ccurately known the proclamation
concerning the historical Christ, his theology in the strict sense of
the word does not revert to it: but springing over the historical, it
begins with the pre-existent Christ (the Man from heaven), whose moral
deed it was to assume the flesh in self-denying love, in order to break
for all men the powers of nature and the doom of death. But he has
pointed to the words and example of the historical Christ in order to
rule the life in the Spirit. (8) Deductions, proofs, and perhaps also
conceptions, which in point of form betray the theology of the Pharisaic
schools, were forced from the Apostle by Christian opponents, who would
only grant a place to the message of the crucified Christ beside the
[Greek: dikaiosune ex ergon]. Both as an exegete and as a typologist he
appears as a disciple of the Pharisees. But his dialectic about law,
circumcision and sacrifice, does not form the kernel of his religious
mode of thought, though, on the other hand, it was unquestionably his
very Pharisaism which qualified him for becoming what he was. Pharisaism
embraced nearly everything lofty which Judaism apart from Christ at all
possessed, and its doctrine of providence, its energetic insistence on
making manifest the religious contrasts, its Messianic expectations, its
doctrines of sin and predestination, were conditions for the genesis of
a religious and Christian character such as Paul.[89] This first
Christian of the second generation is the highest product of the Jewish
spirit under the creative power of the Spirit of Christ. Pharisaism had
fulfilled its mission for the world when it produced this man. (9) But
Hellenism also had a share in the making of Paul, a fact which does not
conflict with his Pharisaic origin, but is partly given with it. In
spite of all its exclusiveness the desire for making proselytes,
especially in the Diaspora, was in the blood of Pharisaism. Paul
continued the old movement in a new way, and he was qualified for his
work among the Greeks by an accurate knowledge of the Greek translation
of the Old Testament, by considerable dexterity in the use of the Greek
language, and by a growing insight into the spiritual life of the
Greeks. But the peculiarity of his Gospel as a message from the Spirit
of Christ, which was equally near to and equally distant from every
religious and moral mode of thought among the nations of the world,
signified much more than all this. This Gospel--w