Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/43

Rh all things under Him, that God may be all in all, is sometimes cited to justify minimising or disparaging views of Christ's place, but nothing could be more inept. The person here spoken of has already brought to nought 'every principality, and every authority and power.' He has put all His enemies under His feet. He has destroyed death. He has fulfilled all the purposes and promises of God. All that God has designed to do for men, He has now done through Him as Messianic King, and the ends of His Kingship being achieved Christ hands over the kingdom to His Father. But that does not touch the fact that these ends have been achieved through Him, and that they can be achieved through no other. What other could do what Christ is here represented as having done for men? What other could hold the place in the apostle's mind which He holds? What other could be called simpliciter 'the Son'? The handing over of the kingdom to the Father does not compromise the solitary greatness which is conveyed by this name; it leaves the Son in that incomparable place which is suggested by His own solemn words in Mark 1332.

The religious attitude of Paul to Christ is made plainer still by the passages in which he involuntarily or deliberately contrasts Him with men. Thus in defending his apostleship to the Galatians he speaks of himself as an apostle who did not owe his calling to a human source nor get it through a human channel, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead (Gal. 11). The last words show that when he mentions Jesus Christ it is the Risen Lord he has in view, and nothing could bring out more clearly than the broad contrast of this sentence how instinctively and decisively Paul sets the Risen Christ side by side with God the Father in contrast to all that is human. That is his place in the Christian religion. He is not in any sense one of those