They would also learn, with Peter, that Scripture is the work and word of the preexistent Christ.
This latter method seems to ignore the relation of Scripture to Christ, and to proceed in its investigations as if there were no preexistent Christ to furnish its principle.
The preexistent Christ has made all this literature one, by the influence in the sacred writers of his omnipresent Spirit.
Our author is himself a devout believer in a preexistent Christ, and he recognizes some rays of Christ's light in Buddha and in Confucius.
It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes.
Failure to bear in mind the difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of teacher and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge.
We were severally brought into being, as spirits, in that preexistent condition, literally the children of the Supreme Being whom Jesus Christ worshiped and addressed as Father.
In short, all earthly existences are material expressions of preexistent entities.
The preexistent or antemortal state of man has been heretofore demonstrated.
Every one of us has been advanced from the unembodied or preexistent state to our present condition, in which the individual spirit is temporarily united with a body of flesh and bones.
Lawful, that is to say righteous, association of the sexes, is an uplifting and ennobling function to the participants, and the heritage of earth-life to preexistent spirits who are thereby advanced to the mortal state.
Even as His bodily birth was the union of a preexistent spirit with a tabernacle of flesh and bones, such also is the birth of every human being.
Students of the so-called science with a newly coined name, Eugenics, are prone to emphasize the facts of heredity to the exclusion of preexistent traits and attributes of the individual spirit as factors in the determination of character.
In the unembodied, preexistent or antemortal state, we were decidedly unequal in capacity and power.
In the light of these Scriptures it is plainly true that the spirits of mankind were there begotten and born into what we call the preexistent or antemortal condition.
The preexistent or antemortal state of man is as plainly affirmed by Scripture as is the fact of life beyond the grave.
His seniority to Abraham plainly referred to the status of each in the antemortal or preexistent state; Jesus was as literally the Firstborn in the spirit-world, as He was the Only Begotten in the flesh.
The one purpose of providing bodies for the preexistent spirits of the race, and of advancing them to the mortal state, was to "prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.
Christ remembered his preexistent state; why should not we?
The Moral Influence theory does not take account of the preexistent Christ and of his atoning work before his manifestation in the flesh.
As Christian theology teaches that man was free but lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the preexistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life.
It consists in choosing between two preexistent impulses.
Julius Mueller's theory of the Fall in a preexistent state makes it impossible for him to hold here that Adam was possessed of moral likeness to God.
He believed in a freedom of the soul in a preexistent state where a choice was made between good and evil, but he believed that, after that antemundane decision had been made, the fates determined men's acts and lives irreversibly.
The Scriptures enlarge our conceptions of Christ's Sonship by giving to him in his preexistent state the names of the Logos, the Image, and the Effulgence of God.
A divine nature apart from its activities, a preexistent Christ, an immanent Trinity, are practically denied.
Besides, how can the phenomenal reality embrace the Preexistent Reality?
The third plane of that Being(126) is the Divine Bounty, the splendor of the Preexistent Beauty, and the radiance of the light of the Almighty.
In the phenomenal we see weakness; in the Preexistent we recognize power.
As knowledge is preexistent, the things known are equally so, and the individualizations and the specifications of beings, which are the preexistent knowledges of the Essence of Unity, are the Divine Knowledge itself.
So in the phenomenal we see ignorance; in the Preexistent we recognize knowledge.
These phenomenal and imperfect waves are the same thing as the Preexistent Sea, which is the sum of all the divine perfections.
So the phenomenal is the source of imperfections, and the Preexistent is the sum of perfections.
This appearance through manifestation would be for God, the Most High, simple imperfection; and this is quite impossible, for the implication would be that the Absolute Preexistent is qualified with phenomenal attributes.
Though the rays are always inseparable from the sun, nevertheless, the sun is preexistent and the rays are phenomenal, for the existence of the rays depends upon that of the sun.
For the phenomenal reality can comprehend the Preexistent attributes only to the extent of the human capacity.
In the phenomenal we see poverty; in the Preexistent we recognize wealth.
How then can the phenomenal reality comprehend the Preexistent Reality?
But even in thepreexistent period the Christ of Paul is different from the apocalyptic Messiah, because the Christ of Paul, unlike the apocalyptic Messiah, has an active part in the creation of the world.
It is the Pauline conception of the preexistent Christ, as distinguished from the incarnate or the risen Christ, which Wrede and Brueckner find it easiest to connect with the apocalypses.
It is, therefore, not perfectly clear that Paul before the conversion believed in a heavenly, preexistent Messiah like the Messiah of the apocalypses.
