Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/51

Rh have; in His resurrection we see the first fruits of a new race which shall wear the image of the heavenly man. It may indeed be said that any man is kin to all humanity, but not any man is kin in such a sense that men of all races can find their centre and rallying-point in Him. The progress of Christian missions is the demonstration in point of fact that Christ is the second Adam, and while His true humanity is asserted in this, as it is taken for granted everywhere in the New Testament, it leaves Him still in a place which is His alone. When Paul thinks of Christ as the second Adam, he does not reduce Him to the level of common humanity, as if He were only one more in the mass; on the contrary, the mass is conceived as absorbed and summed up in Him. It is not a way of denying, it is one way more of asserting, His peculiar place.

(3) The same may be said with even greater confidence of Christ as He is presented to us in the later Epistle to the Colossians.1 We have here to do not with a historical individual whom God has exalted — not with a representative or universal person who is Man rather than one particular man — but with a person who can only be characterised as eternal and divine. When Jesus is represented as the Christ, it is as though He were explained by reference to the history of Israel; as the second Adam, he can be understood only when the reference is widened to take in the constitution and fortunes of the whole human race; but in the later mind of Paul there is something more profound and far-reaching than either. It is not possible to do justice to Jesus until we realise that in Him we are in contact with the eternal truth and being of God. This is the burden of the Epistle to the Colossians. What comes to us and acts upon us in Christ is nothing less than the eternal truth of God's being and character; it is not adequately 1See also I Cor. 86.