Part 6 — Chapter 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:

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 [pg 666]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.

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 [pg 667] 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 [pg 668] “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.

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 [pg 670]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 [pg 671] 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 [pg 672]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 [pg 673]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.”

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 [pg 674]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.

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(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.” [pg 676]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: [pg 677] “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 [pg 678]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 priorionly 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.

[pg 679]

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 unpersonality but inpersonality. 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 [pg 680]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 himto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yet heappears 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 [pg 681]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.

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. [pg 682]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 [pg 683]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.

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 [pg 684] 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.’ ”

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. [pg 685] 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.”