and spiritual, just and good; on the other, it is the letter which "killeth," it produces only wrath, makes transgression to abound, is only a tutor and guardian appointed for a limited time, standing on the same footing with the nature-divinities of the heathen. [The reference is to such passages as Gal. iv. 3, where some exegetes interpret στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου in this sense.] In the heathen world, too, there is a natural moral law written in the heart, and a social order which tends to good, and praiseworthy efforts directed to high ends; nevertheless all men have sinned and come short of the praise of God, and are justified only by grace for Christ's sake. Believers in Christ, as being justified and chosen, are assured of the salvation foreordained for them by His gracious counsel, have no accusers, no condemnation, to fear, cannot be separated by any hostile power from the love of God which is assured to them in Christ; yet they, too, must appear before the judgment-seat of God, or of Christ, to receive the reward of their deeds, and the possibility of their rejection is not excluded. Christians who have died remain asleep until the second coming of Christ, when, awakened by the last trump, they shall arise and meet Him in the air, and thenceforward continue in His presence; on the other hand, the apostle looks forward joyfully to his "departure" in the conviction that he will immediately be at home with the Lord, will receive the habitation prepared for him in heaven, and will never be found naked (disembodied). At the final End, when all enemies have been overcome, even Christ will submit Himself to the Father in order that God (alone) may be all in all; and yet Christ is made

Lord over living and dead, that all in heaven and in earth and below the earth may acknowledge Him as Lord.

Here is a rich field of activity for the systematic and harmonising framer of dogma; the historian, however, lets these disparate assertions stand as they are, and explains them by the inter-play of various motives; now the religious interest preponderates, and now the ethical. Sometimes the continued influence of the Jewish groundwork of his beliefs is traceable, at others the distinctive note of Christian piety is emphatically sounded. That Paul himself felt no need, and made no attempt, to smooth down these unevennesses and harmonise these dissonances, need not surprise us in an apostle who expressly testifies of himself that his speech was not with persuasive words of (scholastic) wisdom but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that his word was not of man, but of God, not learnt from human wisdom but from the Spirit which we have received from God (1 Cor. ii. 4, 12 f.; 1 Thess. i. 5, 13). And, as a fact, his theology is not artistically composed but "inspired," not a result of cool reflection, of scholastic dialectic and argumentation, but of that enthusiastic intuition which is less akin to scientific thinking than to the method of conceiving and producing which is proper to the artist. In religious, as in artistic, intuition, what has long moved and stirred the soul in its very depths, comes to immediate, unsought, involuntary expression, and for that very reason makes the impression of being a truth of experience, laying hold with irresistible power of the souls of the hearers: it was the intuitive

character of Paul's doctrine that made his missionary preaching so marvellously successful. But the reverse of this practical strength is theoretic weakness. Intuition gives, so to speak, an instantaneous photograph of the soul-life, it brings out the state of consciousness and mood of mind at the moment with wonderful vividness and freshness, but it is for that very reason wholly subjective, one-sided, aphoristic, inconsistent ; for the different elements of objective truth are photographed by intuition, not in their mutual relations, but each as at a given point of time it fills and dominates the soul to the exclusion of all else. The different sides of Christian truth, which in the living personality are bound together by the unity of the character in such a way that now one and now another comes into the foreground of consciousness, can only be presented in the utterances of the inspired prophet and apostle in a fragmentary form, and subject to many inconsistencies and obscurities.

THE APOSTLE PAUL

CHAPTER VI

PAUL AND THE FIRST APOSTLES

MOREOVER, Paul contrasted the "spiritual" (" pneumatic") origin of his gospel not only with human wisdom, with his own thought and with the teaching of the Schools, but also with communication by tradition through the intermediary of an earthly teacher. Conscious of having been called to be an apostle directly by the will of God, or by God and Jesus Christ (1 Cor. i. 1; Gal. i. 1), he declares solemnly that he did not receive or learn the Gospel which he preached from any man, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. i. 12). With the special purpose of demonstrating his independence of the original apostles he writes (ibid., 15 ff.): "When it pleased God to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen, I conferred not with flesh and blood, neither went I up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to talk with Peter, and remained with him fourteen days, but of the other apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother." Strange as it may appear to us that the

newly-converted apostle of Christ had no desire to obtain more detailed information regarding the life and teaching of the Lord whom he was to preach from the older apostles, the immediate pupils of Jesus, yet the correctness of this self-witness cannot be doubted, for it is confirmed by the content of his own preaching as we know it from his letters. The sole historical material upon which Paul built up his theology consisted of the crucifixion of Jesus and the appearances of the risen Lord. He himself spoke of his teaching as the "word of the cross (ὁ λόγος τοῦ σTauρoû) and desired to know nothing else than Jesus Christ and Him crucified (1 Cor. i. 18, 22; ii. 2); on the other hand, the earthly life of Christ remains quite out of view, and sayings of Christ are only four times referred to: 1 Cor. vii. 10, ix. 14, xi. 24 f.; 1 Thess. iv. 15. The saying of eschatological import mentioned in the last passage is nowhere found in the Gospels, and so far as concerns the words of the institution of the Supper in 1 Cor. xi. 24 f. we have, as will be shown later, very strong grounds for the conjecture that Paul did not receive them by historical tradition, because they contain a theory of the Supper which was unknown to the primitive community, and which must have been originated by Paul himself. Perhaps the apostle himself wished to suggest that this was the case by the peculiar turn of expression which he uses: "I have received from the Lord" (άTò тоû к. ver. 23) which seems to point to a revelation or inspiration coming direct from Christ. Strange as it may appear to us, it is certainly characteristic of Paul to derive even representations of historical matters such as the words of institution