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PKEACHING CHRIST
PREACHING CHRIST
First Epistle of Peter is on a level with this. In many respects it is more explicit. There has been more reflexion on the absolute significance of Jesus in religion, on His relation to the OT, on the power of His resurrection, on the virtue of His Passion as connected with redemption from sin, and on the examjile set in His life and death. But two passages may be briefly referred to as going to the root of the matter. The first is 1-^ \\here Christians are described as ' you who through him [Jesus] are believers in God.' It is to Him that Christian faith owes its peculiar qualities and virtues : men may be theists apart from Him, but to have specifically Christian faith in God we nmst be His debtors. The other is the longer passage, so much discussed, 3'^-4®. Whatever else this passage reveals, it reveals the writer's conviction that for the dead as well as the living there is no hope of salvation but Christ. Not only in this world, but in all worlds, whatever is called redemp- tion owes its being to Him. All spiritual beings, angels, principalities, and powers, are subject to Him. The Christian is a person who is in Him (5^*), and accordingly by Him everything in the Christian life is determined. To give Christ this place in our spiritual world, though a different mode of conceiving the world of the spirit may modify the intellectual form in which we do so, is indispensable to preaching Christ. Apart from His holding such a place it is possible only to preach about Him, not to make Him the sum of our preaching.
9. To pass from St. Peter to St. Paul is to pass from one who had the most vivid personal recollec- tions of the Man Christ Jesus to one who had no such recollections at all ; and it is all the more striking to find that both of them preach Christ in tiie same sense ; or, perhaps, we should say, mean the same thing by preaching Christ. St. Paul's acquaintance with Christ began when the Lord appeared to him on the way to Damascus, and for him Jesus is predominantly the Lord of Glory (1 Co 2^). When he preaches Him it is as Lord (2 Co 4^) ; that is, as exalted at God's right hand. To call Him 'Lord,' to acknowledge His exaltation, is to make the fundamental Christian confession (1 Co 12^, Ro 10^). It is often asserted that whatever difl'erences may have existed between St. Paul and the Jerusalem Church, there can have been no difference of a Christological character ; but it is not vital to Christianity that this should be so. It is just as plausible to argue from 2 Co I'^ that the Corinthians had heard preachers who did not preach Christ precisely as Paul and Silvanus and Timothy did ; and the argument might be supported by reference to 2 Co 5'® 11*. Further, the fact that St. Paul has something which he calls 'my gospel,' a conception of Christianity and a mode of presenting it which had peculiarities due to the peculiarity of his religious experience, might be adduced on the same side. And the presumption thus raised could not be overturned simply by an appeal to 1 Co 15*- ", which would prove only that his gospel rested, exactly as did that of the Twelve, on the great facts of the death and resurrection of Jesus interpreted in the light of Scripture. What it is important to see is that, be the variations in mode of thought or conception what they may, the Apostle ascribes to Jesus that absolute signifi- cance for religion which we have already seen attach to Him both in His own mind and in the preaching of St. Peter. This is the basis and the content of preaching Christ.
It might seem enough to refer to the salutations of the Epistles, in which St. Paul wishes the Churches grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Ko V), or addresses them as having their being in God the Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Th V). Here we have the Father and Christ confronting men, so to speak, on the same plane, co-operating as one Divine 2>ower for their salvation. When St. Paul preaches Christ it is as a Person who has this power and importance, and stands in this relation to God and men. Or we might refer to what perhaps comes closest in form to Jesus' own mode of expression, the passage in 1 Co 15-'*, in which ' the Son ' is used absolutely, as in Mk 13"-. There is a subordina- tion of the Son to the Father here, and yet no more here than in Mk 13^- or in Mt 11-' could we conceive of either word in the i^lural. Or again, we might refer to such passages as those in which St. Paul contrasts all other persons with Christ. ' What is Apollos ? what is Paul ? Was Paul crucified for you? or were you baptized in the name of Paul ? ' ( 1 Co S' V^). This is entirely in the line of the contrast between the many servants and the one beloved Son in Mk 12i"'^, or of the sayings of Jesus in Mt 23*"^". Of course both these Evangelic passages have been disputed, but the present writer sees no reason to doubt that in substance both are rightly assigned to Jesus. What St. Paul means in the words cited is that any other person has only a relative importance in Christianity, while Christ's importance is ab- solute. The Church would have missed Paul and Apollos, but it would have been there ; whereas but for Christ it could not have been there at all. ■ It existed only iti Him. This is assumed in all preaching of which He is the object. His signifi- cance for the Church is not in the same line with that of Paul and Apollos ; it is on the same line with that of the Father. No matter what the mode in which St. Paul conceives of Christ, he always conceives of Him as having 'this incompar- able significance, and it is worth while to note the ways in which it appears.