individual experience, but could not possibly count on being generally understood in the church. Since the doctrine of redemption has for its starting-point a ransoming of men from the curse of the law through the atoning death of Christ, the absolute claim of the law to the satisfaction of its demands and the fulfilment of its threats is thereby assumed, an assumption which is entirely based on the Pharisaic doctrine of the law. But how does that agree with Paul's new view that the law was only intended to hold men fast in the prison of sin until the coming of their deliverance through faith in the Son of God? How could the law, whose function was of so humble a character and of only temporary duration, make any claim at all to atoning satisfaction for transgressions which, after all, it had itself called forth, and had been intended to call forth? Either, one might be inclined to think, the Pharisaic doctrine of the law is valid, or the Pauline doctrine, but to attempt to maintain both together, as is done in the Pauline doctrine of the law on the one side and of redemption on the other, is simply a contradiction, which might remain concealed from Paul himself, in whose breast the two souls of the Pharisee and the apostle constantly struggled together, but which it could hardly be supposed that the thought of the church could assimilate. To make clear to ourselves the state of the matter, to set clearly before us these various practical and theoretical difficulties and offences of Paulinism, is needful, because, unless this is done, it is impossible to arrive at a right understanding and a just estimate of the post-apostolic development of the theology of the Church.

THE THEOLOGY OF PAUL

CHAPTER XV

REDEMPTION THROUGH JESUS CHRIST

THE redemption from the power of sin and death which the law was unable to effect, since it was too weak to overcome the flesh, God, according to the Pauline teaching, accomplished by sending His Son, who was a heavenly Spirit, in a human and fleshly form. Through His death and resurrection sin and death were overcome, and a new life in the spirit of sonship to God was opened up to man. Paul, since the occurrence of his conversion through the vision of Christ, felt himself a new creature in whom the old man, the flesh, had passed away and a supernatural life had been produced by the heavenly power of the Divine Spirit; and he had seen in Christ the cause and the prototype of this transformation. He is the Lord, who in His essential being is a quickening Spirit, in His origin heavenly, who has appeared upon earth in the flesh, in order, through the surrender of the flesh to death, to wipe out the debt of sin, to annul the curse of the law, to break the power of death, and to bring the spirit of righteousness and life to victorious sovereignty. To express it psychologically we might say: What Paul had experienced

in himself through his faith in Christ—namely, that through the surrender of the natural ego the true life is won, the life of sonship to God, of peace, joy, freedom, love, inspiration,—it was this principle of the religion of Jesus which he saw embodied in the Person of Jesus Christ, and revealed in His death as man's exemplar. But this ethico-religious principle clothed itself for Paul-on the assumptions of that animistic popular metaphysic which had led to the hypostatising in Jewish theology of the Divine Wisdom as a personal mediator in the representation of a personal spiritual being who descended from heaven and took human form in order, as the man Christ Jesus, to become, through His death and resurrection, the founder of a new Humanity. This conception was already a departure in some measure from the historical foundation, and prepared the way for the gnosticising doctrine of Christ of the later Church dogmatic; but, for Paul, this hypostatising of the Spirit of Christ was only the temporal form in which the truth of his Christian faith, of which his experience had convinced him, presented itself to his consciousness, and a way of expressing the universal value, going beyond anything that was individual, national, or temporal, of this truth. The religion of Jesus could only be made the universal means of salvation for the world at the price of setting the supra-temporal principle in abstraction from the individual person of the historical Jesus, personifying this abstraction as the Spirit of Christ, and transferring it to heaven. This psychological genesis of the Pauline representation of Christ explains how it was that the emphasis of the religious interest fell neither

on the earthly life of Christ nor the pre-mundane existence of the Spirit of Christ, but on the postmundane life of the risen Christ Jesus as the "Son of God in power," the "Lord who is the Spirit." On the earthly life of Christ apart from His birth and death, Paul seems scarcely to have reflected, and even to the pre-temporal existence of the Christ-Spirit there are found in the older letters only rare incidental references, which nevertheless are sufficient to indicate that Paul, from the very beginning, attributed to this metaphysical spiritual Being a peculiar position as mediator between God and man and the People of Israel.

We take as our starting-point Rom. i. 3 f., where Paul attaches himself most closely to the view of the primitive community, which thought of Christ's elevation to theocratic sonship to God, i.e. to Messianic dignity, as closely bound up with His resurrection. While, however, according to the belief of the primitive community, the sonship to God only designated a position of theocratic dignity in exactly the same way as the sonship to David, Paul distinguished between the Davidic Sonship and the Divine Sonship in such a way that they describe two characteristics of the one Person of Christ which spring from different origins. By His human birth of the race of David (a statement which implies His natural generation by a human father) Christ became the Son of David according to the flesh; but in this, the earthly form of His manifestation, He is still only the Christ according to the flesh in the sense of the Jewish Messiah; His Divine Sonship is not fully realised. That only came to

pass when He was "appointed Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness from the resurrection onwards." Therefore, the Davidic Sonship, founded upon His birth according to the flesh, was followed, though only at the resurrection, by His appointment by God to the real and effectual Divine Sonship. The possibility of this lay in the fact that Jesus was the Spirit of Holiness; that means, not begotten as to His body by the Holy Spirit, nor having received the Holy Spirit as an endowment at baptism, but that His personal being, His inner man, consisted originally of a holy Spirit. "This practically gives the material ground of His Divine Sonship in the super-theocratic metaphysical sense, His descent from heaven" (Holtzmann). The latter is, it is true, not directly mentioned in our passage, but it is certainly implied, because a holy and spiritual being does not, like a fleshly psychic man, originate from the earth, but from heaven. For, according to 1 Cor. xv. 47, the first man was of the earth and therefore earthly, "the Second Man is the Lord from heaven," and (verse 45) "the first man, Adam, became a living soul, the last Adam a quickening spirit." According to this passage also Christ first became1 by His resurrection a Spiritual Being, who, as the effectual

1 Practically it is of subordinate importance whether in the second member of the phrase in verse 45, the éyévero which is to be understood is interpreted strictly on the analogy of the first as was created,” or, as is equally possible, simply in the sense "became." In the former case the reference would be to the origin of the Spirit of Christ at creation, its influence, however (in the main point, namely, as life-giving power), being supposed to remain dormant up to the resurrection of Christ. The other interpretation has the advantage of simplicity.