St. Paul gives two ' sums ' of grace, the one in 1 Co P", the other in Ro 8^*, to Avhich elsewhere are added 'adoption' and 'reconciliation' (Gal 4^-'', Ro 511, 2 Co 5'3). We may tabulate thus :
A. Predestination and Election.
Justification Adoption Sanctification
B. and and and Bedeniption. Reconciliation. Bighteousness.
0. Resurrection and Glory.
(/3) The Johannine scheme. — Eternal Life is the point of stress in the Johannine scheme. It works itself out in a series of three antitheses subsumed under the general and inclusive one of God versus the world, viz, light v. darkness, life v. death, love V. sin = unrighteousness. God and Christ, working in the Pauline scheme as righteousness and wisdom, work here as light, life, love, driving away dark- ness, death, sin ; restoring life to its full com- pletion by this self-revelation of the Divine Life which is at the same time the principle of the world's real life (Logos). Resurrection here is just fullness of life, the perfection of personality, which we see in Christ (historic), who is the Resurrection and Life, and who communicates it to believers, with self -evidencing force, in the life of love. This new life is attained from the new birth in an ex- perienced succession J of ever-deepening intuitions and acts of faith, in a rich immanence of Christ in the believing soul,§ and of such a soul in Christ, like that of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. II We may tabulate thus :
A. Pre-existent Logos and Life.
God Light Life Love
B. V. " V. V, V. World. Darkness. Death. Sin.
0. Locarnate Logos, Principle of Resurrection and Life.
The broad result of both descriptions of the life of grace is notable. It vindicates the outstanding fact of the Synoptic presentation of Christ : the uniqueness of His self-estimate for salvation. That is the conspicuous fact likeAvise of apostolic experience : ' the mystery of Christ now revealed to his holy apostles.' Unique as His life was, it yet can be the very law of all life. And it is so, when a relation between men and Christ is estab- lished of such a nature as links them to Him, so that they abide in Him as in their element. That relation is not adequately expressed as simply ethical harmony. It is rather an interpenetration of essence, in which the soul, gathering up all its faculties in unitary interplay and under His in- fusion of His Spirit, enters on a progressive sanc- tification, the illumination of the mind, the cleansing of the Spirit, until the whole nature is filled with the rich gifts of grace. Man in all this is neither depersonalized nor self-deified. He is, indeed, a self-contained system of spiritual opera- tions— a little cosmos. But he is this in order to take his rightful and ordained place in the larger
• The phrase is Flint's, in Sermons and Addresses, 18fl9, p. 230 — Christ our Righteousness. It is a merit of Ritschl to have broken down the distinction between justification and sanctification. Cf. hia chief work, Jiecht/ertigung und Versohnung*, 1900.
t Ro 51.
t Cf. W. R. Inge, art 'John, Gospel of,' in DCO I 88611., where, however, the successiveness of the stages is overdrawn, and the equally true simultaneity is obscured.
§ Too narrow a content is at times given to St. John's 'know- ledge ' : it includes not only the mental part, but all the parts of a man's self.
II Jn 1420. a.
GRACE
GRACE
511
cosmos ; for the fundamental energy in his new life is the wider fundamental energj^ which is co- extensive with creation vitalizing all that lives. So large is God's gift.*
(c) The gift of the Holy Ghost.— We find the life of grace to be consummated under the pre-ordained Divine ideal by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the hope of glorj-. The life of grace is the eternal life in its earlier stage. The gift alone corresponding to the requisite grace is the Holy Spirit. It is a gift, the natural and necessary sequel to the process just described.! For the Spirit is the agent of the operations of grace. If God justiHes, adopts, and sanctifies, regenerates and converts, it is but fitting that He take means to make known the fact to them who are subject to these acts of grace : hence in justification the Spirit ' sheds abroad in our hearts ' the love of God ; X in adoption ' the Spirit beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God.'§ St. John dwells on the importance of the sending of the Spirit. II The Spirit is specially the gift of God ; His mission tlie most important of the consequences of Christ's Exaltation. As Christ grew Himself in grace by the Spirit, so by the Spirit He did His work for man, does His work in man, and mystically abides in man. The Spirit comes not to supply the place of an absent Christ but to bring a spiritually present Christ. He dwells in the believer as that Divine personal influence that brings Christ into the heart and seats Him there. He joins us to Christ, and in Christ we are joined to God — hence the terms 'Spirit of Christ,' 'Spirit of the Son,' 'Spirit of Jesus Christ.' Again, the Spirit does His work not abstractly, but by producing conviction of sin, righteousness, judgment to come, in relation to Christ whom 'He glorifies.' H He makes the historic facts of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ the vital points of connexion througli which He acts ; and because it is so, men experi- ence in grace those energies which constitute the Spirit of the Son, the energies of God.