Chapter 67

III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness[pg 684]represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of Godandman; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of Godinman. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was“a mere man.”As if there could be such a thing asmereman, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton's objection to the phrase“Godandman,”because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term“God-man”to the phrase“Godinman,”for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is“the only begotten,”in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one,viz.,‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’”1. Proof of this Union.(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of“I”and“thou”between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here“we”is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ's atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man;Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both[Jew and Gentile]in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”;21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”;2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these[promises]ye may become partakers of the divine nature.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ's divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ's humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man's nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ's πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.Against this theory we urge the following objections:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf.John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ's person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown.“Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ's person. But the theory before us denies both sides.”While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the“half length”portrait which depicted only thelower halfof the man.Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, andHeb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God's immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.[pg 688]See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone hasaseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus' life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.It is objectionable for the following reasons:(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.InLuke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—andPhil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it“leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.”He maintains, against Dorner, that“the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.”193-195—Dorner's view“makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Twowillingpersonalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner:‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the centralegoof this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him.‘Theunio personalisgrows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says:“I and the Logos are one”;“he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”;“the Logos is greater than I”;“I go to the Logos.”In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness[pg 684]represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of Godandman; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of Godinman. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was“a mere man.”As if there could be such a thing asmereman, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton's objection to the phrase“Godandman,”because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term“God-man”to the phrase“Godinman,”for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is“the only begotten,”in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one,viz.,‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’”1. Proof of this Union.(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of“I”and“thou”between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here“we”is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ's atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man;Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both[Jew and Gentile]in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”;21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”;2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these[promises]ye may become partakers of the divine nature.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ's divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ's humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man's nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ's πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.Against this theory we urge the following objections:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf.John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ's person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown.“Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ's person. But the theory before us denies both sides.”While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the“half length”portrait which depicted only thelower halfof the man.Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, andHeb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God's immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.[pg 688]See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone hasaseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus' life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.It is objectionable for the following reasons:(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.InLuke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—andPhil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it“leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.”He maintains, against Dorner, that“the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.”193-195—Dorner's view“makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Twowillingpersonalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner:‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the centralegoof this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him.‘Theunio personalisgrows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says:“I and the Logos are one”;“he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”;“the Logos is greater than I”;“I go to the Logos.”In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness[pg 684]represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of Godandman; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of Godinman. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was“a mere man.”As if there could be such a thing asmereman, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton's objection to the phrase“Godandman,”because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term“God-man”to the phrase“Godinman,”for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is“the only begotten,”in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one,viz.,‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’”1. Proof of this Union.(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of“I”and“thou”between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here“we”is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ's atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man;Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both[Jew and Gentile]in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”;21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”;2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these[promises]ye may become partakers of the divine nature.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ's divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ's humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man's nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ's πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.Against this theory we urge the following objections:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf.John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ's person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown.“Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ's person. But the theory before us denies both sides.”While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the“half length”portrait which depicted only thelower halfof the man.Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, andHeb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God's immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.[pg 688]See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone hasaseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus' life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.It is objectionable for the following reasons:(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.InLuke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—andPhil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it“leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.”He maintains, against Dorner, that“the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.”193-195—Dorner's view“makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Twowillingpersonalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner:‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the centralegoof this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him.‘Theunio personalisgrows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says:“I and the Logos are one”;“he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”;“the Logos is greater than I”;“I go to the Logos.”In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness[pg 684]represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of Godandman; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of Godinman. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was“a mere man.”As if there could be such a thing asmereman, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton's objection to the phrase“Godandman,”because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term“God-man”to the phrase“Godinman,”for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is“the only begotten,”in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one,viz.,‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’”1. Proof of this Union.(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of“I”and“thou”between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here“we”is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ's atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man;Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both[Jew and Gentile]in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”;21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”;2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these[promises]ye may become partakers of the divine nature.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ's divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ's humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man's nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ's πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.Against this theory we urge the following objections:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf.John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ's person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown.“Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ's person. But the theory before us denies both sides.”While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the“half length”portrait which depicted only thelower halfof the man.Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, andHeb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God's immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.[pg 688]See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone hasaseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus' life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.It is objectionable for the following reasons:(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.InLuke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—andPhil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it“leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.”He maintains, against Dorner, that“the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.”193-195—Dorner's view“makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Twowillingpersonalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner:‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the centralegoof this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him.‘Theunio personalisgrows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says:“I and the Logos are one”;“he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”;“the Logos is greater than I”;“I go to the Logos.”In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness[pg 684]represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of Godandman; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of Godinman. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was“a mere man.”As if there could be such a thing asmereman, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton's objection to the phrase“Godandman,”because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term“God-man”to the phrase“Godinman,”for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is“the only begotten,”in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one,viz.,‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’”1. Proof of this Union.(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of“I”and“thou”between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here“we”is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ's atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man;Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both[Jew and Gentile]in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”;21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”;2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these[promises]ye may become partakers of the divine nature.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ's divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ's humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man's nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ's πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.Against this theory we urge the following objections:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf.John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ's person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown.“Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ's person. But the theory before us denies both sides.”While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the“half length”portrait which depicted only thelower halfof the man.Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, andHeb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God's immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.[pg 688]See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone hasaseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus' life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.It is objectionable for the following reasons:(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.InLuke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—andPhil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it“leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.”He maintains, against Dorner, that“the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.”193-195—Dorner's view“makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Twowillingpersonalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner:‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the centralegoof this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him.‘Theunio personalisgrows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says:“I and the Logos are one”;“he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”;“the Logos is greater than I”;“I go to the Logos.”In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness[pg 684]represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of Godandman; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of Godinman. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was“a mere man.”As if there could be such a thing asmereman, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton's objection to the phrase“Godandman,”because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term“God-man”to the phrase“Godinman,”for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is“the only begotten,”in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115—“Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one,viz.,‘I believe that Christ is both God and man.’”1. Proof of this Union.(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of“I”and“thou”between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here“we”is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ's atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man;Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both[Jew and Gentile]in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”;21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”;2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these[promises]ye may become partakers of the divine nature.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ's divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ's humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man's nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ's πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.Against this theory we urge the following objections:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf.John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ's person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown.“Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ's person. But the theory before us denies both sides.”While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the“half length”portrait which depicted only thelower halfof the man.Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, andHeb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God's immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.[pg 688]See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone hasaseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus' life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.It is objectionable for the following reasons:(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.InLuke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—andPhil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it“leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.”He maintains, against Dorner, that“the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.”193-195—Dorner's view“makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Twowillingpersonalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner:‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the centralegoof this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him.‘Theunio personalisgrows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says:“I and the Logos are one”;“he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”;“the Logos is greater than I”;“I go to the Logos.”In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness[pg 684]represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will,—this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.

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

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

1. Proof of this Union.(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of“I”and“thou”between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3:11—“we speak that we do know,”—and even here“we”is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2—“is come in the flesh”—is supplemented by John 1:14—“became flesh”; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”(c) The constant Scriptural representations of the infinite value of Christ's atonement and of the union of the human race with God which has been secured in him are intelligible only when Christ is regarded, not as a man of God, but as the God-man, in whom the two natures are so united that what each does has the value of both.1 John 2:2—“he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world,”—as John in his gospel proves that Jesus is the Son of God, the Word, God, so in his first Epistle he proves that the Son of God, the Word, God, has become man;Eph. 2:16-18—“might reconcile them both[Jew and Gentile]in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father”;21, 22—“in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”;2 Pet. 1:4—“that through these[promises]ye may become partakers of the divine nature.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:107—“We cannot separate Christ's divine from his human acts, without rending in twain the unity of his person and life.”(d) It corroborates this view to remember that the universal Christian consciousness recognizes in Christ a single and undivided personality, and expresses this recognition in its services of song and prayer.The foregoing proof of the union of a perfect human nature and of a perfect divine nature in the single person of Jesus Christ suffices to refute both the Nestorian separation of the natures and the Eutychian confounding of them. Certain modern forms of stating the doctrine of this union, however—forms of statement into which there enter some of the misconceptions already noticed—need a brief examination, before we proceed to our own attempt at elucidation.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.

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

John 17:23—“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me”;3:11—“We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness”;1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”;John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”—he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person.In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97—“He is not so much Godandman, as Godin, andthrough, andasman. He is one indivisible personality throughout.... We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human,—all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.

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

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

(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:3 and 1 Pet.[pg 685]3:18; of the latter, 1 Tim. 2:5 and Heb. 1:2, 3). Hence we can say, on the one hand, that the God-man existed before Abraham, yet was born in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and that Jesus Christ wept, was weary, suffered, died, yet is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; on the other hand, that a divine Savior redeemed us upon the cross, and that the human Christ is present with his people even to the end of the world (Eph. 1:23; 4:10; Mat. 28:20).

Rom. 1:3—“his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”;1 Pet. 3:18—“Christ also suffered for sins once ... being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things ... who being the effulgence of his glory ... when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”;Eph. 1:22, 23—“put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”;4:10—“He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”;Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 142-145—“Mary was Theotokos, but she was not the mother of Christ's Godhood, but of his humanity. We speak of the blood of God the Son, but it is not as God that he has blood. The hands of the babe Jesus made the worlds, only in the sense that he whose hands they were was the Agent in creation.... Spirit and body in us are not merely put side by side, and insulated from each other. The spirit does not have the rheumatism, and the reverent body does not commune with God. The reason why they affect each other is because they are equally ours.... Let us avoid sensuous, fondling, modes of addressing Christ—modes which dishonor him and enfeeble the soul of the worshiper.... Let us also avoid, on the other hand, such phrases as‘the dying God’, which loses the manhood in the Godhead.”Charles H. Spurgeon remarked that people who“dear”everybody reminded him of the woman who said she had been reading in“dear Hebrews.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”The Lutherans hold to a communion of the natures, as well as to an impartation of their properties: (1)genus idiomaticum—impartation of attributes of both natures to the one person; (2)genus apotelesmaticum(from ἀποτέλεσμα,“that which is finished or completed,”i. e., Jesus' work)—attributes of the one person imparted to each of the constituent natures. Hence Mary may be called“the mother of God,”as the Chalcedon symbol declares,“as to his humanity,”and what each nature did has the value of both; (3)genus majestaticum—attributes of one nature imparted to the other, yet so that the divine nature imparts to the human, not the human to the divine. The Lutherans do not believe in agenus tapeinoticon,i. e., that the human elements communicated themselves to the divine. The only communication of the human was to the person, not to the divine nature, of the God-man. Examples of this thirdgenus majestaticumare found isJohn 3:13—“no one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven”[here, however, Westcott and Hort, with א and B, omit ὁ ὢν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ];5:27—“he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man.”Of the explanation that this is the figure of speech called“allæosis,”Luther says:“Allæosisest larva quædam diaboli, secundum cujus rationes ego certe nolim esse Christianus.”Thegenus majestaticumis denied by the Reformed Church, on the ground that it does not permit a clear distinction of the natures. And this is one great difference between it and the Lutheran Church. So Hooker, in commenting upon the Son of man's“ascending up where he was before,”says:“By the‘Son of man’must be meant the whole person of Christ, who, being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence; but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given him.”For the Lutheran view of this union and its results in the communion of natures, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 11th ed., 195-197; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:24, 25. For the Reformed view, see Turretin, loc. 13, quæst. 8; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:387-397, 407-418.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:300-308)—“Three ideas are included in incarnation: (1) assumption of human nature on the part of the Logos (Heb. 2:14—‘partook[pg 686]of ... flesh and blood’;2 Cor. 5:19—‘God was in Christ’;Col. 2:9—‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’); (2) new creation of the second Adam, by the Holy Ghost and power of the Highest (Rom. 5:14—‘Adam's' transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come’;1 Cor. 15:22—‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’;15:45—‘The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit’;Luke 1:35—‘the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee’;Mat. 1:20—‘that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit’); (3) becoming flesh, without contraction of deity or humanity (1 Tim. 3:16—‘who was manifested in the flesh’;1 John 4:2—‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’;John 6:41, 51—‘I am the bread which came down out of heaven.... I am the living bread’;2 John 7—‘Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’;John 1:14—‘the word became flesh’). This last text cannot mean: The Logos ceased to be what he was, and began to be only man. Nor can it be a mere theophany, in human form. The reality of the humanity is intimated, as well as the reality of the Logos.”

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

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

2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.A. Theory of an incomplete humanity.—Gess and Beecher hold that the immaterial part in Christ's humanity is only contracted and metamorphosed deity.The advocates of this view maintain that the divine Logos reduced himself to the condition and limits of human nature, and thus literally became a human soul. The theory differs from Apollinarianism, in that it does not necessarily presuppose a trichotomous view of man's nature. While Apollinarianism, however, denied the human origin only of Christ's πνεῦμα, this theory extends the denial to his entire immaterial being,—his body alone being derived from the Virgin. It is held, in slightly varying forms, by the Germans, Hofmann and Ebrard, as well as by Gess; and Henry Ward Beecher was its chief representative in America.Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.Against this theory we urge the following objections:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of the passage John 1:14—ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The word σάρξ here has its common New Testament meaning. It designates neither soul nor body alone, but human nature in its totality (cf.John 3:6—τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς σάρξ ἐστιν; Rom. 7:18—οὐκ οἰκεῖ ἐν ἐμοί, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου, ἀγαθόν). That ἐγένετο does not imply a transmutation of the λόγος into human nature, or into a human soul, is evident from ἐσκήνωσεν which follows—an allusion to the Shechinah of the Mosaic tabernacle; and from the parallel passage 1 John 4:2—ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα—where we are taught not only the oneness of Christ's person, but the distinctness of the constituent natures.John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”(b) It contradicts the two great classes of Scripture passages already referred to, which assert on the one hand the divine knowledge and power of Christ and his consciousness of oneness with the Father, and on the other hand the completeness of his human nature and its derivation from the stock of Israel and the seed of Abraham (Mat. 1:1-16; Heb. 2:16). Thus it denies both the true humanity, and the true deity, of Christ.See the Scripture passages cited in proof of the Deity of Christ, pages 305-315. Gess himself acknowledges that, if the passages in which Jesus avers his divine knowledge and power and his consciousness of oneness with the Father refer to his earthly life, his theory is overthrown.“Apollinarianism had a certain sort of grotesque grandeur, in giving to the human body and soul of Christ an infinite, divine πνεῦμα. It maintained at least the divine side of Christ's person. But the theory before us denies both sides.”While it so curtails deity that it is no proper deity, it takes away from humanity all that is valuable in humanity; for a manhood that consists only in body is no proper manhood. Such manhood is like the“half length”portrait which depicted only thelower halfof the man.Mat. 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus, andHeb. 2:16—“taketh hold of the seed of Abraham”—intimate that Christ took all that belonged to human nature.(c) It is inconsistent with the Scriptural representations of God's immutability, in maintaining that the Logos gives up the attributes of Godhead, and his place and office as second person of the Trinity, in order to contract himself into the limits of humanity. Since attributes and substance are correlative terms, it is impossible to hold that the substance of God is in Christ, so long as he does not possess divine attributes. As we shall see hereafter, however, the possession of divine attributes by Christ does not necessarily imply his constant exercise of them. His humiliation indeed, consisted in his giving up their independent exercise.[pg 688]See Dorner, Unveränderlichkeit Gottes, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1:361; 2:440; 3:579; esp. 1:390-412—“Gess holds that, during the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life, the Trinity was altered; the Father no more poured his fulness into the Son; the Son no more, with the Father, sent forth the Holy Spirit; the world was upheld and governed by Father and Spirit alone, without the mediation of the Son; the Father ceased to beget the Son. He says the Father alone hasaseity; he is the only Monas. The Trinity is a family, whose head is the Father, but whose number and condition is variable. To Gess, it is indifferent whether the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or (as during Jesus' life) of only one. But this is a Trinity in which two members are accidental. A Trinity that can get along without one of its members is not the Scriptural Trinity. The Father depends on the Son, and the Spirit depends on the Son, as much as the Son depends on the Father. To take away the Son is to take away the Father and the Spirit. This giving up of the actuality of his attributes, even of his holiness, on the part of the Logos, is in order to make it possible for Christ to sin. But can we ascribe the possibility of sin to a being who is really God? The reality of temptation requires us to postulate a veritable human soul.”(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.It is objectionable for the following reasons:(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.InLuke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—andPhil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it“leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.”He maintains, against Dorner, that“the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.”193-195—Dorner's view“makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Twowillingpersonalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner:‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the centralegoof this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him.‘Theunio personalisgrows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says:“I and the Logos are one”;“he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”;“the Logos is greater than I”;“I go to the Logos.”In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

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

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

Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.

Gess holds that Christ gave up his eternal holiness and divine self-consciousness, to become man, so that he never during his earthly life thought, spoke, or wrought as God, but was at all times destitute of divine attributes. See Gess, Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ; and synopsis of his view, by Reubelt, in Bib. Sac., 1870:1-32; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:234-241, and 2:20; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:144-151, and in Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Jesus Christ, der Gottmensch; also Liebner, Christliche Dogmatik. Henry Ward Beecher, in his Life of Jesus the Christ, chap. 3, emphasizes the word[pg 687]“flesh,”inJohn 1:14and declares the passage to mean that the divine Spirit enveloped himself in a humanbody, and in that condition was subject to the indispensable limitations of material laws. All these advocates of the view hold that Deity was dormant, or paralyzed, in Christ during his earthly life. Its essence is there, but not its efficiency at any time.

Against this theory we urge the following objections:

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

John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”

John 1:14—“the Word became flesh, and dwelt[tabernacled]among us, and we behold his glory”;3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”;Rom., 7:18—“in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”;1 John 4:2—“Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”Since“flesh,”in Scriptural usage, denotes human nature in its entirety, there is as little reason to infer from these passages a change of the Logos into a human body, as a change of the Logos into a human soul. There is no curtailed humanity in Christ. One advantage of the monistic doctrine is that it avoids this error. Omnipresence is the presence of the whole of God in every place.Ps. 85:9—“Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, That glory may dwell in our land”—was fulfilled when Christ, the true Shekinah, tabernacled in human flesh and men“beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth”(John 1:14). And Paul can say in2 Cor. 12:9—“Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may spread a tabernacle over me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.”On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.

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

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

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

The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal[pg 689]union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.”2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of thisbecoming, inside of theUnio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequentbecoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”2:464sq.(Syst. Doct., 3:363sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if theUniois to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says:‘I must be about my Father's business.’To Satan's temptation:‘Art thou God's Son?’he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.”Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit.“So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.

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

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

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

It is objectionable for the following reasons:

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

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

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

(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation[pg 690]of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.

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

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

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

Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying:“The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.”But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.Stalker, Imago Christi:“Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeedalwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.”He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.”See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

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

See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which[pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.”Theunityis the foundation of religion; thedifferenceis the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.

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

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