Section VII.—The Salvation Of Infants…

Section VII.—The Salvation Of Infants

The views which have been presented with regard to inborn depravity and the reaction of divine holiness against it suggest the question whether infants dying before arriving at moral consciousness are saved, and if so, in what way. To this question we reply as follows:

(a) Infants are in a state of sin, need to be regenerated, and can be saved only through Christ.

Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”; Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”; John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”; Rom. 5:14—“Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”; 1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—clearly intimate the naturally impure state of infants; and Mat. 19:14—“Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me”—is not only consistent with this doctrine, but strongly confirms it; for the meaning is: “forbid them not to come unto me”—whom they need as a Savior. “Coming to Christ” is always the coming of a sinner, to him who is the sacrifice for sin; cf. Mat. 11:28—“Come unto me, all ye that labor.”

(b) Yet as compared with those who have personally transgressed, they are recognized as possessed of a relative innocence, and of a submissiveness and trustfulness, which may serve to illustrate the graces of Christian character.

Deut 1:39—“your little ones ... and your children, that this day have no knowledge of good or evil”; Jonah 4:11—“sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand”; Rom. 9:11—“for the children being not yet born, neither having done anything good or bad”; Mat. 18:3, 4—“Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:265. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:50—“Unpretentious receptivity, ... not the reception of the kingdom of God at a childlike age, but in a childlike character ... is the condition of entering; ... not blamelessness, but receptivity itself, on the part of those who do not regard themselves as too good or too bad for the offered gift, but receive it with hearty desire. Children have this unpretentious receptivity for the kingdom of God which is characteristic of them generally, since they have not yet other possessions on which they pride themselves.”

(c) For this reason, they are the objects of special divine compassion and care, and through the grace of Christ are certain of salvation.

Mat. 18:5, 6, 10, 14—“whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me: but whoso shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the sea.... See that ye despise not one of these little ones: for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.... Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish”; 19:14—“Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven”—not God’s kingdom of nature, but his kingdom of grace, the kingdom of saved sinners. “Such” means, not children as children, but childlike believers. Meyer, on Mat. 19:14, refers the passage to spiritual infants only: “Not little children,” he says, “but men of a childlike disposition.” Geikie: “Let the little children come unto me, and do not forbid them, for the kingdom of heaven is given only to such as have a childlike spirit and nature like theirs.” The Savior’s words do not intimate that little children are either (1) sinless creatures, or (2) subjects for baptism; but only that their (1) humble teachableness, (2) intense eagerness, and (3) artless trust, illustrate the traits necessary for admission into the divine kingdom. On the passages in Matthew, see Commentaries of Bengel, De Wette, Lange; also Neander, Planting and Training (ed. Robinson), 407.

We therefore substantially agree with Dr. A. C. Kendrick, in his article in the Sunday School Times: “To infants and children, as such, the language cannot apply. It must be taken figuratively, and must refer to those qualities in childhood, its dependence, its trustfulness, its tender affection, its loving obedience, which are typical of the essential Christian graces.... If asked after the logic of our Savior’s words—how he could assign, as a reason for allowing literal little children to be brought to him, that spiritual little children have a claim to the kingdom of heaven—I reply: the persons that thus, as a class, typify the subjects of God’s spiritual kingdom cannot be in themselves objects of indifference to him, or be regarded otherwise than with intense interest.... The class that in its very nature thus shadows forth the brightest features of Christian excellence must be subjects of God’s special concern and care.”

To these remarks of Dr. Kendrick we would add, that Jesus’ words seem to us to intimate more than special concern and care. While these words seem intended to exclude all idea that infants are saved by their natural holiness, or without application to them of the blessings of his atonement, they also seem to us to include infants among the number of those who have the right to these blessings; in other words, Christ’s concern and care go so far as to choose infants to eternal life, and to make them subjects of the kingdom of heaven. Cf. Mat. 18:14—“it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of those little ones should perish”—those whom Christ has received here, he will not reject hereafter. Of course this to said to infants, as infants. To those, therefore, who die before coming to moral consciousness, Christ’s words assure salvation. Personal transgression, however, involves the necessity, before death, of a personal repentance and faith, in order to achieve salvation.

(d) The descriptions of God’s merciful provision as coëxtensive with the ruin of the Fall also lead us to believe that those who die in infancy receive salvation through Christ as certainly as they inherit sin from Adam.

John 3:16—“For God so loved the world”—includes infants. Rom. 5:14—“death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come”—there is an application to infants of the life in Christ, as there was an application to them of the death in Adam; 19-21—“For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous. And the law came in besides, that the trespass might abound; but when sin abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly: that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—as without personal act of theirs infants inherited corruption from Adam, so without personal act of theirs salvation is provided for them in Christ.

Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 170, 171—“Though the sacred writers say nothing in respect to the future condition of those who die in infancy, one can scarcely err in deriving from this silence a favorable conclusion. That no prophet or apostle, that no devout father or mother, should have expressed any solicitude as to those who die before they are able to discern good from evil is surprising, unless such solicitude was prevented by the Spirit of God. There are no instances of prayer for children taken away in infancy. The Savior nowhere teaches that they are in danger of being lost. We therefore heartily and confidently believe that they are redeemed by the blood of Christ and sanctified by his Spirit, so that when they enter the unseen world they will be found with the saints.” David ceased to fast and weep when his child died, for he said: “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam. 12:23).

(e) The condition of salvation for adults is personal faith. Infants are incapable of fulfilling this condition. Since Christ has died for all, we have reason to believe that provision is made for their reception of Christ in some other way.

2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all”; Mark 16:16—“He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that disbelieveth shall be condemned” (verses 9-20 are of canonical authority, though probably not written by Mark). Dr. G. W. Northrop held that, as death to the Christian has ceased to be penalty, so death to all infants is no longer penalty, Christ having atoned for and removed the guilt of original sin for all men, infants included. But we reply that there is no evidence that there is any guilt taken away except for those who come into vital union with Christ. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 166—“The curse falls alike on every one by birth, but may be alleviated or intensified by every one who comes to years of responsibility, according as his nature which brings the curse rules, or is ruled by, his reason and conscience. So the blessings of salvation are procured for all alike, but may be lost or secured according to the attitude of everyone toward Christ who alone procures them. To infants, as the curse comes without their election, so in like manner comes its removal.”

(f) At the final judgment, personal conduct is made the test of character. But infants are incapable of personal transgression. We have reason, therefore, to believe that they will be among the saved, since this rule of decision will not apply to them.

Mat. 25:45, 46—“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me. And these shall go away into eternal punishment”; Rom. 2:5, 6—“_the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who __ will render to every man according to his works._” Norman Fox, The Unfolding of Baptist Doctrine, 24—“Not only the Roman Catholics believed in the damnation of infants. The Lutherans, in the Augsburg Confession, condemn the Baptists for affirming that children are saved without baptism—‘damnant Anabaptistas qui ... affirmant pueros sine baptismo salvos fieri’—and the favorite poet of Presbyterian Scotland, in his Tam O’Shanter, names among objects from hell ‘Twa span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns.’ The Westminster Confession, in declaring that ‘elect infants dying in infancy’ are saved, implies that non-elect infants dying in infancy are lost. This was certainly taught by some of the framers of that creed.”

Yet John Calvin did not believe in the damnation of infants, as he has been charged with believing. In the Amsterdam edition of his works, 8:522, we read: “I do not doubt that the infants whom the Lord gathers together from this life are regenerated by a secret operation of the Holy Spirit.” In his Institutes, book 4, chap. 16, p. 335, he speaks of the exemption of infants from the grace of salvation “as an idea not free from execrable blasphemy.” The Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct. 1890:634-651, quotes Calvin as follows: “I everywhere teach that no one can be justly condemned and perish except on account of actual sin; and to say that the countless mortals taken from life while yet infants are precipitated from their mothers’ arms into eternal death is a blasphemy to be universally detested.” So also John Owen, Works, 8:522—“There are two ways by which God saveth infants. First, by interesting them in the covenant, if their immediate or remote parents have been believers; ... Secondly, by his grace of election, which is most free and not tied to any conditions; by which I make no doubt but God taketh unto him in Christ many whose parents never knew, or were despisers of, the gospel.”

(g) Since there is no evidence that children dying in infancy are regenerated prior to death, either with or without the use of external means, it seems most probable that the work of regeneration may be performed by the Spirit in connection with the infant soul’s first view of Christ in the other world. As the remains of natural depravity in the Christian are eradicated, not by death, but at death, through the sight of Christ and union with him, so the first moment of consciousness for the infant may be coincident with a view of Christ the Savior which accomplishes the entire sanctification of its nature.

2 Cor. 3:18—“But we all, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”; 1 John 3:2—“We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” If asked why more is not said upon the subject in Scripture, we reply: It is according to the analogy of God’s general method to hide things that are not of immediate practical value. In some past ages, moreover, knowledge of the fact that all children dying in infancy are saved might have seemed to make infanticide a virtue.

While we agree with the following writers as to the salvation of all infants who die before the age of conscious and wilful transgression, we dissent from the seemingly Arminian tendency of the explanation which they suggest. H. E. Robins, Harmony of Ethics with Theology: “The judicial declaration of acquittal on the ground of the death of Christ which comes upon all men, into the benefits of which they are introduced by natural birth, is inchoate justification, and will become perfected justification through the new birth of the Holy Spirit, unless the working of this divine agent is resisted by the personal moral action of those who are lost.” So William Ashmore, in Christian Review, 26:245-264. F. O. Dickey: “As infants are members of the race, and as they are justified from the penalty against inherited sin by the mediatorial work of Christ, so the race itself is justified from the same penalty and to the same extent as are they, and were the race to die in infancy it would be saved.” The truth in the above utterances seems to us to be that Christ’s union with the race secures the objective reconciliation of the race to God. But subjective and personal reconciliation depends upon a moral union with Christ which can be accomplished for the infant only by his own appropriation of Christ at death.

While, in the nature of things and by the express declarations of Scripture, we are precluded from extending this doctrine of regeneration at death to any who have committed personal sins, we are nevertheless warranted in the conclusion that, certain and great as is the guilt of original sin, no human soul is eternally condemned solely for this sin of nature, but that, on the other hand, all who have not consciously and wilfully transgressed are made partakers of Christ’s salvation.

The advocates of a second probation, on the other hand, should logically hold that infants in the next world are in a state of sin, and that at death they only enter upon a period of probation in which they may, or may not, accept Christ,—a doctrine much less comforting than that propounded above. See Prentiss, in Presb. Rev., July, 1883: 548-580—“Lyman Beecher and Charles Hodge first made current in this country the doctrine of the salvation of all who die in infancy. If this doctrine be accepted, then it follows: (1) that these partakers of original sin must be saved wholly through divine grace and power; (2) that in the child unborn there is the promise and potency of complete spiritual manhood; (3) that salvation is possible entirely apart from the visible church and the means of grace; (4) that to a full half of the race this life is not in any way a period of probation; (5) that heathen may be saved who have never even heard of the gospel; (6) that the providence of God includes in its scope both infants and heathen.”

“Children exert a redeeming and reclaiming influence upon us, their casual acts and words and simple trust recalling our world-hardened and wayward hearts again to the feet of God. Silas Marner, the old weaver of Raveloe, so pathetically and vividly described in George Eliot’s novel, was a hard, desolate, godless old miser, but after little Eppie strayed into his miserable cottage that memorable winter night, he began again to believe. ‘I think now,’ he said at last, ‘I can trusten God until I die.’ An incident in a Southern hospital illustrates the power of children to call men to repentance. A little girl was to undergo a dangerous operation. When she mounted the table, and the doctor was about to etherize her, he said: ‘Before we can make you well, we must put you to sleep.’ ‘Oh then, if you are going to put me to sleep,’ she sweetly said, ‘I must say my prayers first.’ Then, getting down on her knees, and folding her hands, she repeated that lovely prayer learned at every true mother’s feet: ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’ Just for a moment there were moist eyes in that group, for deep chords were touched, and the surgeon afterwards said: ‘I prayed that night for the first time in thirty years.’ ” The child that is old enough to sin against God is old enough to trust in Christ as the Savior of sinners. See Van Dyke, Christ and Little Children; Whitsitt and Warfield, Infant Baptism and Infant Salvation; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:26, 27; Ridgeley, Body of Div., 1:422-425; Calvin, Institutes, II, i, 8; Westminster Larger Catechism, x, 3; Krauth, Infant Salvation in the Calvinistic System; Candlish on Atonement, part ii, chap. 1; Geo. P. Fisher, in New Englander, Apr. 1868:338; J. F. Clarke, Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy, 360.

PART VI. SOTERIOLOGY, OR THE DOCTRINE OF SALVATION THROUGH THE WORK OF CHRIST AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

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I. Christology, Or The Redemption Wrought By Christ

Section I.—Historical Preparation For Redemption.

Since God had from eternity determined to redeem mankind, the history of the race from the time of the Fall to the coming of Christ was providentially arranged to prepare the way for this redemption. The preparation was two-fold:

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I. Negative Preparation,—in the history of the heathen world

This showed (1) the true nature of sin, and the depth of spiritual ignorance and of moral depravity to which the race, left to itself, must fall; and (2) the powerlessness of human nature to preserve or regain an adequate knowledge of God, or to deliver itself from sin by philosophy or art.

Why could not Eve have been the mother of the chosen seed, as she doubtless at the first supposed that she was? (Gen. 4:1—“and she conceived, and bare Cain [i. e., “gotten”, or “acquired”], and said, I have gotten a man, even Jehovah”). Why was not the cross set up at the gates of Eden? Scripture intimates that a preparation was needful (Gal 4:4—“but when the fulness of the time came, God hath sent forth his Son”). Of the two agencies made use of, we have called heathenism the negative preparation. But it was not wholly negative; it was partly positive also. Justin Martyr spoke of a Λόγος σπερματικός among the heathen. Clement of Alexandria called Plato a Μωσῆς ἀττικίζων—a Greek-speaking Moses. Notice the priestly attitude of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Pindar, Sophocles. The Bible recognizes Job, Balaam, Melchisedek, as instances of priesthood, or divine communication, outside the bounds of the chosen people. Heathen religions either were not religions, or God had a part in them. Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, were at least reformers, raised up in God’s providence. Gal 4:3 classes Judaism with the “rudiments of the world,” and Rom. 5:20 tells us that “the law came in beside,” as a force coöperating with other human factors, primitive revelation, sin, etc.

The positive preparation in heathenism receives greater attention when we conceive of Christ as the immanent God, revealing himself in conscience and in history. This was the real meaning of Justin Martyr, Apol. 1:46; 2:10, 13—“The whole race of men partook of the Logos, and those who lived according to reason (λόγου), were Christians, even though they were accounted atheists. Such among the Greeks were Socrates and Heracleitus, and those who resembled them.... Christ was known in part even to Socrates.... The teachings of Plato are not alien to those of Christ, though not in all respects similar. For all the writers of antiquity were able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the implanted Word (λόγου).” Justin Martyr claimed inspiration for Socrates. Tertullian spoke of Socrates as “pæne noster”—“almost one of us.” Paul speaks of the Cretans as having: “a prophet of their own” (Tit. 1:12)—probably Epimenides (596 B. C.) whom Plato calls a θεῖος ἀνήρ—“a man of God,” and whom Cicero couples with Bacis and the Erythræan Sibyl. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1:19; 6:5—“The same God who furnished both the covenants was the giver of the Greek philosophy to the Greeks, by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks.” Augustine: “Plato made me know the true God; Jesus Christ showed me the way to him.”

Bruce, Apologetics, 207—“God gave to the Gentiles at least the starlight of religious knowledge. The Jews were elected for the sake of the Gentiles. There was some light even for pagans, though heathenism on the whole was a failure. But its very failure was a preparation for receiving the true religion.” Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 133, 238—“Neo-Platonism, that splendid vision of incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek philosophy set.... On its ethical side Christianity had large elements in common with reformed Stoicism; on its theological side it moved in harmony with the new movements of Platonism.” E. G. Robinson: “The idea that all religions but the Christian are the direct work of the devil is a Jewish idea, and is now abandoned. On the contrary, God has revealed himself to the race just so far as they have been capable of knowing him.... Any religion is better than none, for all religion implies restraint.”

John 1:9—“There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world”—has its Old Testament equivalent in Ps. 94:10—“He that chastiseth the nations, shall not he correct, Even he that teacheth man knowledge?” Christ is the great educator of the race. The preincarnate Word exerted an influence upon the consciences of the heathen. He alone makes it true that “anima naturaliter Christiana est.” Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 138-140—“Religion is union between God and the soul. That experience was first perfectly realized in Christ. Here are the ideal fact and the historical fact united and blended. Origen’s and Tertullian’s rationalism and orthodoxy each has its truth. The religious consciousness of Christ is the fountain head from which Christianity has flowed. He was a beginning of life to men. He had the spirit of sonship—God in man, and man in God. ‘Quid interius Deo?’ He showed us insistence on the moral ideal, yet the preaching of mercy to the sinner. The gospel was the acorn, and Christianity is the oak that has sprung from it. In the acorn, as in the tree, are some Hebraic elements that are temporary. Paganism is the materializing of religion; Judaism is the legalizing of religion. ‘In me,’ says Charles Secretan, ‘lives some one greater than I.’ ”

But the positive element in heathenism was slight. Her altars and sacrifices, her philosophy and art, roused cravings which she was powerless to satisfy. Her religious systems became sources of deeper corruption. There was no hope, and no progress. “The Sphynx’s moveless calm symbolizes the monotony of Egyptian civilization.” Classical nations became more despairing, as they became more cultivated. To the best minds, truth seemed impossible of attainment, and all hope of general well-being seemed a dream. The Jews were the only forward-looking people; and all our modern confidence in destiny and development comes from them. They, in their turn, drew their hopefulness solely from prophecy. Not their “genius for religion,” but special revelation from God, made them what they were.

Although God was in heathen history, yet so exceptional were the advantages of the Jews, that we can almost assent to the doctrine of the New Englander, Sept. 1883:576—“The Bible does not recognize other revelations. It speaks of the ‘face of the covering that covereth all peoples, and the veil that is spread over all nations’ (Is. 25:7); Acts 14:16, 17—‘who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways. And yet he left not himself without witness’ = not an internal revelation in the hearts of sages, but an external revelation in nature, ‘in that he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.’ The convictions of heathen reformers with regard to divine inspiration were dim and intangible, compared with the consciousness of prophets and apostles that God was speaking through them to his people.”

On heathenism as a preparation for Christ, see Tholuck, Nature and Moral Influence of Heathenism, in Bib. Repos., 1832:80, 246, 441; Döllinger, Gentile and Jew; Pressensé, Religions before Christ; Max Müller, Science of Religion, 1-128; Cocker, Christianity and Greek Philosophy; Ackerman, Christian Element in Plato; Farrar, Seekers after God; Renan, on Rome and Christianity, in Hibbert Lectures for 1880.

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II. Positive Preparation,—in the history of Israel

A single people was separated from all others, from the time of Abraham, and was educated in three great truths: (1) the majesty of God, in his unity, omnipotence, and holiness; (2) the sinfulness of man, and his moral helplessness; (3) the certainty of a coming salvation. This education from the time of Moses was conducted by the use of three principal agencies:

A. Law.—The Mosaic legislation, (a) by its theophanies and miracles, cultivated faith in a personal and almighty God and Judge; (b) by its commands and threatenings, wakened the sense of sin; (c) by its priestly and sacrificial system, inspired hope of some way of pardon and access to God.

The education of the Jews was first of all an education by Law. In the history of the world, as in the history of the individual, law must precede gospel, John the Baptist must go before Christ, knowledge of sin must prepare a welcome entrance for knowledge of a Savior. While the heathen were studying God’s works, the chosen people were studying God. Men teach by words as well as by works,—so does God. And words reveal heart to heart, as works never can. “The Jews were made to know, on behalf of all mankind, the guilt and shame of sin. Yet just when the disease was at its height, the physicians were beneath contempt.” Wrightnour: “As if to teach all subsequent ages that no outward cleansing would furnish a remedy, the great deluge, which washed away the whole sinful antediluvian world with the exception of one comparatively pure family, had not cleansed the world from sin.”

With this gradual growth in the sense of sin there was also a widening and deepening faith. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, 67—“Abel, Abraham, Moses = the individual, the family, the nation. By faith Abel obtained witness; by faith Abraham received the son of the promise; and by faith Moses led Israel through the Red Sea.” Kurtz, Religionslehre, speaks of the relation between law and gospel as “Ein fliessender Gegensatz”—“a flowing antithesis”—like that between flower and fruit. A. B. Davidson, Expositor, 6:163—“The course of revelation is like a river, which cannot be cut up into sections.” E. G. Robinson: “The two fundamental ideas of Judaism were: 1. theological—the unity of God; 2. philosophical—the distinctness of God from the material world. Judaism went to seed. Jesus, with the sledge-hammer of truth, broke up the dead forms, and the Jews thought he was destroying the Law.” On methods pursued with humanity by God, see Simon, Reconciliation, 232-251.

B. Prophecy.—This was of two kinds: (a) verbal,—beginning with the protevangelium in the garden, and extending to within four hundred years of the coming of Christ; (b) typical,—in persons, as Adam, Melchisedek, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Jonah; and in acts, as Isaac’s sacrifice, and Moses’ lifting up the serpent in the wilderness.

The relation of law to gospel was like that of a sketch to the finished picture, or of David’s plan for the temple to Solomon’s execution of it. When all other nations were sunk in pessimism and despair, the light of hope burned brightly among the Hebrews. The nation was forward-bound. Faith was its very life. The O. T. saints saw all the troubles of the present “sub specie eternitatis,” and believed that “Light is sown for the righteous, And gladness for the upright in heart” (Ps. 97:11). The hope of Job was the hope of the chosen people: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Hutton, Essays, 2:237—“Hebrew supernaturalism has transmuted forever the pure naturalism of Greek poetry. And now no modern poet can ever become really great who does not feel and reproduce in his writings the difference between the natural and the supernatural.”

Christ was the reality, to which the types and ceremonies of Judaism pointed; and these latter disappeared when Christ had come, just as the petals of the blossom drop away when the fruit appears. Many promises to the O. T. saints which seemed to them promises of temporal blessing, were fulfilled in a better, because a more spiritual, way than they expected. Thus God cultivated in them a boundless trust—a trust which was essentially the same thing with the faith of the new dispensation, because it was the absolute reliance of a consciously helpless sinner upon God’s method of salvation, and so was implicitly, though not explicitly, a faith in Christ.

The protevangelium (Gen. 3:15) said “it [this promised seed] shall bruise thy head.” The “it” was rendered in some Latin manuscripts “ipsa.” Hence Roman Catholic divines attributed the victory to the Virgin. Notice that Satan was cursed, but not Adam and Eve; for they were candidates for restoration. The promise of the Messiah narrowed itself down as the race grew older, from Abraham to Judah, David, Bethlehem, and the Virgin. Prophecy spoke of “the sceptre” and of “the seventy weeks.” Haggai and Malachi foretold that the Lord should suddenly come to the second temple. Christ was to be true man and true God; prophet, priest, and king; humbled and exalted. When prophecy had become complete, a brief interval elapsed, and then he, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, actually came.

All these preparations for Christ’s coming, however, through the perversity of man became most formidable obstacles to the progress of the gospel. The Roman Empire put Christ to death. Philosophy rejected Christ as foolishness. Jewish ritualism, the mere shadow, usurped the place of worship and faith, the substance of religion. God’s last method of preparation in the case of Israel was that of

C. Judgment—Repeated divine chastisements for idolatry culminated in the overthrow of the kingdom, and the captivity of the Jews. The exile had two principal effects: (a) religious,—in giving monotheism firm root in the heart of the people, and in leading to the establishment of the synagogue-system, by which monotheism was thereafter preserved and propagated; (b) civil,—in converting the Jews from an agricultural to a trading people, scattering them among all nations, and finally imbuing them with the spirit of Roman law and organization.

Thus a people was made ready to receive the gospel and to propagate it throughout the world, at the very time when the world had become conscious of its needs, and, through its greatest philosophers and poets, was expressing its longings for deliverance.

At the junction of Europe, Asia, and Africa, there lay a little land through which passed all the caravan-routes from the East to the West. Palestine was “the eye of the world.” The Hebrews throughout the Roman world were “the greater Palestine of the Dispersion.” The scattering of the Jews through all lands had prepared a monotheistic starting point for the gospel in every heathen city. Jewish synagogues had prepared places of assembly for the hearing of the gospel. The Greek language—the universal literary language of the world—had prepared a medium in which that gospel could be spoken. “Cæsar had unified the Latin West, as Alexander the Greek East”; and universal peace, together with Roman roads and Roman law, made it possible for that gospel, when once it had got a foothold, to spread itself to the ends of the earth. The first dawn of missionary enterprise appears among the proselyting Jews before Christ’s time. Christianity laid hold of this proselyting spirit, and sanctified it, to conquer the world to the faith of Christ.

Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 2:9, 10—“In his great expedition across the Hellespont, Paul reversed the course which Alexander took, and carried the gospel into Europe to the centres of the old Greek culture.” In all these preparations we see many lines converging to one result, in a manner inexplicable, unless we take them as proofs of the wisdom and power of God preparing the way for the kingdom of his Son; and all this in spite of the fact that “a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in” (Rom. 11:25). James Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 15—“Israel now instructs the world in the Worship of Mammon, after having once taught it the knowledge of God.”

On Judaism, as a preparation for Christ, see Döllinger, Gentile and Jew, 2:291-419; Martensen, Dogmatics, 224-236; Hengstenberg, Christology of the O. T.; Smith, Prophecy a Preparation for Christ; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 458-485; Fairbairn, Typology; MacWhorter, Jahveh Christ; Kurtz, Christliche Religionslehre, 114; Edwards’ History of Redemption, in Works, 1:297-395; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation; Conybeare and Howson, Life and Epistles of St. Paul, 1:1-37; Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 257-281; Schaff, Hist. Christian Ch., 1:32-49; Butler’s Analogy, Bohn’s ed., 228-238; Bushnell, Vicarious Sac., 63-66; Max Müller, Science of Language, 2:443; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:463-485; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 47-73.

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Section II.—The Person Of Christ

The redemption of mankind from sin was to be effected through a Mediator who should unite in himself both the human nature and the divine, in order that he might reconcile God to man and man to God. To facilitate an understanding of the Scriptural doctrine under consideration, it will be desirable at the outset to present a brief historical survey of views respecting the Person of Christ.

In the history of doctrine, as we have seen, beliefs held in solution at the beginning are only gradually precipitated and crystallized into definite formulas. The first question which Christians naturally asked themselves was “What think ye of the Christ” (Mat 22:42); then his relation to the Father; then, in due succession, the nature of sin, of atonement, of justification, of regeneration. Connecting these questions with the names of the great leaders who sought respectively to answer them, we have: 1. the Person of Christ, treated by Gregory Nazianzen (328); 2. the Trinity, by Athanasius (325-373); 3. Sin, by Augustine (353-430); 4. Atonement, by Anselm (1033-1109); 5. Justification by faith, by Luther (1485-1560); 6. Regeneration, by John Wesley (1703-1791);—six weekdays of theology, leaving only a seventh, for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which may be the work of our age. John 10:36—“him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world”—hints at some mysterious process by which the Son was prepared for his mission. Athanasius: “If the Word of God is in the world, as in a body, what is there strange in affirming that he has also entered into humanity?” This is the natural end of evolution from lower to higher. See Medd, Bampton Lectures for 1882, on The One Mediator: The Operation of the Son of God in Nature and in Grace; Orr, God’s Image in Man.

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I. Historical Survey of Views Respecting the Person of Christ

1. The Ebionites (אביון = “poor”; A. D. 107?) denied the reality of Christ’s divine nature, and held him to be merely man, whether naturally or supernaturally conceived. This man, however, held a peculiar relation to God, in that, from the time of his baptism, an unmeasured fulness of the divine Spirit rested upon him. Ebionism was simply Judaism within the pale of the Christian church, and its denial of Christ’s godhood was occasioned by the apparent incompatibility of this doctrine with monotheism.

Fürst (Heb. Lexicon) derives the name “Ebionite” from the word signifying “poor”; see Is. 25:4—“thou hast been a stronghold to the poor”; Mat 5:3—“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It means “oppressed, pious souls.” Epiphanius traces them back to the Christians who took refuge, A. D. 66, at Pella, just before the destruction of Jerusalem. They lasted down to the fourth century. Dorner can assign no age for the formation of the sect, nor any historically ascertained person as its head. It was not Judaic Christianity, but only a fraction of this. There were two divisions of the Ebionites:

(a) The Nazarenes, who held to the supernatural birth of Christ, while they would not go to the length of admitting the preëxisting hypostasis of the Son. They are said to have had the gospel of Matthew, in Hebrew.

(b) The Cerinthian Ebionites, who put the baptism of Christ in place of his supernatural birth, and made the ethical sonship the cause of the physical. It seemed to them a heathenish fable that the Son of God should be born of the Virgin. There was no personal union between the divine and human in Christ. Christ, as distinct from Jesus, was not a merely impersonal power descending upon Jesus, but a preëxisting hypostasis above the world-creating powers. The Cerinthian Ebionites, who on the whole best represent the spirit of Ebionism, approximated to Pharisaic Judaism, and were hostile to the writings of Paul. The Epistle to the Hebrews, in fact, is intended to counteract an Ebionitic tendency to overstrain law and to underrate Christ. In a complete view, however, should also be mentioned:

(c) The Gnostic Ebionism of the pseudo-Clementines, which in order to destroy the deity of Christ and save the pure monotheism, so-called, of primitive religion, gave up even the best part of the Old Testament. In all its forms, Ebionism conceives of God and man as external to each other. God could not become man. Christ was no more than a prophet or teacher, who, as the reward of his virtue, was from the time of his baptism specially endowed with the Spirit. After his death he was exalted to kingship. But that would not justify the worship which the church paid him. A merely creaturely mediator would separate us from God, instead of uniting us to him. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:305-307 (Syst. Doct., 3:201-204), and Hist. Doct. Person Christ, A.1:187-217; Reuss, Hist. Christ. Theol., 1:100-107; Schaff, Ch. Hist., 1:213-215.

2. The Docetæ (δοκέω—“to seem,” “to appear”; A. D. 70-170), like most of the Gnostics in the second century and the Manichees in the third, denied the reality of Christ’s human body. This view was the logical sequence of their assumption of the inherent evil of matter. If matter is evil and Christ was pure, then Christ’s human body must have been merely phantasmal. Docetism was simply pagan philosophy introduced into the church.

The Gnostic Basilides held to a real human Christ, with whom the divine νοῦς became united at the baptism; but the followers of Basilides became Docetæ. To them, the body of Christ was merely a seeming one. There was no real life or death. Valentinus made the Æon, Christ, with a body purely pneumatic and worthy of himself, pass through the body of the Virgin, as water through a reed, taking up into himself nothing of the human nature through which he passed; or as a ray of light through colored glass which only imparts to the light a portion of its own darkness. Christ’s life was simply a theophany. The Patripassians and Sabellians, who are only sects of the Docetæ, denied all real humanity to Christ. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 141—“He treads the thorns of death and shame ‘like a triumphal path,’ of which he never felt the sharpness. There was development only externally and in appearance. No ignorance can be ascribed to him amidst the omniscience of the Godhead.” Shelley: “A mortal shape to him Was as the vapor dim Which the orient planet animates with light.” The strong argument against Docetism was found in Heb. 2:14—“Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same.”

That Docetism appeared so early, shows that the impression Christ made was that of a superhuman being. Among many of the Gnostics, the philosophy which lay at the basis of their Docetism was a pantheistic apotheosis of the world. God did not need to become man, for man was essentially divine. This view, and the opposite error of Judaism, already mentioned, both showed their insufficiency by attempts to combine with each other, as in the Alexandrian philosophy. See Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, A.1:218-253, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307-310 (Syst. Doct., 3:204-206); Neander, Ch. Hist, 1:387.

3. The Arians (Arius, condemned at Nice, 325) denied the integrity of the divine nature in Christ. They regarded the Logos who united himself to humanity in Jesus Christ, not as possessed of absolute godhood, but as the first and highest of created beings. This view originated in a misinterpretation of the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s state of humiliation, and in mistaking temporary subordination for original and permanent inequality.

Arianism is called by Dorner a reaction from Sabellianism. Sabellius had reduced the incarnation of Christ to a temporary phenomenon. Arius thought to lay stress on the hypostasis of the Son, and to give it fixity and substance. But, to his mind, the reality of Sonship seemed to require subordination to the Father. Origen had taught the subordination of the Son to the Father, in connection with his doctrine of eternal generation. Arius held to the subordination, and also to the generation, but this last, he declared, could not be eternal, but must be in time. See Dorner, Person Christ, A.2:227-244, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307, 312, 313 (Syst. Doct., 3:203, 207-210); Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Arianismus. See also this Compendium, Vol. I:328-330.

4. The Apollinarians (Apollinaris, condemned at Constantinople, 381) denied the integrity of Christ’s human nature. According to this view, Christ had no human νοῦς or πνεῦμα, other than that which was furnished by the divine nature. Christ had only the human σῶμα and ψυχή; the place of the human νοῦς or πνεῦμα was filled by the divine Logos. Apollinarism is an attempt to construe the doctrine of Christ’s person in the forms of the Platonic trichotomy.

Lest divinity should seem a foreign element, when added to this curtailed manhood, Apollinaris said that there was an eternal tendency to the human in the Logos himself; that in God was the true manhood; that the Logos is the eternal, archetypal man. But here is no becoming man—only a manifestation in flesh of what the Logos already was. So we have a Christ of great head and dwarfed body. Justin Martyr preceded Apollinaris in this view. In opposing it, the church Fathers said that “what the Son of God has not taken to himself, he has not sanctified”—τὸ ἀπρόσληπτον καὶ ἀθεράπευτον. See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408—“The impossibility, on the Arian theory, of making two finite souls into one, finally led to the [Apollinarian] denial of any human soul in Christ”; see also, Dorner, Person Christ, A.2:352-399, and Glaubenslehre, 2:310 (Syst. Doct., 3:206, 207); Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:394.

Apollinaris taught that the eternal Word took into union with himself, not a complete human nature, but an irrational human animal. Simon, Reconciliation, 329, comes near to being an Apollinarian, when he maintains that the incarnate Logos was human, but was not a man. He is the constituter of man, self-limited, in order that he may save that to which he has given life. Gore, Incarnation, 93—“Apollinaris suggested that the archetype of manhood exists in God, who made man in his own image, so that man’s nature in some sense preëxisted in God. The Son of God was eternally human, and he could fill the place of the human mind in Christ without his ceasing to be in some sense divine.... This the church negatived,—man is not God, nor God man. The first principle of theism is that manhood at the bottom is not the same thing as Godhead. This is a principle intimately bound up with man’s responsibility and the reality of sin. The interests of theism were at stake.”

5. The Nestorians (Nestorius, removed from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, 431) denied the real union between the divine and the human natures in Christ, making it rather a moral than an organic one. They refused therefore to attribute to the resultant unity the attributes of each nature, and regarded Christ as a man in very near relation to God. Thus they virtually held to two natures and two persons, instead of two natures in one person.

Nestorius disliked the phrase: “Mary, mother of God.” The Chalcedon statement asserted its truth, with the significant addition: “as to his humanity.” Nestorius made Christ a peculiar temple of God. He believed in συνάφεια, not ἕνωσις,—junction and indwelling, but not absolute union. He made too much of the analogy of the union of the believer with Christ, and separated as much as possible the divine and the human. The two natures were, in his view, ἄλλος καὶ ἄλλος, instead of being ἄλλο καὶ ἄλλο, which together constitute εἶς—one personality. The union which he accepted was a moral union, which makes Christ simply God and man, instead of the God-man.

John of Damascus compared the passion of Christ to the felling of a tree on which the sun shines. The axe fells the tree, but does no harm to the sunbeams. So the blows which struck Christ’s humanity caused no harm to his deity; while the flesh suffered, the deity remained impassible. This leaves, however, no divine efficacy of the human sufferings, and no personal union of the human with the divine. The error of Nestorius arose from a philosophic nominalism, which refused to conceive of nature without personality. He believed in nothing more than a local or moral union, like the marriage union, in which two become one; or like the state, which is sometimes called a moral person, because having a unity composed of many persons. See Dorner, Person Christ, B.1:53-79, and Glaubenslehre, 2:315, 316 (Syst. Doct., 3:211-213); Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:210; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 152-154.

“There was no need here of the virgin-birth,—to secure a sinless father as well as mother would have been enough. Nestorianism holds to no real incarnation—only to an alliance between God and man. After the fashion of the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, man and God are joined together. But the incarnation is not merely a higher degree of the mystical union.” Gore, Incarnation, 94—“Nestorius adopted and popularized the doctrine of the famous commentator, Theodore of Mopsuestia. But the Christ of Nestorius was simply a deified man, not God incarnate,—he was from below, not from above. If he was exalted to union with the divine essence, his exaltation was only that of one individual man.”

6. The Eutychians (condemned at Chalcedon, 451) denied the distinction and coëxistence of the two natures, and held to a mingling of both into one, which constituted a tertium quid, or third nature. Since in this case the divine must overpower the human, it follows that the human was really absorbed into or transmuted into the divine, although the divine was not in all respects the same, after the union, that it was before. Hence the Eutychians were often called Monophysites, because they virtually reduced the two natures to one.

They were an Alexandrian school, which included monks of Constantinople and Egypt. They used the words σύγχυσις, μεταβολή—confounding, transformation—to describe the union of the two natures in Christ. Humanity joined to deity was as a drop of honey mingled with the ocean. There was a change in either element, but as when a stone attracts the earth, or a meteorite the sun, or when a small boat pulls a ship, all the movement was virtually on the part of the smaller object. Humanity was so absorbed in deity, as to be altogether lost. The union was illustrated by electron, a metal compounded of silver and gold. A more modern illustration would be that of the chemical union of an acid and an alkali, to form a salt unlike either of the constituents.

In effect this theory denied the human element, and, with this, the possibility of atonement, on the part of human nature, as well as of real union of man with God. Such a magical union of the two natures as Eutyches described is inconsistent with any real becoming man on the part of the Logos,—the manhood is well-nigh as illusory as upon the theory of the Docetæ. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 140—“This turns not the Godhead only but the manhood also into something foreign—into some nameless nature, betwixt and between—the fabulous nature of a semi-human demigod,” like the Centaur.

The author of “The German Theology” says that “Christ’s human nature was utterly bereft of self, and was nothing else but a house and habitation of God.” The Mystics would have human personality so completely the organ of the divine that “we may be to God what man’s hand is to a man,” and that “I” and “mine” may cease to have any meaning. Both these views savor of Eutychianism. On the other hand, the Unitarian says that Christ was “a mere man.” But there cannot be such a thing as a mere man, exclusive of aught above and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. The Trinitarian sometimes declares himself as believing that Christ is God and man, thus implying the existence of two substances. Better say that Christ is the God-man, who manifests all the divine powers and qualities of which all men and all nature are partial embodiments. See Dorner, Person of Christ, B.1:83-93, and Glaubenslehre, 2:318, 319 (Syst. Doct., 3:214-216); Guericke, Ch. History, 1:356-360.

The foregoing survey would seem to show that history had exhausted the possibilities of heresy, and that the future denials of the doctrine of Christ’s person must be, in essence, forms of the views already mentioned. All controversies with regard to the person of Christ must, of necessity, hinge upon one of three points: first, the reality of the two natures; secondly, the integrity of the two natures; thirdly, the union of the two natures in one person. Of these points, Ebionism and Docetism deny the reality of the natures; Arianism and Apollinarianism deny their integrity; while Nestorianism and Eutychianism deny their proper union. In opposition to all these errors, the orthodox doctrine held its ground and maintains it to this day.

We may apply to this subject what Dr. A. P. Peabody said in a different connection: “The canon of infidelity was closed almost as soon as that of the Scriptures”—modern unbelievers having, for the most part, repeated the objections of their ancient predecessors. Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“As a shell which has failed to burst is picked up on some old battle-field, by some one on whom experience is thrown away, and is exploded by him in the bosom of his approving family, with disastrous results, so one of these abandoned beliefs may be dug up by the head of some intellectual family, to the confusion of those who follow him as their leader.”

7. The Orthodox doctrine (promulgated at Chalcedon, 451) holds that in the one person Jesus Christ there are two natures, a human nature and a divine nature, each in its completeness and integrity, and that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united, yet so that no third nature is formed thereby. In brief, to use the antiquated dictum, orthodox doctrine forbids us either to divide the person or to confound the natures.

That this doctrine is Scriptural and rational, we have yet to show. We may most easily arrange our proofs by reducing the three points mentioned to two, namely: first, the reality and integrity of the two natures; secondly, the union of the two natures in one person.

The formula of Chalcedon is negative, with the exception of its assertion of a ἕνωσις ὑποστατική. It proceeds from the natures, and regards the result of the union to be the person. Each of the two natures is regarded as in movement toward the other. The symbol says nothing of an ἀνυποστασία of the human nature, nor does it say that the Logos furnishes the ego in the personality. John of Damascus, however, pushed forward to these conclusions, and his work, translated into Latin, was used by Peter Lombard, and determined the views of the Western church of the Middle Ages. Dorner regards this as having given rise to the Mariolatry, saint-invocation, and transubstantiation of the Roman Catholic Church. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:189 sq.; Dorner, Person Christ, B.1:93-119, and Glaubenslehre, 2:320-328 (Syst. Doct., 3:216-223), in which last passage may be found valuable matter with regard to the changing uses of the words πρόσωπον, ὑπόστασις, οὐσία, etc.

Gore, Incarnation, 96, 101—“These decisions simply express in a new form, without substantial addition, the apostolic teaching as it is represented in the New Testament. They express it in a new form for protective purposes, as a legal enactment protects a moral principle. They are developments only in the sense that they represent the apostolic teaching worked out into formulas by the aid of a terminology which was supplied by Greek dialectics.... What the church borrowed from Greek thought was her terminology, not the substance of her creed. Even in regard to her terminology we must make one important reservation; for Christianity laid all stress on the personality of God and man, of which Hellenism had thought but little.”

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II. The two Natures of Christ,—their Reality and Integrity

1. The Humanity of Christ.

A. Its Reality.—This may be shown as follows:

(a) He expressly called himself, and was called, “man.”

John 8:40—“ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth”; Acts 2:22—“Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you”; Rom. 5:15—“the one man, Jesus Christ”; 1 Cor. 15:21—“by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead”; 1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and man, himself man, Christ Jesus.” Compare the genealogies in Mat. 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38, the former of which proves Jesus to be in the royal line, and the latter of which proves him to be in the natural line, of succession from David; the former tracing back his lineage to Abraham, and the latter to Adam. Christ is therefore the son of David, and of the stock of Israel. Compare also the phrase “Son of man,” e. g., in Mat. 20:28, which, however much it may mean in addition, certainly indicates the veritable humanity of Jesus. Compare, finally, the term “flesh” (= human nature), applied to him in John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh” and in 1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.”

“Jesus is the true Son of man whom he proclaimed himself to be. This implies that he is the representative of all humanity. Consider for a moment what is implied in your being a man. How many parents had you? You answer, Two. How many grandparents? You answer, Four. How many great-grandparents? Eight. How many great-great-grandparents? Sixteen. So the number of your ancestors increases as you go further back, and if you take in only twenty generations, you will have to reckon yourself as the outcome of more than a million progenitors. The name Smith, or Jones, which you bear, represents only one strain of all those million; you might almost as well bear any other name; your existence is more an expression of the race at large than of any particular family or line. What is true of you, was true, on the human side, of the Lord Jesus. In him all the lines of our common humanity converged. He was the Son of man, far more than he was Son of Mary”; see A. H. Strong, Sermon before the London Baptist Congress.

(b) He possessed the essential elements of human nature as at present constituted—a material body and a rational soul.

Mat. 26:38—“My soul is exceeding sorrowful”; John 11:33—“he groaned in the spirit”; Mat. 26:26—“this is my body”; 28—“this is my blood”; Luke 24:39—“a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; Heb. 2:14—“Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same”; 1 John 1:1—“that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life”; 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.”

Yet Christ was not all men in one, and he did not illustrate the development of all human powers. Laughter, painting, literature, marriage—these provinces he did not invade. Yet we do not regard these as absent from the ideal man. The perfection of Jesus was the perfection of self-limiting love. For our sakes he sanctified himself (John 17:19), or separated himself from much that in an ordinary man would have been excellence and delight. He became an example to us, by doing God’s will and reflecting God’s character in his particular environment and in his particular mission—that of the world’s Redeemer; see H. E. Robins, Ethics of the Christian Life, 259-303.

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 86-105—“Christ was not a man only amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that he was another specimen, differing, by being another, from every one but himself. His relation to the race was not a differentiating but a consummating relation. He was not generically but inclusively man.... The only relation that can at all directly compare with it is that of Adam, who in a real sense was humanity.... That complete indwelling and possessing of even one other, which the yearnings of man toward man imperfectly approach, is only possible, in any fulness of the words, to that spirit of man which is the Spirit of God: to the Spirit of God become, through incarnation, the spirit of man.... If Christ’s humanity were not the humanity of Deity, it could not stand in the wide, inclusive, consummating relation, in which it stands, in fact, to the humanity of all other men.... Yet the centre of Christ’s being as man was not in himself but in God. He was the expression, by willing reflection, of Another.”

(c) He was moved by the instinctive principles, and he exercised the active powers, which belong to a normal and developed humanity (hunger, thirst, weariness, sleep, love, compassion, anger, anxiety, fear, groaning, weeping, prayer).

Mat 4:2—“he afterward hungered”; John 19:28—“I thirst”; 4:6—“Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus by the well”; Mat 8:24—“the boat was covered with the waves: but he was asleep”; Mark 10:21—“Jesus looking upon him loved him”; Mat. 9:36—“when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them”; Mark 3:5—“looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart”; Heb. 5:7—“supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death”; John 12:27—“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour”; 11:33—“he groaned in the spirit”; 35—“Jesus wept”; Mat 14:23—“he went up into the mountain apart to pray.” Heb. 2:16—“For it is not doubtless angels whom he rescueth, but he rescueth the seed of Abraham” (Kendrick).

Prof. J. P. Silvernail, on The Elocution of Jesus, finds the following intimations as to his delivery. It was characterized by 1. Naturalness (sitting, as at Capernaum); 2. Deliberation (cultivates responsiveness in his hearers); 3. Circumspection (he looked at Peter); 4. Dramatic action (woman taken in adultery); 5. Self-control (authority, poise, no vociferation, denunciation of Scribes and Pharisees). All these are manifestations of truly human qualities and virtues. The epistle of James, the brother of our Lord, with its exaltation of a meek, quiet and holy life, may be an unconscious reflection of the character of Jesus, as it had appeared to James during the early days at Nazareth. So John the Baptist’s exclamation, “I have need to be baptized of thee” (Mat 3:14), may be an inference from his intercourse with Jesus in childhood and youth.

(d) He was subject to the ordinary laws of human development, both in body and soul (grew and waxed strong in spirit; asked questions; grew in wisdom and stature; learned obedience; suffered being tempted; was made perfect through sufferings).

Luke 2:40—“the child grew, and waxed strong, filled with wisdom”; 46—“sitting in the midst of the teachers, both hearing them, and asking them questions” (here, at his twelfth year, he appears first to become fully conscious that he is the Sent of God, the Son of God); 49—“know ye not that I must be in my Father’s house?” (lit. “in the things of my Father”); 52—“advanced in wisdom and stature”; Heb. 5:8—“learned obedience by the things which he suffered”; 2:18—“in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”; 10—“it became him ... to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”

Keble: “Was not our Lord a little child, Taught by degrees to pray; By father dear and mother mild Instructed day by day?” Adamson, The Mind in Christ: “To Henry Drummond Christianity was the crown of the evolution of the whole universe. Jesus’ growth in stature and in favor with God and men is a picture in miniature of the age-long evolutionary process.” Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, 185—“The incarnation of the Son was not his one revelation of God, but the interpretation to sinful humanity of all his other revelations of God in nature and history and moral experience, which had been darkened by sin.... The Logos, incarnate or not, is the τέλος as well as the ἀρχή of creation.”

Andrew Murray, Spirit of Christ, 26, 27—“Though now baptized himself, he cannot yet baptize others. He must first, in the power of his baptism, meet temptation and overcome it; must learn obedience and suffer; yea, through the eternal Spirit, offer himself a sacrifice to God and his Will; then only could he afresh receive the Holy Spirit as the reward of obedience, with the power to baptize all who belong to him”; see Acts 2:33—“Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he hath poured forth this, which ye see and hear.”

(e) He suffered and died (bloody sweat; gave up his spirit; his side pierced, and straightway there came out blood and water).

Luke 22:44—“being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground”; John 19:30—“he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit”; 34—“one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and straightway there came out blood and water”—held by Stroud, Physical Cause of our Lord’s Death, to be proof that Jesus died of a broken heart.

Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, 1:9-19—“The Lord is said to have grown in wisdom and favor with God, not because it was so, but because he acted as if it were so. So he was exalted after death, as if this exaltation were on account of death.” But we may reply: Resolve all signs of humanity into mere appearance, and you lose the divine nature as well as the human; for God is truth and cannot act a lie. The babe, the child, even the man, in certain respects, was ignorant. Jesus, the boy, was not making crosses, as in Overbeck’s picture, but rather yokes and plows, as Justin Martyr relates—serving a real apprenticeship in Joseph’s workshop: Mark 6:3—“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”

See Holman Hunt’s picture, “The Shadow of the Cross”—in which not Jesus, but only Mary, sees the shadow of the cross upon the wall. He lived a life of faith, as well as of prayer (Heb. 12:2—“Jesus the author [captain, prince] and perfecter of our faith”), dependent upon Scripture, which was much of it, as Ps. 16 and 118, and Is. 49, 50, 61, written for him, as well as about him. See Park, Discourses, 297-327; Deutsch, Remains, 131—“The boldest transcendental flight of the Talmud is its saying: ‘God prays.’ ” In Christ’s humanity, united as it is to deity, we have the fact answering to this piece of Talmudic poetry.

B. Its Integrity. We here use the term “integrity” to signify, not merely completeness, but perfection. That which is perfect is, a fortiori, complete in all its parts. Christ’s human nature was:

(a) Supernaturally conceived; since the denial of his supernatural conception involves either a denial of the purity of Mary, his mother, or a denial of the truthfulness of Matthew’s and Luke’s narratives.

Luke 1:34, 35—“And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” The “seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15) was one who had no earthly father. “Eve” = life, not only as being the source of physical life to the race, but also as bringing into the world him who was to be its spiritual life. Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 29—Jesus Christ “had no earthly father; his birth was a creative act of God, breaking through the chain of human generation.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:447 (Syst. Doct., 3:345)—“The new science recognizes manifold methods of propagation, and that too even in one and the same species.”

Professor Loeb has found that the unfertilized egg of the sea-urchin may be made by chemical treatment to produce thrifty young, and he thinks it probable that the same effect may be produced among the mammalia. Thus parthenogenesis in the highest order of life is placed among the scientific possibilities. Romanes, even while he was an agnostic, affirmed that a virgin-birth even in the human race would be by no means out of the range of possibility; see his Darwin and After Darwin, 119, footnote—“Even if a virgin has ever conceived and borne a son, and even if such a fact in the human species has been unique, it would not betoken any breach of physiological continuity.” Only a new impulse from the Creator could save the Redeemer from the long accruing fatalities of human generation. But the new creation of humanity in Christ is scientifically quite as possible as its first creation in Adam; and in both cases there may have been no violation of natural law, but only a unique revelation of its possibilities. “Birth from a virgin made it clear that a new thing was taking place in the earth, and that One was coming into the world who was not simply man.” A. B. Bruce: “Thoroughgoing naturalism excludes the virgin life as well as the virgin birth.” See Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 254-270; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 176.

Paul Lobstein, Incarnation of our Lord, 217—“That which is unknown to the teachings of St. Peter and St. Paul, St. John and St. James, and our Lord himself, and is absent from the earliest and the latest gospels, cannot be so essential as many people have supposed.” This argument from silence is sufficiently met by the considerations that Mark passes over thirty years of our Lord’s life in silence; that John presupposes the narratives of Matthew and of Luke; that Paul does not deal with the story of Jesus’ life. The facts were known at first only to Mary and to Joseph; their very nature involved reticence until Jesus was demonstrated to be “the Son of God with power ... by the resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4); meantime the natural development of Jesus and his refusal to set up an earthly kingdom may have made the miraculous events of thirty years ago seem to Mary like a wonderful dream; so only gradually the marvellous tale of the mother of the Lord found its way into the gospel tradition and creeds of the church, and into the inmost hearts of Christians of all countries; see F. L. Anderson, in Baptist Review and Expositor, 1904:25-44, and Machen, on the N. T. Account of the Birth of Jesus, in Princeton Theol. Rev., Oct. 1905, and Jan. 1906.

Cooke, on The Virgin Birth of our Lord, in Methodist Rev., Nov. 1904:849-857—“If there is a moral taint in the human race, if in the very blood and constitution of humanity there is an ineradicable tendency to sin, then it is utterly inconceivable that any one born in the race by natural means should escape the taint of that race. And, finally, if the virgin birth is not historical, then a difficulty greater than any that destructive criticism has yet evolved from documents, interpolations, psychological improbabilities and unconscious contradictions confronts the reason and upsets all the long results of scientific observation,—that a sinful and deliberately sinning and unmarried pair should have given life to the purest human being that ever lived or of whom the human race has ever dreamed, and that he, knowing and forgiving the sins of others, never knew the shame of his own origin.” See also Gore, Dissertations, 1-68, on the Virgin Birth of our Lord, J. Armitage Robinson, Some Thoughts on the Incarnation, 42, both of whom show that without assuming the reality of the virgin birth we cannot account for the origin of the narratives of Matthew and of Luke, nor for the acceptance of the virgin birth by the early Christians. Per contra, see Hoben, in Am. Jour. Theol., 1902:478-506, 709-752. For both sides of the controversy, see Symposium by Bacon, Zenos, Rhees and Warfield, in Am. Jour. Theol., Jan. 1906:1-30; and especially Orr, Virgin Birth of Christ.

(b) Free, both from hereditary depravity, and from actual sin; as is shown by his never offering sacrifice, never praying for forgiveness, teaching that all but he needed the new birth, challenging all to convict him of a single sin.

Jesus frequently went up to the temple, but he never offered sacrifice. He prayed: “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34); but he never prayed: “Father, forgive me.” He said: “Ye must be born anew” (John 3:7); but the words indicated that he had no such need. “At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.” He not only yielded to God’s will when made known to him, but he sought it: “I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 5:30). The anger which he showed was no passionate or selfish or vindictive anger, but the indignation of righteousness against hypocrisy and cruelty—an indignation accompanied with grief: “looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart” (Mark 3:5). F. W. H. Myers, St. Paul, 19, 53—“Thou with strong prayer and very much entreating Willest be asked, and thou wilt answer then, Show the hid heart beneath creation beating, Smile with kind eyes and be a man with men.... Yea, through life, death, through sorrow and through sinning, He shall suffice me, for he hath sufficed: Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.” Not personal experience of sin, but resistance to it, fitted him to deliver us from it.

Luke 1:35—“wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”; John 8:46—“Which of you convicteth me of sin?” 14:30—“the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in me” = not the slightest evil inclination upon which his temptations can lay hold; Rom. 8:3—“in the likeness of sinful flesh” = in flesh, but without the sin which in other men clings to the flesh; 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin”; Heb. 4:15—“in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin”; 7:26—“holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners”—by the fact of his immaculate conception; 9:14—“through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; 1 Pet. 1:19—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ”; 2:22—“who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth”; 1 John 3:5, 7—“in him is no sin ... he is righteous.”

Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 29—“Had Christ been only human nature, he could not have been without sin. But life can draw out of the putrescent clod materials for its own living. Divine life appropriates the human.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344)—“What with us is regeneration, is with him the incarnation of God.” In this origin of Jesus’ sinlessness from his union with God, we see the absurdity, both doctrinally and practically, of speaking of an immaculate conception of the Virgin, and of making her sinlessness precede that of her Son. On the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, see H. B. Smith, System, 389-392; Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 129-131—“It makes the regeneration of humanity begin, not with Christ, but with the Virgin. It breaks his connection with the race. Instead of springing sinless from the sinful race, he derives his humanity from something not like the rest of us.” Thomas Aquinas and Liguori both call Mary the Queen of Mercy, as Jesus her Son is King of Justice; see Thomas, Præf. in Sept. Cath. Ep., Comment on Esther, 5:3, and Liguori, Glories of Mary, 1:80 (Dublin version of 1866). Bradford, Heredity, 289—“The Roman church has almost apotheosized Mary; but it must not be forgotten that the process began with Jesus. From what he was, an inference was drawn concerning what his mother must have been.”

“Christ took human nature in such a way that this nature, without sin, bore the consequences of sin.” That portion of human nature which the Logos took into union with himself was, in the very instant and by the fact of his taking it, purged from all its inherent depravity. But if in Christ there was no sin, or tendency to sin, how could he be tempted? In the same way, we reply, that Adam was tempted. Christ was not omniscient: Mark 13:32—“of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” Only at the close of the first temptation does Jesus recognize Satan as the adversary of souls: Mat. 4:10—“Get thee hence, Satan.” Jesus could be tempted, not only because he was not omniscient, but also because he had the keenest susceptibility to all the forms of innocent desire. To these desires temptation may appeal. Sin consists, not in these desires, but in the gratification of them out of God’s order, and contrary to God’s will. Meyer: “Lust is appetite run wild. There is no harm in any natural appetite, considered in itself. But appetite has been spoiled by the Fall.” So Satan appealed (Mat. 4:1-11) to our Lord’s desire for food, for applause, for power; to “Ueberglaube, Aberglaude, Unglaube” (Kurtz); cf. Mat. 26:39; 27:42; 26:53. All temptation must be addressed either to desire or fear; so Christ “was in all points tempted like as we are” (Heb. 4:15). The first temptation, in the wilderness, was addressed to desire; the second, in the garden, was addressed to fear. Satan, after the first, “departed from him for a season” (Luke 4:13); but he returned, in Gethsemane—“the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in me” (John 14:30)—If possible, to deter Jesus from his work, by rousing within him vast and agonizing fears of the suffering and death that lay before him. Yet, in spite of both the desire and the fear with which his holy soul was moved, he was “without sin” (Heb. 4:15). The tree on the edge of the precipice is fiercely blown by the winds: the strain upon the roots is tremendous, but the roots hold. Even in Gethsemane and on Calvary, Christ never prays for forgiveness, he only imparts it to others. See Ullman, Sinlessness of Jesus; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:7-17, 126-136, esp. 135, 136; Schaff, Person of Christ, 51-72; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 3:330-349.

(c) Ideal human nature,—furnishing the moral pattern which man is progressively to realize, although within limitations of knowledge and of activity required by his vocation as the world’s Redeemer.

Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ. Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.” 1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; so verse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly [man], we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” [man]. 2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord” is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed. Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”; Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”; 1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”; 1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”

The phrase “Son of man” (John 5:27; cf. Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey, in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”; Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”; Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”; Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar: “Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.” So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.

But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him, “love can never love too much.” Christ’s human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ’s miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge: “Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”

Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is no mere ideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“The a priori only outlines a possible, and does not determine what shall be actual within the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.” No a priori truths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, a realization of the divine ideal. “Great men,” says Amiel, “are the true men.” Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.

Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time. ‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’ But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.” Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.” On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451 sq.

(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.

By the impersonality of Christ’s human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored not _un_personality but _in_personality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.” In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus’ two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner’s Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christ is humanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”

Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man’s evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.” Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ’s incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God’s witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.” The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word “whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2).

(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.

In Is. 9:6, Christ is called “Everlasting Father.” In Is. 53:10, it is said that “he shall see his seed.” In Rev. 22:16, he calls himself “the root” as well as “the offspring of David.” See also John 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”; 15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures. John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”; 1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here “spirit” = not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ’s divine nature, but “the ego of his total divine-human personality.”

Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church” = the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his “little children” (John 13:33); when he leaves them they are “orphans” (14:18 marg.). “He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother” (20:17—“my brethren”; cf. Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and 13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. on John 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. Hence John 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”; Mat. 10:37 and Luke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” = none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race. Cf. 1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451 sq. (Syst. Doct., 3:349 sq.).

Lightfoot on Col. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not only principium principiatum, but also principium principians. As he is first with respect to the universe, so he becomes first with respect to the church; cf. Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.” Paul teaches that “the head of every man is Christ” (1 Cor. 11:3), and that “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks on Eph. 1:10, that God’s purpose is “to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name of the Son of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.

Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflects him to us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yet he appears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25; 2 Cor. 3:18; 1 Cor. 13:12).

Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ’s indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ’s humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.

Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.” The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ, “the light that lighteth every man” (John 1:9), is present and is working within us.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as ‘the son of his love’ (Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.” But Mead, Ritschl’s Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl: “Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”

The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ’s veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ’s veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ’s human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.

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2. The Deity of Christ

The reality and integrity of Christ’s divine nature have been sufficiently proved in a former chapter (see pages 305-315). We need only refer to the evidence there given, that, during his earthly ministry, Christ:

(a) Possessed a knowledge of his own deity.

John 3:13—“the Son of man, who is in heaven”—a passage with clearly indicates Christ’s consciousness, at certain times in his earthly life at least, that he was not confined to earth but was also in heaven [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ; for advocacy of the common reading, see Broadus, in Hovey’s Com. on John 3:13]; 8:58—“Before Abraham was born, I am”—here Jesus declares that there is a respect in which the idea of birth and beginning does not apply to him, but in which he can apply to himself the name “I am” of the eternal God; 14:9, 10—“Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?”

Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 24-49, gives the following instances of Jesus’ supernatural knowledge: 1. Jesus’ knowledge of Peter (John 1:42); 2. his finding of Philip (1:43); 3. his recognition of Nathanael (1:47-50); 4. of the woman of Samaria (4:17-19, 39); 5. miraculous draughts of fishes (Luke 5:6-9; John 21:6); 6. death of Lazarus (John 11:14); 7. of the ass’s colt (Mat. 21:2); 8. of the upper room (Mark 14:15); 9. of Peter’s denial (Mat. 26:34); 10. of the manner of his own death (John 12:33; 18:32); 11. of the manner of Peter’s death (John 21:19); 12. of the fall of Jerusalem (Mat. 24:2).

Jesus does not say “our Father” but “my Father” (John 20:17). Rejection of him is a greater sin than rejection of the prophets, because he is the “beloved Son” of God (Luke 20:13). He knows God’s purposes better than the angels, because he is the Son of God (Mark 13:32). As Son of God, he alone knows, and he alone can reveal, the Father (_Mat. __ 11:27_). There to clearly something more in his Sonship than in that of his disciples (John 1:14—“only begotten”; Heb. 1:6—“first begotten”). See Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 37; Denney, Studies in Theology, 33.

(b) Exercised divine powers and prerogatives.

John 2:24, 25—“But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all man, and because he needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man; for he himself knew what was in man”; 18:4—“Jesus therefore, knowing all the things that were coming upon him, went forth”; Mark 4:39—“he awoke, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm”; Mat. 9:6—“But that ye may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy), Arise, and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house”; Mark 2:7—“Why doth this man thus speak? he blasphemeth: who can forgive sins but one, even God?”

It is not enough to keep, like Alexander Severus, a bust of Christ, in a private chapel, along with Virgil, Orpheus, Abraham, Apollonius, and other persons of the same kind; see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xvi. “Christ is all in all. The prince in the Arabian story took from a walnut-shell a miniature tent, but that tent expanded so as to cover, first himself, then his palace, then his army, and at last his whole kingdom. So Christ’s being and authority expand, as we reflect upon them, until they take in, not only ourselves, our homes and our country, but the whole world of sinning and suffering men, and the whole universe of God”; see A. H. Strong, Address at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference, April 23, 1900.

Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 39—“What is that law which I call gravitation, but the sign of the Son of man in heaven? It is the gospel of self-surrender in nature. It is the inability of any world to be its own centre, the necessity of every world to center in something else.... In the firmament as on the earth, the many are made one by giving the one for the many.” “Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter; Churches change, forms perish, systems go; But our human needs, they will not alter, Christ no after age will e’er outgrow. Yea, amen, O changeless One, thou only Art life’s guide and spiritual goal; Thou the light across the dark vale lonely, Thou the eternal haven of the soul.”

But this is to say, in other words, that there were, in Christ, a knowledge and a power such as belong only to God. The passages cited furnish a refutation of both the Ebionite denial of the reality, and the Arian denial of the integrity, of the divine nature in Christ.

Napoleon to Count Montholon (Bertrand’s Memoirs): “I think I understand somewhat of human nature, and I tell you all these [heroes of antiquity] were men, and I am a man; but not one is like him: Jesus Christ was more than man.” See other testimonies in Schaff, Person of Christ. Even Spinoza, Tract. Theol.-Pol., cap. 1 (vol. 1:383), says that “Christ communed with God, mind to mind ... this spiritual closeness is unique” (Martineau, Types, 1:254), and Channing speaks of Christ as more than a human being,—as having exhibited a spotless purity which is the highest distinction of heaven. F. W. Robertson has called attention to the fact that the phrase “Son of man” (John 5:27; cf. Dan. 7:13) itself implies that Christ was more than man; it would have been an impertinence for him to have proclaimed himself Son of man, unless he had claimed to be something more; could not every human being call himself the same? When one takes this for his characteristic designation, as Jesus did, he implies that there is something strange in his being Son of man; that this is not his original condition and dignity; in other words, that he is also Son of God.

It corroborates the argument from Scripture, to find that Christian experience instinctively recognizes Christ’s Godhead, and that Christian history shows a new conception of the dignity of childhood and of womanhood, of the sacredness of human life, and of the value of a human soul,—all arising from the belief that, in Christ, the Godhead honored human nature by taking it into perpetual union with itself, by bearing its guilt and punishment, and by raising it up from the dishonors of the grave to the glory of heaven. We need both the humanity and the deity of Christ; the humanity,—for, as Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment witnesses, the ages that neglect Christ’s humanity must have some human advocate and Savior, and find a poor substitute for the ever-present Christ in Mariolatry, the invocation of the saints, and the “real presence” of the wafer and the mass; the deity,—for, unless Christ is God, he cannot offer an infinite atonement for us, nor bring about a real union between our souls and the Father. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:325-327 (Syst. Doct., 3:221-223)—“Mary and the saints took Christ’s place as intercessors in heaven; transubstantiation furnished a present Christ on earth.” It might almost be said that Mary was made a fourth person in the Godhead.

Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums: “It is no paradox, and neither is it rationalism, but the simple expression of the actual position as it lies before us in the gospels: Not the Son, but the Father alone, has a place in the gospel as Jesus proclaimed it”; i. e., Jesus has no place, authority, supremacy, in the gospel,—the gospel is a Christianity without Christ; see Nicoll, The Church’s One Foundation, 48. And this in the face of Jesus’ own words: “Come unto me” (Mat. 11:28); “the Son of man ... shall sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations” (Mat. 25:31, 32); “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9); “he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36). Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, advocates the nut-theory in distinction from the onion-theory of doctrine. Does the fourth gospel appear a second century production? What of it? There is an evolution of doctrine as to Christ. “Harnack does not conceive of Christianity as a seed, at first a plant in potentiality, then a real plant, identical from the beginning of its evolution to the final limit, and from the root to the summit of the stem. He conceives of it rather as a fruit ripe, or over ripe, that must be peeled to reach the incorruptible kernel, and he peels his fruit so thoroughly that little remains at the end.” R. W. Gilder: “If Jesus is a man, And only a man, I say That of all mankind I will cleave to him, And will cleave alway. If Jesus Christ is a God, And the only God, I swear I will follow him through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air.”

On Christ manifested in Nature, see Jonathan Edwards, Observations on Trinity, ed. Smyth, 92-97—“He who, by his immediate influence, gives being every moment, and by his Spirit actuates the world, because he inclines to communicate himself and his excellencies, doth doubtless communicate his excellency to bodies, as far as there is any consent or analogy. And the beauty of face and sweet airs in men are not always the effect of the corresponding excellencies of the mind; yet the beauties of nature are really emanations or shadows of the excellencies of the Son of God. So that, when we are delighted with flowery meadows and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see his love and purity. So the green trees and fields, and singing of birds, are the emanations of his infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and vines are shadows of his beauty and loveliness. The crystal rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of his favor, grace and beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of his glory and goodness, and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things wherein we may behold his awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, in the hovering thunder clouds, in ragged rocks and the brows of mountains. That beauteous light wherewith the world is filled in a clear day is a lively shadow of his spotless holiness, and happiness and delight in communicating himself. And doubtless this is a reason why Christ is compared so often to these things, and called by their names, as the Sun of Righteousness, the Morning Star, the Rose of Sharon, and Lily of the Valley, the apple tree among trees of the wood, a bundle of myrrh, a roe, or a young hart. By this we may discover the beauty of many of those metaphors and similes which to an unphilosophical person do seem so uncouth. In like manner, when we behold the beauty of man’s body in its perfection, we still see like emanations of Christ’s divine perfections, although they do not always flow from the mental excellencies of the person that has them. But we see the most proper image of the beauty of Christ when we see beauty in the human soul.”

On the deity of Christ, see Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:262, 351; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 127, 207, 458; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:61-64; Hovey, God with Us, 17-23; Bengel on John 10:30. On the two natures of Christ, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 201-212.

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III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person

Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of God and man; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of God in man. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was “a mere man.” As if there could be such a thing as mere man, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton’s objection to the phrase “God and man,” because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term “God-man” to the phrase “God in man,” for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is “the only begotten,” in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one, viz., ‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’ ”

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1. Proof of this Union

(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of “I” and “thou” between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here “we” is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.

John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”; 3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”; 1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”; John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.

In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ’s divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much God and man, as God in, and through, and as man. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.” We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ’s words were spoken, and all Christ’s deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.

(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet. 3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).

Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”; 1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”; 1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”; Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”; Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”; 4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”; Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ’s Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as ‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.” Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who “dear” everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in “dear Hebrews.”

(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ’s atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.

1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man; Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both [Jew and Gentile] in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”; 21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”; 2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these [promises] ye may become partakers of the divine nature.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ’s divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”

(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.

The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘_partook __ of ... flesh and blood_’; 2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’; Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam’s’ transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’; 1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’; 15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’; Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’; Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’; 1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’; John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’; 2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’; John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”

The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1) genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2) genus apotelesmaticum (from ἀποτέλεσμα, “that which is finished or completed,” i. e., Jesus’ work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called “the mother of God,” as the Chalcedon symbol declares, “as to his humanity,” and what each nature did has the value of both; (3) genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in a genus tapeinoticon, i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this third genus majestaticum are found is John 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven” [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ]; 5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.” Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called “allæosis,” Luther says: “Allæosis est larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”

The genus majestaticum is denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man’s “ascending up where he was before,” says: “By the ‘Son of man’ must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.” For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.

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2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union

A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ’s humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.

The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man’s nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ’s πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.

Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word “flesh,” in John 1:14 and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a human body, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.

Against this theory we urge the following objections:

(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf. John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ’s person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.

John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt [tabernacled] among us, and we behold his glory”; 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”; Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”; 1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” Since “flesh,” in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place. Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men “beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). And Paul can say in 2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”

(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.

See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown. “Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ’s person. But the theory before us denies both sides.” While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the “half length” portrait which depicted only the lower half of the man. Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, and Heb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.

(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God’s immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.

See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus’ earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone has aseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus’ life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”

(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.

See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God’s Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ’s nature and our own,—Christ’s being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ’s unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”

Isaac Watts’s theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.” On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.

B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.

The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.” 2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of this becoming, inside of the Unio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus’ life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequent becoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”

2:464 sq. (Syst. Doct., 3:363 sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if the Unio is to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God’s will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says: ‘I must be about my Father’s business.’ To Satan’s temptation: ‘Art thou God’s Son?’ he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.” Dorner’s view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).

A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit. “So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.” Rothe’s statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.

It is objectionable for the following reasons:

(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.

In Luke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—and Phil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.

(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.

Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner’s view, that it “leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.” He maintains, against Dorner, that “the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.” 193-195—Dorner’s view “makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Two willing personalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner: ‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the central ego of this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’ At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him. ‘The unio personalis grows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’ Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ’s person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.” See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.

(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says: “I and the Logos are one”; “he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”; “the Logos is greater than I”; “I go to the Logos.” In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.

Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner’s view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying: “The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.” But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”

See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.” The unity is the foundation of religion; the difference is the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man’s moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.

Stalker, Imago Christi: “Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeed always God, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.” He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.” See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

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3. The real nature of this Union

(a) Its great importance.—While the Scriptures represent the person of Christ as the crowning mystery of the Christian scheme (Matt 11:27; Col. 1:27; 2:2; 1 Tim. 3:16), they also incite us to its study (John 17:3; 20:27; Luke 24:39; Phil. 3:8, 10). This is the more needful, since Christ is not only the central point of Christianity, but is Christianity itself—the embodied reconciliation and union between man and God. The following remarks are offered, not as fully explaining, but only as in some respects relieving, the difficulties of the subject.

Matt. 11:27—“no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” Here it seems to be intimated that the mystery of the nature of the Son is even greater than that of the Father. Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:408—The Person of Christ is in some respects more baffling to reason than the Trinity. Yet there is a profane neglect, as well as a profane curiosity: Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery ... which is Christ in you, the hope of glory”; 2:2, 3—“the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”; 1 Tim. 3:16—“great is the mystery of godliness; He who was manifested in the flesh”—here the Vulgate, the Latin Fathers, and Buttmann make μυστήριον the antecedent of ὅς, the relative taking the natural gender of its antecedent, and μυστήριον referring to Christ; Heb. 2:11—“both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one [not father, but race, or substance]” (cf. Acts 17:26—“he made of one every nation of men”)—an allusion to the solidarity of the race and Christ’s participation in all that belongs to us.

John 17:3—“this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him who thou didst send, even Jesus Christ”; 20:27—“Reach hither thy finger, and see my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and put it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing”; Luke 24:39—“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; Phil. 3:8, 10—“I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord ... that I may know him”; 1 John 1:1—“that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life.”

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 254, 255—“Ranke said that Alexander was one of the few men in whom biography is identical with universal history. The words apply far better to Christ.” Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 267—“Religion being merely the personality of God, Christianity the personality of Christ.” Pascal: “Jesus Christ is the centre of everything and the object of everything, and he who does not know him knows nothing of the order of nature and nothing of himself.” Goethe in his last years wrote: “Humanity cannot take a retrograde step, and we may say that the Christian religion, now that it has once appeared, can never again disappear; now that it has once found a divine embodiment, cannot again be dissolved.” H. B. Smith, that man of clear and devout thought, put his whole doctrine into one sentence: “Let us come to Jesus,—the person of Christ is the centre of theology.” Dean Stanley never tired of quoting as his own Confession of Faith the words of John Bunyan: “Blest Cross—blest Sepulchre—blest rather he—The man who there was put to shame for me!” And Charles Wesley wrote on Catholic Love: “Weary of all this wordy strife, These motions, forms, and modes and names, To thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life, Whose love my simple heart inflames—Divinely taught, at last I fly, With thee and thine to live and die.”

“We have two great lakes, named Erie and Ontario, and these are connected by the Niagara River through which Erie pours its waters into Ontario. The whole Christian Church throughout the ages has been called the overflow of Jesus Christ, who is infinitely greater than it. Let Lake Erie be the symbol of Christ, the pre-existent Logos, the Eternal Word, God revealed in the universe. Let Niagara River be a picture to us of this same Christ now confined to the narrow channel of His manifestation in the flesh, but within those limits showing the same eastward current and downward gravitation which men perceived so imperfectly before. The tremendous cataract, with its waters plunging into the abyss and shaking the very earth, is the suffering and death of the Son of God, which for the first time makes palpable to human hearts the forces of righteousness and love operative in the Divine nature from the beginning. The law of universal life has been made manifest; now it is seen that justice and judgment are the foundations of God’s throne; that God’s righteousness everywhere and always makes penalty to follow sin; that the love which creates and upholds sinners must itself be numbered with the transgressors, and must bear their iniquities. Niagara has demonstrated the gravitation of Lake Erie. And not in vain. For from Niagara there widens out another peaceful lake. Ontario is the offspring and likeness of Erie. So redeemed humanity is the overflow of Jesus Christ, but only of Jesus Christ after He has passed through the measureless self-abandonment of His earthly life and of His tragic death on Calvary. As the waters of Lake Ontario are ever fed by Niagara, so the Church draws its life from the cross. And Christ’s purpose is, not that we should repeat Calvary, for that we can never do, but that we should reflect in ourselves the same onward movement and gravitation towards self-sacrifice which He has revealed as characterizing the very life of God” (A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress, London, July 12, 1905).

(b) The chief problems.—These problems are the following: 1. one personality and two natures; 2. human nature without personality; 3. relation of the Logos to the humanity during the earthly life of Christ; 4. relation of the humanity to the Logos during the heavenly life of Christ. We may throw light on 1, by the figure of two concentric circles; on 2, by remembering that two earthly parents unite in producing a single child; on 3, by the illustration of latent memory, which contains so much more than present recollection; on 4, by the thought that body is the manifestation of spirit, and that Christ in his heavenly state is not confined to place.

Luther said that we should need “new tongues” before we could properly set forth this doctrine,—particularly a new language with regard to the nature of man. The further elucidation of the problems mentioned above will immediately occupy our attention. Our investigation should not be prejudiced by the fact that the divine element in Jesus Christ manifests itself within human limitations. This is the condition of all revelation. John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the father”; Col. 2:9—“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” = up to the measure of human capacity to receive and to express the divine. Heb. 2:11 and Acts 17:26 both attribute to man a consubstantiality with Christ, and Christ is the manifested God. It is a law of hydrostatics that the smallest column of water will balance the largest. Lake Erie will be no higher than the water in the tube connected therewith. So the person of Christ reached the level of God, though limited in extent and environment. He was God manifest in the flesh.

Robert Browning, Death in the Desert: “I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee to be wise”; Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ: “That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my Universe that feels and knows.” “That face,” said Browning to Mrs. Orr, as he finished reading the poem, “is the face of Christ. That is how I feel him.” This is his answer to those victims of nineteenth century scepticism for whom incarnate Love has disappeared from the universe, carrying with it the belief in God. He thus attests the continued presence of God in Christ, both in nature and humanity. On Browning as a Christian Poet, see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 181-226.

(c) Reason for mystery.—The union of the two natures in Christ’s person is necessarily inscrutable, because there are no analogies to it in our experience. Attempts to illustrate it on the one hand from the union and yet the distinctness of soul and body, of iron and heat, and on the other hand from the union and yet the distinctness of Christ and the believer, of the divine Son and the Father, are one-sided and become utterly misleading, if they are regarded as furnishing a rationale of the union and not simply a means of repelling objection. The first two illustrations mentioned above lack the essential element of two natures to make them complete: soul and body are not two natures, but one, nor are iron and heat two substances. The last two illustrations mentioned above lack the element of single personality: Christ and the believer are two persons, not one, even as the Son and the Father are not one person, but two.

The two illustrations most commonly employed are the union of soul and body, and the union of the believer with Christ. Each of these illustrates one side of the great doctrine, but each must be complemented by the other. The former, taken by itself, would be Eutychian; the latter, taken by itself, would be Nestorian. Like the doctrine of the Trinity, the Person of Christ is an absolutely unique fact, for which we can find no complete analogies. But neither do we know how soul and body are united. See Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Hypostasis; Sartorius, Person and Work of Christ, 27-65; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 39-77; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 281-334.

A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 218, 230—“Many people are Unitarians, not because of the difficulties of the Trinity, but because of the difficulties of the Person of Christ.... The union of the two natures is not mechanical, as between oxygen and nitrogen in our air; nor chemical, as between oxygen and hydrogen in water; nor organic, as between our hearts and our brains; but personal. The best illustration is the union of body and soul in our own persons,—how perfectly joined they are in the great orator! Yet here are not two natures, but one human nature. We need therefore to add the illustration of the union between the believer and Christ.” And here too we must confess the imperfection of the analogy, for Christ and the believer are two persons, and not one. The person of the God-man is unique and without adequate parallel. But this constitutes its dignity and glory.

(d) Ground of possibility.—The possibility of the union of deity and humanity in one person is grounded in the original creation of man in the divine image. Man’s kinship to God, in other words, his possession of a rational and spiritual nature, is the condition of incarnation. Brute-life is incapable of union with God. But human nature is capable of the divine, in the sense not only that it lives, moves, and has its being in God, but that God may unite himself indissolubly to it and endue it with divine powers, while yet it remains all the more truly human. Since the moral image of God in human nature has been lost by sin, Christ, the perfect image of God after which man was originally made, restores that lost image by uniting himself to humanity and filling it with his divine life and love.

2 Pet. 1:4—“partakers of the divine nature.” Creation and providence do not furnish the last limit of God’s indwelling. Beyond these, there is the spiritual union between the believer and Christ, and even beyond this, there is the unity of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:283 (Syst. Doct., 3:180)—“Humanity in Christ is related to divinity, as woman to man in marriage. It is receptive, but it is exalted by receiving. Christ is the offspring of the [marriage] covenant between God and Israel.” Ib., 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:301-308)—“The question is: How can Christ be both Creator and creature? The Logos, as such, stands over against the creature as a distinct object. How can he become, and be, that which exists only as object of his activity and inworking? Can the cause become its own effect? The problem is solved, only by remembering that the divine and human, though distinct from each other, are not to be thought of as foreign to each other and mutually exclusive. The very thing that distinguishes them binds them together. Their essential distinction is that God has aseity, while man has simply dependence. ‘Deep calleth unto deep’ (Ps. 42:7)—the deep of the divine riches, and the deep of human poverty, call to each other. ‘From me a cry,—from him reply.’ God’s infinite resources and man’s infinite need, God’s measureless supply and man’s boundless receptivity, attract each other, until they unite in him in whom dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The mutual attraction is of an ethical sort, but the divine love has ‘first loved’ (1 John 4:19).

“The new second creation is therefore not merely, like the first creation, one that distinguishes from God,—it is one that unites with God. Nature is distinct from God, yet God moves and works in nature. Much more does human nature find its only true reality, or realization, in union with God. God’s uniting act does not violate or unmake it, but rather first causes it to be what, in God’s idea, it was meant to be.” Incarnation is therefore the very fulfilment of the idea of humanity. The supernatural assumption of humanity is the most natural of all things. Man is not a mere tangent to God, but an empty vessel to be filled from the infinite fountain. Natura humana in Christo capax divinæ. See Talbot, in Bap. Quar., 1868:129; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 270.

God could not have become an angel, or a tree, or a stone. But he could become man, because man was made in his image. God in man, as Phillips Brooks held, is the absolutely natural. Channing said that “all minds are of one family.” E. B. Andrews: “Divinity and humanity are not contradictory predicates. If this had been properly understood, there would have been no Unitarian movement. Man is in a true sense divine. This is also true of Christ. But he is infinitely further along in the divine nature than we are. If we say his divinity is a new kind, then the new kind arises out of the degree.” “Were not the eye itself a sun, No light for it could ever shine: By nothing godlike could the soul be won, Were not the soul itself divine.”

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:165—“A smaller circle may represent a larger in respect of its circularity; but a circle, small or large, cannot be the image of a square.” ... 2:101—“God would not be God without union with man, and man would not be man without union with God. Immanent in the spirits he has made, he shares their pains and sorrows.... Showing the infinite element in man, Christ attracts us toward his own moral excellence.” Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 190—“Incarnation is the indwelling of God in his children, of which the type and pattern is seen in him who is at once the manifestation of God to man, and the revelation to men of what humanity is to be when God’s work in the world is done—perfect God and perfect man, because God perfectly dwelling in a perfect man.”

We have quoted these latter utterances, not because we regard them as admitting the full truth with regard to the union of the divine and human in Christ; but because they recognize the essential likeness of the human to the divine, and so help our understanding of the union between the two. We go further than the writers quoted, in maintaining not merely an indwelling of God in Christ, but an organic and essential union. Christ moreover is not the God-man by virtue of his possessing a larger measure of the divine than we, but rather by being the original source of all life, both human and divine. We hold to his deity as well as to his divinity, as some of these authors apparently do not. See Heb. 7:15, 16—“another priest, who hath been made ... after the power of an endless life”; John 1:4—“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”

(e) No double personality.—This possession of two natures does not involve a double personality in the God-man, for the reason that the Logos takes into union with himself, not an individual man with already developed personality, but human nature which has had no separate existence before its union with the divine. Christ’s human nature is impersonal, in the sense that it attains self-consciousness, and self-determination only in the personality of the God-man. Here it is important to mark the distinction between nature and person. Nature is substance possessed in common; the persons of the Trinity have one nature; there is a common nature of mankind. Person is nature separately subsisting, with powers of consciousness and will. Since the human nature of Christ has not and never had a separate subsistence, it is impersonal, and in the God-man the Logos furnishes the principle of personality. It is equally important to observe that self-consciousness and self-determination do not belong to nature as such, but only to personality. For this reason, Christ has not two consciousnesses and two wills, but a single consciousness and a single will. This consciousness and will, moreover, is never simply human, but is always theanthropic—an activity of the one personality which unites in itself the human and the divine (Mark 13:32; Luke 22:42).

The human father and the human mother are distinct persons, and they each give something of their own peculiar nature to their child; yet the result is, not two persons in the child, but only one person, with one consciousness and one will. So the Fatherhood of God and the motherhood of Mary produced not a double personality in Christ, but a single personality. Dorner illustrates the union of human and divine in Jesus by the Holy Spirit in the Christian,—nothing foreign, nothing distinguishable from the human life into which it enters; and by the moral sense, which is the very presence and power of God in the human soul,—yet conscience does not break up the unity of the life; see C. C. Everett, Essays, 32. These illustrations help us to understand the interpenetration of the human by the divine in Jesus; but they are defective in suggesting that his relation to God was different from ours not in kind but only in degree. Only Jesus could say: “Before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58); “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

The theory of two consciousnesses and two wills, first elaborated by John of Damascus, was an unwarranted addition to the orthodox doctrine propounded at Chalcedon. Although the view of John of Damascus was sanctioned by the Council of Constantinople (681), “this Council has never been regarded by the Greek Church as œcumenical, and its composition and spirit deprive its decisions of all value as indicating the true sense of Scripture”; see Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 90. Nature has consciousness and will, only as it is manifested in person. The one person has a single consciousness and will, which embraces within its scope at all times a human nature, and sometimes a divine. Notice that we do not say Christ’s human nature had no will, but only that it had none before its union with the divine nature, and none separately from the one will which was made up of the human and the divine united; versus Current Discussions in Theology, 5:283.

Sartorius uses the illustration of two concentric circles: the one ego of personality in Christ is at the same time the centre of both circles, the human nature and the divine. Or, still better, illustrate by a smaller vessel of air inverted and sunk, sometimes below its centre, sometimes above, in a far larger vessel of water. See Mark 13:32—“of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son”; Luke 22:42—“Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” To say that, although in his capacity as man he was ignorant, yet at that same moment in his capacity as God he was omniscient, is to accuse Christ of unveracity. Whenever Christ spoke, it was not one of the natures that spoke, but the person in whom both natures were united.

We subjoin various definitions of personality: Boëthius, quoted in Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:415 (Syst. Doct., 3:313)—“Persona est animæ rationalis individua substantia”; F. W. Robertson, Lect. on Gen., p. 3—“Personality = self-consciousness, will, character”; Porter, Human Intellect, 626—“Personality = distinct subsistence, either actually or latently self-conscious and self-determining”; Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 408—“Person = being, conscious of self, subsisting in individuality and identity, and endowed with intuitive reason, rational sensibility, and free-will.” Dr. E. G. Robinson defines “nature” as “that substratum or condition of being which determines the kind and attributes of the person, but which is clearly distinguishable from the person itself.”

Lotze, Metaphysics, § 244—“The identity of the subject of inward experience is all that we require. So far as, and so long as, the soul knows itself as this identical subject, it is and is named, simply for that reason, substance.” Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, 32—“Our conception of substance is not derived from the physical, but from the mental, world. Substance is first of all that which underlies our mental affections and manifestations. Kant declared that the idea of freedom is the source of our idea of personality. Personality consists in the freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature.” On personality, see Windelband, Hist. Philos., 238. For the theory of two consciousnesses and two wills, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:129, 234; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:314; Ridgeley, Body of Divinity, 1:476; Hodge, Syst Theol., 2:378-391; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308, esp. 328. Per contra, see Hovey, God with Us, 66; Schaff, Church Hist., 1:757, and 3:751; Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 12-14; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 148-169; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 512-518.

(f) Effect upon the human.—The union of the divine and the human natures makes the latter possessed of the powers belonging to the former; in other words, the attributes of the divine nature are imparted to the human without passing over into its essence,—so that the human Christ even on earth had power to be, to know, and to do, as God. That this power was latent, or was only rarely manifested, was the result of the self-chosen state of humiliation upon which the God-man had entered. In this state of humiliation, the communication of the contents of his divine nature to the human was mediated by the Holy Spirit. The God-man, in his servant-form, knew and taught and performed only what the Spirit permitted and directed (Mat. 3:16; John 3:34; Acts 1:2; 10:38; Heb. 9:14). But when thus permitted, he knew, taught, and performed, not, like the prophets, by power communicated from without, but by virtue of his own inner divine energy (Mat. 17:2; Mark 5:41; Luke 5:20, 21; 6:19; John 2:11, 24, 25; 3:13; 20:19).

Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2d ed., 2:77—“Human nature does not become divine, but (as Chemnitz has said) only the medium of the divine; as the moon has not a light of her own, but only shines in the light of the sun. So human nature may derivatively exercise divine attributes, because it is united to the divine in one person.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 151—“Our souls spiritualize our bodies, and will one day give us the spiritual body, while yet the body does not become spirit. So the Godhead gives divine powers to the humanity in Christ, while yet the humanity does not cease to be humanity.”

Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:131—“The union exalts the human, as light brightens the air, heat gives glow to the iron, spirit exalts the body, the Holy Spirit hallows the believer by union with his soul. Fire gives to iron its own properties of lighting and burning; yet the iron does not become fire. Soul gives to body its life-energy; yet the body does not become soul. The Holy Spirit sanctifies the believer, but the believer does not become divine; for the divine principle is the determining one. We do not speak of airy light, of iron heat, or of a bodily soul. So human nature possesses the divine only derivatively. In this sense it is our destiny to become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4). Even in his earthly life, when he wished to be, or more correctly, when the Spirit permitted, he was omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, could walk the sea, or pass through closed doors. But, in his state of humiliation, he was subject to the Holy Spirit.”

In Mat. 3:16, the anointing of the Spirit at his baptism was not the descent of a material dove (“as a dove”). The dove-like appearance was only the outward sign of the coming forth of the Holy Spirit from the depths of his being and pouring itself like a flood into his divine-human consciousness. John 3:34—“for he giveth not the Spirit by measure”; Acts 1:2—“after that he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles”; 10:38—“Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him”; Heb, 9:14—“the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish onto God.”

When permitted by the Holy Spirit, he knew, taught, and wrought as God: Mat. 17:2—“he was transfigured before them”; Mark 5:41—“Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise”; Luke 5:20, 21—“Man, thy sins are forgiven thee.... Who can forgive sins, but God alone?”—Luke 6:19—“power came forth from him, and healed them all”; John 2:11—“This beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory”; 24, 25—“he knew all men.... he himself knew what was in man”; 3:13—“_the Son of man, who is __ in heaven_” [here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἔν τῷ ὀυρανῷ,—for advocacy of the common reading, see Broadus, in Hovey’s Com., on John 3:13]; 20:19—“when the doors were shut ... Jesus came and stood in the midst.”

Christ is the “servant of Jehovah” (Is. 42:1-7; 49:1-12; 52:13; 53:11) and the meaning of παῖς (Acts 3:13, 28; 4:27, 30) is not “child” or “Son”; it is “servant,” as in the Revised Version. But, in the state of exaltation, Christ is the “Lord of the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18—Meyer), giving the Spirit (John 16:7—“I will send him unto you”), present in the Spirit (John 14:18—“I come unto you”; Mat. 28:20—“I am with you always, even unto the the end of the world”), and working through the Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45—“The last Adam became a life-giving spirit”); 2 Cor. 3:17—“Now the Lord is the Spirit”. On Christ’s relation to the Holy Spirit, see John Owen, Works, 282-297; Robins, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1874:615; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-241.

Delitzsch: “The conception of the servant of Jehovah is, as it were, a pyramid, of which the base is the people of Israel as a whole; the central part, Israel according to the Spirit; and the summit, the Mediator of Salvation who rises out of Israel.” Cheyne on Isaiah, 2:253, agrees with this view of Delitzsch, which is also the view of Oehler. The O. T. is the life of a nation; the N. T. is the life of a man. The chief end of the nation was to produce the man; the chief end of the man was to save the world. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 59—“If humanity were not potentially and in some degree an Immanuel, God with us, there would never have issued from its bosom he who bore and revealed this blessed name.” We would enlarge and amend this illustration of the pyramid, by making the base to be the Logos, as Creator and Upholder of all (Eph. 1:23; Col. 1:16); the stratum which rests next upon the Logos is universal humanity (Ps, 8:5, 6); then comes Israel as a whole (Mat. 2:15); spiritual Israel rests upon Israel after the flesh (Is. 42:1-7); as the acme and cap stone of all, Christ appears, to crown the pyramid, the true servant of Jehovah and Son of man (Is. 53:11; Mat. 20:28). We may go even further and represent Christ as forming the basis of another inverted pyramid of redeemed humanity ever growing and rising to heaven (Is. 9:6—“Everlasting Father”; Is. 53:10—“he shall see his seed”; Rev. 22:16—“root and offspring of David”; Heb. 2:13—“I and the children whom God hath given me.”)

(g) Effect upon the divine.—This communion of the natures was such that, although the divine nature in itself is incapable of ignorance, weakness, temptation, suffering, or death, the one person Jesus Christ was capable of these by virtue of the union of the divine nature with a human nature in him. As the human Savior can exercise divine attributes, not in virtue of his humanity alone, but derivatively, by virtue of his possession of a divine nature, so the divine Savior can suffer and be ignorant as man, not in his divine nature, but derivatively, by virtue of his possession of a human nature. We may illustrate this from the connection between body and soul. The soul suffers pain from its union with the body, of which apart from the body it would be incapable. So the God-man, although in his divine nature impassible, was capable, through his union with humanity, of absolutely infinite suffering.

Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300 sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.

A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousness in him which makes his death necessary.”

(h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).

Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”; 4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”; 1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”; Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”

Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil’s Æneid, Dido says well: “Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.” And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote: “Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.” Christ’s experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.

(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf. Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).

1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”; John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”; Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”; 7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son’s will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ’s reign ceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.

The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ’s giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour: “When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.” We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.

Melanchthon: “Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.” Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God’s medium of accomplishing all.” An. Par. Bible, on 1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.” See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85 sq. Expositor’s Greek Testament, on 1 Cor. 15:28, “affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ’s relation to humanity would be a merely external one.” Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord’s Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord’s humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? See Col. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’; Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’; 1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’ ” In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).

(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.

Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God’s Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ’s humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite; 2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”; John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.

J. M. Whiton: “How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished, qua divine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth the fulness of the Godhead bodily. I emphasize fulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but the fulness is in the head alone—a fulness of course not absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life is pro tanto and in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God’s way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... The Homoousios of the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.” So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man’s nature to be the same in kind with God’s. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134. Homoiousios he regards as involving homoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.

Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is, “not God and man, but God in man.” Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ’s distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks: “To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.” Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man: “You are a part of God.”

While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it. “Jesus quotes approvingly the words of Psalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’ Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause. ‘And we through him’ (1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.” Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of “the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.” The Son, or Word of God, “when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.” Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter, natura naturata: “Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris” (Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as the natura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.

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Section III.—The Two States Of Christ

I. The State of Humiliation.

1. The nature of this humiliation.

We may dismiss, as unworthy of serious notice, the views that it consisted essentially either in the union of the Logos with human nature,—for this union with human nature continues in the state of exaltation; or in the outward trials and privations of Christ’s human life,—for this view casts reproach upon poverty, and ignores the power of the soul to rise superior to its outward circumstances.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 224—“The error of supposing it too humiliating to obey law was derived from the Roman treasury of merit and works of supererogation. Better was Frederick the Great’s sentiment when his sturdy subject and neighbor, the miller, whose windmill he had attempted to remove, having beaten him in a lawsuit, the thwarted monarch exclaimed: ‘Thank God, there is law in Prussia!’ ” Palmer, Theological Definition, 79—“God reveals himself in the rock, vegetable, animal, man. Must not the process go on? Must there not appear in the fulness of time a man who will reveal God as perfectly as is possible in human conditions—a man who is God under the limitations of humanity? Such incarnation is humiliation only in the eyes of men. To Christ it is lifting up, exaltation, glory; John 12:32—‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.’ ” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409—“The divinity of Christ is not obscured, but is more clearly seen, shining through his humanity.”

We may devote more attention to the

A. Theory of Thomasius, Delitzsch, and Crosby, that the humiliation consisted in the surrender of the relative divine attributes.

This theory holds that the Logos, although retaining his divine self-consciousness and his immanent attributes of holiness, love, and truth, surrendered his relative attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, in order to take to himself veritable human nature. According to this view, there are, indeed, two natures in Christ, but neither of these natures is infinite. Thomasius and Delitzsch are the chief advocates of this theory in Germany. Dr. Howard Crosby has maintained a similar view in America.

The theory of Thomasius, Delitzsch, and Crosby has been, though improperly, called the theory of the Kenosis (from ἐκένωσεν—“emptied himself”—in Phil. 2:7), and its advocates are often called Kenotic theologians. There is a Kenosis of the Logos, but it is of a different sort from that which this theory supposes. For statements of this theory, see Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:233-255, 542-550; Delitzsch, Biblische Psychologie, 323-333; Howard Crosby, in Bap. Quar., 1870:350-363—a discourse subsequently published in a separate volume, with the title: The True Humanity of Christ, and reviewed by Shedd, in Presb. Rev., April, 1881:429-431. Crosby emphasizes the word “became,” in John 1:14—“and the Word became flesh”—and gives the Word “flesh” the sense of “man,” or “human.” Crosby, then, should logically deny, though he does not deny, that Christ’s body was derived from the Virgin.

We object to this view that:

(a) It contradicts the Scriptures already referred to, in which Christ asserts his divine knowledge and power. Divinity, it is said, can give up its world-functions, for it existed without these before creation. But to give up divine attributes is to give up the substance of Godhead. Nor is it a sufficient reply to say that only the relative attributes are given up, while the immanent attributes, which chiefly characterize the Godhead, are retained; for the immanent necessarily involve the relative, as the greater involve the less.

Liebner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 3:349-356—“Is the Logos here? But wherein does he show his presence, that it may be known?” Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 217, note. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:125-146, criticises the theory of the Kenosis, but grants that, with all its self-contradictions, as he regards them, it is an attempt to render conceivable the profound truth of a sympathizing, self-sacrificing God.

(b) Since the Logos, in uniting himself to a human soul, reduces himself to the condition and limitations of a human soul, the theory is virtually a theory of the coëxistence of two human souls in Christ. But the union of two finite souls is more difficult to explain than the union of a finite and an infinite,—since there can be in the former case no intelligent guidance and control of the human element by the divine.

Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408—“The impossibility of making two finite souls into one finally drove Arianism to the denial of any human soul in Christ” (Apollinarianism). This statement of Dorner, which we have already quoted in our account of Apollinarianism, illustrates the similar impossibility, upon the theory of Thomasius, of constructing out of two finite souls the person of Christ. See also Hovey, God with Us, 68.

(c) This theory fails to secure its end, that of making comprehensible the human development of Jesus,—for even though divested of the relative attributes of Godhood, the Logos still retains his divine self-consciousness, together with his immanent attributes of holiness, love, and truth. This is as difficult to reconcile with a purely natural human development as the possession of the relative divine attributes would be. The theory logically leads to a further denial of the possession of any divine attributes, or of any divine consciousness at all, on the part of Christ, and merges itself in the view of Gess and Beecher, that the Godhead of the Logos is actually transformed into a human soul.

Kahnis, Dogmatik 3:343—“The old theology conceived of Christ as in full and unbroken use of the divine self-consciousness, the divine attributes, and the divine world-functions, from the conception until death. Though Jesus, as fœtus, child, boy, was not almighty and omnipresent according to his human nature, yet he was so, as to his divine nature, which constituted one ego with his human. Thomasius, however, declared that the Logos gave up his relative attributes, during his sojourn in flesh. Dorner’s objection to this, on the ground of the divine unchangeableness, overshoots the mark, because it makes any becoming impossible.

“But some things in Thomasius’ doctrine are still difficult: 1st, divinity can certainly give up its world-functions, for it has existed without these before the world was. In the nature of an absolute personality, however, lies an absolute knowing, willing, feeling, which it cannot give up. Hence Phil. 2:6-11 speaks of a giving-up of divine glory, but not of a giving-up of divine attributes or nature. 2d, little is gained by such an assumption of the giving-up of relative attributes, since the Logos, even while divested of a part of his attributes, still has full possession of his divine self-consciousness, which must make a purely human development no less difficult. 3d, the expressions of divine self-consciousness, the works of divine power, the words of divine wisdom, prove that Jesus was in possession of his divine self-consciousness and attributes.

“The essential thing which the Kenotics aim at, however, stands fast; namely, that the divine personality of the Logos divested itself of its glory (John 17:5), riches (2 Cor. 8:6), divine form (Phil. 2:6). This divesting is the becoming man. The humiliation, then, was a giving up of the use, not of the possession, of the divine nature and attributes. That man can thus give up self-consciousness and powers, we see every day in sleep. But man does not, thereby, cease to be man. So we maintain that the Logos, when he became man, did not divest himself of his divine person and nature, which was impossible; but only divested himself of the use and exercise of these—these being latent to him—in order to unfold themselves to use in the measure to which his human nature developed itself—a use which found its completion in the condition of exaltation.” This statement of Kahnis, although approaching correctness, is still neither quite correct nor quite complete.

B. Theory that the humiliation consisted in the surrender of the independent exercise of the divine attributes.

This theory, which we regard as the most satisfactory of all, may be more fully set forth as follows. The humiliation, as the Scriptures seem to show, consisted:

(a) In that act of the preëxistent Logos by which he gave up his divine glory with the Father, in order to take a servant-form. In this act, he resigned not the possession, nor yet entirely the use, but rather the independent exercise, of the divine attributes.

John 17:5—“glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”; Phil. 2:6, 7—“who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men”; 2 Cor. 8:9—“For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.” Pompilia, in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book: “Now I see how God is likest God in being born.”

Omniscience gives up all knowledge but that of the child, the infant, the embryo, the infinitesimal germ of humanity. Omnipotence gives up all power but that of the impregnated ovum in the womb of the Virgin. The Godhead narrows itself down to a point that is next to absolute extinction. Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, in John 13:1-20, is the symbol of his coming down from his throne of glory and taking the form of a servant, in order that he may purify us, by regeneration and sanctification, for the marriage-supper of the Lamb.

(b) In the submission of the Logos to the control of the Holy Spirit and the limitations of his Messianic mission, in his communication of the divine fulness of the human nature which he had taken into union with himself.

Acts 1:2—Jesus, “after that he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”; 10:38—“Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power”; Heb. 9:14—“the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God.” A minor may have a great estate left to him, yet may have only such use of it as his guardian permits. In Homer’s Iliad, when Andromache brings her infant son to part with Hector, the boy is terrified by the warlike plumes of his father’s helmet, and Hector puts them off to embrace him. So God lays aside “That glorious form, that light unsufferable, And that far-beaming blaze of majesty.” Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his Friends, 282, 283—“Revelation is the voluntary approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”

(c) In the continuous surrender, on the part of the God-man, so far as his human nature was concerned, of the exercise of those divine powers with which it was endowed by virtue of its union with the divine, and in the voluntary acceptance, which followed upon this, of temptation, suffering, and death.

Mat. 26:53—“thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he shall even now send me more than twelve legions of angels?” John 10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; Phil. 2:8—“and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.” Cf. Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice: “Such music is there in immortal souls, That while this muddy vesture of decay Doth close it in, we cannot see it.”

Each of these elements of the doctrine has its own Scriptural support. We must therefore regard the humiliation of Christ, not as consisting in a single act, but as involving a continuous self-renunciation, which began with the Kenosis of the Logos in becoming man, and which culminated in the self-subjection of the God-man to the death of the cross.

Our doctrine of Christ’s humiliation will be better understood if we put it midway between two pairs of erroneous views, making it the third of five. The list would be as follows: (1) Gess: The Logos gave up all divine attributes; (2) Thomasius: The Logos gave up relative attributes only; (3) True View: The Logos gave up the independent exercise of divine attributes; (4) Old Orthodoxy: Christ gave up the use of divine attributes; (5) Anselm: Christ acted as if he did not possess divine attributes. The full exposition of the classical passage with reference to the humiliation, namely, Phil. 2:5-8, we give below, under the next paragraph, pages 705, 706. Brentius illustrated Christ’s humiliation by the king who travels incognito. But Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 158, says well that “to part in appearance with only the fruition of the divine attributes would be to impose upon us with a pretence of self-sacrifice; but to part with it in reality was to manifest most perfectly the true nature of God.”

This same objection lies against the explanation given in the Church Quarterly Review, Oct. 1891:1-30, on Our Lord’s Knowledge as Man: “If divine knowledge exists in a different form from human, and a translation into a different form is necessary before it can be available in the human sphere, our Lord might know the day of judgment as God, and yet be ignorant of it as man. This must have been the case if he did not choose to translate it into the human form. But it might also have been incapable of translation. The processes of divine knowledge may be far above our finite comprehension.” This seems to us to be a virtual denial of the unity of Christ’s person, and to make our Lord play fast and loose with the truth. He either knew, or he did not know; and his denial that he knew makes it impossible that he should have known in any sense.

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2. The stages of Christ’s humiliation

We may distinguish: (a) That act of the preïncarnate Logos by which, in becoming man, he gave up the independent exercise of the divine attributes. (b) His submission to the common laws which regulate the origin of souls from a preëxisting sinful stock, in taking his human nature from the Virgin,—a human nature which only the miraculous conception rendered pure. (c) His subjection to the limitations involved in a human growth and development,—reaching the consciousness of his sonship at his twelfth year, and working no miracles till after the baptism. (d) The subordination of himself, in state, knowledge, teaching, and acts, to the control of the Holy Spirit,—so living, not independently, but as a servant. (e) His subjection, as connected with a sinful race, to temptation and suffering, and finally to the death which constituted the penalty of the law.

Peter Lombard asked whether God could know more than he was aware of? It is only another way of putting the question whether, during the earthly life of Christ, the Logos existed outside of the flesh of Jesus. We must answer in the affirmative. Otherwise the number of the persons in the Trinity would be variable, and the universe could do without him who is ever “upholding all things by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3), and in whom “all things consist” (Col. 1:17). Let us recall the nature of God’s omnipresence (see pages 279-282). Omnipresence is nothing less than the presence of the whole of God in every place. From this it follows, that the whole Christ can be present in every believer as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness, and that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the universe. By virtue of this omnipresence, therefore, the whole Logos can suffer on earth, while yet the whole Logos reigns in heaven. The Logos outside of Christ has the perpetual consciousness of his Godhead, while yet the Logos, as united to humanity in Christ, is subject to ignorance, weakness, and death. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:153—“Jehovah, though present in the form of the burning bush, was at the same time omnipresent also”; 2:265-284, esp. 282—“Because the sun is shining in and through a cloud, it does not follow that it cannot at the same time be shining through the remainder of universal space, unobstructed by any vapor whatever.” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 21—“Not with God, as with finite man, does arrival in one place necessitate withdrawal from another.” John Calvin: “The whole Christ was there; but not all that was in Christ was there.” See Adamson, The Mind of Christ.

How the independent exercise of the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence can be surrendered, even for a time, would be inconceivable, if we were regarding the Logos as he is in himself, seated upon the throne of the universe. The matter is somewhat easier when we remember that it was not the Logos per se, but rather the God-man, Jesus Christ, in whom the Logos submitted to this humiliation. South, Sermons, 2:9—“Be the fountain never so full, yet if it communicate itself by a little pipe, the stream can be but small and inconsiderable, and equal to the measure of its conveyance.” Sartorius, Person and Work of Christ, 39—“The human eye, when open, sees heaven and earth; but when shut, it sees little or nothing. Yet its inherent capacity does not change. So divinity does not change its nature, when it drops the curtain of humanity before the eyes of the God-man.”

The divine in Christ, during most of his earthly life, is latent, or only now and then present to his consciousness or manifested to others. Illustrate from second childhood, where the mind itself exists, but is not capable of use; or from first childhood, where even a Newton or a Humboldt, if brought back to earth and made to occupy an infant body and brain, would develop as an infant, with infantile powers. There is more in memory than we can at this moment recall,—memory is greater than recollection. There is more of us at all times than we know,—only the sudden emergency reveals the largeness of our resources of mind and heart and will. The new nature, in the regenerate, is greater than it appears: “Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We, know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). So in Christ there was an ocean-like fulness of resource, of which only now and then the Spirit permitted the consciousness and the exercise.

Without denying (with Dorner) the completeness, even from the moment of the conception, of the union between the deity and the humanity, we may still say with Kahnis: “The human nature of Christ, according to the measure of its development, appropriates more and more to its conscious use the latent fulness of the divine nature.” So we take the middle ground between two opposite extremes. On the one hand, the Kenosis was not the extinction of the Logos. Nor, on the other hand, did Christ hunger and sleep by miracle,—this is Docetism. We must not minimize Christ’s humiliation, for this was his glory. There was no limit to his descent, except that arising from his sinlessness. His humiliation was not merely the giving-up of the appearance of Godhead. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 585—“Should any one aim to celebrate the condescension of the emperor Charles the Fifth, by dwelling on the fact that he laid aside the robes of royalty and assumed the style of a subject, and altogether ignore the more important matter that he actually became a private person, it would be very weak and absurd.” Cf. 2 Cor. 8:9—“though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor” = he beggared himself. Mat. 27:46—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” = non-exercise of divine omniscience.

Inasmuch, however, as the passage Phil. 2:6-8 is the chief basis and support of the doctrine of Christ’s humiliation, we here subjoin a more detailed examination of it.

EXPOSITION OF PHILIPPIANS, 2:6-8. The passage reads: “who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.”

The subject of the sentence is at first (verses 6, 7) Christ Jesus, regarded as the preëxistent Logos; subsequently (verse 8), this same Christ Jesus, regarded as incarnate. This change in the subject is indicated by the contrast between μορφῇ θεοῦ (verse 6) and μορφὴν δούλου (verse 7), as well as by the participles λαβών and γενόμενος (verse 7) and εύρεθείς (verse 8) It is asserted, then, that the preëxisting Logos, “although subsisting in the form of God, did not regard his equality with God as a thing to be forcibly retained, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, (that is,) by being made in the likeness of men. And being found in outward condition as a man, he (the incarnate son of God, yet further) humbled himself, by becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (verse 8).

Here notice that what the Logos divested himself of, in becoming man, is not the substance of his Godhead, but the “form of God” in which this substance was manifested. This “form of God” can be only that independent exercise of the powers and prerogatives of Deity which constitutes his “equality with God.” This he surrenders, in the act of “taking the form of a servant”—or becoming subordinate, as man. (Here other Scriptures complete the view, by their representations of the controlling influence of the Holy Spirit in the earthly life of Christ.) The phrases “made in the likeness of men” and “found in fashion as a man” are used to intimate, not that Jesus Christ was not really man, but that he was God as well as man, and therefore free from the sin which clings to man (cf. Rom. 8:3—ἐν ὁμοιώματι σαρκὸς ἁμαρτίας—Meyer). Finally, this one person, now God and man united, submits himself, consciously and voluntarily, to the humiliation of an ignominious death.

See Lightfoot, on Phil. 2:8—“Christ divested himself, not of his divine nature, for that was impossible, but of the glories and prerogatives of Deity. This he did by taking the form of a servant.” Evans, in Presb. Rev., 1883:287—“Two stages in Christ’s humiliation, each represented by a finite verb defining the central act of the particular stage, accompanied by two modal participles. 1st stage indicated in v. 7. Its central act is: ‘he emptied himself.’ Its two modalities are: (1) ‘taking the form of servant’; (2) ‘being made in the likeness of men.’ Here we have the humiliation of the Kenosis,—that by which Christ became man. 2d stage, indicated in v. 8. Its central act is: ‘he humbled himself.’ Its two modalities are: (1) ‘being found in fashion as a man’; (2) ‘becoming obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross.’ Here we have the humiliation of his obedience and death,—that by which, in humanity, he became a sacrifice for our sins.”

Meyer refers Eph. 5:31 exclusively to Christ and the church, making the completed union future, however, i. e., at the time of the Parousia. “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother” = “in the incarnation, Christ leaves father and mother (his seat at the right hand of God), and cleaves to his wife (the church), and then the two (the descended Christ and the church) become one flesh (one ethical person, as the married pair become one by physical union). The Fathers, however, (Jerome, Theodoret, Chrysostom), referred it to the incarnation.” On the interpretation of Phil 2:6-11, see Comm. of Neander, Meyer, Lange, Ellicott.

On the question whether Christ would have become man had there been no sin, theologians are divided. Dorner, Martensen, and Westcott answer in the affirmative; Robinson, Watts, and Denney in the negative. See Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 5:236; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 327-329; Westcott, Com. on Hebrews, page 8—“The Incarnation is in its essence independent of the Fall, though conditioned by it as to its circumstances.” Per contra, see Robinson, Christ. Theol., 219, note—“It would be difficult to show that a like method of argument from a priori premisses will not equally avail to prove sin to have been a necessary part of the scheme of creation.” Denney, Studies in Theology, 101, objects to the doctrine of necessary incarnation irrespective of sin, that it tends to obliterate the distinction between nature and grace, to blur the definite outlines of the redemption wrought by Christ, as the supreme revelation of God and his love. See also Watts, New Apologetic, 198-202; Julius Müller, Dogmat. Abhandlungen, 66-126; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 512-526, 543-548; Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 340-345. On the general subject of the Kenosis of the Logos, see Bruce, Humiliation of Christ; Robins, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1874:615; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:138-150, 386-475; Pope, Person of Christ, 23; Bodemeyer, Lehre von der Kenosis; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:610-625.

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II. The State of Exaltation

1. The nature of this exaltation.

It consisted essentially in: (a) A resumption, on the part of the Logos, of his independent exercise of divine attributes. (b) The withdrawal, on the part of the Logos, of all limitations in his communication of the divine fulness to the human nature of Christ. (c) The corresponding exercise, on the part of the human nature, of those powers which belonged to it by virtue of its union with the divine.

The eighth Psalm, with its account of the glory of human nature, is at present fulfilled only in Christ (see Heb. 2:9—“but we behold ... Jesus”). Heb. 2:7—ἠλάττωσας αὐτὸν βραχύ τι παρ᾽ ἀγγέλους—may be translated, as in the margin of the Rev. Vers.: “_Thou madest __ him for a little while lower than the angels._” Christ’s human body was not necessarily subject to death; only by outward compulsion or voluntary surrender could he die. Hence resurrection was a natural necessity (Acts 2:24—“whom God raised up, having loosed the pangs of death: because it was not possible he should be holden of it”; 31—“neither was he left unto Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption”). This exaltation, which then affected humanity only in its head, is to be the experience also of the members. Our bodies also are to be delivered from the bondage of corruption, and we are to sit with Christ upon his throne.

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2. The stages of Christ’s exaltation

(a) The quickening and resurrection.

Both Lutherans and Romanists distinguish between these two, making the former precede, and the latter follow, Christ’s “preaching to the spirits in prison.” These views rest upon a misinterpretation of 1 Pet. 3:18-20. Lutherans teach that Christ descended into hell, to proclaim his triumph to evil spirits. But this is to give ἐκήρυξεν the unusual sense of proclaiming his triumph, instead of his gospel. Romanists teach that Christ entered the underworld to preach to Old Testament saints, that they might be saved. But the passage speaks only of the disobedient; it cannot be pressed into the support of a sacramental theory of the salvation of Old Testament believers. The passage does not assert the descent of Christ into the world of spirits, but only a work of the preïncarnate Logos in offering salvation, through Noah, to the world then about to perish.

Augustine, Ad Euodiam, ep. 99—“The spirits shut up in prison are the unbelievers who lived in the time of Noah, whose spirits or souls were shut up in the darkness of ignorance as in a prison; Christ preached to them, not in the flesh, for he was not yet incarnate, but in the spirit, that is, in his divine nature.” Calvin taught that Christ descended into the underworld and suffered the pains of the lost. But not all Calvinists hold with him here; see Princeton Essays, 1:153. Meyer, on Rom. 10:7, regards the question—“Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead)”—as an allusion to, and so indirectly a proof-text for, Christ’s descent into the underworld. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 211, favors a preaching to the dead: “During that time [the three days] he did not return to heaven and his Father.” But though John 20:17 is referred to for proof, is not this statement true only of his body? So far as the soul is concerned, Christ can say: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” and “To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43, 46).

Zahn and Dorner best represent the Lutheran view. Zahn, in Expositor, March, 1898: 216-223—“If Jesus was truly man, then his soul, after it left the body, entered into the fellowship of departed spirits.... If Jesus is he who lives forevermore and even his dying was his act, this carrying in the realm of the dead cannot be thought of as a purely passive condition, but must have been known to those who dwelt there..... If Jesus was the Redeemer of mankind, the generations of those who had passed away must have thus been brought into personal relation to him, his work and his kingdom, without waiting for the last day.”

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:662 (Syst. Doct., 4:127), thinks “Christ’s descent into Hades marks a new era of his pneumatic life, in which he shows himself free from the limitations of time and space.” He rejects “Luther’s notion of a merely triumphal progress and proclamation of Christ. Before Christ,” he says, “there was no abode peopled by the damned. The descent was an application of the benefit of the atonement (implied in κηρύσσειν). The work was prophetic, not high-priestly nor kingly. Going to the spirits in prison is spoken of as a spontaneous act, not one of physical necessity. No power of Hades led him over into Hades. Deliverance from the limitations of a mortal body is already an indication of a higher stage of existence. Christ’s soul is bodiless for a time—πνεῦμα only—as the departed were.

“The ceasing of this preaching is neither recorded, nor reasonably to be supposed,—indeed the ancient church supposed it carried on through the apostles. It expresses the universal significance of Christ for former generations and for the entire kingdom of the dead. No physical power is a limit to him. The gates of hell, or Hades, shall not prevail over or against him. The intermediate state is one of blessedness for him, and he can admit the penitent thief into it. Even those who were not laid hold of by Christ’s historic manifestation in this earthly life still must, and may, be brought into relation with him, in order to be able to accept or to reject him. And thus the universal relation of Christ to humanity and the absoluteness of the Christian religion are confirmed.” So Dorner, for substance.

All this versus Strauss, who thought that the dying of vast masses of men, before and after Christ, who had not been brought into relation to Christ, proves that the Christian religion is not necessary to salvation, because not universal. For advocacy of Christ’s preaching to the dead, see also Jahrbuch für d. Theol., 23:177-228; W. W. Patton, in N. Eng., July, 1882:460-478; John Miller, Problems Suggested by the Bible, part 1:93-98; part 2:38; Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison; Kendrick, in Bap. Rev., Apl. 1888; Clemen, Niedergefahren zu den Toten.

For the opposite view, see “No Preaching to the Dead,” in Princeton Rev., March, 1875:197; 1878:451-491; Hovey, in Bap. Quar., 4:486 sq., and Bib. Eschatology, 97-107; Love, Christ’s Preaching to the Spirits in Prison; Cowles, in Bib. Sac., 1875:401; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:616-622; Salmond, in Popular Commentary; and Johnstone, Com., in loco. So Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Bishop Pearson. See also E. D. Morris, Is There Salvation after Death? and Wright, Relation of Death to Probation, 22:28—“If Christ preached to spirits in Hades, it may have been to demonstrate the hopelessness of adding in the other world to the privileges enjoyed in this. We do not read that it had any favorable effect upon the hearers. If men will not hear Moses and the Prophets, then they will not hear one risen from the dead. ‘Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise’ (Luke 23:43) was not comforting, if Christ was going that day to the realm of lost spirits. The antediluvians, however, were specially favored with Noah’s preaching, and were specially wicked.”

For full statement of the view presented in the text, that the preaching referred to was the preaching of Christ as preëxisting Logos to the spirits, now in prison, when once they were disobedient in the days of Noah, see Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1872: 601 sq., and in Bib. Sac., Apr. 1883:333-373. Before giving the substance of Bartlett’s exposition, we transcribe in full the passage in question, 1 Pet. 3:18-20—“Because Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God; being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, that aforetime were disobedient, when the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah.”

Bartlett expounds as follows: “ ‘In which [πνεύματι, divine nature] ‘he went and preached to the spirits in prison when once they disobeyed.’ ἀπειθήσασιν is circumstantial aorist, indicating the time of the preaching as a definite past: It is an anarthrous dative, as in Luke 8:27; Mat. 8:23; Acts 15:25; 22:17. It is an appositive, or predicative, participle. [That the aorist participle does not necessarily describe an action preliminary to that of the principal verb appears from its use in verse 18 (θανατωθείς), in 1 Thess. 1:6 (δεξάμενοι), and in Col. 2:11, 13.] The connection of thought is: Peter exhorts his readers to endure suffering bravely, because Christ did so,—in his lower nature being put to death, in his higher nature enduring the opposition of sinners before the flood. Sinners of that time only are mentioned, because this permits an introduction of the subsequent reference to baptism. Cf. Gen. 6:3; 1 Pet. 1:10, 11; 2 Pet. 2:4, 5.”

(b) The ascension and sitting at the right hand of God.

As the resurrection proclaimed Christ to men as the perfected and glorified man, the conqueror of sin and lord of death, the ascension proclaimed him to the universe as the reinstated God, the possessor of universal dominion, the omnipresent object of worship and hearer of prayer. Dextra Dei ubique est.

Mat. 28:18, 20—“All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth.... lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”; Mark 16:19—“So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken unto them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God”; Acts 7:55—“But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God”; 2 Cor. 13:4—“he was crucified through weakness, yet he liveth through the power of God”; Eph. 1:22, 23—“he put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”; 4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.” Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:184-189—“Before the resurrection, Christ was the God-man; since the resurrection, he is the God-man.... He ate with his disciples, not to show the quality, but the reality, of his human body.” Nicoll, Life of Christ: “It was hard for Elijah to ascend”—it required chariot and horses of fire—“but it was easier for Christ to ascend than to descend,”—there was a gravitation upwards. Maclaren: “He has not left the world, though he has ascended to the Father, any more than he left the Father when he came into the world”; John 1:18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father”; 3:13—“the Son of man, who is in heaven.”

We are compelled here to consider the problem of the relation of the humanity to the Logos in the state of exaltation. The Lutherans maintain the ubiquity of Christ’s human body, and they make it the basis of their doctrine of the sacraments. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:674-676 (Syst. Doct., 4:138-142), holds to “a presence, not simply of the Logos, but of the whole God-man, with all his people, but not necessarily likewise a similar presence in the world; in other words, his presence is morally conditioned by men’s receptivity.” The old theologians said that Christ is not in heaven, quasi carcere. Calvin, Institutes, 2:15—he is “incarnate, but not incarcerated.” He has gone into heaven, the place of spirits, and he manifests himself there; but he has also gone far above all heavens, that he may fill all things. He is with his people alway. All power is given into his hand. The church is the fulness of him that filleth all in all. So the Acts of the Apostles speak constantly of the Son of man, of the man Jesus as God, ever present, the object of worship, seated at the right hand of God, having all the powers and prerogatives of Deity. See Westcott, Bible Com., on John 20:22—“he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit”—“The characteristic effect of the Paschal gift was shown in the new faith by which the disciples were gathered into a living society; the characteristic effect of the Pentecostal gift was shown in the exercise of supremacy potentially universal.”

Who and what is this Christ who is present with his people when they pray? It is not enough to say, He is simply the Holy Spirit; for the Holy Spirit is the “Spirit of Christ” (Rom. 8:9), and in having the Holy Spirit we have Christ himself (John 16:7—“I will send him [the Comforter] unto you”; 14:18—“I come unto you”). The Christ, who is thus present with us when we pray, is not simply the Logos, or the divine nature of Christ,—his humanity being separated from the divinity and being localized in heaven. This would be inconsistent with his promise, “Lo, I am with you,” in which the “I” that spoke was not simply Deity, but Deity and humanity inseparably united; and it would deny the real and indissoluble union of the two natures. The elder brother and sympathizing Savior who is with us when we pray is man, as well as God. This manhood is therefore ubiquitous by virtue of its union with the Godhead.

But this is not to say that Christ’s human body is everywhere present. It would seem that body must exist in spatial relations, and be confined to place. We do not know that this is so with regard to soul. Heaven would seem to be a place, because Christ’s body is there; and a spiritual body is not a body which is spirit, but a body which is suited to the uses of the spirit. But even though Christ may manifest himself, in a glorified human body, only in heaven, his human soul, by virtue of its union with the divine nature, can at the same moment be with all his scattered people over the whole earth. As, in the days of his flesh, his humanity was confined to place, while as to his Deity he could speak of the Son of man who is in heaven, so now, although his human body may be confined to place, his human soul is ubiquitous. Humanity can exist without body; for during the three days in the sepulchre, Christ’s body was on earth, but his soul was in the other world; and in like manner there is, during the intermediate state, a separation of the soul and the body of believers. But humanity cannot exist without soul; and if the human Savior is with us, then his humanity, at least so far as respects its immaterial part, must be everywhere present. Per contra, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:326, 327. Since Christ’s human nature has derivatively become possessed of divine attributes, there is no validity in the notion of a progressiveness in that nature, now that it has ascended to the right hand of God. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:131; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 558, 576.

Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:327—“Suppose the presence of the divine nature of Christ in the soul of a believer in London. This divine nature is at the same moment conjoined with, and present to, and modified by, the human nature of Christ, which is in heaven and not in London.” So Hooker, Eccl. Pol., 54, 55, and E. G. Robinson: “Christ is in heaven at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us, while he is present in the church by his Spirit. We pray to the theanthropic Jesus. Possession of a human body does not now constitute a limitation. We know little of the nature of the present body.” We add to this last excellent remark the expression of our own conviction that the modern conception of the merely relative nature of space, and the idealistic view of matter as only the expression of mind and will, have relieved this subject of many of its former difficulties. If Christ is omnipresent and if his body is simply the manifestation of his soul, then every soul may feel the presence of his humanity even now and “every eye” may “see him” at his second coming, even though believers may be separated as far as is Boston from Pekin. The body from which his glory flashes forth may be visible in ten thousand places at the same time; (Mat. 28:20; Rev. 1:7).

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Section IV.—The Offices Of Christ

The Scriptures represent Christ’s offices as three in number,—prophetic, priestly, and kingly. Although these terms are derived from concrete human relations, they express perfectly distinct ideas. The prophet, the priest, and the king, of the Old Testament, were detached but designed prefigurations of him who should combine all these various activities in himself, and should furnish the ideal reality, of which they were the imperfect symbols.

1 Cor. 1:30—“of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.” Here “wisdom” seems to indicate the prophetic, “righteousness” (or “justification”) the priestly, and “sanctification and redemption” the kingly work of Christ. Denovan: “Three offices are necessary. Christ must be a prophet, to save us from the ignorance of sin; a priest, to save us from its guilt; a king, to save us from its dominion in our flesh. Our faith cannot have firm basis in any one of these alone, any more than a stool can stand on less than three legs.” See Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 583-586; Archer Butler, Sermons, 1:314.

A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 235—“For ‘office,’ there are two words in Latin: munus = position (of Mediator), and officia = functions (of Prophet, Priest, and King). They are not separate offices, as are those of President, Chief-Justice, and Senator. They are not separate functions, capable of successive and isolated performance. They are rather like the several functions of the one living human body—lungs, heart, brain—functionally distinct, yet interdependent, and together constituting one life. So the functions of Prophet, Priest, and King mutually imply one another: Christ is always a prophetical Priest, and a priestly Prophet; and he is always a royal Priest, and a priestly King; and together they accomplish one redemption, to which all are equally essential. Christ is both μεσίτης and παράκλητος.”

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