96 The Fundamentals seem by this inscription that the Apostle desired to introduce Christ into the sphere of the truly Divine. The famous benediction at the close of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians implies a very high conception of Christ’s person and position. One could scarcely believe that Paul would use such a collocation of phrases as the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, unless Christ had been for him a Divine Being, even God. Now all this simply adds force to John’s prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The four great Pauline epistles agree, in the most im portant details, with the portraiture given us of Jesus in the Gospels. The conception of the person of Christ, as we have already shown, was not natural to Paul. He was a bitter op ponent of Christianity. It was not the result of gradually changing convictions regarding the claims of Jesus Christ—all the testimony which bears upon the subject implies the con trary. I t was not due to extreme mysticism, for Paul’s writ ings impress us as being remarkably sane and logical. No endeavor to account for it upon merely natural grounds is satisfactory, and so we must accept his own statement of the case. The truth of the Messiahship of Jesus was a matter of revelation in the experience of his conversion, and if we accept that, we must necessarily accept all that it involves. The Gospels and Epistles do not contradict, but only supple ment this protraiture. They add lines of beauty to the rugged outline painted by Paul, and are inextricably connected with the four great epistles. Accepting these letters as genuine and Paul’s explanation of his doctrine as true, we must ac cept the whole of the New Testament documents as credible, and the portraiture of the Christ as that of a real person— Son of man and Son of God, the God-Man.
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