he Lord, and to attempt to come to terms with
Greek philosophy.

Except with regard to the Second Coming, the Jewish ideas of the
Davidic Messiah and of the Son of Man ceased to have any living
importance. It {100} was not doubted that the Lord was divine, but
there were two ways of considering his divinity. One was to regard
Jesus as a man who had been inspired by the Holy Spirit, and had
himself been taken up into the sphere of divinity after his death, so
that he, as well as the spirit which had been in him, was now divine.
This form of thought is generally known as Adoptionism. The other way
was to think of Jesus as a pre-existent divine being who had become
human.

The difference between the two forms of thought is that whereas
Adoptionism postulates a distinct human personality for the human
Jesus, which had a beginning in time and was promoted to divinity, the
other theory postulates only a divine person who became human. Both
theories, therefore, begin with much the same doctrine of God, as
consisting, if the metaphor may be used, of the two factors of the
Father and the Spirit, who was sometimes called his Son,[1] and was
frequently identified with the Logos of the Greek philosophers. There
is very little evidence in early Christian writings for that
distinction between the Logos and the Spirit which afterward became
orthodox.

The competing existence of Adoptionist and Pre-existent Christology
does much to explain the early development of the doctrine of the
Trinity. Starting with the Father and the Spirit-son, Adoptionism
added {101} a third to the sphere of divinity, namely, the glorified
Jesus. This belief was preserved in the baptismal formula of the
Church of Rome, as found in Justin Martyr, which was "In the name of
the Father of all, and in the name of Jesus Christ who was crucified
under Pontius Pilate, and in the name of the Holy Spirit," and though
Adoptionism was in the end rejected, it left its permanent mark on
Christian theology in the "threeness"[2] of the doctrine of God. The
doctrines of Pre-existent Christology could scarcely have had this
result,[3] for it is quite clear that the Logos and the Spirit were
distinguished only in language, and the Incarnation was, as it were,
but an incident in the work of the Logos.

Few things are more needed than study of this side of the growth of
Christian doctrine. Harnack's _History of Doctrine_ has indeed done
something, but many of the d