So, too, with the title ' Son of God.' Its meaning was very far from being exhausted by the holding of a certain office or function, such as that of the Messiah. For Jesus the phrase means the absolute fulness of all that it ouglit to mean — the perfection of Sonship in relation to God ; in a word, just all that sum of relations and habitudes of feeling and thought and action that we have seen so amply set before us in the Gospel of St. John. It is the pic- ture of a mind lying ojien without flaw or impedi- ment to the stream of Divine love pouring in upon it, and responding to that love at once with exquisite sensitiveness and with entire com|)leteness. It is indeed the very perfection of what we mean by religion and the religious attitude of the soul to God.
It thus appears that in the mind of Christ the .Jewish conception of the Messiah parted in two directions — one covering all the relationships of man to m.an, and the other in like manner covering all the relationships of the perfect Man to (Jod. It parted in these directions, and it was resolvable into the two complementary ideals to which they led. .\nd as a matter of fact the life of Christ on earth was the consummate realization of those ideals. [Compare with the above an admirable paragraph in Holtzmann, JVeute.it. Theol. i. 281 f.].
The Jewish title ' Messiah ' had upon it the stamp of something local and temjiorary; and as sucli it has lost much of its interest for the modern «orld. But the two other titles of which we have leen speaking imply what is neither local nor temporary, but as permanent as Humanity itself. It is therefore specialK- under these titles that our Lord most freely revealed Himself.
There is, however, something in the title 'Mes- hiah ' which although present was not quite so prominent in the other two. They convey to us as fully as it could be convcj'eil what Jesus was in Himself. But they do not bring out in the same relief the historical mission that He had in the first instance for His contemporaries and through Ihem for all after-ages. The wonderful birth, the wonderful works, the crucifixion, the resurrection.
and the ascension maj- be viewed as aspects of th» work of the Son of JSlan and of the Son of God,— they are aspects of the work of salv.ation and of the coming forth from and return to the Father, — but as enacted in space and time they might be more ajipropriately described as belonging to the manifestation of the Messiah.
Wliat deeper implications are there in the title ' Son of God ' ? Were the 4th cent. Fathers right in claiming that He who bore this title was not only in the full sense ' Son ' but in the full sense ' God,' — that to be the Son of God implied identity of nature or of essence V
We may say with confidence that a Sonship such as is described in the Fourth Gospel would carry with it this conclusion. How could any inferior being either enter so perfectly into the mind of the Father or rellect it so perfectly to man? Of what created being could it be said, ' He that hath seen me hath seen the Father ' ? We need not stay to pick out other expressions that ailmit of no lower interpretation, because the evangelist has made it clear by his Prologue what construction he himself put upon his own narrative.
But, although this conclusion can really be mada good independently of the next and last point that we have to consider, it is to some extent mixed up with it, and it may be well to pass on to this point.
(iv.) Pre-existence. — When we use the title 'Son of God,' how much does it cover ? Is it strictly and properly applied to the incarnate Christ, or does it extend backwards before the Incarnation ? In other words, does it, or does it not, imply pre- existence ? We cannot discuss this question ade- quately without taking in the rest of the NT. ^\'e may, however, provisionally ask what infer- ence would be drawn from the Gospels.
And in regard to these there is no doubt that in the great majority of cases the words would be satisfied by a reference to Christ as incarnate. All the instances in the Synoptic Gospels would come uniler this head. On the other hand, it is equally little oj)en to question that in the Fourth Gospel Christ is conceived as pre-existent. Nothing could be more explicit than the opening verse. Christ as the Lo''Os was in the beginning with God, and was God. But does this hold good of Him also as the Sim ? That is more debatable. We have to look about somewhat for expressions that are free from ambiguity. Perhaps there are not any.
The clearest would be the verse Jn 1" (which belongs to the evangelist), if we could be sure that the common reading is correct : ' the onlj'-begotten Son, which is in the bo.som of the Father,' seems to speak of this jne-existent condition (=irp6s rbr 6ebv of v.') as though it belonged to Him as Son. l)Ut then we are confronted by the well-known question of reading. It must be enough to refer to the elaborate note in WH, and to Dr. Hort's dissertation (INTO), with which the present writer, so far as his judgment goes, would express his agreement. But the reading would then be not ' the only-begotten Scm,' but ' God only-begotten.' Places like 3"- [u.^]^', which are unambiguous ^.s to lire-existence, do not clearly connect it with ' the Son.' Indeed the first of these introduces some- what unexpectedly not the ' Son of God,' but the ' Son of Man,' who must be the Son incarnate. At tlie same time the terms ' Father ' and ' Son ' are so correlative that the frequent occurrence of such phrases as ' My Father which sent me,' ' Not any man hath seen the Father save he which is from (Jod,* ' I speak the things which I have seen with my Father,' would seem to suggest that the relation of Father and Son existed before the Son became incarnate. At any rate the great emiihasis on the two terms would seem to show that the relition to