Theology has heretofore found itself rather helpless in presence of the votaries of Comparative Religion. It could not accept their results as correct, but on the other hand it was not in a position to explain Paul’s sacramental views, because it had never taken into consideration the possibility that they might have arisen out of the Jewish and primitive Christian future-hope. There was thus no course open to it but to engage in an inglorious guerilla warfare with the new science and skirmish with [pg 244] it over particular passages and statements. It is only the acceptance of the fact that the Apostle’s doctrine is integrally, simply and exclusively eschatological, which puts it in a position to assume the offensive in a systematic way and with good prospect of success. The Apostle’s most general views must be taken as the starting point from which to explain how he arrives at the paradox that the believer is united with Christ, experiences along with Him death and resurrection, and becomes a new creature, emancipated from fleshly corporeity. The assertion that these statements are meant in a “physical” sense does not carry us very far. The reason which explains their “reality” must be shown. Simply in and by themselves they are not explicable. What has been advanced regarding the solidarity of Jesus with the human race is far from sufficing to make it in any degree intelligible, especially as Paul has not in view Christ and humanity, but Christ and the elect. The mistake in the attempts at explanation hitherto made consists in the fact that they seek to argue from the facts of the death and resurrection of Jesus, simply as such, directly to that which takes place in the believer. In reality, it can only be a question of a general event, which in the time immediately preceding the End brings about this dying and rising again in Jesus and believers as together forming a single category of mankind, and thus antedates the future into the present. For that which happens both to the Lord and to the elect it must be possible to find some kind of common-denominator which exactly contains the factors, the forces which are at work in the two cases. Since those which produce their effect in Christ are the first to become manifest, Paul can cast his theory into the form that the believers have died and risen again with Him. The general fact which comes into question must result from the condition of the world between the death of Jesus and His parousia. The Apostle asserts an overlapping of the still natural, and the already supernatural, [pg 245] condition of the world, which becomes real in the case of Christ and believers in the form of an open or hidden working of the forces of death and resurrection—and becomes real in them only. The doctrine of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the mystical doctrine of redemption are alike cosmically conditioned.