The structure of St. Paul's theology renders it unlikely that his doctrine of the Spirit was materially afl'ected by his intercourse with pliilo- sophically-minded Greeks. Nowhere in St. Paul do we find concrete parallels either to the Platonic repudiation of sense in favour of reason, or to the Cynic protest against culture, or to the mj-stical teachings wiiich implied that the soul is an alien sojourner in the body. It is certainly possible, perhaps even probable, that the forceful way in which he made use of the antithesis between flesh and spirit as a means of evoking faith and repent- ance was in some manner related to the dualistic ideas whicii prevailed in Greek metaphysics and ethics. But his conscious and successful rejection of all the Hellenistic forms of doctrine in that field is clearly seen in the remarkable fact that there is not a single passage in iiis letters which would go to prove that the antithesis between the materi- ality of nature and the immateriality of God, be- tween the concrete image of sense and the pure idea, had any meaning for him at all.
2. The primitive type of the doctrine and its relation to the Pauline type. — It would be alto- gether eri'oneous to think that the conviction of the Spirit's indwelling in believers was first intro- duced into the Churcli l)v St. Paul. Every single document of primitive Christianitj^ implies that the possession of tiie Spirit is tiie distinctive feature of the Christian society. When Christians spoke of themselves as '.saints,' and thus indicated tiie ditt'erence between tiiem and the Jews, they had in mind not the measure of their moral achieve- ments, but the fact that tliey were united to God
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through their knoAvledge of Christ. Their union with God, however, was rendered effective and manifest precisely in virtue of the Spirit's work in their lives. But while St. Paul relates every phase of the Christian life to the Spirit, so that believers may learn to think of their entire Chris- tian experience as life in the Spirit, and so that the Church may recognize the working of the Spirit in all that it does, the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem keep the thought of the Spirit apart from their own self-consciousness. It is certainly the case that here the Church's relation to God is conceived as determined by the new covenant which the coming of the Spirit has brought to all. The individual believer, however, was not encouraged to find the basis of that belief in the work of the Spirit Avhich he could trace in his own experience ; on the contrary, each found the ade- quate ground of his conviction in that manifesta- tion of the Spirit which is apparent to all. In the eyes of the Church the apostles are those who teach in the Spirit, perform miracles in the Spirit, and administer judgment in the Spirit, and beside them stand prophets who make manifest to all the reality of the new Divine covenant. The conception of the Spirit, however, was not thereby rendered particularistic, nor was its action re- garded as restricted to the special class of the irvfufiaTLKoL. It was, in fact, impossible for those who confessed Christ, the Perfecter of the com- munity, to divide the community into two gi'oups — those who know God and those who knoAV Him not, or those who obey Him and those Avho resist Him. Only in the indwelling of the Spirit as shared by all was it made certain that the mem- bers of the Church were members of the Kingdom of God. When all is said, however, the conscious- ness of believers in which they know that they are under the influence of Divine grace is much more vigorously developed in the Epistles of St. Paul than in the documents bearing the Palestinian stamp, viz. the writings of James, Matthew, Peter, and John.
(a) The Epistle of James. — St. James assures those who draw near to God with sincere repent- ance that God will draw near to them (4^). But he does not describe how the presence of God becomes an experience in the penitent. The wis- dom that produces pride he reproves as sensual {\{/vxi-Kri [3'^]) ; the true wisdom, on the contrary, is spiritual ; but he is content to say of it simply that it comes from above. To one who is in perplexity as to his course, St. James gives the promise that he shall receive wisdom in answer to prayer (P). Here too, therefore, a work of God is said to take place in the inner life — a Divine operation regulating the thoughts and desires of man. That directing power of God acting from within is just what St. Paul calls Spirit, but this term is not used here. Again, man is born of God, through the word of truth (P^), and the doer of the Law is brought into the state of liberty (1^). Both of these assertions approximate to what is expressed elsewhere in Scripture by statements referring to the Spirit. We thus see that the ex- hortations of the Epistle are nowhere based upon the legalistic point of view. The injunction of Scripture or the precept of the teacher is never regarded as taking the place of one's own ethical knowledge. Casuistry is set aside, as is also the idea of merit. The individual is called upon to submit to God in his own knowledge and love. But the writer does not deal with the manner in which this autonomous turning of the will towards God is brought about.