Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/42

22 terrible day in view, 'Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved' (Acts 221; Rom. 1013). If Peter cries to the Jews, 'There is not salvation in any other' (Acts 412), Paul writes to the Gentiles, 'Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ' (I Cor. 311). The absolute religious significance of Jesus, in all the relations of God and man, is the specific quality of the new faith as it appears in both.

The place Paul has filled in the history of Christianity justifies us in showing with some detail how this absolute religious significance of Christ pervades and dominates his spiritual life.

Sometimes it comes out quite casually, where, as we might say, he is not specially thinking about it. Thus in the salutations of his epistles he habitually wishes the churches grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 17; I Cor. 13; 2 Cor. 12; Gal. 13, etc.), or he writes to them as societies which have their being in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (I Thess. 11; 2 Thess. 11). This is exactly parallel, in the place it gives to Jesus, to what we have already seen in Acts 2. Paul would not think any more than Peter of questioning the real and complete humanity of Jesus; but when he thinks of the grace and peace by which the Church lives, he does not think of Jesus as sharing in them with himself; he sets Him instinctively and spontaneously on the side of God from whom they come. If the Father is the source, Christ is the channel of these blessings; the Father and the Son together confront men as the divine power to which salvation is due.

Sometimes, again, the place Christ has in Paul's faith comes out in a single word; for example, when in I Cor. 1528 he calls Him without qualification 'the Son.' This passage, in which the apostle tells us that when the end comes the Son Himself shall be subject to Him who put