Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/52

32 explained by thinking of Israel or by thinking of humanity, but only by thinking of God. The Jesus Christ of the apostle's faith was indeed an Israelite after the flesh; He was true and complete man, born of a woman; but the ultimate truth about Him is that in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and that we are complete in Him. There is not anything that can be understood if its relation to Him is ignored. All that we call being, and all that we call redemption, must be referred to Him alone; this is the divine way to comprehend it. In Him were all things created, and it pleased the Father through Him to reconcile all things to Himself (Col. 1 and 2).

These are overwhelming ideas when we think of Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean carpenter, who had not where to lay His head, and reflect that they have to be associated with Him. The intellectual daring of them is almost inconceivable; imagination fails to realise the pressure under which the mind must have been working when it rose to the height of such assertions. Yet the seriousness and passion of the apostle are unquestionable, and the writer can only express his conviction that the attempts made to explain what may be called the Christology of Colossians by reference to Philo are essentially beside the mark. At the utmost, they help us to understand a casual expression here and there in Paul; they contribute nothing to the substance of his thought. Christ was not a lay figure that Paul could drape as he chose in the finery of Palestinian apocalyptic or of Alexandrian philosophy. He was the living Lord and Saviour, and if we can be sure of anything it is that in what the apostle says of Him there is nothing merely formal, nothing which has the character of literary or speculative borrowing, but that everything rests on experience. If Christ had been to Paul only a name in