Person of Christ (continued) – Person of Christ (continued)

Person of Christ (continued)

1. It may be taken as certain that St. Paul was acquainted with the Evangelical tradition as to Jesus’ earthly life. He appeals to the words of the Lord as of supreme authority. Yet no allusion is made to His miracles or to His ways and habits among men. His human birth, His sinlessness. His institution of the Holy Supper, His death by crucifixion and His resurrection on the third day — these and a few more details are reported. The truth is that St. Paul’s mind dwelt chiefly on the decisive acts of redemption, and the blessings won thereby; hence it is not surprising that he should say little or nothing as to Jesus’ human development. At the same time the real humanity of our Lord is to him an axiom. Jesus was made of a woman, of the seed of David according to the flesh. There is nothing inconsistent with this in the remarkable expression (Romans 8:3) that God sent His own Son ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’; which simply means that the sinful flesh of man is the pattern on which Christ’s sinless (2 Corinthians 5:21) flesh was formed; in Him alone we see the flesh in perfect relation to the spirit. Moreover, human nature, as He wore it on earth, was a form of being intrinsically and unavoidably inadequate to His true essence. Originally He belonged to a higher world, and left it by a voluntary act; indeed, on the whole, it may be said that what St. Paul puts in place of a full-drawn picture of Jesus’ earthly activities is the great act of the Incarnation. The fact that He should have lived as man at all is more wonderful than any of His words or deeds.

2. In addition to a body of flesh and blood, the unique constitution of Jesus’ Person included spirit, ‘the spirit of holiness’ (Romans 1:4. on which cf. Denney’s note in EGT), which completely dominated His nature, and was not merely the power energizing in His life in the flesh, but the active principle of His resurrection from the dead. To this spiritual being St. Paul would probably have referred for an ultimate explanation of what he meant by Christ’s pre-existence.

3. The main reason for St. Paul’s comparative silence as to Jesus’ earthly career is that the Person with whom he was directly in relation, habitually and from the flrst, was the risen Lord of glory. This is the starting-point of his Christology, and it determines it to the last. The attitude is no doubt common to the NT writers, but it has been accentuated in St. Paul’s case by his singular history, and his passionate faculty of faith. All redeeming influences, whether they concern the individual or the world, and bear on sin or death or principalities or powers, flow directly from the risen Christ. This pre-occupation with Christ as glorified is expressed forcibly in 2 Corinthians 5:16. ‘Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more.’ The present majesty of the Lord is something other and better than the earthly life now past. Yet again — the counter-stroke always follows — the Exalted One is also the Crucified, who has in Him for ever and ever the redemptorial efficacy of His death.

We can hardly put the fact too strongly, that for St. Paul’s mind it was after the Resurrection that the manifested Being of Christ took on its full greatness. The classical passage on this is Romans 1:4: ‘appointed (ordeclared) Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.’ The implication is that Divine power, acting through the medium of the Resurrection, set Christ free from the limitations of life on earth, limitations which had permitted to His Divine Sonship only a reduced and depotentiated expression here. In His exaltation that Sonship is displayed fully. With this we may compare Philippians 2:9 and Romans 14:9. the latter being a somewhat remarkable statement: ‘For to this end Christ died, and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.’ In these and all parallel passages the two ideas are combined: first, that Christ has ascended up to be Lord of the world, assuming this place for the first time at the Resurrection, and still retaining His humanity; secondly, that there was In Him from the beginning

glory.

It is rewarding to pause for a moment upon this concrete, working conception of Jesus Christ as it inspired the Apostle’s heroic lite. The Redeemer is to him a Divine Being, clad for ever, as on the way to Damascus, in the glorious radiance which is the mark of Deity. He has reached a position from which He can make effectual the reconciling and redemptive work achieved in His passion. He is more than Head of the Church; He is omnipotent in the fullest sense. God has set Him far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come (Ephesians 1:21). Vast as His glory is. He has not yet come to His full triumph; for it is God’s purpose yet to sum up all things in Christ, the things in heaven and the things on earth (v. 10). His sway will culminate in His advent at the last. And this royal Lord is not far off, inaccessibly high above belie vers, but rather within and beside them always, to guide, warn, inspire, comfort with infinite might and love; so that St. Paul could speak of himself as being in Christ, of his life as being not his own, but the life of Christ living in him, and could pray for his converts that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith (Galatians 2:20, Ephesians 3:17). Were our subject the personal religion of the Apostle, much more would have to be said as to his immediate certainty of Christ as alike dwelling in and embracing our spiritual life — ^the ideas of ‘Christ in us’ and ‘we in him’ alternate — but here it must suffice to have noted this profound and ever-present mystical note. The passage about the thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12) shows us the reverential fellowship in which St. Paul lived with the risen Lord, and the natural spontaneity with which he prayed to Him.

What are the Apostle’s reasons for giving Christ this Divine place? (a) The first is the relation which He sustains to humanity as Redeemer, and which is indicated by the title ‘Second Adam.’ As Adam was head, representative, and type of the race that derived from him, so Christ by death and resurrection is Head and Representative of a new, redeemed humanity (Romans 5). For human development has these two stages, the earthly or carnal and the spiritual. Now ‘the one element in the conception of Christ that ruled the thoughts of the Apostle was that of Spirituality’ (Somerville). The spirit of holiness is the inmost and deepest reality of His own life, and of the life that emanates from Him; He is the organic Head of a new spiritual creation, and, as such, mediates to men the renewing grace of God.

Many scholars, not altogether unnaturally, hold that St. Paul borrowed this turn’of thought from the’Jewish-Hellenic conception of a pre-existent heavenly Man, the archetypal model of man’s creation, and that he accordingly conceived Christ as having existed as Man in heaven prior to His being incarnate. Certainly we can perceive that the Apostle was acquainted with these ideas. Nevertheless, no decisive proof can be given that he allowed them to exercise any particular influence on his view of Christ. At all events, this is true of the parallel he draws between Adam and.Christ in Romans 5 ■ ; and in the passage in which this ‘Heavenly Man’ theory has its chief support, 1 Corinthians 15:45–47. t^o points may be noted which lessen the probability of Alexandrian descent— first, that the Heavenly Man, for whom Philo’a designation is the ‘First Man,’ is by St. Paul called the ‘Second Man’; secondly, that the important concluding phrase ‘the second man is from heaven,’ is referred by many of the best exegetes to the glorified Lord, the sense being that at His resurrection Christ became the life-giving head of a new race. It is all but incredible that this ‘Heavenly Man’ idea, which can only be proved to exist in one chapter of one Epistle, really was the fans et origo of the Apostle’s Christology ; and in any case it is out of keeping with his undoubtedascription of .personal Divinity to Jesus . On the other hand, it was eminently natural that Jewish theology should often supply the framework of his ar^ment, or supply him with terms by which to give expression to truths springing directly from his faith in Christ. That faith, we have seen, grasps Jesus Christ as Redeemer of the world, and thereafter proceeds to view Him reflectively as sustaining a unique relation to God and to mankind.

(6) St. Paul’s second reason for placing Christ so high is that he believes Him to have been Son of God originally. In a heavenly life prior to incarnation. The incidental fashion in which allusion is made to this fact, as to something familiar to all Christians, is very impressive. As to specific passages, we may not be able to lay very much weight on the expression: ‘God sent forth his Son’ (Galatians 4:4), for it might conceivably be used of one who came into the world simply with the commission of a prophet. But the underlying idea becomes plainer in 1 Corinthians 10:4, which affirms that the rock which followed the fathers in the desert, and from which they drank, was Christ; in other words. He is represented as having personally intervened in OT history. And no doubt at all is possible as to 2 Corinthians 8:9: ‘Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich,’ where it is unmistakably asserted not only that His life on earth was less glorious than His life in heaven, but — a yet more sublime idea — that His entrance upon the lower estate of being was a voluntary act. Real pre-existence, i.e. independent and self-conscious life, is even more deliberately affirmed in the great passage Philippians 2:5–11. Here it is stated — and the entire appeal hinges on the statement — ^that before He came as man Christ was in possession of a Divine form of being, and spontaneously renounced it to assume the form of a servant. Without permitting himself to speculate as to the transcendent relations of the pre-existent Christ to God, St. Paul clearly pictures Him as enjoying, in that prior life, the same kind of being as God enjoys. And the ethical motif of the passage is the great conception that while it was open to Christ so to use the infinite powers inherent in His Divine nature as to compel men, without more ado, to worship Him as God, He resolved to reach this high dignity — of Lordship recognized and adored — by the path of humiliation, suffering, and death. But while we are justified in saying that Jesus was constituted Lord by His exaltation, and that this was in some sense the reward of His self-emptying, we must avoid every kind of language which suggests that to St. Paul the ascension of Christ was a deification. To a Jew the idea that a man might come to be God would have been an intolerable blasphemy. ‘It is to be noted that the increased glory which St. Paul and all the NT viniters regard as pertaining to Christ after His resurrection has only to do with His dignity. His " theocratic position," not with His essential personality. He has simply become in actuality that which He already was substantially’ (Kennedy).

4. In view of all this, it is not surprismg that the Apostle should ascribe to Christ a part in the creating of the world and an original relation to man. This comes out especially in the Epistles of the Imprisonment, notably in Colossians 1:13–18, of which Lightfoot gives the following luminous paraphrase:

‘The Son of the Father’s love, in whom we have ourredemption, is the image of the invisible God, the first-begotten of all creation. For in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible; all things have been created through Him and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. This la He who is the Head of the Body, the Church. In both spheres, the natural and the spiritual, He has the pre-eminence.*

The chief predications which are made here should be noted: (1) Christ is the instrument of creation; (2) He sustains all; (3) all moves on to Him as goal. The words ‘in him were all things created’ ought to be taken in correlation to these other clauses, ‘in him all things consist,’ and ‘he is the head of the body, the church’; and when we take them so, they assert that Christ was appointed by God Creator of all things qua the Person in whom the world, through the work of reconciliation, now finds its organic centre. His function as Creator is proleptically viewed as conditioned by His subsequent worli as Redeemer; but the expression of the thought is rendered well nigh impossible by the mysterious relations of eternity and time. Just as even in his conception of the pre-existent One, St. Paul never loses sight of the crucified and risen Saviour, neither can he think of Christ as Creator and Sustainer of the world except as he mediates the idea to his own mind through the present certainty of Christ the Redeemer. In a word, the Creatorship of Christ is never dwelt upon for its own sake, but always in relation to His Saviourhood. It is strikingly so in a verse which in various ways forms a parallel to the verses just commented on, 1 Corinthians 8:6, ‘Tobit 9 is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him.’ Here the ideas of creation and redemption are held and envisaged together, redemption being the experimental idea from which the mind starts, as it also is the exalted Lord who is the subject of predication. It is a noteworthy fact that the risen Christ should thus be bracketed with God the Father in a verse which actually insists on monotheism.

On the other hand, one of the most bafHing problems of NT theology is just the fact that St. Paul should combine with these plain assertions of Christ’s Divinity a number of statements of a different complexion. No candid exegete will deny that over and over again Christ is somehow given a place inferior to God, His entire redeeming Work and position being traced back directly to the Father. We have such expressions as ‘God sent forth his Son’ (Galatians 4:4), ‘He that spared not his own Son’ (Romans 8:32). ‘God hath highly exalted him’ (Philippians 2:9) in which either the gift of Christ to the world, or the bestowal of exalted glory on Christ Himself, is declared to be God’s act. All is accepted, endured, achieved ‘to the glory of God the Father.’ Still more explicit is 1 Corinthians 11:3 ‘The head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God’; and in 1 Corinthians 15:28 — a passage which strangely touched the imagination of the Greek and Latin Fathers — Christ is portrayed as delivering up the Kingdom to God, and as finally submitting even Himself to a higher, ‘that God may be all in all.’ These statements, as we have seen, are to be found on the same pages which unambiguously aflirra Christ’s real Deity. It may be that St. Paul nowhere names Christ ‘God,’ and that 2 Thessalonians 1:12. Titus 2:13, and Romans 9:5 must all be otherwise explained; yet a verse like Colossians 2:9 ‘in Him dweUeth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,’ asserting that in Christ there is given as a unity, or in organic oneness, the whole sum of qualities and attributes which make God to be God, Is quite decisive as to the Apostle’s real belief. St. Paul does not give us much help, perhaps, in solving this antinomy. Questions as to the origin of Christ’s being in God, or the relation of the personal energies of the Son to those of the Father, did not, apparently, come before him. It is possibly a true exegesis which holds that in verses of a subordinationist tendency the subject of predication is Christ viewed as a historic person, the Incarnate Mediator, One who has fulfilled on earth a certain vocation for humanity, and, from the nature of the case, has submitted Himself to God in the fulfilment of it. But there is at least as much help for the intelligence in the view that while a certain subordination of Christ indubitably forms part of NT teaching, we may still think of Him as being one in nature with God, in the light of certain human analogies which are our only guide. Father and son, or ruler and subject, may still be of one nature, although there exist between them relations of higher and lower.

It has been argued that for St. Paul the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit are really one and the same. This ia a hasty deduction f rem the firat clause of 2 Corinthians 3:17 ‘Now the Lord is the Spirit’: but it is at once refuted by the second clause, — which speaks of ‘the Spirit of the Lord," so making a distinction between the two, — as well as by the threefold blessing of 2 Corinthians 13:14. What the Apostle means by his form of verbal identification is rather the religious certainty that Jesus Christ, In whom God redeems .men, and the Spirit, in whom He -communicates Himself to men, are so indissolubly bound up in one, act so absolutely for the same end through the same means, that from the standpoint of the practical issue they are seen as merged m each other ‘They are one as the fountain and the stream are one.’ Christ in you, or the Spirit of Christ in you; thrae are not different realities; but the one is the method of the other’ (Moberly).

5. The Christology of St. Paul, it ought to be said with emphasis, is built firmly on the foundation of the primitive doctrine. After all, his view of Christ, as the incarnate Son of God, was never, so far as our knowledge goes, the subject of denial or controversy in the early Church; if it was an advance, therefore, on the first beliefs, it was such an advance as no one felt to be out of line with what they already held. But of course his conception of the Lord does go beyond the primitive Christology. Instances are his view of Christ in relation to the universe, alike in its creation and in its maintenance; also,, perhaps, his permanent conjunction, not to say identification, of the Spirit of God with the principle of life and energy that constitutes the personality of Christ. Further, we must allow for the influence of the intellectual categories of his time, even upon his doctrine of Christ’s Person. Ideas borrowed from Jewish apocalyptic come out in certain pictures of the Lord’s return; and in the statement that the rock which followed the Israelites in the desert was Christ, we may see a vestige of Alexandrian typology. ‘The last Adam’ is possibly a Rabbinical conception. But at most these things form part of the setting for his purely Christian thinking; they were a mode in which St. Paul’s mind naturally expressed itself; they were essential if the truth he had grasped was to be passed on to his contemporaries; and in this lies their abundant historical justification. It is vastly more important to note that the Apostle’s profoundest afiirmations regarding the Lord Jesus Christ, so far from having faded into obsolescence, still elude us by their very greatness. They are still beyond us; we can but throw out our minds at an infinite reality; and the believing intelligence will for ever strive in vain adequately to discern and express all that St. Paul saw in Christ when he was moved to say: ‘In him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth.’

IV. The Chhistology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. — The writer of this Epistle develops his view of the Person of Christ as an implied presupposition of His priestly vocation. Christ is the Mediator of the new and better covenant (12 9:15 8) and its superiority to the old covenant rests upon the incomparable dignity of the Eternal High Priest.

1. The picture which is drawn of the historical Jesus is full and intimate; indeed, no NT book sets forth the real humanity of our Lord with more moving power. Particular incidents of His life are referred to (Hebrews 2:3, 4 5:7 12:2 13:12) and the name ‘Jesus’ occurs 10 times. He passed through the normal development of human life, and learned by suffering (5:8). The infirmities and temptations common to man were His also (4:15. a verse which ‘means not only that He conquered the temptation, but also that He was moved by no sinful impulses of His own’ (Weiss)). Elsewhere His sinlessness is affirmed categorically, in its bearing on His redeeming work (7:26) The human virtues of Jesus are brought out in a fashion unique in the NT: His fidelity (2:17 3:2), His trust (2:13), His piety (5:7). By this course of experience He was finally ‘made perfect’ (5:9) not that at any time evil really touched Him, but that the potencies of absolute goodness that were in Him were completely evoked by a moral discipline which rendered Hira the great High Priest of humanity. Nevertheless, He does not, as man, gain His perfect unity with God’s will, but is represented as bringing it with Him into the world (10:5–7). Life on earth, although an imperfect medium of His higher nature, is a humiliation demanded by His office or vocation as the Sanctifler of sinners. He assumed flesh, not merely to make Himself apprehensible, but in order to suffer, by tasting death for every man; and to the bitterness and shame of death for Jesus there are pathetic allusions (5:7, 8 13:12).

2. In spite of all this vivid portraiture of the humanity of Jesus, the writer well-nigh outstrips Paul in the loftiness of his Christology. As with other NT believers, his mind starts from the Exalted One (cf. 9:28). whom he conceives habitually as High Priest within the veil, but a Priest who has sat down on the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens (8:1) and from this Messianic dignity he argues back to Jesus’ original nature. In 1:2 Christ is announced as the ‘Son’; and statements are made regarding the Son which imply that He is more than man (!’, where He is plainly addressed as God), eternal both before and after (7:3). and transcendently related to God (l’). Thus eternal and Divine, He was made a little lower than the angels (2:9) and it touches the writer’s heart to think that in coming into the world the Son did not stop short of a genuine participation in the flesh and blood we mortals wear (2). It has been justly pointed out that in Hebrews a certain metaphysical colour has been added to the ethical sense in which the term ‘Son’ occurs in other Apostolic writings; although we ought to take this distinction of metaphysical and ethical with great caution. Still, a proof of the primitive feeling which underlies the whole is given in the fact that in Hebrews, precisely as in the Synoptics, the Sonship of Christ is looked upon as the basis of His Messiahship, for it is to fulfil the Messianic function of salvation that the Son comes into the world.

3. A very difficult question is whether in this Epistle ‘Son’ is applied to the pre-incarnate One, or to the incarnate Christ only. The passage chiefly in dispute is l’-*. No one can doubt that the writer’s mind starts from Christ the Son, a,s known in history and in His exaltation, and holds these revealing facts steadily in the foreground of his thought ; but does he go further back, and carry this Sonship into the pre-existeut state? A. B. Davidson says, ‘Son is His characteristic name, describing His essential relation to God, a relation unaffected by change of state’; and A. B. Bruce urges that the interest of magnifying Christ’s sacrifice requires His Sonship to be of older date than the life on earth. In favour of this view, despite weighty arguments against it, is the fact that throughout the three stages of His existence Christ is represented as personally identical. It is prima fade as Son that He is said to have acted as agent of God in the creation of the worlds (l^), or to have built the ‘house’ of the OT dispensation (3:3). But probably the point is one which exegesis by itself cannot decide; and we ought to note that a similar unavoidable ambiguity obtains in what are more or less parallel passages — Colossians 1:15 and John 1:18.

But, at all events, it is clear that Hebrews teaches the real pre-existence of Christ, whether or not the pre-existent One is designated by the title ‘Son.’ It was the reproach of Christ that Moses bore (11:26) as Lord, He laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning 1:10) He came into the world with the conscious purpose of sacrificing Himself (lO*). Little is said about the pre-existing state, yet it occupies more space than in any other NT Epistle. But the writer offers no rationale of the Incarnation; there is no passage comparable with Philippians 2:5–11; although in one place it is pointed out how close the Son came to men in taking fiesh and blood (2:14–16). The supernatural character of His being .is insisted on: ‘He did not come out of humanity. He cluded; for not only is suffering and death represented as the aim of His entrance upon human life, but the experience of His passion still remains as the ground on which He is resorted to by men as the great High Priest, who has learned sympathy through sufferings (2:18).

It is in His capacity as Son that the priestly work of Christ, in which, dying as a man, He offers Himself in and after death, is accomplished. So again, it is the essential being of the Son that is indicated when, in a striking expression (9). it is said that He offered Himself unto God ‘through an eternal spirit’; for the words mean that the Spirit which was in Him, and constituted His personal being, was indestructible by death, and enabled Him to pursue His high-priestly vocation in the heavenly sanctuary. Once more, strong emphasis is laid on the activity of Christ the Son for us in heaven, particularly as Intercessor (7 ga 4:14 13) jt ig as Son that He sits down at God’s right hand, the heir of all things, and Messianic King; as Son that He carries His offering before the face of God for us, and enters the holy place. In a word, the Sonship of Christ is the central thought of Hebrews; it supplies the ground and precondition of His being a perfect Surety of the eternal covenant.

4. A brief comparison with the Christology of St. Paul is not without interest. In both there is a distinct assertion of Christ’s pre-temporal being, and His activity in creation; the argument going back from His present exaltation to His original nature. In both Christ reaches His throne, far above the angels, by way of the cross; and the idea is suggested that at the Hesurrection or Ascension Christ first attained in status what He had always possessed by nature. In both real Divinity is combined with as distinct subordination; thus in Hebrews not Christ, but God, is Judge, and the Son’s place is not on, but on the right hand of, the throne of God (8 12). On the other hand, certain slight features of difference may be noted. In Hebrews, as contrasted with St. Paul, Christ is definitely represented as having taken flesh and blood with a view to suffering; the earthly Jesus, rather than the pre-existing One or the glorified Lord, is viewed as our example; the exaltation becomes slightly more prominent than the resurrection; the high-priestly activity in heaven fills a large place; the mystical strain of reciprocal unity with Christ is absent; nor is there any suggestion, as in 1 Corinthians 15:45–47. of a time yet to be when the reign of Christ shall close, and be merged in some final dispensation.

It is not improbable that the writer of Hebrews had felt the influence of the cultivated Jewish thought of Alexandria, that crucible of all the creeds. But while the system of Philo may have partially supplied him with a vocabulary, what appears to be certain is that this did not dictate his use of it. Thus the term ‘Logos’ is nowhere employed in the Philonic sense, nor is Christ called ‘Logos ; His regular designation rather, we have seen, is’ Son,’ as given by the (JT and Christian usage. What finally puts out of court the identification of the Son with the Logos of Philo is that the Son participates in a redeeming history, which is unthinkable for the other. Nor is there anything in Philo that could properly be compared with the High Priesthood of Christ.

V. The Apocalypse. — The Christology of the Apocalypse presents a rather perplexing problem to the historical critic. Whatever be the sources that lie behind the book, most scholars now regard it as a characteristic product of intensely Jewish Christianity; and OT and Jewish conceptions of the Messiah are certainly the foundation upon which its view of Christ is built up. Yet, on the other hand, its Christology is ‘apparently the most advanced in all the NT’ (Bousset), and seems at a few points to pass beyond the limits of Paulinism.

1. Although the book represents the heavenly rather than the earthly life of Christ, yet the personal, historic name ‘Jesus’ occurs frequently. Our Lord is described as the root and the offspring of David, and as of the tribe of Judah. Primitive Christian thought comes out in the picture of Him as ruling the nations with a rod of iron (Revelation 2:27). or, quite in terms of the Danielle passage, as ‘one like unto a son of man’ (14:14). He is repeatedly set forth in eschatological language; He is the bright and morning star (22). ushering in the day of final triumph. His redeeming work on the cross is compendiously summarized in the profoundly significant title of ‘the Lamb,’ which may almost be called the writer’s favourite designation of Him.

2. Yet all memories of history are lost in the higher view of Christ which centres in His exalted glory. It is not too much to say that the strain of praise to Christ rises from point to point until, in His essential qualities and attributes. He is frankly identified with God. He is the ‘Living One,’ whose victory over the grave has given Him the keys of death and the underworld (1:18) He can unlock the secrets of human destiny (ch. S); with eyes that are like a flame of fire He searches the reins and hearts (2:18, 23). He is ranked with God, not with finite being, in phrases like ‘the beginning of the creation of God’ (3:14; cf. Colossians 1:15). the ‘Son of God’ (2:18) who names God His Father in some unique sense (2 3:21; cf. 1:6). and ‘the Word of God’ (19). — this last being introduced with much solemnity. The specifically Divine title ‘the First and the Last’ (cf. Isaiah 44:6 and Revelation 1:8) He applies three times directly to Himself (1:17 2:8 22:13). thereby signalizing His own Person as the source and end of all that is. This claim is echoed passionately throughout the book. Notwithstanding the prohibition of 19:10, all creation unites to worship Him, in strains offered elsewhere to God Almighty (1:6; cf. 7:12) and ‘God and the Lamb’ receive united adoration (5:13 7:10). One meaning of such phenomena is plain. They are ‘the most convincing proof of the impression made by Jesus upon His disciples, one which had been sufficient to revolutionize their most cherished religious belief; for them He had the value of God’ (Anderson Scott).

3. Yet even here the subordinationist note which is audible in other Apostolic writings does not fail. Thus the revelation forming the book was given to Jesus Christ by God (1:1) His authority over the nations He has received of His Father (2:27) and more than once, in the letters to the Churches, the phrase ‘my God’ is put upon His lips. Similarly, in 3:21 and 5:9 there appears the conception — present also in Philippians 2:5–11 and John 17:4, 5 — that our Lord’s risen glory is the issue and the reward of His saving word. In reply to the argument that this is incongruous with pre-existent Divinity, Weiss remarks, with great point, that so far from the assertion of His original Divine nature being neutralized by this representation of Jesus’ exalted glory as the gift of God, the one is rather the ground and justification of the other.

VI. JoHANNiNB Chhistologt. — 1. The view of Christ presented in the Fourth Gospel, it should be noted at the outset, is based firmly upon common NT beliefs. The writer — a Jew and an Apostle — declares it his purpose to prove that Jesus is the Messiah (Jn 20:31). though no doubt he went far beyond primitive Christian reflexion in perceiving all that Messiahship implies. This interest is everywhere present. Thus in John 1:49 Nathanael hails Jesus as the Christ on the ground of His preterhuman insight; the woman of Samaria is led to the same conclusion; and a similar movement of thought on the part of the multitude is indicated by their question (7:31) ‘When the Christ cometh, will he do more signs than this man?’ And the work entrusted to Jesus is specifically Messianic. He comes to raise the dead, to execute judgment, to confer the gift of the Spirit according to the ancient promise, to take to Himself universal Lordship (3:35 16:15) — in a word, to exert a delegated but competent authority from above, such as none but the Messiah could assume. Only, the Jewish horizon has disappeared. All that Jesus is as Messiah, He is for the whole world.

2. It is observable, further, that the writer deliberately makes Christology his main theme. The relation of the Father to the Son, thrown up so conspicuously on one occasion in the Synoptics (Matthew 11:27). now becomes the central interest. The book opens with an assertion of the Godhead of the Son (Prologue), and it closes upon the same note (20:28). What, in the self-revelation of daily life and act, the Synoptist had shown Christ to be, the Fourth Evangelist explicitly proclaims and demonstrates that He is; or, as we inay express it otherwise, while Matthew, Mark, and Luke exhibit Jesus as Messiah, the Gospel of John goes a step further, and discloses the ultimate ground on which Messiahship rests. Christ is Messiah, in the absolute sense of that word, because He is the Eternal Son, the personal, articulate expression of God, in whom the Father is perfectly revealed; and the changing incidents of the narrative are so disposed as to bring out, by a variety of selected scenes, both the content of this revelation and its diverse reception by men.

As to the historical accuracy of the discourses, it ought to be said that there is a growing consent among scholars that Jesus’ words have passed through the medium of the writer’s mind, and somewhat taken the colour of his mature thinking. As Haupt has expressed it, the teaching of Jesus has bound up with it an authentic commentary, showing that all, and more than all, the truth which St. John and the Church around him had learned by the close of the Apostolic age was really present in the teaching of the historic Jesus. It is thus that we can understand the comparative absence of growthorprogressalikein Jesus’ self -revelation and in thedisciples’ apprehension of it; ‘to the Evangelist looking back, the evolutionary process was foreshortened’ (Sanday). He carries out Jesus teaching about Himself to its last consequence; he views it svb specie tetemitaiis: but he does so with unerring perception , for it is remarkable that when we analyze a Johannine discourse into its simplest elements we invariably come to what is present also in the Synoptics. This being granted, however, it ought to be considered an axiom that the writer’s conception of Christ had undergone along, rich development. Influences which must have acted on it can easily be imagined, such as his daily communion with Christ in prayer, the general teaching of St. Paul, of which he cannot have been ignorant, and the challenge of the wistful religious questionings everywhere current in the Grseco-Romau world of his day. Unless experience is something of which God can make no use in conveying truth to man, these forces, playing on the writer’s memories of the historic Jesus, must nave gone to evoke an ever fuller appreciation of His significance for humanity. Hence we may conclude that i;he Fourth Gospel is the work of one who, in the late evening of life, was moved to communicate to men the intuition he had reached of the permanent and essential factors in the Person of Christ — His unique relation to God as only-begotten Son, His unique relation to men as Life and Truth; and who, in doing so, has really seized the inmost centre of the self -consciousness of Jesus with greater firmness and profounder truth than even the Synoptic writers.