The law of redemption, which St. Paul considers to have been triumphantly summed up by the death and resurrection of Christ,[86] would hardly be proved to be an universal law if the Pauline Christ were only the “heavenly man,” as some critics have asserted. St. Paul’s teaching about the Person of Christ was really almost identical with the Logos doctrine as we find it in St. John’s prologue, and as it was developed by the mystical philosophy of a later period. Not only is His pre-existence “in the form of God” clearly taught,[87] but He is the agent in the creation of the universe, the vital principle upholding and pervading all that exists. “The Son,” we read in the Epistle to the Colossians,[88] “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth; all things have been created through Him, and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist” (that is, “hold together,” as the margin of the Revised Version explains it). “All things are summed up in Christ,” he says to the Ephesians.[89] “Christ is all and in all,” we read again in the Colossians.[90] And in that bold and difficult passage of the 15th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians he speaks of the “reign” of Christ as coextensive with the world’s history. When time shall end, and all evil shall be subdued to good, Christ “will deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father,” “that God may be all in all.[91]” Very important, too, is the verse in which he says that the Israelites in the wilderness “drank of that spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was Christ.[92]” It reminds us of Clement’s language about the Son as the Light which broods over all history.
The passage from the Colossians, which I quoted just now, contains another mystical idea besides that of Christ as the universal source and centre of life. He is, we are told, “the Image of the invisible God,” and all created beings are, in their several capacities, images of Him. Man is essentially “the image and glory of God";[93] the “perfect man” is he who has come “to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.[94]” This is our nature, in the Aristotelian sense of completed normal development; but to reach it we have to slay the false self, the old man, which is informed by an actively maleficent agency, “flesh”