Predestination 1. Context.-Predestination in its widest reference, as attributed to God, is ‘His eternal purpose, according to the counsel of His will, whereby, for His own glory, He hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass’ (The Shorter Catechism, A. 7). The word ‘predestinate’ appears nowhere in the AV_ of the OT, and in the NT it has now disappeared, having given place to ‘foreordain’ in the RV_ in the four places where the AV_ had it (Romans 8:29-30, Ephesians 1:5). ‘Foreordained’ of the AV_ has also given place to ‘foreknown’ in the RV_ of 1 P 1:20 (where the Gr. is προεγνωσμένου. See Foreknowledge). ‘Foreordain’ in the passages referred to above, and also in Acts 4:28 (AV_ ‘determined before’), 1 Corinthians 2:7 (AV_ ‘ordained’), renders προορίζειν, the tense employed i n these six instances being the aorist, as befitted a purpose of the Divine mind from eternity. The simple ὁ ρίζειν occurs similarly with a kindred meaning (Luke 22:22 : κατ ὰ τ ὸ ὡ ρισμένον; Acts 2:23 : τ ῇ ὡ ρισμέν ῃ βουλ ῇ; cf. Acts 10:42, Romans 1:4).
2. Connotation.-Election and predestination belong to the purpose of grace cherished in the Divine mind from all eternity; and as far as salvation is concerned they are the expression of the entire dependence of sinful man upon the grace of God from the beginning to the end. They are included together by St. Paul among the spiritual blessings bestowed upon believers; and the two transactions are regarded as taking place before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4-5). Election has in view the persons who ar e to be the objects of Divine blessing; predestination the privileges and blessings which are to be their portion (Romans 8:29-30, Ephesians 1:4-5). Foreknowledge, (πρόγνωσις, 1 P 1:2; cf. Romans 8:29 P 1:20) belongs to the same purpose of gra ce, and is spoken of b y St. Paul as the first step in the Divine plan of salvation, for it is those whom God ‘foreknew’ whom He also ‘foreordained’ to be conformed to the image of His Son. The word ‘chose’ (ε ἴ λατο) in 2 Thessalonians 2:13 includes ‘foreknew’ and ‘foreordained’ of Romans 8:29, and has itself apparently the force of ‘elected’ (ἐ ξελέξατο).
3. Predestination in the moral world.-It belongs to the very nature of God that He should have a counsel or purpose which embraces all things from the beginning to the end, and that this counsel shall be assuredly accomplished. This is again and again declared in Scripture: ‘The Lord hath made all things for himself; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil’ (Proverbs 16:4); ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure’ (Isaiah 46:10). St. Paul affirms this truth when he speaks of ‘the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will’ (Ephesians 1:11). Not only the good but the evil of the world comes under the Divine predestinating purpose, for the evil as well as the good is known beforehand to the Omniscient (Acts 15:18). ‘In him we live, and move, and have our being’ (17:28), and every act of man, whatever its motive, is performed with bodily life and strength, with faculties and powers which He has supplied, and continues to supply, to the best and to the worst, to the noblest and the most depraved. Whilst not Himself the author of sin, He not only suffers the evil designs and wicked purposes of men, but uses them (and by using them shows that He purposed to use them from all eternity) for ends of His own, even the loftiest and holiest of which men can form any conception. The death of Christ was an essential element in the Divine plan of redemption. To bring to pass the death of Christ He made use of the hatred of the Jews, the baseness of the betrayer, and the culpable weakness of the Roman governor. The first Christians discerned and acknowledged this as they lifted up their united voice in prayer to God and said: ‘Of a truth in this city against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel foreordained to come to pass’ (ὄ σα ἡ χείρ σου κα ὶ ἡ βουλ ὴ προώρισεν γενέσθαι, Acts 4:27 f.). And St. Peter declared the same truth to the Jewish multitudes on the Day of Pentecost: ‘Him being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay’ (τ ῇ ὡ ρισμέν ῃ βουλ ῇ κα ὶ προγνώσει το ῦ θεο ῦ, Acts 2:23). It was in language no less strong that the Lord Himself predicted His betrayal and death: ‘The Son of man indeed goeth, as it hath been determined (κατ ὰ τ ὸ ὡ ρισμένον, Luke 22:22): but w ce unto that man through whom he is betrayed.’ We also read that He showed ‘unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up’ (Matthew 16:21). These passages ‘combine to show that not only in the physical world, which is generally admitted to be subject in all its provinces to the absolute control and regulation of the Almighty, but also in the moral world, all circumstances and events, dependent though they may be on the voluntary actions of His intelligent creatures, are nevertheless pre-arranged and predetermined by Him; or, in other words, that whatsoever God does by His own personal agency in any department of the universe, and whatsoever He permits to be done by the agency of His rational creatures, is done or permitted by Him purposely and designedly, in accordance with his own determinate counsels, and for the accomplishment of His own contemplated ends’ (Crawford, Mysteries of Christianity, p. 303).
4. St. Paul’s view of predestination and salvation.-Predestination, however, in its bearing upon salvation finds its great exponent in the apostle Paul. That God has foreordained particular persons from all eternity to salvation and eternal life, that He has provided for them the means to that salvation in the work of Christ and the gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit, and that He bestows upon them grace to persevere to the end, is especially the teaching of St. Paul. Here, again, as in his teaching upon election, St. Paul follows up the teaching of the Lord. ‘No man can come to me,’ says Jesus, ‘except the Father which sent me draw him: and I will raise him up in the last day’ (John 6:44). ‘My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.… My Father, which hath given them unto me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand’ (10:27, 29). ‘All that which the Father giveth me shall come unto me’ is, as the older divines would have put it, an article in the Covenant of Redemption between the Father and the Son in the counsels of eternity; ‘and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out’ is an article in the Covenant of Grace wherein the offer of a free and a full salvation is made to all (6:37). It is this teaching which St. Paul casts into his own more philosophical moulds and expounds in language which has not only passed into the vocabulary of theology, but even become familiar in the religious speech of many types of evangelical Christians. ‘We know,’ he says in a characteristic utterance, ‘that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose. For whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren’ (Romans 8:28-29). The sovereignty in which St. Paul here reposes such confidence is the sovereignty of a God of grace and faithfulness; and he is confident that He who began a good work in him and his fellow-believers ‘will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ’ (Philippians 1:6). The end to which God ‘foreordained’ those whom He ‘foreknew’ is conformity to the image of His Son, that they should be sons of God after His likeness of love and holiness here and dignity and glory above. This end is that which apostolic teaching always has in view, and no other: the apostles have nothing to say of predestination to wrath or destruction (cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:2-5, 2 Thessalonians 2:13, 2 Timothy 1:9 P 1:1, 2).
In the opening passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians St. Paul sets forth in still greater detail this great doctrine (Ephesians 1:3-8). It is ‘the saints which are at Ephesus and the faithful in Christ Jesus’ who are the objects of this Divine choice and blessing, persons who are believing men and women (το ῖ ς πιστο ῖ ς) and Christians indeed (το ῖ ς ἁ γίοις). The be nefits bestowed upon them in common with the Apostle are enumerated as ‘redemption,’ ‘forgiveness of sins,’ ‘holiness,’ ‘adoption’ as sons of God, ‘a heavenly inheritance,’ and they comprise ‘every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ’-benefits not merely offered but actually enjoyed, and that in accordance with the purpose of God before the foundation of the world. The Divine choice rested upon them and took effect in them not because of their merits or attainments, not because God foresaw in them a holiness and a faith marking them out as recipients of eternal favour and blessing, but ‘according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace.’ They were chosen not because of foreseen holiness and blamelessness, but ‘in order that they should be holy and without blemish.’ If we adopt the punctuation which connects ‘in love’ (at the close of v. 4) with ‘having foreordained’ (at the commencement of v. 5), and which has some textual authority, we should hold that it was in love that He foreordained them, moved by ‘an “unseen universe” of reasons and causes wholly beyond our discovery’ (H. C. G. Moule, Cambridge Bible, ‘Ephesians,’ 1886, p. 48). Whatever the grounds of God’s predestinating purpose, they did not lie in any merits or qualifications of theirs, for they were called ‘not according to their works, but according to his own purpose and grace before the world began’ (2 Timothy 1:9). Election is a spontaneous act of God’s favour and grace, uncalled for by anything in the objects of it moving Him thereto. Before the ages of time God foreordained the glory of the saints, and with a view to that consummation He purposed both creation and redemption (1 Corinthians 2:7 with T. S. Evans’ note in Speaker’s Com. iii. [1881]).
Whilst St. Paul in speaking of God’s predestinating purpose towards the saints calls them ‘vessels of mercy which he afore prepared unto glory’ (Romans 9:23), he is careful not to attribute to the immediate agency of God ‘the destruction’ which overtakes the ‘vessels of wrath’ (Romans 9:22). These the Apostle describes as ‘fitted unto destruction,’ whom God ‘endured with much longsuffering’; and he regards them as bringing upon themselves by their obstinacy and continued sinfulness the natural penalty of their guilt, the just judgment of God. The issue of glory for the saints proceeds from God’s predestinating purpose ‘according to the good pleasure of his will’ and without any foresight of merit on their part; the issue of destruction for the wicked proceeds from the rejection of offered grace and their persistence in transgression and sin. The distinction is that set forth by St. Paul when he says: ‘The wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 6:23).
That God’s sovereignty in predestination is exercised consistently with man’s perfect liberty to choose is an antinomy which it is impossible for us to reconcile, but which, nevertheless, stands out clear in the teaching of St. Paul. In Romans 9:20-21 St. Paul appeals to one side of the antinomy and affirms the Divine sovereignty by reference to the figure of the potter; and in Romans 10:11-15 he exhibits the other side when he affirms the universality and freeness of the gospel offer, saying, ‘Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?’ Whilst St. Paul, as we have seen, affirms the doctrine of absolute predestination to life, he asserts no less clearly the truth of human responsibility. Underlying all his exhortations to holiness, and all his presentations of gospel privilege and blessing, there is the assumption of the freedom of the human will to avail itself of offered grace or to refuse it, to put forth effort or to remain inactive. Whilst the kindling of the Divine life in the soul through the exercise of faith in Christ is of sovereign grace (Ephesians 2:8), the increase and fruitfulness of the Divine life through prayer and service depends upon the same grace, as St. Paul exhorts: ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure’ (Philippians 2:12, Philippians 2:13).
5. Predestination in Christian experience.-The doctrine of predestination has the analogy of Christian experience to support it. Every Christian man is ready to acknowledge that there was some power at work for his salvation before his own freewill. ‘We love,’ says St. John, ‘because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). It is He who, through the Holy Spirit, by the use of the means of grace, quickens into spiritual life men who are dead in trespasses and sins. And there are multitudes who acknowledge their experience to have been that of Lydia, ‘whose heart the Lord opened, to give heed unto the things which were spoken by Paul’ (Acts 16:14). In Christian experience there is the conviction of this gracious influence which has been beforehand with us in showing us the guilt of sin and leading us to Christ for salvation, but there is also the consciousness of moral responsibility, requiring from us the constant exercise of faith and the diligent use of all the means of grace. ‘I could no more,’ says Erskine of Linlathen, writing to Thomas Chalmers from Herrnhut (Letters, 1800-1840, ed. Hanna, 1877), ‘separate the belief of predestination from my idea of God, than I could separate the conviction of moral responsibility from my own consciousness. I do not, to be sure, See how these two things coincide, but I am prepared for my own ignorance on these points. We know things, not absolutely as they are in themselves, but relatively as they are to us and to our practical necessities.’ There we must be content to leave the antinomy, believing that though it is beyond our limited powers to reconcile, it is reconciled in the mind of the All-knowing and Eternal God.
6. Practical applications.-The doctrine of predestination has practical applications full of comfort and encouragement. A reasonable assurance of salvation finds in the eternal decree, whose sole cause is the good pleasure and eternal will of God, its most certain and abiding ground. To have a well-grounded persuasion, through the fruit of the Spirit and the evidences of the new life, that one is of the number of those whom God foreknew and foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son, cannot fail on the one hand to fill one with gratitude and humility, and on the other to stimulate one to the pursuit of holiness and all the graces of the Christian life. The belief that God in His predestinating purpose has His elect-known to Him when unknown to man-in every community and every congregation where Christ is preached, is an encouragement to faithful ministry, as it was to St. Paul when in a vision of the night the Lord said to him: ‘I have much people in this city’ (Acts 18:10). ‘The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination,’ says the Westminster Confession (ch. iii. 8), ‘is to be handled with special prudence and care, that men attending to the will of God revealed in His word, and yielding obedience thereunto, may, from the certainty of their effectual vocation, be assured of their eternal election. So shall this doctrine afford matter of praise, reverence, and admiration of God, and of humility, diligence, and abundant consolation to all that sincerely obey the Gospel.’
Literature.-C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1872, i. 535 ff.; T. J. Crawford, Mysteries of Christianity, 1874, p. 291 ff.; John Forbes, Predestination and Freewill, 1878; J. B. Mozley, Predestination2, 1878; B. Jowett, The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans, 1894, ii. 870; J. Drummond, Studies in Christian Doctrine, 1907, p. 463; T. Haering, The Christian Faith, 1913, p. 788ff.
T. Nicol.
PRE- EXISTENCE OF CHRIST
With regard to pre-existence, the apostolic Scriptures furnish material for the two-fold conclusion, that it does not belong to the primary data of Christian faith in the Historic and Exalted Jesus, but that it is a necessary implicate of that faith. It forms no element in the primitive doctrine recorded in the opening chapters of Acts. Under the impulse of the Spirit, the conviction of their Master’s resurrection wrought in the first disciples a victorious re-assertion of faith in Him as the Messianic Redeemer. He is proclaimed as ‘both Lord and Christ’; and under the category of Messiahship this primitive gospel involves all that is characteristic in historical Christianity (See Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, p. 15 ff.). Jesus is sovereign in the government of the world as in the realm of spiritual ideals, author of salvation in every sense of the word, moral and eschatological; but there is no emergence of the thought that His origin must be transcendent as His destiny-no hint of pre-existence. Christ’s place in eternity is in the foreknowledge and counsel of the Father.
Coming to the Pauline Epistles, we enter a Christological atmosphere which is startlingly different. In the earlier Epistles the Pre-existence is not so much asserted as taken for granted. In marked contrast with such themes as the Atonement or Justification, it is never made the subject of the Apostle’s dialectic; but deductions, both practical and speculative, are drawn from it as an axiomatic truth, familiar equally to writer and to readers, and disputed by no one. And although it is only in the later Epistles that the necessity of the Pre-existence as the basis for a full world-embracing redemption is deliberately set forth, there is no evidence of a real development either in the conviction of the fact or in the conception of its significance.
The chief Pauline passages are the following. With regard to the closely parallel texts, Galatians 4:4 and Romans 8:3, it is not too much to say that the obviously intended contrast between the dignity of God’s ‘own Son’ and the conditions of His earthly life (‘born of a woman, made under the law,’ ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’) is fully illuminated only by the assumption of His pre-existence. In speaking of the sacraments of the wilderness (1 Corinthians 10:1-4) St. Paul clearly presupposes the activity of the pre-incarnate Christ in the history of Israel. The statement that the Rock in Kadesh was Christ does not imply that he regarded it as an actual Christophany (Bousset, Die Schriften des NT, ii. [1908] 115); but it does imply that, in St. Paul’s view, the water miraculously furnished by it was ‘spiritual drink’ because in it Christ was sacramentally active for receptive souls. In 1 Corinthians 8:6, as one God, the Father, is the ultimate source and end of all creation, so one Lord, Jesus Christ, is its Mediator-the first hint of that more fully formulated conception of the ‘cosmic’ Christ which is a feature of later Epistles. A similarly anticipatory passage is 2 Corinthians 8:9 -‘Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, he for your sakes became poor,’ which cannot be naturally understood in any other sense than that Christ’s earthly life was to His prior condition as beggary to wealth. This thought of the Incarnation as an act of self-abnegation, by which an original state of heavenly glory was voluntarily exchanged for one of human limitation and suffering, is expanded in Philippians 2:5-11, the most deliberate and majestic of St. Paul’s utterance s upon the subject. Whether we understand by μορφ ὴ θεο ῦ a form which is separable or that which is inseparable from the Divine essence, one which was surrendered or that which could not be surrendered, does not affect the assertion of pre-existence . Christ became man only by laying aside a state of being to which an equal participation with God in all Divine prerogatives (τ ὸ ε ἶ ναι ἴ σα θε ῷ) naturally belonged. Finally, in Colossians and Ephesians St. Paul develops the thought of Christ’s relation to created being as a whole. In His pre-incarnate state, He is the ἀ ρχή, the Head or Origin, the πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως, begotten before all creatures and the agent of their creation, therefore possessing supremacy, absolute and universal (Colossians 1:15-16). The same conception is implied in Ephesians 1:10 -as all things are originally centred in Him, so they are destined to be gathered together and re-centred in Him; while in Ephesians 1:4 His pre-existence is brought more directly into relation with human redemption-we are chosen ‘in him before the foundation of the world.’
In the later Epistles, it thus appears, there is a larger use of the concept of pre-existence, a more deliberate unfolding of its relations to God, humanity, and the created universe; but, while this enables us to apprehend more clearly how the concept was already latent in the primary faith experience of the Exalted Christ, it cannot be said that the later Epistles, as compared with the earlier, show any distinct advance in the Apostle’s or in the Church’s belief in the fact. And here we are confronted with a problem. The thought of the Apostolic Church has advanced from the position reflected in the first chapters of Acts, in which there is no hint of a doctrine of pre-existence, to that presupposed even in the earlier Pauline Epistles, where its presence and activity are fully assumed; and apparently nothing save a process of development so gradual, silent, and unconscious as to have left no trace, bridges the distance between the Pentecostal discourses and Colossians. by what processes of thought may it be supposed that this remarkable transition was effected? Various attempts have been made to find a solution of the problem ab extra.
(a) Jewish apocalyptic.-‘Even as a Jew, Saul believed the Messiah to be already in existence’ (H. Weinel, St. Paul, Eng. tr._, 1906, p. 45). ‘Jewish Messianic speculation had already imagined a picture for the completion of which really nothing was wanting but the Nicene dogmas’ (ib. p. 313). It is true that such passages as 2Es 12:32; 2Es 13:26; 2Es 14:9, En. xlviii. 6, lxii. 7 bear out the statement that pre-existence of the Messiah was a feature of traditional apocalyptic doctrine; nor is there any antecedent improbability that the development of Christian belief may have been influenced from this quarter. At the same time it is to be noted that the apocalyptic tenet has its place in a connexion of ideas quite different from the Christian. Since according to the cherished apocalyptic hope the Redemption was imminent and might arrive at any moment, it followed that the Messiah must be already in existence, waiting only to be revealed (Dalman, Words of Jesus, Eng. tr._, 1902, p. 302). No such stimulus was applicable to the development of the Christian belief.
(b) Rabbinism.-According to its peculiar mode of thought, Rabbinism expressed the transcendent value of any person or thing by assigning to it a pre-existent celestial archetype. Thus, according to the Midrash on Psalms 8:9, the Throne of Glory, Messiah the King, the Torah, ideal Israel, Repentance, Gehenna, were created before the world. but the inclusion of Repentance in this list sheds a significant light upon the sense in which these entities are regarded as having preternatural existence. In Rabbinism, according to the best authorities, the pre-existence of the Messiah was only ideal-‘not literal, but present only in God’s eternal counsel of salvation’ (Weber, Jüdische Theologie, p. 355). The name of the Messiah was ideally pre-existent (ib. p. 198). ‘As a matter of fact, the earlier rabbinism was content with holding, on the basis of Psalms 72:17, the pre-existence of the name only’ (Dalman, Words of Jesus, p. 301).
(c) Alexandrian, Judaism.-According to Philo (Sac. leg. alleg. on Genesis 2:7 [ed. Mangey, i. 49], de mundi opificio, ed. Mangey, i. 30), God created two kinds of men-a ‘heavenly’ man, made after the image of God, incorruptible and super-terrestrial; the other formed of the dust, composed of body and soul, male and female, by nature mortal. And, with 1 Corinthians 15:44-49 as almost a sole support, it has been maintained by various scholars since Baur, that St. Paul has simply taken over the Alexandrian theory. That some such theory has, directly or indirectly, suggested the wording of the Pauline passage seems certain. but if there is any intentional reference, it can only be by way of refuting the Philonic view (See Bousset, Religion des Judenthums, p. 406). The ‘heavenly’ man, who with Philo is the ‘first,’ is with St. Paul the ‘second’ (as if to emphasize the point, it is expressly said, ‘that was not first which was spiritual, but that which was natural; and afterward that which is spiritual’). When, moreover, St. Paul distinguishes the two as ‘from earth’ and ‘from heaven,’ he points to their respective sources and qualities of being, implying nothing as to a previous state of being.
While the history of primitive Christianity proves its eclectic genius, its hospitality towards all ideas and forms of thought by which it could express its sense of the inexpressible religious value of Christ, and while there is no a priori reason to deny that it may have incidentally woven into its own web sundry hints of a pre-existent Messiah or Ideal Man, it seems impossible that the rapid Christological advance which had taken place by the time the Pauline Epistles were written can have been in any vital way influenced by the recondite speculations of apocalyptic, Rabbinical, or Hellenistic Judaism.
That this advance was connected chiefly with Pauline lines of thought is perhaps suggested by the fact that little or no use is made of the conception of pre-existence in 1 Peter. The language of 1:11-τ ὸ ἐ ν α ὑ το ῖ ς πνε ῦ μα Χριστο ῦ-suggests but does not necessarily imply it (See Hort’s note in loc.). To say that the Spirit who inspired the prophets was the Spirit of Christ does not imply that Christ was personally cce val with the prophets (cf. Hebrews 11:26). In 1 P 1:20 it is claimed that φανερωθέντος implies pre-existen ce, since only that which already exists can b e manifested; but, on the contrary, the parallelism between φανερωθέντος and προεγνωσμένου excludes a referen ce to personal pre-existence. He who was manifested is He who was foreknown, and the object of Divine foreknowledge must be the incarnate, not the pre-existent Christ. Nor is the present writer able to appreciate the force of the reason for which Chase (HDB_ iii. 793b) regards 3:18, 19 as decisive-viz. that the ‘spirit’ in which Christ was ‘quickened’ and ministered to the ‘spirits in prison’ is represented as something assumed by Him no less than the ‘flesh’ in which He was ‘put to death,’ and that, therefore, Christ is conceived as having existed before the beginning of His human life. To deduce from the words ἐ ν ᾦ that Christ had a personal existence prior to His possession of the ‘spirit’ in which He acted after His death in the flesh, seems to lay on them a greater stress than they are fitted to hear.
The advance in Christological ideas which had taken place by the time of the Pauline Epistles must be ascribed to an innate necessity of thought. The concept of pre-existence lay implicit in the Church’s most primitive consciousness of the Crucified and Exalted Christ as Saviour. The form in which this first found expression was Messianic. Jesus was the Lord Christ, the Person by whom the people of God were to be turned from their iniquities, and the Divine Kingdom brought to men. Without intellectual perception that this implied His proper Divinity, the Exalted Lord was felt as God; the instinctive attitude towards Him was that of faith and worship. but in a community which entirely retained the fundamental theocentric postulate of OT religion, such an attitude could not long remain merely instinctive. Granted the premise that Jesus is Saviour and that only the Eternal God can save, we pass, logically, at a single step from the Acts of the Apostles into Colossians. The inevitable conclusion, slowly as it may come to formulation, is that in Him the fullness of the God-head dwells; otherwise it is a man, not God, who takes the central place in faith’s universe. And to connect the Historical Christ with the being of Eternal God, the category of pre-existence was indispensable; for to Jewish monotheism the idea of θεοποίησις-that any one should become God-wa s unthinkable. He who was Divine unto everlasting must have been Divine from everlasting; in whatever sense God is preternatural, in the same sense must Christ also be.
Further, there are two lines along which this necessity of thought is seen to be especially urgent.
(a) Ethical.-It cannot be said that the great ethical appeal of the gospel to self-sacrificing love is explicit in its first proclamation. It is implicit there in its central truth of the suffering Messiah; but the presentation is shaped by the polemical necessities of the hour, and the chief aim is to establish that the Crucified Jesus is Lord rather than to emphasize that His sovereignty is won by sacrifice. In St. Paul’s Epistles the ethical appeal is dominant throughout. His experience of salvation was an experience of forgiveness and eternal life bestowed with an unspeakable fervour of Divine love-love that by infinite sacrifice reconciled the sinner unto God. And in his conception of this love, the pre-existence of Christ had a two-fold function. (i.) It raised the earthly manifestation to infinitude. The redeeming sacrifice of Christ was not a love that was commensurable with any human self-sacrifice. It is voluntary poverty seen against a background of Divine wealth. The most amazing in the series of His self-emptyings is the first-the choosing to renounce the Divine form of existence for another in which He was destined to reach the absolute point of humiliation and suffering. This was the love beyond compare, passing knowledge. (ii.) In the same way, we may suppose, the conception of pre-existence helped St. Paul to relate the love of Christ to the love of God. It is not inconceivable, indeed, that St. Paul should have found in the historical life and death of Jesus ample reason for such expressions as, ‘Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift,’ ‘He that withheld not his own Son’; but how much more amazing and subduing is the thought, if the Son thus ‘delivered up for us all’ was God’s own image,’ His ‘first begotten before every creature.’ It scarcely permits of doubt that this was the thought in the Apostle’s mind.
(b) Soteriological.-Salvation in the full sense includes not merely a subjective change in man, but a corresponding change in man’s environment. No more than humanity itself does nature embody the perfect final will of God. In its present constitution it is the correlative of human sin; it lies under the dominion of ‘principalities and powers’ that are unfriendly to man; and for man to be spiritually renewed and reconciled to God, and yet left in the midst of a hostile universe, would be no complete redemption. Thus, even in St. Paul’s earlier Epistles it is seen that Christ’s redeeming work must extend its influence over all created things (1 Corinthians 15:24-28, Romans 8:19-22); and in Colossians the cosmic Redemption, the vision of a ‘Christianized universe,’ becomes one of the Apostle’s central themes. The Church’s Lord and Redeemer must be Lord and Reconciler of all things (Colossians 1:15-20; cf. Philippians 2:10, Philippians 2:11). but this is possible only to One in whom the undivided fullness of the God-head dwells (Colossians 1:19-20; cf. Philippians 2:6, Philippians 2:9), who is the one Mediator between God and the created universe. And this, again, involves His pre-existence (πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως, Colossians 1:15). Only He who is the original and eternal principle of unity in all things (1:17), who stands in such a relation to God (ε ἰ κ ὼ ν το ῦ ἀ οράτου θεο ῦ, 1:15) that this must be His relation to the universe, can bring the universe into final unity with the Divine character and purpose. Only He who is the mediatorial beginning can be the mediatorial end; only the First can he the Last.
The question immediately arises for theology: How is one to relate this conception of the Pre-existent Christ to the Eternal Unity of the God-head? Beyschlag’s theory of an ideal pre-existence in the Divine thought and will is wholly inadequate as a historical interpretation of Pauline thought; and the same may be said of the theory (Baur, Pfleiderer) according to which the conception of the ‘Man from Heaven,’ the ‘Second Adam,’ is the fountainhead of the Pauline Christology. The point in which the effort of NT thought to answer this question culminates is the Johannine doctrine of the Logos; and to treat of this lies beyond the scope of the present article. Suffice it to say here, that for the whole Johannine group of writings-Apocalypse, Gospel, Epistles-the truth of Christ’s pre-existence is absolutely fundamental. On the one hand, there is the deliberate endeavour to relate this, through the concept of the Logos, to the God-head; on the other hand, and especially in the First Epistle, the strongest emphasis is laid upon the complete, personal, permanent identity of the Pre-incarnate with Him who became flesh and tabernacled among us. That ‘Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh’ is the test and watchword of the Christian faith. Though the foundation for the cosmic significance of the Incarnation is laid in the prologue to the Gospel (1:3) this is nowhere elaborated as by St. Paul. The ethical interest absorbs all others; and here St. John has spoken the last word (John 3:16, 1 John 4:9-10). The love of Christ is the manifested love of God. He who died on Calvary, the propitiation for our sins, is He who came forth from the bosom of the Father.
Literature.-This is enormous: all the text-books on NT Theology, including those by Baur (1893), Beyschlag (Eng. tr._, 1895), Feine (1910), Holtzmann (21911), Schlatter (31905), Stevens (1899), Weinel (21913), B. Weiss (Eng. tr._, 1882-83). Among special treatises the following may be mentioned: H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, 1912; A. B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ2, 1881; W. Bousset, Die Religion des Judenthums2, 1906; J. Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 1908; A. Harnack, History of Dogma, Eng. tr._2, 1897, vol. 1. app._ i.; P. Lobstein, Notion de la préexistence du Fils de Dieu, 1883; W. Olchewski, Die Wurzeln der paulinischen Christologie, 1909; R. L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, 1896; O. Pfleiderer, Paulinism, Eng. tr._, 1891, i. 123-159; D. Somerville, St. Paul’s Conception of Christ, 1897; F. Weber, Jüdische Theologie, 1897.
R. Law.