Ritschl and Harnack, in opposing this assumption of Baur and his successors, went to the other extreme. They maintained that universalism and freedom from the law were purely practical and separable views, which had, properly speaking, nothing to do with the fundamental ideas of the doctrine of redemption. In this way they succeeded, no doubt, in liberating the history of dogma from the prejudices of the Tübingen school; but they did less justice to the Apostle’s statements than those whom they were attacking, since on every page of his writings he implies an actual connexion between his doctrines and the practical views which he is defending. It is to be noted that Ritschl and Harnack never clearly explain why Paul holds a different view on these points from that of the primitive community. Truth here appears as the synthesis of a thesis and antithesis. Universalism and freedom from the law do in fact belong to the history of dogma, but not in the way Baur thought. And they are in themselves practical views, but at the same time they claim to be logically derived from the system of doctrine. The presuppositions on which they are based have nothing to do with Greek thought; it was purely by systematically thinking out to its conclusions the primitive Christian doctrine that Paul was led to his theories of the universal [pg 084] destination of the Gospel and of emancipation from the law. These are the facts as they lie clearly before us in the letters. But to register them is not to explain them. How, exactly, do these conclusions result from the logic of the primitive Christian belief as rightly worked out in the Apostle’s mind? That is the form which the question takes as the next stage, after Baur, Ritschl, and Harnack. The negative result that the Pauline attitude in regard to these points is not Greek is in any case established. And so too is the other result that the creators of Greek dogma did not take him as their starting-point, and cannot therefore have discovered anything Hellenic in him. They had no consciousness that he had already quarried and shaped the material which they needed for their edifice. But if they did not recognise in him one who had made a beginning in their direction, it is more than questionable whether modern historical criticism is right in professing to find Greek elements in him. If so, it must be supposed to have a better instinct for what is Hellenic than the men who Hellenised Christianity. In any case it has no right to talk at large about the significance of Paulinism for Greek Christianity, as though the history of dogma was not there to prove the contrary.