(4) Through the Resurrection the Divinity of Jesus was establislied. He was shown to be not only Messiah but the Son of God. A unique rela- tion to Goil He had Himself claimeil. Tlie title ' Son of God,' indeed, is very rarelj' found applied by Jesus to Himself. More often it is used to describe the impression made by Him upon others (e.g. on the possessed, Mk 3" 5" ami ||s ; on the centurion, Mk 15*' and ||s). The crowning instance is the confession of Peter, ' Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God' (Mt 1G'«). Th.aton this matter of His Divine Sonship our Lord maintained a great measure of reserve and reticence was quite in keeping with His whole method of self-revela- tion. The truth of His Divine Sonship was not one that could be t.aught the disciples as a dogma ; it must be allowed to break naturally upon them as they increasingly divined the uniqueness of His characi er. But we see in tlie records of the Evan- gelists how Jesus consistently sought to guide the thoughts of His disciples concerning Himself into true and worthy lines. He uniformly claimed to stand in a unique relation to God. He habitually speaks of God as 'my Father' (Mt. 23 times), never embracing Himself with His disciples as being in the same sense sons of God. He attributes to Himself powers and prerogatives which imply essential coequality with God. He claims perfect mutuaiitj- of knowledge as well as of will with the Father, whereby He possesses an exclusive power of manifesting Him (Mt 11", Lk 10"). He claims to do for men what only God can do— to grant for- giveness (Mt 9", Mk 21", Lk 5-*) and to bestow the Holy Spirit (Mt 10'», Lk 12>=). And, further. He demands from men that complete surrender and utter devotion of life which can be granted only to God (Mt 10", Lk 14=8). go j^ jg altogether in keep- ing with the Synoptic representation when the Fourth Gospel records such sayings as these : ' I and the Father are one' (thing or essence, tv) (lO'"), ' He who has seen me has seen the Father' (14'), 'I am in the Father, and the F'ather is in me' (14"), 'the Je«'.s sought the more to kill him because he said, God was his peculiar (tSiov) Father, making himself equal to God ' (5'*).
The claim of Jesus to be the Son of God is thus implied in His attitude throughout, and for refusing to disown it He was counted a blasphemer and con- demned to death (Mt 26«3- »«'• 21^; cf. Jn \ii^). Such a death — a ' hanging on a gibbet ' — seemed to be a confirmation of the judgment of His enemies, but the Resurrection was God's great declaration in action substantiating the truth of Jesus' claim : 'declared Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead ' (Ro I''). No blasphemer was He. The Resurrec- tion 'declared,' defined, or marked Him out to be (bpurBifTO^) what He always truly was — Son of God. For the Sonship thus declared 'in power' (iv Svvdfia — no longer in humiliation but in power, the power of e.xalted Lordship) by the Resurrection was ' according to ' or answered to the spirit of holiness {Kara Tr^'fO/xa a.yi!ii(riii>jis), the spirit of excep- tional and transcendent holiness which was the inmost reality in the person and life of Jesus, and testified to His peculiar relation to God. Divine Sonship, that is to say, was not an honour to which for the first time Christ was exalted after His death. The Resurrection only displayed Him as being what He was inalienably from the first, and installed Him in the dignity which corre-
sponded to His nature. 'In virtue of His resur- rection . . . Christ is established in that dignity which is His and which answers to His nature' (Denney, K(!T, on Ro l-").
For St. I'aul the conviction of the Divine Son- ship of Jesus dated from the appearance to him on the way to Dama.scus of tlie Glorified Christ. What was revealed to him then was that the Crucified One was the Son of God in power. .So that the gosjiel he immediately began to preach was ' that .Icsus is the .Son of God ' {Av ',)■"). It is sometimes maintained that the ' Son of God ' was a recogiiizeil title of the Messiah (cf. En. cv. 2 ; .4 Ezr. vii. '28 f., xiii. 32, 37, 52, xiv. 9), and that we cannot argue from the mere use of the phrase to His Divinity. But it is not a ca.se of thus aigiiing. We have but to take the first writing of his which has come down to us — 1 Tliess. — to see tlurre writ large what the assertion of the Divine Sonship of Jesus meant for St. Paul. In this first extant NT writing (written, according to Sanday, probably about A.D. 51, i.e. about twenty years after the Resurrection) three remarkable predictions are made of Jesus.
( 1 ) In the first verse, the Glorified Jesus is brack- eted in dignity with God the Father. St. Paul and his coin])anions give solemn greeting to 'the Church of the Thessalonians (which is) in God the F'ather and the Lord Jesus Christ' (v.'). The wonder of such a juxtaposition is realized only when we remember that St. Paul was a strict Jew, in whose blood therefore monothei.sm ran like a passion. Yet this .Jewish apostle does not scruple to place Jesus side by side with God, and assume a like estimate of Him on the jiart of those to whom he writes.