Hence St. Paul's unique experience of the gospel as power of God in the soul, and as an essentially present Salvation, marks an epoch in the NT doctrine of Regeneration. His deeply self-reveal- ing consciousness of sin gave him to see, traced within, the process by which new moral energy was received, and to realize the Divine quickenin" involved in man's experience of repentance and faith. He saw that human nature embraced two principles, opposed in tendency to each other, and competing for the control of man's settled personal will. In actual human nature the lower or sensu- ous (^('I'xtKii"') and self-centred principle, called ' the flesh ' (ffd/jj), had the upper hand and determined the quality of man's moral life : and the outcome was ' death ' towards God and His righteousness. But in Jesus Christ, who was a ' second ' or new type of manhood, of heavenly origin (6 deiWcpot dfdpuTros (( ovpafov), and ' spiritual ' in contrast to the 'sensuous' or 'eartliy ' type of Adamic man- hood (1 Co IS""^'), a new basis was laid for humanity. To believers this Saviour became ' a quickening spirit' (iri-eDjua (woroiovv), turning the scale decisively against 'the flesh,' and setting free, as if by a resurrection, the enthralled higher nature (^oDs or irvevfui), before as good as dead, by tilling it with Divine energy or life {irveOfui d-yiov) akin to His own, in virtue of which He rose vic- torious over death. A man so vivified by the Spirit of God, and after the likeness of Christ, was in very deed a new moral being {Kainii Kricns), a son of God, bj- Divine re-creative action and adoption. The S])irit replaced the flesh as piime determinant of will and conduct ; and therewith ' the old man,' the moral state of the individual by nature, gave way to 'the new man,' the state in which the human will is in harmony with the Divine in principle, and normally so in practice likewise. ' Cleaving to the Lord, the soul ' is one spirit' with Him (1 Co 6"), animated by one and the same life that is in Christ, the Head of the new humanity, a life that is essentially of God and Divine.
This deeper idea of Salvation seems certainly to have left its trace on St. Peter's later thought, to Judge by 1 P. Possibly also it affected the form in whicn St. John himself interpreted the new Life which hail been manifested, first among the original disciples, and then in them. Yet there were elements in St. John's doctrine proper to his o^\'n experience, both of his Master's teaching ano
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of the Light and Life in himself and others. He shared with St. Paul the idea of moral dualism as rooted in a dualism of elements in human nature. On the one hand man was related to ' the world ' of sense and of self (the flesh), on the other he was akin to God, as .sensitive to His word and BO potentially His 'child' in deed and in truth. St. Paul thought most of the new experience in itself, speaking of the regenerate man as a ' new (moral) creature,' or as a ' son ' in respect of dchnite status and privileges in relation to God through faith in Christ and by virtue of the Spirit (2 Co 5", Gal 3^ 4'-', Ko S"""- ^). Thus it is a question of a new status or condition into which a man is brought by a definite act. Adoption (vlod(aia), by which the transition is made from the opposite states of serfdom, wretchedness, aliena- tion, death (Gal S^'-\ Ko 7=^ S"'- ") : so tliat the full etlect of such adoption waits upon man's emancipation from ' the bondage of corruption ' in 'the redemption of our body' (Ro S-"''^). St. John, on the other hand, thought rather of the intrinsic nature of the ' eternallife' quickened in believers, of the wonder and glory of its origin in God — the Divine nature germinating as 'seed' in the liuman soul, and by a new birth begettin<j a new personality. Thus it is his writings which present the most classic statement of the doctrine of Kegeneration, as ' that work of the Holy Spirit in a man by which a new life of holy love, like the life of God, is initiated.'
Aside from tliis main line of development stand St. James and the writer ' to Hebrews.'
The former thinks of the origin of the higher life in the soul in terms of the Wisdom literature of the OT and of writers like Philo.* ' The word of truth,' 'the inborn word,' or 'the wisdom from above,' is the medium of God's creative action on the soul, by ' the Spirit which he hath caused to d'vell in us' (!'»■" 3" 4»). To the latter, men are essentially 'spirits,' placed by 'the Father of spirits' in the body, to be disciplined and puri- hed with a view to conscious sonship, and so to the ' glory ' of the spiritual and leal world of which the visible is but the poor shadow (12'-'-'' oio 12'"). Hence the work of grace is set forth as moral enlightenment and puriticalion of the con- science (6* hy'- 9* KI-), believers being ' those who have been illumined.' The vital and djTiamic aspects are not, indeed, absent (5"-6°) ; but the renewal ell'ected in the fundamental change of heart which the NT everywhere recognizes in Repentance (6"), is to him a matter of divinely- given insight into the realities of the moral and spiritual world, and a corresponding obedience, 'ihe Christian 'tastes the word of God to be good,' and as he feeds upon the oracles of God he gains an ever more relined perception of shades of moral and spiritual truth (6' 5"). This, the writer's own emphasis (as distinct from his readers' type of thought), is Hellenistic and ' Alexandrine, being largely paralleled in the so-called Epistle of Bar- nabas, as well as in 1 Clement and a good deal of 2nd cent. Christian literature.