Philippians 2:5

Let this mind be R.V., Have this mind; adopting a reading different in form but scarcely so in import from that taken for the A.V., which fairly represents either reading.

In the great passage which follows we have a suggestive example of Christian moral teaching. One of the simplest and most primary elements of duty is being enforced, and it is enforced by appealing to the inmost secrets of the truth of the Person and Work of Christ. The spiritual and eternal, in deep continuity, descends into the practical. At the present time a powerful drift of thought goes in the direction of separating Christian theology from practical Christianity; the mysteries of our Lord's Person and Work from the greatness of His Example. It may at least check hasty speculations in this direction to remember that such a theory rends asunder the teaching of the New Testament as to its most characteristic and vital elements. The anti-doctrinal view of Christianity is a theory of it started strictly and properly de novo. See further Appendix E.

whichwas] The verb is not in the Greek, but is necessarily implied. Meanwhile the sacred character which came out in the mysterious past (" was") of the Lord's pre-temporal glory, still and for ever isHis character, His "mind."

in Christ Jesus It is observable that he calls the Lord not only "Christ" but "Jesus," though referring to a time before Incarnation. Historically, He had yet to be "anointed" (Christ), and to be marked with His human Name (Jesus). But on the one hand the Person who willed to descend and save us is identically the Person who actually did so; and on the other hand what is already decreed in the Eternal Mind is to It already fact. Cp. the language of Revelation 13:8.

E. CHRISTOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY (Ch. Philippians 2:5)

"A Christianity without Christ is no Christianity; and a Christ not Divine is one other than the Christ on whom the souls of Christians have habitually fed. What virtue, what piety, have existed outside of Christianity, is a question totally distinct. But to hold that, since the great controversy of the early time was wound up at Chalcedon, the question of our Lord's Divinity has generated all the storms of the Christian atmosphere, would be simply an historical untruth.

"Christianity … produced a type of character wholly new to the Roman world, and it fundamentally altered the laws and institutions, the tone, temper and tradition of that world. For example, it changed profoundly the relation of the poor to the rich … It abolished slavery, and a multitude of other horrors. It restored the position of woman in society. It made peace, instead of war, the normal and presumed relation between human societies. It exhibited life as a discipline … in all its parts, and changed essentially the place and function of suffering in human experience … All this has been done not by eclectic and arbitrary fancies, but by the creed of the Homoousion, in which the philosophy of modern times sometimes appears to find a favourite theme of ridicule. The whole fabric, social as well as personal, rests on the new type of character which the Gospel brought into life and action."

W. E. Gladstone (- Nineteenth Century," May1888; pp. 780 784).