form of the Lord Jesus; ‘God’ was there ‘in Christ, reconciling’ Saul ‘unto himself,’ and the old things became new to him from that hour—‘ all things are of God’ (2 Co 57"). A new conception of God was imparted to Saul, a new re- lationship to God established for him. Henceforth his life is ‘hid with Christin God.’ St. Paul’s Soteri- ology and Christology are rooted in his Theology.
A profound unity underlies the Judaic and Christian stages of St. Paul’s life. The convert carried with him the Scriptures of his youth, which he read now with the veil lifted from his heart (2Co 31%), finding in them everywhere testimonies, preparations, adumbrations of the things of the new covenant, the σκιὰ τῶν μελλόντων, the παιδαγωγὸς els Χριστόν (Ro 37 154, Gal 3%, Col 216-17, ete.). The Christian apostle blossomed out of the Israelitish believer ai scholar. At times he speaks as though there had been no break in his career (2 Ti 15). Instead of ceasing to be a Jew by becoming a Christian, Paul regarded himself as now properly belonging to the Israel of God (Ph 3%). Instead of severing himself from the stock of Abraham, he would graft the Gentiles into that ‘good olive tree,’ in whose ‘root and fatness’ is nourishment for all races; by their admission to the covenant, Abraham becomes, according to the romise, ‘father of many nations’ (Ro 46.17.11), t was tor this reason that Paul laid stress on the