Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/48

28 in those days to think otherwise. But there was always one immense qualification of this 'purely historical' view. Paul never thought of Christ, and could not think of Him, except as risen and exalted. Christianity may exist without any speculative Christology, but it never has existed and never can exist without faith in a living Saviour. It is quite possible that there was a stage in his Christian life when Paul had asked no theological questions about Jesus of Nazareth whom God had made by His exaltation both Lord and Christ. It is quite possible that he received the Holy Spirit and the apostolic commission and preached the gospel with divine power and blessing, before he had asked any question about the nature of Christ, or His original relation to God or to the human race, or about the mode in which the historical personality originated in which he now recognized the only Lord and Saviour. It is not his speculative Christology, if we are to call it such, which secures for Christ His place in Paul's religious life; Christ holds that place by another title, before the speculative Christology appears. The importance of that Christology lies not so immediately in itself as in the testimony it bears to the immense stimulation of intelligence by the new faith. If we look, for example, at the Epistles to the Thessalonians, we find no trace of Christology in the technical sense. There is an entire absence of speculative construction or interpretation of the Person of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is simply the historical person, known to Paul's contemporaries, who had been put to death by the Jews, and whom God had raised from the dead. There is not a word about preexistence, or the incarnation, or an eternal relation to to God, or a universal relation to men. Yet the person who is thus simply conceived is one on whom Christians are absolutely dependent; as all men live and move and have their being in God, so Christians live and move