RELATIONS OF NEW TESTAMENT SCIENCE 575 



character of the forms which it has assumed." A better definition of 

 the relation of our science to kindred sciences cannot be formulated. 

 It was also well to emphasize, as Meyer has done from the very start, 

 what is that vital, distinctive element of Christianity, which has 

 enabled it to take up and assimilate congenial elements from sur- 

 rounding soil, instead of being itself assimilated. " Not primarily the 

 belief in Jesus as the Son of God, but Jesus' own belief in his mission 

 and his relation to God his Father." "Not primarily the belief in 

 Jesus as the Son of God," because the gospel as Paul preached it is 

 already secondary. But the gospel of Jesus is for us approachable only 

 through the secondary gospel, whose distinctive feature is certainly 

 this belief. 



It is also significant from this standpoint to note how just a year 

 ago Pfleiderer, at the International Congress of Theologians at 

 Amsterdam, denned the preliminary problem of Paulinism. His 

 address was entitled Das Christusbild des urchristlichen Glaubens in 

 religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung; and he too lays chief stress upon 

 the need for reaching the distinctive element in the Gospel of Paul 

 through its embodiment in conceptions and forms current in both 

 Gentile and Jewish religious life. For Paul was the natural heir of the 

 latter, but adoptive heir of the former also, and through him more 

 than all others Christianity became endowed with the great Greek 

 and Stoic ideas of a creative Logos, a mystic union, sacramentally 

 renewed, of the human spirit in its weak and corruptible embodiment 

 with the life-giving divine spirit, and of a race brotherhood, or new 

 social order of humanity. This absorption by Christianity of the 

 aspirations and cravings expressed in the contemporary world-move- 

 ments of religious thought Pfleiderer has summed up as follows: 

 " The postulate of a Deliverer-god (0e6? o-omjp) who shall guarantee 

 both the salvation of the individual soul in the hereafter, and also the 

 dominion of redemption and peace for the social commonwealth on 

 this earth, was already present in the visions and cravings of the 

 Gentile world at the beginning of our era; the question was only, 

 Whence should it obtain the certainty of his real existence? The 

 Christology of the Church gave th'e answer by welding into a personal 

 unity the Messiah-king of the earthly kingdom of God and the mysti- 

 cal conqueror of death and dispenser of life. Thus arose the ideal form 

 of the eternal Son of God, who historically became man, died, passed 

 through the underworld overcoming Death and the Devil, rose victo- 

 rious, ascended to heaven, sits on the right hand of God as Sovereign 

 of the world, and is to come upon the clouds to judge the quick and 

 dead. All these doctrinal conceptions are also found already present 

 in the religious cults of decadent antiquity, here and there, in Orient 

 and Occident, in the varied forms of Jewish apocalypse, Oriental mys- 

 ticism and Gnosis, Greek speculation and Roman emperor-worship. 



