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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.[pg 675](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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.[pg 675](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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.[pg 675](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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.[pg 675](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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.[pg 675](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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.[pg 675](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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.[pg 675](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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.
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 inMat. 1:1-17andLuke 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., inMat. 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 inJohn 1:14—“And the Word became flesh”and in1 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.”
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.
Mat 4:2—“he afterward hungered”;John 19:28—“I thirst”;4:6—“Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus by the well”;Mat 8:24—“the boat was covered with the waves: but he was asleep”;Mark 10:21—“Jesus looking upon him loved him”;Mat. 9:36—“when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them”;Mark 3:5—“looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart”;Heb. 5:7—“supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death”;John 12:27—“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour”;11:33—“he groaned in the spirit”;35—“Jesus wept”;Mat 14:23—“he went up into the mountain apart to pray.”Heb. 2:16—“For it is not doubtless angels whom he rescueth, but he rescueth the seed of Abraham”(Kendrick).
Prof. J. P. Silvernail, on The Elocution of Jesus, finds the following intimations as to his delivery. It was characterized by 1. Naturalness (sitting, as at Capernaum); 2. Deliberation (cultivates responsiveness in his hearers); 3. Circumspection (he looked at Peter); 4. Dramatic action (woman taken in adultery); 5. Self-control (authority, poise, no vociferation, denunciation of Scribes and Pharisees). All these are manifestations of truly human qualities and virtues. The epistle of James, the brother of our Lord, with its exaltation of a meek, quiet and holy life, may be an unconscious reflection of the character of Jesus, as it had appeared to James during the early days at Nazareth. So John the Baptist's exclamation,“I have need to be baptized of thee”(Mat 3:14), may be an inference from his intercourse with Jesus in childhood and youth.
(d) He was subject to the ordinary laws of human development, both in body and soul (grew and waxed strong in spirit; asked questions; grew in wisdom and stature; learned obedience; suffered being tempted; was made perfect through sufferings).
Luke 2:40—“the child grew, and waxed strong, filled with wisdom”;46—“sitting in the midst of the teachers, both hearing them, and asking them questions”(here, at his twelfth year, he appears first to become fully conscious that he is the Sent of God, the Son of God);49—“know ye not that I must be in my Father's house?”(lit.“in the things of my Father”);52—“advanced in wisdom and stature”;Heb. 5:8—“learned obedience by the things which he suffered”;2:18—“in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;10—“it became him ... to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”Keble:“Was not our Lord a little child, Taught by degrees to pray; By father dear and mother mild Instructed day by day?”Adamson, The Mind in Christ:“To Henry Drummond Christianity was the crown of the evolution of the whole universe. Jesus' growth in stature and in favor with God and men is a picture in miniature of the age-long evolutionary process.”Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, 185—“The incarnation of the Son was not his one revelation of God, but the interpretation to sinful humanity of all his other revelations of God in nature and history and moral experience, which had been darkened by sin.... The Logos, incarnate or not, is the τέλος as well as the ἀρχή of creation.”Andrew Murray, Spirit of Christ, 26, 27—“Though now baptized himself, he cannot yet baptize others. He must first, in the power of his baptism, meet temptation and overcome it; must learn obedience and suffer; yea, through the eternal Spirit, offer himself a sacrifice to God and his Will; then only could he afresh receive the Holy Spirit as the reward of obedience, with the power to baptize all who belong to him”; seeActs 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.”
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”; seeActs 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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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.
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, asPs. 16and118, andIs. 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.
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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.
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, forgiveme.”He said:“Ye must be born anew”(John 3:7); but the words indicated thathehad no such need.“At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not onlyyieldedto God's will when made known to him, but hesoughtit:“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. Butlifecan 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.