Pauls Life

Here lay the revolutionary element in Paul's thought in rela tion to Judaism. Historically, it saved Christianity from being a mere Jewish sect. But as it was conditioned by recoil from an overdriven use of the Law in the circles in which Saul was trained, so it was at times one-sided in its emphasis on the pathological workings of the Law upon human nature, in virtue of sinful egoism. Still Saul secured mankind for ever against bondage to religious legalism. In him, as F. W. Myers put it, Desperate tides of the whole world's anguish Poured through the channels of a single heart.

He first detected the specific virus generated by Law in the "natural man," and discovered the antidote in Christ. Nor had he the Jewish Torah exclusively in view. He deals with it rather as the classic type of law in religion. "Nitimur in vetitum cupi musque negata." This is too often overlooked by Jewish critics. Paul felt reverence for the Torah in what he took to be its proper place, as secondary to faith and subordinate to Christ. In short, Paul set forth the principle of inspiration to God-likeness by a personal ideal, in place of obedience to an impersonal Law, as condition of salvation.

Christology.

Saul's conversion left Jesus the Christ as central to his new world as the Law had been to his old. An inspiring personality superseded a static code of precepts. All was summed up in Christ, and Him crucified. This was to him the essence of Christianity as distinct from Judaism. As, to the Jew, life was lived under the law or in it as native element, so to the Christian life was "in Christ" as element and law of being. Christ simply replaced the Law as form and medium of relations between God and man. In this Paul went far beyond the older apostles, whose simpler attitude to the Law had never suggested the problem of its dispensational relation to Messiah, though in fact they relied on Messiah alone for acceptance with God. The logic of this, as Paul later urged it on Peter at Antioch (Gal. ii. 15 sqq.), they did not yet perceive. But the contrast goes far ther. The very form in which Jesus was known to Saul by per sonal experience, namely, as a spiritual being—in a body already glorified in virtue of a regnant "spirit of holiness" (Rom. i. 4)— determined all his thought about Him. To this even Jesus's earthly

life, real as it was, was subordinate. The extent of Paul's knowl edge of the historical Jesus has been much debated. Besides his express appeals to Davidic birth, the institution of the Supper, the Death and Resurrection, and to precepts of "the Lord" (I Cor. vii. 1o, ix. 14; cf . Rom. xii. 14), he shows a marked in sight into the character of Jesus as it is described in the Gospels (see 2 Cor. x. I ; cf. Phil. ii. 5-8). Still his attitude to Jesus was fixed by his own experience. The varied theoretic expressions in his writings of Christ's relations to God, to mankind, and even to the universe, were to him but corollaries of this.

The most persistent element in his conception of Christ's per son started from his own experience, though it included the specu lative postulate of pre-existence in terms of some current Mes sianic form of thought. That is, Paul's new Christology expressed his peculiar sense of the all-inclusive significance of Christ in his own experience. So, too, most of his distinctive thoughts on religion, sometimes called "Paulinism" (see p. 393), were both experimental in origin and capable of statement in terms of his Christ. To him the Death and Resurrection of Christ were not isolated facts, nor yet abstractions, but had being within his own experience: so that here, and not in any second-hand facts touch ing Christ's earthly career, lay the real spiritually verified basis of the whole Christian life.

His Early Apostolate.

It is unlikely that Saul began straight way to preach all the ideas prominent in his epistles, which belong only to about io years at the end of a ministry of some 3o. Even his special mission to the Gentiles dawned on him only gradually. No doubt, as he looked back, he felt that the final purpose of God in "revealing His Son in him" had been that he "might preach Him among the Gentiles." But this does not prove that he saw it all at once as involved in "the heavenly vision." He was in tensely Jewish in feeling; "to the Jew first" was his maxim all along. Only bitter experience convinced him (Rom. ix. i sqq., x. I sqq.) that the Jews as a people would continue to spurn their birthright in God's Messiah—until the Gentiles had come in.