Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.[pg 679]Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ.Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.”1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; soverse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly[man],we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”[man].2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord”is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed.Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”;Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”;1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”;1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”
The phrase“Son of man”(John 5:27;cf.Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey,in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”;Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”;Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”;Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar:“Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.”So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.
But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him,“love can never love too much.”Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge:“Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”
Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is nomereideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“Thea priorionly outlines apossible, and does not determine what shall beactualwithin the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.”Noa prioritruths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, arealizationof the divine ideal.“Great men,”says Amiel,“are the true men.”Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.
Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time.‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.”Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”
Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.”On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.
(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.
By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).
By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored notunpersonality butinpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.
Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.”In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christishumanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”
Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but[pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word“whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting”(Micah 5:2).
(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.
InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”
InIs. 9:6, Christ is called“Everlasting Father.”InIs. 53:10, it is said that“he shall see his seed.”InRev. 22:16, he calls himself“the root”as well as“the offspring of David.”See alsoJohn 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”;15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures.John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”;1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here“spirit”= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but“the ego of his total divine-human personality.”
Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church”= the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his“little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are“orphans”(14:18marg.).“He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother”(20:17—“my brethren”;cf.Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. onJohn 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. HenceJohn 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”;Mat. 10:37andLuke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”= none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race.Cf.1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:349sq.).
Lightfoot onCol. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not onlyprincipium principiatum, but alsoprincipium principians. As heisfirst with respect to the universe, so hebecomesfirst with respect to the church;cf.Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.”Paul teaches that“the head of every man is Christ”(1 Cor. 11:3), and that“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”(Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks onEph. 1:10, that God's purpose is“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name oftheSon of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.
Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflectshimto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yetheappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while[pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25;2 Cor. 3:18;1 Cor. 13:12).
Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.
Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.”The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ,“the light that lighteth every man”(John 1:9), is present and is working within us.
Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:272—“That the divine idea of man as‘the son of his love’(Col. 1:13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world.”But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl:“Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another.”
The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.