3. Non-mystical anthropology. — The apostolic writings other than those of the Pauline and Johannine group hardly supply sufficient data to make a detailed statement of their distinctive con- ceptions of human nature practicable. There are, however, a number of incidental references of con- siderable interest. The psychology of temptation as given in the Epistle of James (l'^"'°) singles out desire as the parent of sin, and makes death the natural issue of sin, in a sequence that should be compared with the fuller Pauline analysis in Ko 1. The Epistle to the Hebrews teaches that the wilful sin of apostasy after a genuine Christian experience excludes a second repentance ; the appended illus- tration of the fruitless land suggests that those who commit this sin are incapable of repentance (6<-8; cf. 12"). The Petrine reference to 'the spirits in prison' (1 P 3"-" 4') has afforded a basis for much speculation on the possibility of moral change after death. Of more importance than these isolated points is the general characteristic that distinguishes Hebrews, 1 Peter, and James from the Pauline (and Johannine) writings, viz. the absence of the idea of faith as involving mys- tical union with Christ. In the Ep. to the Hebrews, according to the underlying idea of the high priest in the OT, Christ rather represents man before God than brings the energies of God into the world. Faith in His work means confidence to approach God through Him (4"-"^ lO'"--). Through Christ, according to this Epistle, the realities of tlie unseen world (11') find their supreme substantiation ; whereas, for St. Paul, Christ was primarily the source of new energy to achieve the ideal, a new dynamic within the believer who is mystically united to Him. The more objective conception of faith in the Ep. to the Hebrews (along a dilierent line from that of the Johannine tendency noticed above) is farther illustrated by the outlook in 1 Peter, where the example of Christ is specially em- phasized (1" 2^' 4'). This non-mystical Christianity finds its most extreme example in the polemic of St. James against faith without works (2''''-''). The Pauline faith as a mystical energy is here appar- ently misunderstood and taken to be a bare in- tellectual assent. The presence within the NT of this more prosaic type of Christian experience is of considerable interest. It reminds us tliat the non-mystical temperament has its own legitimate place and can make its own characteristic contri- bution ; indeed, the genuine mystic will probably always belong to the minority. This non-mystical backgi-ound to the Pauline- Johannine anthropology is indeed more than background ; it probably represents the general type of Christian ethics in the 1st century. A notable example of this may be seen in the Didache (c. A.D. 120). The first five chapters form a manual of instruction for baptismal candidates (cf. § 7, ' Having first recited all these
things'), and are concerned with the moral dis- tinctions of right and wrong in practical life — the 'Two Ways' — without a touch of Paulino ' mj-s- ticism.' This may be further illustrated from the Epistle of Clement of Home to the Corinthians, at the end of the 1st century : ' If our mind be lixed through faith towards God ; if we seek out those things which are well pleasing and acceptable unto Him ; if we .accomplish such things as beseem His faultless will, and follow the way of truth, cast- ing off' from ourselves all unrighteousness and iniquity,' we shall be ' partakers of His promised gifts' (xxxv. 5). We have only to compare such an attitude with that underlying the moral exhor- tations of St. Paul in his Letters to the same Church (transformation through the Lord the Spirit) to feel the externalism of the later writer and the inward- ness of the earlier. We must not, of course, forget the mysticism of Ignatius, to which must now be added that of the Odes of Solomon, as implying a deeper interpretation of human nature. But the Pauline anthropology can have been little under- stood, and in the neglect of it lay already some of the seeds of anthropological controversy in the days of Augustine and of the Keformation. Failure to understand the Pauline experience robbed the early Church of an important part of its inheritance.
Conclusion. — An exegetical survey of the apo- stolic anthropology must frankly recognize the existence of various problems — e.g. the relation of human freedom to IJivine control— not only un- solved by the writers, but hardly realized by them. We must not, under the guise of ' exegesis,' read our later dogmatic or philosophical solutions into these lacunae. But neither must we, because of their existence, under-estimate the value of the contribution made by these writers to a doctrine of human nature. Primarily, no doubt, the NT supplies data for all Christian theories rather than dogmatic solutions of the problems which Christian experience raises. But that experience, as re- corded in the NT, rests on an acceptance of certain fundamental truths — on the one hand, the worth of human nature and its responsibility to God ; on the other, the reality of that spiritual world which men enter through Christ. We are made most eff'ectually to feel the far-reaching power of those truths in their simple majesty when we read the story of His life. But they are not absent from any of the pages of the NT. Indeed, its subtle fascination, its peculiar and unique atmosphere, its constant vision of a land of distances, are largely due to the presence and interaction of these truths. Even the book which reveals most clearly its debt to Jewish supernaturalism, the Apocalypse, begins with the vision of the Risen Lord amongst the golden lampstands of His Churches, and ends with the recognition of individual freedom and its momentous issues (Rev 22"). These truths, like their Lord in His incarnation, may seem to have emptied themselves of their universality in taking the form natural to the first Christian generation. But, like Him, they have proved their power as the perennial basis of Christian thinking. Neither the science nor the pliilosophy of the present day has any quarrel with them. We are happily leaving behind us the naturalism which looked on men as 'streaks of morning cloud,' which soon ' shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past' (Tyndall's Belfast Address to British Asso- ciation, 1874). The modern interest in the psy- chology of religion, combined with the growinj? emphasis of philosophy on personality, may well become the prelude to a genuine revival of Paulin- ism, destined to be not less influential than that of the Reformation.