028. HUMANITY LIVES ONLY IN CHRIST
HUMANITY LIVES ONLY IN CHRIST
Thus far we have gotten, but there is another step to take, and to take that step is to furnish the principle of unification to both philosophy and theology. This common life is the life of God in Christ. Humanity is not a congeries of independent units,—it is an organic whole because the life of Christ is in it, and it is a manifestation of himself. What Origen in the third century said of the universe at large we can apply to humanity: As our body, while consisting of many members, is yet an organism which is held together by one soul, so the universe is to be thought of as an immense living being which is held together by one soul, the power and Logos of God.
I hardly need to point out how greatly this relation to one another and to Christ exalts our human nature. We are inter-related, because we are related to Christ, who is the life of humanity. Pelagianism saw man’s dignity in isolation. It was man’s declaration of independence—independence of his fellows and independence of God. But that independence was a false independence—it was sin itself, separating the creature in will and purpose from the Creator. The true dignity of man is in his union with God, and that union both natural and moral is mediated only by Christ. We are coming to see that man lives, moves, and has his being only in Christ, the Word and Life of God. The individual, so far as his activities are rational and normal, is only a part and a manifestation of a greater whole. His ideals, his conscience, his inspiration, when he is inspired, come from a higher and larger reason than his own. Freedom and holiness are found only in voluntary union with Christ. As we are one with him by creation, and receive from him a physical and natural life, so we may become one with him by re-creation, and receive from him a moral and spiritual life. In his light alone we see light, and without his life our spirits die. This is not the place to expound the relations of my theme to atonement and to justification, though I am greatly tempted to undue expansion here. I feel assured that, when we get back to Christ and recognize him as the life of humanity, we have found the key to these deepest problems of theology. I have hope for theology when I read in a recent non-theological review1 such words as the following:
Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but he is also the vital principle which molds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man’s evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ He exists and has always existed potentially, in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the rest of the universe. This quotation prepares us for still another statement. As we have tried to go back from deism to Christ the Life of Nature, and from atomism to Christ the Life of ’Emma Marie Caillard, on "Man in the Light of Evolution," in the "Contemporary Review," December, 1893; pp. 873-881.