Section II.—The Person Of Christ.
The redemption of mankind from sin was to be effected through a Mediator who should unite in himself both the human nature and the divine, in order that he might reconcile God to man and man to God. To facilitate an understanding of the Scriptural doctrine under consideration, it will be desirable at the outset to present a brief historical survey of views respecting the Person of Christ.
In the history of doctrine, as we have seen, beliefs held in solution at the beginning are only gradually precipitated and crystallized into definite formulas. The first question which Christians naturally asked themselves was “What think ye of the Christ” (Mat 22:42); then his relation to the Father; then, in due succession, the nature of sin, of atonement, of justification, of regeneration. Connecting these questions with the names of the great leaders who sought respectively to answer them, we have: 1. the Person of Christ, treated by Gregory Nazianzen (328); 2. the Trinity, by Athanasius (325-373); 3. Sin, by Augustine (353-430); 4. Atonement, by Anselm (1033-1109); 5. Justification by faith, by Luther (1485-1560); 6. Regeneration, by John Wesley (1703-1791);—six weekdays of theology, leaving only a seventh, for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which may be the work of our age. John 10:36—“him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world”—hints at some mysterious process by which the Son was prepared for his mission. Athanasius: “If the Word of God is in the world, as in a body, what is there strange in affirming that he has also entered into humanity?” This is the natural end of evolution from lower to higher. See Medd, Bampton Lectures for 1882, on The One Mediator: The Operation of the Son of God in Nature and in Grace; Orr, God's Image in Man.
I. Historical Survey of Views Respecting the Person of Christ.
1. The Ebionites (אביון = “poor”; A. D. 107?) denied the reality of Christ's divine nature, and held him to be merely man, whether naturally or supernaturally conceived. This man, however, held a peculiar relation to God, in that, from the time of his baptism, an unmeasured fulness of the divine Spirit rested upon him. Ebionism was simply Judaism within the pale of the Christian church, and its denial of Christ's godhood was occasioned by the apparent incompatibility of this doctrine with monotheism.
Fürst (Heb. Lexicon) derives the name “Ebionite” from the word signifying “poor”; see Is. 25:4—“thou hast been a stronghold to the poor”; Mat 5:3—“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It means “oppressed, pious souls.” Epiphanius traces them back to the Christians who took refuge, A. D. 66, at Pella, just before the destruction of Jerusalem. They lasted down to the fourth century. Dorner can assign no age for the formation of the sect, nor any historically ascertained person as its head. It was not Judaic Christianity, but only a fraction of this. There were two divisions of the Ebionites:
(a) The Nazarenes, who held to the supernatural birth of Christ, while they would not go to the length of admitting the preëxisting hypostasis of the Son. They are said to have had the gospel of Matthew, in Hebrew.
(b) The Cerinthian Ebionites, who put the baptism of Christ in place of his supernatural birth, and made the ethical sonship the cause of the physical. It seemed to them a heathenish fable that the Son of God should be born of the Virgin. There was no personal union between the divine and human in Christ. Christ, as distinct from Jesus, was not a merely impersonal power descending upon Jesus, but a preëxisting hypostasis above the world-creating powers. The Cerinthian Ebionites, who on the whole best represent the spirit of Ebionism, approximated to Pharisaic Judaism, and were hostile to the writings of Paul. The Epistle to the Hebrews, in fact, is intended to counteract an Ebionitic tendency to overstrain law and to underrate Christ. In a complete view, however, should also be mentioned:
(c) The Gnostic Ebionism of the pseudo-Clementines, which in order to destroy the deity of Christ and save the pure monotheism, so-called, of primitive religion, gave up even the best part of the Old Testament. In all its forms, Ebionism conceives of God and man as external to each other. God could not become man. Christ was no more [pg 670]than a prophet or teacher, who, as the reward of his virtue, was from the time of his baptism specially endowed with the Spirit. After his death he was exalted to kingship. But that would not justify the worship which the church paid him. A merely creaturely mediator would separate us from God, instead of uniting us to him. See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:305-307 (Syst. Doct., 3:201-204), and Hist. Doct. Person Christ, A.1:187-217; Reuss, Hist. Christ. Theol., 1:100-107; Schaff, Ch. Hist., 1:213-215.
2. The Docetæ (δοκέω—“to seem,” “to appear”; A. D. 70-170), like most of the Gnostics in the second century and the Manichees in the third, denied the reality of Christ's human body. This view was the logical sequence of their assumption of the inherent evil of matter. If matter is evil and Christ was pure, then Christ's human body must have been merely phantasmal. Docetism was simply pagan philosophy introduced into the church.
The Gnostic Basilides held to a real human Christ, with whom the divine νοῦς became united at the baptism; but the followers of Basilides became Docetæ. To them, the body of Christ was merely a seeming one. There was no real life or death. Valentinus made the Æon, Christ, with a body purely pneumatic and worthy of himself, pass through the body of the Virgin, as water through a reed, taking up into himself nothing of the human nature through which he passed; or as a ray of light through colored glass which only imparts to the light a portion of its own darkness. Christ's life was simply a theophany. The Patripassians and Sabellians, who are only sects of the Docetæ, denied all real humanity to Christ. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 141—“He treads the thorns of death and shame ‘like a triumphal path,’ of which he never felt the sharpness. There was development only externally and in appearance. No ignorance can be ascribed to him amidst the omniscience of the Godhead.” Shelley: “A mortal shape to him Was as the vapor dim Which the orient planet animates with light.” The strong argument against Docetism was found in Heb. 2:14—“Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same.”
That Docetism appeared so early, shows that the impression Christ made was that of a superhuman being. Among many of the Gnostics, the philosophy which lay at the basis of their Docetism was a pantheistic apotheosis of the world. God did not need to become man, for man was essentially divine. This view, and the opposite error of Judaism, already mentioned, both showed their insufficiency by attempts to combine with each other, as in the Alexandrian philosophy. See Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, A.1:218-253, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307-310 (Syst. Doct., 3:204-206); Neander, Ch. Hist, 1:387.
3. The Arians (Arius, condemned at Nice, 325) denied the integrity of the divine nature in Christ. They regarded the Logos who united himself to humanity in Jesus Christ, not as possessed of absolute godhood, but as the first and highest of created beings. This view originated in a misinterpretation of the Scriptural accounts of Christ's state of humiliation, and in mistaking temporary subordination for original and permanent inequality.
Arianism is called by Dorner a reaction from Sabellianism. Sabellius had reduced the incarnation of Christ to a temporary phenomenon. Arius thought to lay stress on the hypostasis of the Son, and to give it fixity and substance. But, to his mind, the reality of Sonship seemed to require subordination to the Father. Origen had taught the subordination of the Son to the Father, in connection with his doctrine of eternal generation. Arius held to the subordination, and also to the generation, but this last, he declared, could not be eternal, but must be in time. See Dorner, Person Christ, A.2:227-244, and Glaubenslehre, 2:307, 312, 313 (Syst. Doct., 3:203, 207-210); Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Arianismus. See also this Compendium, Vol. I:328-330.
4. The Apollinarians (Apollinaris, condemned at Constantinople, 381) denied the integrity of Christ's human nature. According to this view, Christ had no human νοῦς or πνεῦμα, other than that which was furnished by [pg 671] the divine nature. Christ had only the human σῶμα and ψυχή; the place of the human νοῦς or πνεῦμα was filled by the divine Logos. Apollinarism is an attempt to construe the doctrine of Christ's person in the forms of the Platonic trichotomy.
Lest divinity should seem a foreign element, when added to this curtailed manhood, Apollinaris said that there was an eternal tendency to the human in the Logos himself; that in God was the true manhood; that the Logos is the eternal, archetypal man. But here is no becoming man—only a manifestation in flesh of what the Logos already was. So we have a Christ of great head and dwarfed body. Justin Martyr preceded Apollinaris in this view. In opposing it, the church Fathers said that “what the Son of God has not taken to himself, he has not sanctified”—τὸ ἀπρόσληπτον καὶ ἀθεράπευτον. See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:397-408—“The impossibility, on the Arian theory, of making two finite souls into one, finally led to the [Apollinarian] denial of any human soul in Christ”; see also, Dorner, Person Christ, A.2:352-399, and Glaubenslehre, 2:310 (Syst. Doct., 3:206, 207); Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:394.
Apollinaris taught that the eternal Word took into union with himself, not a complete human nature, but an irrational human animal. Simon, Reconciliation, 329, comes near to being an Apollinarian, when he maintains that the incarnate Logos was human, but was not a man. He is the constituter of man, self-limited, in order that he may save that to which he has given life. Gore, Incarnation, 93—“Apollinaris suggested that the archetype of manhood exists in God, who made man in his own image, so that man's nature in some sense preëxisted in God. The Son of God was eternally human, and he could fill the place of the human mind in Christ without his ceasing to be in some sense divine.... This the church negatived,—man is not God, nor God man. The first principle of theism is that manhood at the bottom is not the same thing as Godhead. This is a principle intimately bound up with man's responsibility and the reality of sin. The interests of theism were at stake.”
5. The Nestorians (Nestorius, removed from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, 431) denied the real union between the divine and the human natures in Christ, making it rather a moral than an organic one. They refused therefore to attribute to the resultant unity the attributes of each nature, and regarded Christ as a man in very near relation to God. Thus they virtually held to two natures and two persons, instead of two natures in one person.
Nestorius disliked the phrase: “Mary, mother of God.” The Chalcedon statement asserted its truth, with the significant addition: “as to his humanity.” Nestorius made Christ a peculiar temple of God. He believed in συνάφεια, not ἕνωσις,—junction and indwelling, but not absolute union. He made too much of the analogy of the union of the believer with Christ, and separated as much as possible the divine and the human. The two natures were, in his view, ἄλλος καὶ ἄλλος, instead of being ἄλλο καὶ ἄλλο, which together constitute εἶς—one personality. The union which he accepted was a moral union, which makes Christ simply God and man, instead of the God-man.
John of Damascus compared the passion of Christ to the felling of a tree on which the sun shines. The axe fells the tree, but does no harm to the sunbeams. So the blows which struck Christ's humanity caused no harm to his deity; while the flesh suffered, the deity remained impassible. This leaves, however, no divine efficacy of the human sufferings, and no personal union of the human with the divine. The error of Nestorius arose from a philosophic nominalism, which refused to conceive of nature without personality. He believed in nothing more than a local or moral union, like the marriage union, in which two become one; or like the state, which is sometimes called a moral person, because having a unity composed of many persons. See Dorner, Person Christ, B.1:53-79, and Glaubenslehre, 2:315, 316 (Syst. Doct., 3:211-213); Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:210; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 152-154.
“There was no need here of the virgin-birth,—to secure a sinless father as well as mother would have been enough. Nestorianism holds to no real incarnation—only to an alliance between God and man. After the fashion of the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, man and God are joined together. But the incarnation is not merely a higher degree of the mystical union.” Gore, Incarnation, 94—“Nestorius adopted and popularized [pg 672]the doctrine of the famous commentator, Theodore of Mopsuestia. But the Christ of Nestorius was simply a deified man, not God incarnate,—he was from below, not from above. If he was exalted to union with the divine essence, his exaltation was only that of one individual man.”
6. The Eutychians (condemned at Chalcedon, 451) denied the distinction and coëxistence of the two natures, and held to a mingling of both into one, which constituted a tertium quid, or third nature. Since in this case the divine must overpower the human, it follows that the human was really absorbed into or transmuted into the divine, although the divine was not in all respects the same, after the union, that it was before. Hence the Eutychians were often called Monophysites, because they virtually reduced the two natures to one.
They were an Alexandrian school, which included monks of Constantinople and Egypt. They used the words σύγχυσις, μεταβολή—confounding, transformation—to describe the union of the two natures in Christ. Humanity joined to deity was as a drop of honey mingled with the ocean. There was a change in either element, but as when a stone attracts the earth, or a meteorite the sun, or when a small boat pulls a ship, all the movement was virtually on the part of the smaller object. Humanity was so absorbed in deity, as to be altogether lost. The union was illustrated by electron, a metal compounded of silver and gold. A more modern illustration would be that of the chemical union of an acid and an alkali, to form a salt unlike either of the constituents.
In effect this theory denied the human element, and, with this, the possibility of atonement, on the part of human nature, as well as of real union of man with God. Such a magical union of the two natures as Eutyches described is inconsistent with any real becoming man on the part of the Logos,—the manhood is well-nigh as illusory as upon the theory of the Docetæ. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 140—“This turns not the Godhead only but the manhood also into something foreign—into some nameless nature, betwixt and between—the fabulous nature of a semi-human demigod,” like the Centaur.
The author of “The German Theology” says that “Christ's human nature was utterly bereft of self, and was nothing else but a house and habitation of God.” The Mystics would have human personality so completely the organ of the divine that “we may be to God what man's hand is to a man,” and that “I” and “mine” may cease to have any meaning. Both these views savor of Eutychianism. On the other hand, the Unitarian says that Christ was “a mere man.” But there cannot be such a thing as a mere man, exclusive of aught above and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. The Trinitarian sometimes declares himself as believing that Christ is God and man, thus implying the existence of two substances. Better say that Christ is the God-man, who manifests all the divine powers and qualities of which all men and all nature are partial embodiments. See Dorner, Person of Christ, B.1:83-93, and Glaubenslehre, 2:318, 319 (Syst. Doct., 3:214-216); Guericke, Ch. History, 1:356-360.
The foregoing survey would seem to show that history had exhausted the possibilities of heresy, and that the future denials of the doctrine of Christ's person must be, in essence, forms of the views already mentioned. All controversies with regard to the person of Christ must, of necessity, hinge upon one of three points: first, the reality of the two natures; secondly, the integrity of the two natures; thirdly, the union of the two natures in one person. Of these points, Ebionism and Docetism deny the reality of the natures; Arianism and Apollinarianism deny their integrity; while Nestorianism and Eutychianism deny their proper union. In opposition to all these errors, the orthodox doctrine held its ground and maintains it to this day.
We may apply to this subject what Dr. A. P. Peabody said in a different connection: “The canon of infidelity was closed almost as soon as that of the Scriptures”—modern unbelievers having, for the most part, repeated the objections of their ancient predecessors. Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“As a shell which has failed to burst is [pg 673]picked up on some old battle-field, by some one on whom experience is thrown away, and is exploded by him in the bosom of his approving family, with disastrous results, so one of these abandoned beliefs may be dug up by the head of some intellectual family, to the confusion of those who follow him as their leader.”
7. The Orthodox doctrine (promulgated at Chalcedon, 451) holds that in the one person Jesus Christ there are two natures, a human nature and a divine nature, each in its completeness and integrity, and that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united, yet so that no third nature is formed thereby. In brief, to use the antiquated dictum, orthodox doctrine forbids us either to divide the person or to confound the natures.
That this doctrine is Scriptural and rational, we have yet to show. We may most easily arrange our proofs by reducing the three points mentioned to two, namely: first, the reality and integrity of the two natures; secondly, the union of the two natures in one person.
The formula of Chalcedon is negative, with the exception of its assertion of a ἕνωσις ὑποστατική. It proceeds from the natures, and regards the result of the union to be the person. Each of the two natures is regarded as in movement toward the other. The symbol says nothing of an ἀνυποστασία of the human nature, nor does it say that the Logos furnishes the ego in the personality. John of Damascus, however, pushed forward to these conclusions, and his work, translated into Latin, was used by Peter Lombard, and determined the views of the Western church of the Middle Ages. Dorner regards this as having given rise to the Mariolatry, saint-invocation, and transubstantiation of the Roman Catholic Church. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:189 sq.; Dorner, Person Christ, B.1:93-119, and Glaubenslehre, 2:320-328 (Syst. Doct., 3:216-223), in which last passage may be found valuable matter with regard to the changing uses of the words πρόσωπον, ὑπόστασις, οὐσία, etc.
Gore, Incarnation, 96, 101—“These decisions simply express in a new form, without substantial addition, the apostolic teaching as it is represented in the New Testament. They express it in a new form for protective purposes, as a legal enactment protects a moral principle. They are developments only in the sense that they represent the apostolic teaching worked out into formulas by the aid of a terminology which was supplied by Greek dialectics.... What the church borrowed from Greek thought was her terminology, not the substance of her creed. Even in regard to her terminology we must make one important reservation; for Christianity laid all stress on the personality of God and man, of which Hellenism had thought but little.”