LiTERATnEE.— C. Hodgre, Syttematic Theology, 1872, i. 536 ff. ; T. J. Crawford, Myst^Hes of Christianity, 1874, p. 291 flf. ; John Forbes, Predestination and Freewill, J878 ; J. B. Mozley, Piedcstinalion-, 1878 ; B. Jowett, The Epistles o/ St. Paul to the Tfirs>^alonians, Galatians, and Romans, 1894, iU 370 ; J. Drummond, Studies in Christian Doctrine, 1907, p. 463 ; T. Haering, The Christian Faith, 1913, p. 788 £E.
T. NicoL.
PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST.— With regard to pre-existence, the apostolic Scriptures furnish material for the two-fold conclusion, that it does not belong to the primary data of Christian faith in the Historic and Exalted Jesus, but that it is a necessary implicate of that faith. It forms no element in the primitive doctrine recorded in the opening chapters of Acts. Under the impulse of the Spirit, the conviction of their Master s resur- rection wrought in the first disciples a victorious re-assertion of faith in Him as the Messianic Redeemer. He is proclaimed as ' both Lord and Christ ' ; and under the category of Messiahship this primitive gospel involves all that is character- istic in historical Christianity (see Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, p. 15 ff.). Jesus is sovereign in the government of the world as in the realm of spirit- ual ideals, author of salvation in every sense of the word, moral and eschatological ; but there is no emergence of the thought that His origin must be transcendent as His destiny — no hint of pre- existence. Christ's place in eternity is in the foreknowledge and counsel of the Father.
Coming to the Pauline Epistles, we enter a Christological atmosphere which is startlingly different. In the earlier Epistles the Pre-existence is not so much asserted as taken for granted. In marked contrast with such themes as the Atone- ment or Justification, it is never made the subject of the Apostle's dialectic ; but deductions, both jjractical and speculative, are drawn from it as an axiomatic truth, familiar equally to writer and to readers, and disputed by no one. And although it is only in the later Epistles that the necessity of the Pre-existence as the basis for a full world- embracing redemption is deliberately set forth, there is no evidence of a real development either in the conviction of the fact or in the conception of its signilicance.
The chief Pauline passages are the following. With regard to the closely parallel texts. Gal 4* and Ro 8^, it is not too much to say that the obviously intended contrast between the dignity of
God's ' own Son ' and the conditions of His eartlily life (' born of a woman, made under the law,' ' in the likeness of sinful flesh ') is fuUj' illuminated only by the assumption of His i)reexistence. In speakiu" of the sacraments of the wilderness (1 Co 10'^) St. Paul clearly jjresupjjoses the activity of the pre-incarnate Christ in the history of Israel. The statement that the Kock in Kadesh was Christ does not imply that he regarded it as an actual Christophany (Bousset, Die Scliriftcn ties NT, ii. [1908] 115); but it does imply that, in St. Paul's view, the water miraculously furnished by it was 'spiritual drink' because in it Christ was sacra- mentally active for receptive souls. In 1 Co 8*, aa one GoQ, the Father, is the ultimate source and end of all creation, so one Lord, Jesus Christ, is its Mediator — the first hint of that more fully formu- lated conception of the 'cosmic' Christ which is a feature of later Epistles. A similarly anticipatory passage is 2 Co 8' — ' Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, he for your sakes became poor,' which cannot be naturally understood in any other sense than that Christ's earthly life was to His prior condition as beggary to wealth. This thought of the Incarnation as an act of self-abnegation, by which an original state of heavenly glory was voluntarily exchanged for one of human limitation and suffering, is expanded in Ph 2'", the most deliberate and majestic of St. Paul's utterances upon the subject. Whether we understand by ti.op<f>rt dtou a form which is separable or that which is inseparable from the Divine essence, one which was surrendered or that which could not be surrendered, does not afi'ect the assertion of pre-existence. Christ became man only by laying aside a state of being to which an equal participation with God in all Divine pre- rogatives (t6 dvai !<ra Seifi) naturally belonged. Finally, in Colossians and Ephesians St. Paul de- velops the thought of Clirist's relation to created being as a whole. In His pre-incarnate state. He is the apx'^, the Head or Origin, the Trpurdroxos Trdffi;! (cricreMs, begotten before all creatures and the agent of their creation, therefore possessing supre- macy, absolute and universal (Col l'^- "•). The same conception is implied in Eph 1'° — as all things are originally centred in Him, so they are destined to be gathered together and re-centred in Him ; while in Eph I'' His pre-existence is brought more directly into relation with human redemption — we are chosen ' in him before the foundation of the world.'
In the later Epistles, it thus appears, there is a larger use of the concept of pre-existence, a more deliberate unfolding of its relations to God, humanity, and the created universe ; but, while this enables us to apprehend more clearly how the con- cept was already latent in the primary faith- experience of the Exalted Christ, it cannot be said that the later Epistles, as compared with the earlier, show any distinct advance in the Apostle's or in the Church's belief in the fact. And here we are confronted with a problem. The thought of the Apostolic Church has advanced from the posi- tion reflected in the first chapters of Acts, in which there is no hint of a doctrine of pre-existence, to that presupposed even in the earlier Pauline Epistles, where its presence and activity are fully assumed ; and apparently nothing save a process of development so gradual, silent, and unconscious as to have left no trace, bridges the distance between the Pentecostal discourses and Colossians. By what processes of thought may it be supposed that this remarkable transition was ettucted ? Various attempts have been made to find a solution of the problem ab extra.