Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”[pg 698](h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”[pg 698](h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”[pg 698](h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”[pg 698](h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”[pg 698](h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”[pg 698](h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”[pg 698](h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”
Just as my soul could never suffer the pains of fire if it were only soul, but can suffer those pains in union with the body, so the otherwise impassible God can suffer mortal pangs through his union with humanity, which he never could suffer if he had not joined himself to my nature. The union between the humanity and the deity is so close, that deity itself is brought under the curse and penalty of the law. Because Christ was God, did he pass unscorched through the fires of Gethsemane and Calvary? Rather let us say, because Christ was God, he underwent a suffering that was absolutely infinite. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:300sq.; Lawrence, in Bib. Sac., 24:41; Schöberlein, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1871:459-501.
A. J. F. Behrends, in The Examiner, April 21, 1898—“Jesus Christ is God in the form of man; as completely God as if he were not man; as completely man as if he were not God. He is always divine and always human.... The infirmities and pains of his body pierced his divine nature.... The demand of the law was not laid upon Christ from without, but proceeded from within. It is the righteousnessinhim which makes his death necessary.”
(h) Necessity of the union.—The union of two natures in one person is necessary to constitute Jesus Christ a proper mediator between man and God. His two-fold nature gives him fellowship with both parties, since it involves an equal dignity with God, and at the same time a perfect sympathy with man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). This two-fold nature, moreover, enables him to present to both God and man proper terms of reconciliation: being man, he can make atonement for man; being God, his atonement has infinite value; while both his divinity and his humanity combine to move the hearts of offenders and constrain them to submission and love (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 7:25).
Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.
Heb. 2:17,18—“Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted”;4:15,16—“For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need”;1 Tim. 2:5—“one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus”;Heb. 7:25—“Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”
Because Christ is man, he can make atonement for man and can sympathize with man. Because Christ is God, his atonement has infinite value, and the union which he effects with God is complete. A merely human Savior could never reconcile or reunite us to God. But a divine-human Savior meets all our needs. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 170-208. As the high priest of old bore on his mitre the name Jehovah, and on his breastplate the names of the tribes of Israel, so Christ Jesus is God with us, and at the same time our propitiatory representative before God. In Virgil's Æneid, Dido says well:“Haud ignara malí, miseris succurrere disco”—“Myself not ignorant of woe, Compassion I have learned to show.”And Terence uttered almost a Christian word when he wrote:“Homo sum, et humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and I count nothing human as foreign to me.”Christ's experience and divinity made these words far more true of him than of any merely human being.
(i) The union eternal.—The union of humanity with deity in the person of Christ is indissoluble and eternal. Unlike the avatars of the East, the incarnation was a permanent assumption of human nature by the second person of the Trinity. In the ascension of Christ, glorified humanity has attained the throne of the universe. By his Spirit, this same divine-human Savior is omnipresent to secure the progress of his kingdom. The final subjection of the Son to the Father, alluded to in 1 Cor. 15:28, cannot be other than the complete return of the Son to his original relation to the Father; since, according to John 17:5, Christ is again to possess the glory which he had with the Father before the world was (cf.Heb. 1:8; 7:24, 25).
1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).
1 Cor. 15:28—“and when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all”;John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”;Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever”;7:24—“he, because he abideth forever, hath his priesthood unchangeable.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:281-283 (Syst. Doct. 3:177-179), holds that there is a present and relative distinction between the Son's will, as Mediator, and that of the Father (Mat. 26:39—“not as I will, but as thou wilt”)—a distinction which shall cease when Christ becomes Judge (John 16:26—“In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not onto you, that I will pray the Father for you”) If Christ'sreignceased, he would be inferior to the saints, who are themselves to reign. But they are to reign only in and with Christ, their head.
The best illustration of the possible meaning of Christ's giving up the kingdom is found in the Governor of the East India Company giving up his authority to the Queen and merging it in that of the home government, he himself, however, at the same time becoming Secretary of State for India. So Christ will give up his vicegerency, but not[pg 699]his mediatorship. Now he reigns by delegated authority; then he will reign in union with the Father. So Kendrick, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1890:68-83. Wrightnour:“When the great remedy has wrought its perfect cure, the physician will no longer be looked upon as the physician. When the work of redemption is completed, the mediatorial office of the Son will cease.”We may add that other offices of friendship and instruction will then begin.
Melanchthon:“Christ will finish his work as Mediator, and then will reign as God, immediately revealing to us the Deity.”Quenstedt, quoted in Schmid, Dogmatik, 293, thinks the giving up of the kingdom will be only an exchange of outward administration for inward,—not a surrender of all power and authority, but only of one mode of exercising it. Hanna, on Resurrection, lect. 4—“It is not a giving up of his mediatorial authority,—that throne is to endure forever,—but it is a simple public recognition of the fact that God is all in all, that Christ is God's medium of accomplishing all.”An. Par. Bible, on1 Cor. 15:28—“Not his mediatorial relation to his own people shall be given up; much less his personal relation to the Godhead, as the divine Word; but only his mediatorial relation to the world at large.”See also Edwards, Observations on the Trinity, 85sq.Expositor's Greek Testament, on1 Cor. 15:28,“affirms no other subjection than is involved in Sonship.... This implies no inferiority of nature, no extrusion from power, but the free submission of love ... which is the essence of the filial spirit which actuated Christ from first to last.... Whatsoever glory he gains is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who glorifies him in turn.”
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:402 (Syst. Doct., 3:297-299)—“We are not to imagine incarnations of Christ in the angel-world, or in other spheres. This would make incarnation only the change of a garment, a passing theophany; and Christ's relation to humanity would be a merely external one.”Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our Lord's Knowledge as Man, XX—“Are we permitted to believe that there is something parallel to the progress of our Lord's humanity in the state of humiliation, still going on even now, in the state of exaltation? that it is, in fact, becoming more and more adequate to the divine nature? SeeCol. 1:24—‘fill up that which is lacking’;Heb. 10:12, 13—‘expecting till his enemies’;1 Cor. 15:28—‘when all things have been subjected unto him.’”In our judgment such a conclusion is unwarranted, in view of the fact that the God-man in his exaltation has the glory of his preëxistent state (John 17:5); that all the heavenly powers are already subject to him (Eph. 1:21, 22); and that he is now omnipresent (Mat. 28:20).
(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.
Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.
Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite;2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”;John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.
J. M. Whiton:“How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished,quadivine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth thefulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasizefulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but thefulnessis in the head alone—a fulness of course not[pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life ispro tantoand in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... TheHomoousiosof the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.”So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134.Homoiousioshe regards as involvinghomoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.
Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is,“not Godandman, but Godinman.”Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power”(Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks:“To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.”Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man:“You are a part of God.”
While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it.“Jesus quotes approvingly the words ofPsalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause.‘And we through him’(1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.”Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of“the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.”The Son, or Word of God,“when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter,natura naturata:“Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris”(Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as thenatura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.