It is only as we carry this conception of the person of our Lord with us--the conception of Him as at once our Supreme Lord, to whom our adoration is due, and our fellow in the experiences of a human life--that unity is induced in the multiform allusions to Him throughout, whether the Epistles of Paul or the Epistle to the Hebrews, or, indeed, the other epistolary literature of the New Testament. For in this matter there is no difference between those and these. There are no doubt a few passages in these other letters in which a plurality of the elements of the person of Christ are brought together and given detailed mention. In 1 Pet 3:18, for instance, the two constitutive elements of His person are spoken of in the contrast, familiar from Paul, of the "flesh" and the "spirit." But ordinarily we meet only with references to this or that element separately. Everywhere our Lord is spoken of as having lived out His life as a man; but everywhere also He is spoken of with the supreme reverence which is due to God alone, and the very name of God is not withheld from Him. In 1 Pet 1:11 His pre-existence is taken for granted; in Jas 2:1 He is identified with the Shekinah, the manifested Yahweh--`our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glory'; in Jude verse 4 He is "our only Master (Despot) and Lord"; over and over again He is the divine Lord who is Yahweh (e.g. 1Pe 2:3,13; 2Pe 3:2,18); in 2Pe 1:1, He is roundly called "our God and Saviour." There is nowhere formal inculcation of the entire doctrine of the person of Christ. But everywhere its elements, now one and now another, are presupposed as the common property of writer and readers. It is only in the Epistles of John that this easy and unstudied presupposition of them gives way to pointed insistence upon them.
Continued in PERSON OF CHRIST, 4-5.