way of conceiving Christ, in which the individual historical Person is elevated or expanded into a universal or representative Person, pervades the Epp. to the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians
see esp. Ro 5'-^-, 1 Co 15-^-'''). As these Epp. are central in St. Paul's writings, there is a certain justification for laying this conception of Christ — the second Adam — at the basis of a Pauline Clirist- ologj- (as was done by Somerville in his .SV. PrnJ's
Conceptioti of Chri,st). It is the conception Mhich lends itself most readily to ' mystical ' interpreta- tions of Christ's work and of Christian experience. To bear the Christian name we must ' identify VOL. 11. — 26
ourselves ' with all the experiences of the Second Adam. But though it is eminently characteristic of St. Paul, it is neither his first lior his last way of representing the absolute significance of Christ. It belongs to the controversial period in which everjthing Christian was defined by contrast. What St. Paul wanted to annihilate was legalism, the influence of the statutory in religion ; and he argues that the really important categories in the religious history of humanity, those of universal and abiding significance, are not law, but sin and grace. The great figures in the history are not Closes, but Adam and Christ. He works out the parallel or rather the contrast between them with enthusiasm ; but when we realize what he is doing, we feel that this is only one way of giving Christ His peculiar place. It is, however, a way which will maintain itself as long as the antithesis of sin and gi-ace determines the religious life ; and as this is a limit beyond which we cannot see, it seems involved in any adequate preaching of Christ that He should be preached in this universal character as the head of a new humanity.
(e) In his later Epp., St. Paul preaches Christ in what seems a more wonderful light. Christ is pre- sented to us not merely as a historical, or as a uni- versal, but also as aii eternal or Divine Person. That which is manifested to the world in Him does not originate with its manifestation. The ex- planation of it is not to be sought merelj- in the historj- of Israel (as though Jesus were no more than a national ^lessiah), nor even in the history of humanity (as though He were no more than the restorer of the ruin which began with Adam) : it is to be sought in the eternal being of God. When St. Paul came in contact with Jesus, he came in contact with what he felt instinctively was the ulti- mate reality in the universe. Here, he could not but be conscious, is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, all that is meant — all that has ever been meant — by 'God.' Here is 'all the fulness of the Godhead bodily ' (Col 1^" 2^) : here is the revelation of what God essentiallj* and eternally is, and here therefore is that by which all our thinking must lie ruled. Christ belongs to, or is involved in, because He is the manifestation of, the eternal being and nature of God. How far does this cany us when we try to think it out ? Possibly not fvulher, in some respects, than ^^e have come already. Christ, it may be said, is represented as an eternal Person when He is spoken of as fnal Judge of all (Ac lO'*'-, 2 Co 5'") ; that is eternity as apprehended in conscience. Again, He is represented as an eternal Person when we speak of Him as fnal Heir or Lord of all things (He 1-, Mt 28'« ) ; that is eternity as apprehended in imagination. But in Col. it is not through the conscience or the imagination, but through a more specidative faculty, that St. Paul interprets his conception of the eternal being of Christ. If Christ really has the absolute signi- ficance which all Christian experience implies, — for in all such experience we meet with God in Him, — then all things miist be defined by relation to Christ ; the universe must be reconstituted with Him as its principle, its centre of unity, its goal. Nature must be conceived as an order of things brouglit into being with a view to His Kingdom, and this implies that He was present in the consti- tution of natm-e. To say that He was ideally but not actually present, — present only in the mind of God as the intended consummation of the process, — would have been to St. Paul to introduce a dis- tinction which we have no means of applying where God is concerned. The tnie doctrine of Christ — this is what St. Paul teaches in Colossians — in- volves a doctrine of the universe. The doctrine of the universe is put only negatively, or so as to
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PREACHING CHRIST
PREACHING CHRIST