5.01. Christ's Theanthropic Person
Christ’s Theanthropic Person Preliminary Considerations
Christology (christou logos)1[Note: 1. χριστοῦ λόγος = a word/discourse about Christ] is that division of theological science which treats the person of the Redeemer. As the doctrine of the Trinity is found in the Old Testament, so is that of the Redeemer. As there is an Old Testament trinitarianism, so there is an Old Testament Christology. Both doctrines, however, are less clearly revealed under the former economy than under the latter. Christ is explicit in asserting that the doctrine of his person is found in the Old Testament: “Many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which you see” (Matthew 13:17); “Abraham saw my day and was glad” (John 8:56; John 12:41; Luke 24:27); “the prophets searched diligently what the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow”2[Note: 2. WS: The patristic and Reformation divines find both the Trinity and the God-man in the Old Testament. Irenaeus (Against Heresies 4.33-34) makes ample quotations in proof of both doctrines. For the Lutheran and Reformed citations, see Gerhard, Chemnitz, Hase, Heppe, and Schweitzer in locis.] (1 Peter 1:10-12). The Redeemer is announced under several names in the Old Testament. The earliest designation is the “seed of the woman” (Genesis 3:15). Christ himself adopts this designation in the title “Son of Man,” employed by himself but never by his apostles. The next name in order is Shiloh (49:10). Luther, Gesenius, Rosenmüller, Hengstenberg, and others explain this to mean the “peacemaker.” This is favored by other messianic texts: in Isaiah 9:6 Messiah is denominated “prince of peace”; in Micah 5:5 of the Redeemer it is said, “This man shall be our peace”; in Zechariah 9:10 he is denominated the “speaker of peace”; and in Ephesians 2:14 “our peace.”3[Note: 3. WS: See Kitto’s Encyclopedia; Speaker’s Commentary onGenesis 49:10; and Newton, Prophecies, diss. 4.] Others explain the term Shiloh to mean “the desired one” (Haggai 2:7); “he who shall be sent”; “his son” (Calvin); “he whose right it is” (Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, Onkelos); “the place Shiloh” (Eichhorn, Bleek, Hitzig, Ewald, Delitzsch, Kalisch).4[Note: 4. WS: The connection is strongly against this last interpretation: “Probably the town Shiloh did not exist in Jacob’s time, and Judah neither acquired nor lost the preeminence over the other tribes at Shiloh. He was not the leader in the wilderness, for the people were led by Moses and Aaron; nor did he gain any fresh authority at Shiloh. Every ancient version, paraphrase, and commentator makes Shiloh, not the objective case after the verb, but the nominative before the verb” (Speaker’s Commentary in loco).] In Isaiah 7:14 the Redeemer is called Immanuel; in Daniel 9:25 Messiah; in Zechariah 6:12 the branch; and in Malachi 3:1 the messenger of the covenant. The designation of the Redeemer that was most common among the Jews was Messiah or Anointed One (māšîaḥ),5[Note: 5. îÈùÑÄéçÇ] rendered in the Septuagint by christos.6[Note: 6. χρίστος = Messiah, Anointed One] It is found 39 times in the Old Testament (see Alexander on Isaiah 52:13). The time of the Redeemer’s advent is distinctly foretold in Genesis 49:10 : “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come.” Historically, the scepter, that is, self-government, did not depart from the Hebrew nation, represented by the tribe of Judah (Judaei = Jews) until the destruction of Jerusalem in a.d.70. The time is again specified very particularly in Daniel 9:24-27 : “Seventy weeks are determined upon your people and upon the holy city, to finish the transgression and to make an end of sins and to make reconciliation for iniquity and to bring in everlasting righteousness and to seal up the vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy.” In this prophecy, a day stands for a year; 70 weeks denoting 490 years. The prophet announces that in 7 weeks or 49 years from the end of the captivity Jerusalem should be rebuilt; that in 62 weeks or 434 years from the rebuilding Messiah should appear; and that in 1 week or 7 years from his appearance he should “confirm the covenant” and should be “cut off” “in the middle of the week.”7[Note: 7. WS: “It is supposed that John the Baptist began his ministry about three and a half years before Christ; so that John’s ministry and Christ’s put together made seven years, which were the last of Daniel’s weeks. Christ came in the middle of the week, as Daniel foretold: ‘And in the middle of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and oblation to cease’ ” (Edwards, Work of Redemption in Works 1.407).] In the different calculations of exegetes there is a difference of only ten years. The difficulty is to know exactly when the seventy weeks begin. Hales says that they begin from the twentieth year of Artaxerxes Longimanus. W. Smith supposes that “the final and effectual edict of Artaxerxes was the commencing date and that this was issued in 457 b.c. Exactly 490 years may be counted from this to the death of Christ in a.d.33.” That the Jesus Christ of the New Testament is the Messiah promised in the Old Testament is proved by the agreement between the descriptions of the personage in each. In both he is …
1. the seed of the woman (Genesis 3:15; Psalms 22:10; Micah 5:3; Galatians 4:4; 1 Timothy 2:15; Revelation 12:15) 2. born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23; Luke 1:26-35) 3. of the family of Shem (Genesis 9:26-27) 4. of the Hebrew race (Exodus 3:18) 5. of the seed of Abraham (Genesis 12:3; Genesis 18:18; Matthew 1:1; John 8:56; Acts 3:25) 6. of the line of Isaac (Genesis 17:19; Romans 9:7; Galatians 4:23-28; Hebrews 11:8) 7. of the line of Jacob or Israel (Genesis 28:4-14; Numbers 24:5-17; Isaiah 41:8; Luke 1:68; Luke 2:32; Acts 28:20) 8. of the tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10; 1 Chronicles 5:2; Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:6; Hebrews 7:14; Revelation 5:5)
9. of the house of David (2 Samuel 7:12-15; 1 Chronicles 17:11-14; Psalms 89:4-36; Isaiah 9:7; Matthew 1:1; Luke 1:69; Luke 2:4; John 7:42; Acts 2:30; Romans 1:3; 2 Timothy 2:8; Revelation 22:16) 10. born at Bethlehem (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:6; Luke 2:4; John 7:42) 11. to suffer an agony (Genesis 3:15; Psalms 22:1-18; Isaiah 53:1-12; Zechariah 13:6-7; Matthew 26:37; Luke 24:26)
12. to die in a peculiar manner (Isaiah 53:9; Daniel 9:26; Numbers 21:9 compared with John 3:14; Psalms 22:18 compared with John 19:24) 13. to be embalmed and entombed (Isaiah 53:9; Matthew 27:57; Luke 23:56; John 19:38-41) 14. to rise from the dead (Psalms 16:10; Acts 3:15) 15. to ascend into heaven (Psalms 68:18 compared with Ephesians 4:8; Psalms 110:1; Luke 24:51)
16. to come a second time spiritually in regeneration (Isaiah 40:10; Isaiah 62:11; Jeremiah 23:5-6; Hosea 3:5; Micah 5:4; Daniel 7:13-14; John 14:3; John 14:18; John 14:23; John 16:23; John 16:26)
17. to come a second time visibly (Job 19:25; Psalms 50:1-6; Daniel 12:1-2; Matthew 25:31; 1 Corinthians 15:23; 1 Thessalonians 1:10; Revelation 20:11-12) The biblical representations of the person of the Redeemer make him to be a complex person, constituted of two natures. He is not merely God or merely man; but a union of both. He is a God-man. The Westminster statement defines him as follows: “The Redeemer of God’s elect is the Lord Jesus Christ, who being [originally] the eternal Son of God became man, and so was and continues to be God and man in two distinct natures and one person, forever” (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q.21). The principal prooftexts are “the Word was God” (John 1:1); “the Word was made flesh” (1:14); “who being in the form of God took upon him the form of a servant” (Php 2:6-7; Galatians 4:4; Luke 1:35; Romans 9:5; Colossians 2:9; Romans 1:3-4; 1 Timothy 2:5). In order to a self-consistent scheme of Christ’s complex person, the following particulars are to be marked.
Christ’s Divine Nature and the Second Trinitarian Person The divine nature in Christ’s person is the second person of the Godhead, the eternal Son, or Logos. This is asserted in John 1:14 : “The Word was made flesh.” Neither God the Father nor God the Spirit became man. The Godhead did not become incarnate, because the Godhead is the divine essence in all three modes; and the essence in all three modes did not become incarnate. Says Turretin (13.6.4), “It is not proper to say that the Trinity itself became incarnate, because the incarnation is not terminated on the divine nature absolutely, but on the person of the Logos relatively.”8[Note: 8. Non ipsa trinitas bene incarnata dicatur, quia incarnatio non terminatur ad naturam divinam absolute, sed ad personam τοῦ λογοῦ (tou logou) relate.] And Aquinas (3.2.1-2) remarks that “it is more proper to say that a divine person assumed a human nature, than to say that the divine nature assumed a human nature.” It was only the divine essence in that particular mode of it which constitutes the second trinitarian person that was united with man’s nature. There was, consequently, something in the triune Godhead which did not enter into Christ’s person. This something is the personal characteristic of the Father and of the Holy Spirit. The paternity of the first person and the procession of the third person do not belong to Jesus Christ. (See supplement 5.1.1.) The following reasons for the incarnation of the second person, rather than of the first or third, are mentioned by Paraeus (Notes on the Athanasian Creed): First, that by the incarnation the names of the divine persons should remain unchanged; so that neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit should have to take the name of Son. Second, it was fitting that by the incarnation men should become God’s adopted sons, through him who is God’s natural Son. Third, it was proper that man, who occupies a middle position between angels and beasts in the scale of creatures should be redeemed by the middle person in the Trinity. Last, it was proper that the fallen nature of man which was created by the word (John 1:3) should be restored by him. In addition to these reasons, it is evident that it is more fitting that a father should commission and send a son upon an errand of mercy than that a son should commission and send a father.
Incarnation vs. Transmutation
Incarnation must be distinguished from transmutation or transubstantiation. The phrase became man does not mean that the second person in the Trinity ceased to be God. This would be transubstantiation. One substance, the divine, would be changed or converted into another substance, the human, as in the papal theory the substance of the bread becomes the substance of Christ’s body (see Anselm, Why the God-?Man 2:7). In saying that “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14), it is meant that the Word came to possess human characteristics in addition to his divine, which still remained as before. The properties of the divine nature cannot be either destroyed or altered. A human nature was united with the divine in order that the resulting person might have a human form of consciousness as well as a divine. Previous to the assumption of a human nature, the Logos could not experience a human feeling because he had no human heart, but after this assumption he could; previous to the incarnation, he could not have a finite perception because he had no finite intellect, but after this event he could; previous to the incarnation, the self-consciousness of the Logos was eternal only, that is, without succession, but subsequent to the incarnation it was both eternal and temporal, with and without succession. This twofold consciousness may be illustrated by the union between the human soul and body. Prior to or apart from its union with a material body, a man’s immaterial soul cannot feel a physical sensation or a sensuous appetite; but when united with it in a personal union, it can so feel. In like manner, prior to the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity could not have human sensations and experiences; but after it he could. The unincarnate Logos could think and feel only like God; he had only one form of consciousness. The incarnate Logos can think and feel either like God or like man; he has two modes or forms of consciousness.
When, therefore, it is said that “God became man,” the meaning is that God united himself with man, not that God changed himself into man. Unification of two natures, not transmutation of one nature into another is meant. We might say of the union of soul and body, in the instance of a human person, that “spirit becomes matter,” that is, is materialized or embodied. We would not mean by this phrase that spirit is actually changed into matter, but that it is united with matter in that intimate manner which is denominated personal union. In the incarnation, God is humanized, as in ordinary human generation, spirit is materialized or embodied. Each substance, however, still retains its own properties. In an ordinary man, spirit remains immaterial and body remains material; and in the God-man, the divine nature remains divine in its properties and the human remains human.
Christ as a Single Person in Two Natures The distinctive characteristic of the incarnation is the union of two diverse natures, a divine and a human, so as to constitute one single person. A single person may consist of one nature or of two natures or of three. A trinitarian person has only one nature, namely, the divine essence. A human person has two natures, namely, a material body and an immaterial soul. A theanthropic person has three natures, namely, the divine essence, a human soul, and a human body. By the incarnation, not a God, not a man, but a God-man is constituted. A theanthropic person is a trinitarian person modified by union with a human nature, similarly as a trinitarian person is the divine essence modified by generation or spiration. A theanthropic person is constituted, consequently, in the same general manner in which an ordinary human person is-namely, by the union of diverse natures. In the case of a human individual, it is the combination of one material nature and one immaterial that makes him a person. Says Howe (Oracles 2.37), “The production of a human creature [individual] does not lie in the production of either of the parts, but only in the uniting of them substantially with one another. It neither lies in the production of the soul, nor does it lie in the production of the matter of the body; but it lies in the beginning of these into a substantial union with one another.” Says Hooker (5.54), “The incarnation of the Son of God consists merely in the union of natures, which union does add perfection to the weaker, to the nobler no alteration at all.” The divine-human person, Jesus Christ, was produced by the union of the divine nature of the Logos with a human nature derived from a human mother. Before this union was accomplished, there was no theanthropic person. There was the divine person of the Logos existing in the Trinity before this union, and there was the unindividualized substance of Christ’s human nature existing in the virgin Mary before this union; but until the two were united at the instant of the miraculous conception, there was no God-man. The trinitarian personality of the Son of God did not begin at the incarnation, but the theanthropic personality of Jesus Christ did.
Divine Nature as the Root of Christ’s Person
It is the divine nature and not the human which is the base of Christ’s person. The second trinitarian person is the root and stock into which the human nature is grafted. The wild olive is grafted into the good olive and partakes of its root and fatness. The eternal Son, or the Word, is personal per se. He is from everlasting to everlasting conscious of himself as distinct from the Father and from the Holy Spirit. He did not acquire personality by union with a human nature. The incarnation was not necessary in order that the trinitarian Son of God might be self-conscious. On the contrary, the human nature which he assumed to himself acquired personality by its union with him. By becoming a constituent factor in the one theanthropic person of Christ, the previously impersonal human nature, “the seed of the woman,” was personalized. If the Logos had obtained personality by uniting with a human nature, he must have previously been impersonal. The incarnation would then have made an essential change in the Logos and thereby in the Trinity itself. But no essential change can be introduced into the triune Godhead, even by so remarkable an act as the incarnation. (See supplement 5.1.2.)
If the human nature and not the divine had been the root and base of Christ’s person, he would have been a man-God and not a God-man. The complex person Jesus Christ would have been anthropotheistic, not theanthropic. This was the error of Paul of Samosata, Photinus, and Marcellus, according to whom Christ was an anthrōpos entheos9[Note: 9. ἄνθρωπος ἔνθεος] (deified man), the base of the complex person being the human nature. Christ is humanized deity, not deified humanity. That the personality of the God-man depends primarily upon the divine nature and not upon the human is also evinced by the fact that this complex theanthropic personality was not destroyed by the death of Christ. At the crucifixion, the union between the human soul and the human body was dissolved temporarily, but the union between the Logos and the human soul and body was not. Christ’s human soul and body were separated from each other during the “three days and three nights,” in which he “lay in the heart of the earth.” This was death. The humanity of Christ was thus dislocated for a time, and its complete personality was interrupted. For a soul without its body is not a full and entire human person, although it is the root and the base of the person. Between death and the resurrection, when the human soul and body are separated, although there is self-consciousness in the disembodied spirit, and so the most important element in personality, yet there is an incomplete human personality until the resurrection of the body restores the original union between soul and body. But no such interruption and temporary dissolution of the unity of Christ’s theanthropic personality was caused by the crucifixion. The divine nature was of course unaffected by the bodily dissolution; and although the human soul and body were separated from one another by the crucifixion, they were neither of them separated from the Logos, by this event. Between Christ’s death and resurrection, both the human soul and the human body were still united with the Logos. That the body was still united to the Logos is evinced by the fact that it “did not see corruption” (Acts 2:31). Says Hooker (5.53): The divine and the human natures from the moment of their first combination have been and are forever inseparable. For even when Christ’s human soul forsook the tabernacle of his body, his deity forsook neither body nor soul. If it had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ was buried or that the person of Christ did raise up himself from the dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulcher. The like is also to be said of the soul; otherwise we are plainly and inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ, therefore, forever one and the self-same, was only touching bodily substance concluded within the grave, his soul only from thence severed; but by personal union his deity still inseparably joined with both.
Turretin (13.6.9) makes the same statement: “The natural union of soul and body in the one human nature is separable, which was sundered in Christ’s death. But the personal union of the two natures-divine and human-in the one person is inseparable, because that which the Logos assumed once for all he never laid aside.”10[Note: 0 10. Naturalis unio animae et corporis in unam naturam humanam est separabilis, quaesoluta fuit morte Christi; personalis unio duarum naturarum, divinae et humanae, in unam personam est inseparabilis, quia quod semel λόγος (logos) assumpsit nunquam deposuit.] Owen also affirms (Holy Spirit 2.3) that the theanthropic personality of Christ “was necessary and indissoluble, so that it was not impeached nor shaken in the least by the temporary dissolution of the humanity by the separation of the soul and body. For the union of the soul and body in Christ did not constitute him a [theanthropic] person, so that the dissolution of them should destroy his [theanthropic] personality; but he was a [theanthropic] person by the uniting of both into the Son of God”11[Note: 1 11. WS: In a similar manner, the body and soul of a believer, though separated from each other between death and the resurrection, are both as truly united to Christ during this disembodied period as they were before it (Westminster Larger Catechism 86). But in this case the union is mystical, not theanthropic.] (cf. Belgic Confession 19). The unification, then, of the three factors-the Logos, the human soul, and the human body-which was effected in the miraculous conception and which continued through the whole earthly life of our Lord was not interrupted by the crucifixion. The God-man existed between the crucifixion and the resurrection, notwithstanding the separation between the human soul and body, as truly as he did before or as he does this instant. And this, because it was the immutable divinity and not the mutable humanity which constitutes the foundation of his personality. That the divinity and not the humanity is dominant and controlling in Christ’s person is proved by the fact that his acts of power were regulated by it. If the Logos so determined, Jesus Christ was powerless; and if the Logos so determined, Jesus Christ was all powerful. When the divine nature withdrew its support from the human, the latter was as helpless as it is in an ordinary human creature. And when the divine nature imparted its power, the human nature became “mighty in word and deed.”12[Note: 2 12. WS: It did not become strictly omnipotent, according to the later Lutheran doctrine, for this would be, insofar, the conversion of the human nature into the divine. But it became powerful enough to do anything which the Logos willed it to do.] When the Logos so pleased, Jesus of Nazareth could no more be taken by human hands and nailed to the cross, than the eternal Trinity could be; and when the Logos so pleased, he could be arrested without any resistance and be led like a lamb to the slaughter. This is taught repeatedly in the gospels, when it is related that no man could lay violent hands upon him “because his hour had not come.” Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary, speaking generally, had so much power and only so much as the divine nature in his complex person pleased to exert in him. Sometimes, consequently, he was almighty in his acts, and sometimes he was “a worm and no man” (Psalms 22:6). (See supplement 5.1.3.)
Again, the knowledge of the God-man depended upon the divine nature for its amount, and this proves that the divinity is dominant in his person. The human mind of Jesus Christ stood in a somewhat similar relation to the Logos that the mind of a prophet does to God. Though not the same in all respects, because the Logos and the human mind in the instance of Jesus Christ constitute one person, while the Holy Spirit and the inspired prophet are two persons, yet in respect to the point of dependence for knowledge, there is an exact similarity. As the prophet Isaiah could know no more of the secret things of God than it pleased the Holy Spirit to disclose to him, so the human mind of Christ could know no more of these same divine secrets than the illumination of the Logos made known. And this illumination, like that of the material sun, was dimmed by the cloud through which it was compelled to penetrate. The finite and limited human nature hindered a full manifestation of the omniscience of the deity. This was a part of the humiliation of the eternal Logos. He condescended to unite himself with an inferior nature, through which his own infinite perfections could shine only in part. When deity does not work as simple deity untrammeled but works in “the form of a servant,” it is humbled. The Logos in himself knew the time of the day of judgment, but he did not at a particular moment make that knowledge a part of the human consciousness of Jesus Christ. In so doing, he limited and conditioned his own manifestation of knowledge in the theanthropic person, by the ignorance of the human nature. The same is true respecting the retention of knowledge. Though the Logos himself cannot forget anything, yet he might permit the human nature to forget many things for a season and afterward bring them to remembrance. The gospels, however, mention no instance of Christ’s ignorance excepting that respecting the day of judgment: supposing this to be an instance of ignorance (see p. 622 n.18 [Note: .18 18. WS: Bengel onMark 13:32adopts the explanation favored by Augustine: “Christ’s words may be understood to mean that he does not know the time of the judgment day because it was not among his instructions from the Father to declare the time. An apostle was able both to know and not to know one and the same thing, according to the different point of view (‘I know that I shall abide’;Php 1:25); how much more Christ?” In1 Corinthians 2:2to “know” means to “make known”: “I determined not to know anything among you but Christ and him crucified.” The same is the meaning of “know” inGenesis 22:12: “Now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son from me.” God has made Abraham’s faith to be known by this trial.] ). The difficult subject of the ignorance of Christ and his growth in wisdom and knowledge has light thrown upon it by distinguishing between the existence of the Logos in Christ’s person and the manifestation of this existence. This is the key to the doctrine of the kenosis. The Logos constantly existed in Jesus Christ, but did not constantly act through his human soul and body. He did not work miracles continually; nor did he impart to the human soul of Christ the whole of his own infinite knowledge.
Compare the infancy of Jesus Christ with his manhood. When Christ lay in the manger at Bethlehem, the eternal Logos was the root and base of his person as much and as really as it was when he appeared at the age of thirty on the banks of the Jordan and was inaugurated to his office. Christ in the manger was called the messianic King and was worshiped as such by the Magi. Even the theanthropic embryo (to gennōmenon)13[Note: 3 13. τὸ γεννώμενον = that which is begotten] is denominated the “Son of God” (Luke 1:35). In Heber’s hymn, the “infant Redeemer” is styled “maker and monarch and Savior of all.” But the Logos, though present, could not properly and fittingly make such a manifestation of knowledge through that infant body and infant soul, as he could through a child’s body and a child’s soul and still more through a man’s body and a man’s soul. It would have been unnatural if the Logos had empowered the infant Jesus to work a miracle or deliver the Sermon on the Mount. The repulsive and unnatural character of the apocryphal gospels, compared with the natural beauty of the canonical gospels, arises from attributing to the infant and the child Jesus acts that were befitting only a mature humanity.
During all these infantile years of the immature and undeveloped human nature, the Logos, though present, was in eclipse in the person of Jesus Christ.14[Note: 4 14. WS: The term occultatio (hiding, concealment) is used by Zanchi, Heidegger, Ursinus, andothers to denote the self-emptying (heauton ekenōse, ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε = he emptied himself) of the Logos spoken of by St. Paul inPhp 2:7. The exinanition related to the use and manifestation of divine excellences, not to their possession. Traces of thisare seen in Ambrose (On the Incarnation 1), who employs the terms retentio (keeping back, withholding) and retraxit (holding back). Van Mastricht uses subducere (to take away stealthily) with occultare (to hide). Francis Junius says: “In humana natura, gloriam et majestatem apud homines non exercuerit Christus ut post resurrectionem et ascensionem, sed veluti represserit et occultam continuerit: vel (ut loquitur Irenaeus) quieverit, ut humana natura tentari et mori possit, quamvis interim divinae naturae quaedam vindicia [sic] ad fidei confirmationem prodierint” [AG: Christ did not make use of his glory and majesty in his human nature among men as he did after his resurrection and ascension, but accordingly he restrained and kept them hidden-or, as Irenaeus said, he remained quiescent (quieverit). He did this so that the human nature could be tempted and die, although, meanwhile, certain vindicia of the divine nature appeared for the confirmation of faith]; Theological Theses: Concerning the Humiliation of Christ. The words of Irenaeus are the following: “As Christ became man in order to undergo temptation, so also was he the Word that he might be glorified; the Word remaining quiescent, that he might be capable of being tempted, dishonored, crucified, and suffering death” (Against Heresies 3.19, quoted by Paraeus in Christian Doctrines Q. 37). [AG: The word vindicia in the above passage from Junius may be an error in Shedd’s citation. If Shedd cited the Latin correctly, then vindicia probably carries the sense of “vindicating marks or evidences.” If the Latin word is actually indicia (evidences), then the text reads “certain evidences of the divine nature appeared.” Either way the meaning is nearly the same.] (See supplement 5.1.4.)] By this is meant that the Logos made no manifestation of his power through the human nature he had assumed, because this human nature was still infantine. When the infant Jesus lay in the manger, the Logos was present and united with the human nature as really and completely as he is this instant, but he made no exhibition of himself. There was no more thinking going on in the infant human mind of Jesus than in the case of any other infant. The babe lay in the manger unconscious and inactive. Yet the eternal Logos was personally united with this infant. There was a God-man in the manger as truly as there was upon the cross.
It will not follow, however, that because there was no thinking going on in the human mind of the infant Jesus, there was none going on in the Logos. For it must be remembered that though the Logos has condescended to take “the form of a servant,” he has not ceased to exist in “the form of God.” While he voluntarily submits to the limitations of human infancy and will do no more in the sphere of the finite infant with the feeble instrument which he has condescended to employ than that instrument is fitted to perform, yet in the other infinite sphere of the Godhead he is still the same omniscient and omnipotent person that he always was. The Son of Man was on earth and in heaven at one and the same instant (John 3:13). Because the Logos was localized and limited by a human body on the earth, it does not follow that he did not continue to exist and act in heaven. And because the Logos did not think in and by the mind of the infant Jesus, it does not follow that he did not think in and by his own infinite mind. The humanity of Jesus Christ, then, knew as much and only as much as the Logos pleased to disclose and manifest through a human mind. Says Beza: “The very fullness of the Godhead (theotētos) itself penetrated the assumed humanity just as and as much as it wished.”15[Note: 5 15. Ipsa θεότητος plenitudo sese, prout et quatenas ipsa libuit, humanitati assumtae insinuavit.] Grotius (on Mark 13:32) says: “It seems to me that it is not impious to explain this passage in this way: that we might say that divine wisdom impressed its effects on the human mind of Christ according to the manner of the times.”16[Note: 6 16. Videtur mihi, hic locus non impie posse exponi hunc in modum; ut dicamus divinam sapientiam menti humanae Christi effectus suos impressisse pro temporum ratione. By pro temporum ratione (according to the manner of the times), Grotius presumably is referring to Christ’s mental development appropriate to his chronological age.] Says Tillotson: “It is not unreasonable to suppose that divine wisdom, which dwelled in our Savior, did communicate itself to his human soul according to his pleasure, and so his human nature might at some time not know some things.” Christ’s knowledge was, and ever is, dependent upon the amount of information vouchsafed by the deity in his person. He did not know the time of the day of judgment “because the Word had not revealed this to him,”17[Note: 7 17. quia verbum hoc illi non releverat] says Turretin (13.13.5).18[Note: 8 18. WS: Bengel onMark 13:32adopts the explanation favored by Augustine: “Christ’s words may be understood to mean that he does not know the time of the judgment day because it was not among his instructions from the Father to declare the time. An apostle was able both to know and not to know one and the same thing, according to the different point of view (‘I know that I shall abide’;Php 1:25); how much more Christ?” In1 Corinthians 2:2to “know” means to “make known”: “I determined not to know anything among you but Christ and him crucified.” The same is the meaning of “know” inGenesis 22:12: “Now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son from me.” God has made Abraham’s faith to be known by this trial.] He could therefore “increase in wisdom” (Luke 2:52) as a child and a youth, because from the unfathomable and infinite fountain of the divine nature of the Logos there was inflowing into the human understanding united with it a steady and increasing stream. But that infinite fountain was never emptied. The human nature is not sufficiently capacious to contain the whole fullness of God. The ignorance of Jesus Christ may still further be illustrated by the forgetfulness of an ordinary man. No man, at each and every instant, holds in immediate consciousness all that he has ever been conscious of in the past. He is relatively ignorant of much which he has previously known and experienced. But this forgetting is not absolute and total ignorance. This part of his consciousness may reappear here upon earth and will all of it reappear in the day of judgment. But he cannot recall it just at this instant. He is ignorant and must say: “I do not know.” Similarly, if we suppose that Christ when he spoke these words to his disciples was ignorant of the time of the judgment, he may subsequently have come to know it as his human nature increased in knowledge through the illumination of the divine. Says Bengel, “The stress in Matthew 24:36 is on the present tense, ‘No man knows.’ In those days, no man did know, not even the Son. But afterward he knew it, for he revealed it in the Apocalypse.” Christ was relatively ignorant, not absolutely, if he was destined subsequently to know the time of the judgment day. It is more probable that the glorified human mind of Christ on the mediatorial throne now knows the time of the day of judgment, than that it is ignorant of it. The dawning of Christ’s messianic consciousness, as seen in the incident of the youth in the temple with the doctors, illustrates the gradual illumination and instruction of the humanity by the divinity in his person. It is not necessary in order to explain this occurrence to suppose that the virgin mother had informed Jesus respecting his miraculous conception. On the contrary, as she did not feel authorized to inform her husband of the fact but left its disclosure to God, so neither did she feel authorized to inform her child of it. Christ’s self-consciousness of his theanthropic person and mediatorial office was formed gradually as he passed from youth to manhood by the increasing illumination of the humanity by the divinity, similarly as in an ordinary human person, the self-consciousness gradually forms and increases by the interpenetration of the lower sensuous nature by the higher rational. That the divinity is the dominant factor in Christ’s complex person is proved by the fact that the degree of his happiness was determined by it. The human nature had no more enjoyment than the divine permitted. The desertion of the humanity by the divinity is implied in the cry: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” The Logos at this moment did not support and comfort the human soul and body of Jesus. This may be regarded equally as desertion by the Father or by the Logos, because of the unity of essence. In the promise “if you shall ask anything [of the Father] in my name I will do it” (John 14:14), the official work of the first person is attributed to the second. As God the Father raised Christ from the dead and Christ also raised himself from the dead, so also God the Father deserted the human nature and God the Logos also deserted it. That the foundation of Christ’s complex personality is the divine nature is proved by his immutability: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). What has been said concerning the effect of the crucifixion upon the theanthropic personality will apply here. Christ is immutably the God-man, notwithstanding the temporary separation between his human soul and body.
Beginning and Continuation of Christ’s Theanthropic Personality The theanthropic personality of the Redeemer began in time. The God-man was a new person as well as a unique one. There was no God-man until the moment when the incarnation began. This beginning is to be placed at the instant of the miraculous conception, and this at the instant of the salutation, when the angel Gabriel uttered the words: “Hail you that are highly favored, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women” (Luke 1:28). At this punctum temporis,19[Note: 9 19. point of time] the eternal Logos united with a portion of human nature in the virgin Mary. The union was embryonic in its first form. Previous to this instant, the only person existing was the second trinitarian person: the human nature existing in the virgin Mary being yet unpersonalized. This trinitarian person was not complex but simple: God the Son but not God-man; the unincarnate Logos (logos asarkos)20[Note: 0 20. λόγος ἄσαρκος = the Word (Logos) outside of the flesh] not the incarnate Logos (logos ensarkos).21[Note: 1 21. λόγος ἔνσαρκος = the Word (Logos) enfleshed] Jesus Christ is not the proper name of the unincarnate second person of the Trinity but of the second person incarnate: “You shall conceive and bring forth a son and shall call his name Jesus” (1:31). Prior to the incarnation the Trinity consisted of the Father, the unincarnate Son, and the Holy Spirit; subsequent to the incarnation it consists of the Father, the incarnate Son, and the Holy Spirit. Yet it would not be proper to alter the baptismal formula and baptize “in the name of the Father and of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit” because the incarnate Christ is the mediator between the triune God and sinful man, so that the primary trinitarian designation Son, not the secondary mediatorial designation Christ, is the fitting term in the baptismal formula.
Though beginning in time, the theanthropic personality of the Redeemer continues forever. This is taught in the following: “Of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all God blessed forever” (Romans 9:5); “in him dwells [now and forever] all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9); “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8); “believers sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6); “we have a great high priest who has passed into the heavens” (Hebrews 4:14-15).
Incarnation and Divine Immutability The incarnation makes no change in the constitution of the Trinity. It leaves in the Godhead, as it finds in it, only three persons. For the addition of a human nature to the person of the Logos is not the addition of another person to him. The second trinitarian person, though so much modified by the incarnation as to become a God-man, is not so much modified as to lose his proper trinitarian personality, because incarnation is not the juxtaposition of a human person with a divine person, but the assumption of a human nature to a divine person. The incarnation produces a change in the humanity that is assumed by exalting and glorifying it, but no change in the deity that assumes. “Divine nature,” says Bull (Concerning Subordination 4.4.14), “flows through (immeat) the human nature, but the human nature does not flow through the divine.” If the Logos had united himself with a distinct and separate individual, the modification of the Logos by incarnation would have been essential, and a fourth person, namely, a human person, would have thereby entered into the Godhead, which would have been an alteration in the constitution of the Trinity, making it to consist of four persons instead of three. Says Ussher (Incarnation in Works 1.580):
We must consider that divine nature did not assume a human person, but the divine person did assume a human nature; and that of the three divine persons, it was neither the first nor the third that did assume this nature, but it was the middle person who was to be the middle one [mediator] that must undertake the mediation between God and us. For if the fullness of the Godhead should have thus dwelled in any human person, there should have been added to the Godhead a fourth kind of person; and if any of the three persons besides the second had been born of a woman, there should have been two Sons in the Trinity. Whereas, now, the Son of God and the Son of the blessed virgin, being but one person, is consequently but one Son; and so, no alteration at all made in the relations of the persons of the Trinity (see Hooker 5.54). (See supplement 5.1.5.) The Logos, by his incarnation and exaltation, marvelous as it seems, took a human nature with him into the depths of the Godhead. A finite glorified human nature is now eternally united with the second trinitarian person, and a God-man is now the middle person of the Trinity: No Paean there, no Bacchic song they raise; But the three persons of the Trinity, And the two natures joined in one they praise.
-Dante, Paradise 13.25-27
Yet the Trinity itself is not altered or modified by the incarnation. Only the second person is modified. The Trinity is not divine-human, nor is the Father nor is the Holy Spirit. But the eternal Son is. For this reason, the Son stands in a nearer relation to redeemed man than either the Father or the Spirit can. Neither of them is the “elder brother” of the redeemed. Neither of them is the “head” of which the church is the “body.” Neither of them is the divine person of whom it can be said, “We are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones” (Ephesians 5:30). The union of the Logos with a human nature does not disturb either the trinitarian relation of the Logos or his relation to the created universe. When the Logos consents to unite with a human nature, he consents to exist and act in “the form of a servant.” But, as previously remarked, this does not imply that he ceases to exist and act “in a form of God.” Incarnation is not transubstantiation. Consequently, when incarnate, the Logos is capable of a twofold mode of existence, consciousness, and agency. Possessing a divine nature, he can still exist and act as a divine being, and he so exists and acts within the sphere of the infinite and eternal Godhead without any limitation. Possessing a human nature, he can also exist and act as a human being, and he so exists and acts within the sphere of finite and temporal humanity and under its limitations. The Son of Man was in heaven and upon earth simultaneously (John 3:13). In heaven he was in glory; on earth he was in sorrow and death. The God-man is both unlimited and limited, illocal and local. He has consequently a twofold consciousness: infinite and finite. He thinks like God; and he thinks like man. He has the eternal, all-comprehending, and successionless consciousness of God; and he has the imperfect, gradual, and sequacious consciousness of man. In this way, the trinitarian relations of the second person remain unchanged by his incarnation. Divine nature, though it condescends to exist and act in and through a human soul and body and to be trammeled by it, at the same time is existing and acting in an untrammeled manner throughout the universe of finite being and in the immensity of the Godhead.
Consider, for illustration, Christ’s relations to space. He lived a double life in this reference when he lived in Palestine eighteen centuries ago. He subsisted in both forms-that of God and that of a servant-at one and the same moment. He was simultaneously the absolute and eternal Spirit, unlocalized, filling immensity; and he was also that same Spirit localized, dwelling in and confined to the soul and body of Jesus of Nazareth. Because the Logos voluntarily confined and limited himself to the latter, it does not follow that he could not also continue to be unconfined and unlimited God. Because the sun is shining in and through a cloud, it does not follow that it cannot at the same time be shining through the remainder of universal space unobscured by any vapor whatever. The omnipresence of the Logos is that of the infinite Spirit. Consequently, he is all in every place and at every point. He is all in the human soul and body of Jesus of Nazareth, and simultaneously he is all at every other point of space. His total presence in the man Christ Jesus did not prevent his total presence throughout the universe. He was therefore both omnipresent and locally present. Says Calvin (2.15, “Although the infinite essence of the Logos is united in one person with the nature of man, yet we have no thought of its incarceration or confinement. For the Son of God miraculously descended from heaven, yet in such a manner that he never left heaven: he chose to be miraculously conceived in the womb of the virgin, to live on earth, and to be suspended on the cross; and yet he never ceased to fill the universe in the same manner as from the beginning.”22[Note: 2 22. For more information on this passage from Calvin, see extra calvinisticum in the glossary 1.] “Who will say,” says Paraeus (Upon Hunnius,21), “that the deity of the Word was only where his body was, say, in the mother’s womb, in the temple, on the cross, in the sepulcher, and was absent in other places where his body was not? Who will say that he did not fill heaven and earth; that he was not at Rome, at Athens, and everywhere outside of Judea, at the same time when his body was within the limits of Judea alone?” “The word of God,” says Augustine (Letter 137 to Volusianus), “did so assume a body from the virgin and manifest himself with mortal senses, as neither to destroy his own immortality nor to change his eternity nor to diminish his power nor to relinquish the government of the world nor to withdraw from the bosom of the Father, that is from the secret place where he is with him and in him.” Says Aquinas (3.5.2), “Christ is said to have descended from heaven from the standpoint of his divine nature-not in such a way that the divine nature ceased to be in heaven, but because he began to be here below in a new way, namely, according to the nature he assumed.”23[Note: 3 23. Christus dicitur de coelo descendisse ratione divinae naturae, non ita quod natura divina in coelo desierit; sed quia in infimis novo modo coepit, scilicet secundum naturam assumptam.] (See supplement 5.1.6.) As the inspiration of a prophet by the Holy Spirit or his indwelling in a believer does not interfere with the trinitarian relations of the third person, so neither does the incarnation interfere with those of the second. The Holy Spirit makes intercessions that cannot be uttered and thereby unites himself to a certain degree to a particular man, but is still the same distinct person in the Trinity. Moreover, this intercession of the Holy Spirit in the soul of the believer does not disturb or prevent the single self-consciousness of the believer. Here are two distinct persons, confessedly, and yet only one self-consciousness in the believer. But if a single self-consciousness is not dualized and destroyed in the instance when the divine nature and the human, the Holy Spirit and the believer, do not constitute a God-man, still less need it be when they do. The two different modes or forms of consciousness-the divine and the human-in the God-man do not constitute two self-consciousnesses or two persons, any more than two or more different forms of consciousness in a man constitute two or more self-consciousnesses or persons. A man at one moment has a sensuous form of consciousness and at another moment a spiritual form; but he is one and the same person in both instances and has but a single self-consciousness.
Incarnation as the Assumption of a Nature, Not a Person In the incarnation, the Logos does not unite himself with a human person, but with a human nature. This is taught in Scripture. Christ “took upon him the seed (sperma)24[Note: 4 24. σπέρμα] of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16); Christ “was made of the seed of David” (Romans 1:3); in the first promise the Redeemer is denominated the “seed of the woman” (Genesis 3:15); “forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same” (Hebrews 2:14). The terms seed and flesh and blood imply that the humanity which the Logos laid hold upon and assumed into personal union with himself was not yet personalized. At the instant when it was assumed, it was human nature unindividualized, not a distinct individual person. This is the interpretation of the scriptural statement which is found in the creeds generally. More particular attention was turned to the distinction between a nature and a person by the Nestorian controversy, and ever since that time the creeds have been careful to state that the Logos united a human nature-but not a human person-with himself. The orthodox statement in the patristic church is made in the following extract from John of Damascus (Concerning the Orthodox Faith 3.2): “The Logos was not united with a flesh which previously existed by itself as an individual man, but, in and by his own infinite person dwelling in the womb of the holy virgin, he personalized (hypestēsato)25[Note: 5 25. ὑπεστησάτο] of the chaste blood of the ever-virgin a flesh enlivened with a rational and intellectual soul; the Logos thereby assuming the firstfruits of the human lump and becoming a [divine] person in the flesh.”
Westminster Confession 8.2 accords with ancient, medieval, and Reformed Christology in its statement that “the Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, did take upon him man’s nature with all the essential properties thereof; so that the two whole perfect and distinct natures, the Godhead [Godhood] and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person.” Athanasian Creed 31 denominates Christ “a man born in the world from the substance of his mother”26[Note: 6 26. homo ex substantia matris in saeculo natus] In the theological nomenclature, “nature” is designated by “substance,” and person by “subsistence.”27[Note: 7 27. See essentia and substantia in glossary 1 for a discussion of these terms.]
Hooker (5.52) enunciates the doctrine in the following language: “The Son of God did not assume a man’s person into his own person, but a man’s nature to his own person; and therefore he took semen, the seed of Abraham, the very first original element of our nature before it was come to have any personal human subsistence.” In similar terms, Owen (Holy Spirit 2.3) expresses himself. He remarks that the Son of God took the nature formed and prepared for him in the womb of the virgin by the operation of the Holy Spirit “to be his own, in the instant of its formation, thereby preventing [going before] the singular [single] and individual subsistence of that nature in and by itself.” Again he says that “as it is probable that the miraculous conception was immediate upon the angelic salutation, so it was necessary that nothing of the human nature of Christ should exist of itself antecedently unto its union with the Son of God.” By the phrase exist of itself, Owen here means “exist by itself” as constituted and formed into a distinct and separate individual person. That the human nature as bare nature existed antecedently to its union with the Logos, Owen abundantly teaches in all that he says of the work of the Holy Spirit in preparing and forming the human nature as it existed in the virgin mother. In another passage (Trinity Vindicated), Owen is still more explicit: “The person of the Son of God, in his assuming human nature to be his own, did not take an individual person of anyone into a near conjunction with himself, but preventing the personal subsistence of human nature in that flesh which he assumed, he gave it its subsistence (i.e., its personality) in his own person, whence it has its individuation and distinction from all other persons whatever. This is the personal union.” Again, Owen (Vindication of the Gospel, 19) says: “Jesus Christ the mediator, theanthrōpos,28[Note: 8 28. θεάνθρωπος = God-man] God and man, the Son of God, having assumed hagion to gennōmenon29[Note: 9 29. ἅγιον τὸ γεννώμενον] (Luke 1:35) that holy thing that was born of the virgin, anypostaton,30[Note: 0 30. ἀνυπόστατον = anhypostatic (see anhypostasis and enhypostasis in glossary 1)] having no subsistence of its own, into personal subsistence with himself, is to be worshiped with divine religious worship, even as the Father” (see Owen, Person of Christ, chap. 18). Says Charnock (Wisdom of God):
Christ did not take the person of man, but the nature of man into subsistence with himself. The body and soul of Christ were not united in themselves, had no [personal] subsistence in themselves, till they were united to the [trinitarian] person of the Son of God. If the person of a man were united to him, the human nature would have been the nature of the person so united to him, and not the [human] nature of the Son of God according to Hebrews 2:14; Hebrews 2:16. The [trinitarian] Son of God took “flesh and blood”to be his own [human] nature, perpetually to subsist in the person of the Logos; which must be by a personal union, or no way: the deity united to the humanity, and both natures to be one person.
Turretin (13.6.18) says:
Although the human nature of Christ is a spiritual and intelligent substance and perfect in respect to the existence and properties of such a substance, yet it is not at first (statim) a person;31[Note: 1 31. WS: It is noticeable that in this place Turretin describes Christ’s “human nature,” while existing in the virgin mother, as a “spiritual” and “intelligent” substance and not as merely physical. This is inconsistent with the creationist view adopted by Turretin.] because it has not that peculiar incommunicable property which constitutes a subsistence as distinguished from a substance [or a person as distinguished from a nature]. Just as soul (anima) taken by itself is a particular intelligent substance, yet not a person, because it is an incomplete part of a greater whole. It requires to be joined to a body, before there can be an individual man. It does not derogate from the reality and perfection of Christ’s human nature to say that before it was assumed into union with the Logos it was destitute of personality, because we measure the reality and dignity of a human nature by the essential properties of the nature and not by the characteristic of individuality subsequently added to it. These essential properties belong to it by creation, but the individual form is superinduced after creation by generation. The definition of substance or nature, consequently, differs from the definition of subsistence or person. Personality is not an integral and essential part of a nature, but is, as it were, the terminus to which it tends32[Note: 2 32. WS: This agrees with Aristotle’s materia appetit formam [AG: matter seeks form].] (nec pars integralis nec essentialis naturae, sed quasi terminus); and Christ’s human nature acquired a more exalted and perfect personality by subsisting in the Logos, than it would had it acquired personality by ordinary generation.
Similarly, Quenstedt (Hase, Hutterus, 233) asserts that “subsistence does not apply to the essence of man, but to the terminus (terminationem) of humanity.”33[Note: 3 33. Subsistentia non ad essentiam hominis pertinet, sed ad terminationem humanitatis. For the meaning of terminus in this quotation, note Shedd’s discussion of the word in this paragraph.] He also remarks (Hase, Hutterus, 232), “For it was not a person but a human nature, lacking its own personality, that was assumed. Otherwise there would be two persons in Christ.”34[Note: 4 34. Non enim persona (alioquin duae essent in Christo personae), sed natura humana, propria personalitate destituta, assumpta est.] Calovius teaches that Christ as man was “born from the seminal mass”;35[Note: 5 35. natus e massa seminali] Hollaz says “animated from the seed”;36[Note: 6 36. e semine animato] Baier says “from the bloodline of the virgin.”37[Note: 7 37. e massa sanguinea virginis]
An American theologian, Samuel Hopkins (1.283), adopts the Catholic Christology: The personality of Jesus Christ is in his divine nature and not in the human. Jesus Christ existed a distinct, divine person from eternity, the second person in the adorable Trinity. The human nature which this divine person, the Word, assumed into a personal union with himself is not and never was a distinct person by itself, and personality cannot be ascribed to it and does not belong to it, any otherwise than as united to the Logos, the word of God. The Word assumed the human nature, not a human person, into a personal union with himself, by which the complex person exists, God-man. Hence, when Jesus Christ is spoken of as being a man, “the Son of Man, the man Christ Jesus,” etc., these terms do not express the personality of the manhood or of the human nature of Jesus Christ; but these personal terms are used with respect to the human nature as united to a divine person and not as a mere man [i.e., as merely human nature]. For the personal terms he, I, and you cannot with propriety or truth be used by or of the human nature considered as distinct from the divine nature of Jesus Christ.38[Note: 8 38. WS: The human nature of Christ viewed by itself and prior to the union with the Logos must be designated by the impersonal pronoun it. We could not call it he; nor could we address it as you. InLuke 1:35the neuter is employed: to gennōmenon (τὸ γεννώμενον), “that holy thing which shall be born” or rather “which is being conceived.”]
In a similar manner, Hodge explains the subject. After remarking (Theology 2.391) that “though realism may not be a correct philosophy, the fact of its wide and long-continued prevalence may be taken as a proof that it does not involve any palpable contradiction,” he proceeds to make use of realism in the statement that “human nature although endowed with intelligence and will may be, and in fact is, in the person of Christ, impersonal.39[Note: 9 39. WS: The more accurate statement would be that the human nature in the virgin mother, antecedent to the assumption of it by the Logos, is impersonal. Strictly speaking, the human nature when once “in the person of Christ” is no longer impersonal, because it has been personalized by the union. As Owen says, the Logos “gave it its subsistence in his own person, whence it has its individuation and distinction from all other persons whatever.”] That it is so, is the plain doctrine of Scripture, for the Son of God, a divine person, assumed a perfect human nature and nevertheless remains one person.”
Van Mastricht (Theology 5.4.7) defines the hypostatic union as “a certain ineffable relation of the divine person to the human nature through which this human nature is peculiarly the human nature of the second person of the deity.”40[Note: 0 40. Ineffabilis quaedam relatio divinae personae ad humanam naturam per quam haec humana natura peculiariter est humana natura secundae personae deitatis.] Wollebius (1.16) says that “Christ assumed not man, but the humanity; not the person, but the nature.” John Bunyan (On Imputed Righteousness) says that “the Son of God took not upon him a particular person, though he took to him a human body and soul; but that which he took was, as I may call it, a lump of the common nature of man. ‘For verily he took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham.’ ”41[Note: 1 41. WS: Dorner (Christian Doctrine §93) objects to “the anhypostasia or impersonality of the human nature” and asserts that “it has passed into no creed and is only to a moderate extent the doctrine of theologians.” The extracts given above disprove the latter assertion. Dorner’s objection to the tenet is that “if a divine ego is supposed to take the place of the human, there is an abridgment of the humanity, according to its complete idea-a more subtle kind of Apollinarianism.” But the divine ego does not take the place of the human ego, for the reason that there is no human ego. There is, at the moment of the assumption, only the seed or unindividualized substance of the virgin. Dorner assumes that a human nature without a human individuality is “abridged” and incomplete humanity. But all the essential properties of humanity are in this nature. Only it has not been constituted a particular person by conception in the womb. This personalizing, which in the case of Christ’s humanity is produced miraculously by its union with deity, adds no new properties to the human nature. It only gives it a new form.] (See supplement 5.1.7.)
Since much depends in Christology upon the important distinction between “nature” and “person” or between “substance” and “subsistence,” we shall enlarge somewhat upon it. When we speak of a human nature, a real substance having physical, rational, moral, and spiritual properties is meant. This human nature or substance is capable of becoming a human person, but as yet is not one. It requires to be personalized in order to be a self-conscious individual man. A human person is a fractional part of a specific human nature or substance which has been separated from the common mass and formed into a distinct and separate individual by the process of generation. Prior to this separation and formation, this fractional portion of the common human nature has all the qualities of the common mass of which it is a part, but it is not yet individualized. It is potentially, not actually personal. It has all the properties that subsequently appear in the particular individual formed of it, such as spirituality, rationality, voluntariness-viewing the nature upon the psychical side of it-and sensuousness with general adaptation to a visible and material world-viewing the nature upon the physical side.42[Note: 2 42. WS: This description is traducian. The creationist concedes only one side to the nature, namely, the sensuous; and finds only physical properties.]
Accordingly, Westminster Confession 8.2 affirms that “the second person in the Trinity did take upon him man’s nature with all the essential properties thereof.” It does not say “with the individual form thereof.” The fact that the nature has all the properties of man, though it has not as yet the form of an individual man, is sufficient to make it human nature. A brute’s nature does not have all the properties of human nature; and neither does an angel’s nature. Therefore, the Logos “took not upon him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed (sperma)43[Note: 3 43. σπέρμα] of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16).
Saint Paul’s figure of the potter’s clay and the vessels to be shaped from it may be employed in illustration. A lump of clay has all the properties of matter that belong to the vessel of honor or dishonor. But it has not as yet the individual form of the vessel. An act of the potter must intervene, whereby a piece of clay is separated from the lump and molded into a particular vase having its own peculiar shape and figure. In like manner, human nature as an entire whole existing in Adam possessed all the elementary properties that are requisite to personality, though it was not yet personalized. And in like manner, any portion of this entire human nature, when transmitted from Adam and existing in nearer or remote ancestors, is also possessed of all the properties requisite to personality, though it is not yet, in Owen’s phrase, “individuated” or transformed from a nature to a person. The difference, then, between nature and person is virtually that between substance and form. As a material substance may exist without being shaped in a particular manner, so a human nature may exist without being individualized (see pp. 469-70).
Thus it appears that although a human nature is not actually personal, that is, a distinct person, it is nevertheless potentially personal, that is, it is capable of becoming a separate self-conscious individual man. Every individual of Adam’s posterity has precisely the same properties or qualities in his person that there are in the specific nature of which he is a part and portion. He is physical, rational, intelligent, and voluntary, only because the human nature out of which he is formed is a physical, rational, intelligent, and voluntary substance created by God on the sixth day when he created the species man. It is the properties of a substance that make it what it is, not the particular individual form which it may assume. As Turretin says, in the extract previously quoted, “We measure the reality and dignity of a human nature by the essential properties of the nature, not by the characteristic of individuality subsequently added to it. Personality is not an integral and necessary part of a nature, but, as it were, the terminus to which it tends.”
It is evident, then, from this discussion, that the term nature is a more impersonal term than the term person. A human nature, though not absolutely impersonal like a brute nature or like inorganic matter, is yet less personal than a human person. This may be illustrated by considering the divine nature and the trinitarian persons. In the discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, we have seen that if we abstract trinality from the divine essence we have nothing left but the impersonal substance of pantheism or the unreflecting unit of deism. It is only when the divine nature is contemplated, as it is in Scripture, as “subsisting” or “modified” or, if we may so speak, metamorphosed in the eternal three-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-that we have full and clear personality. This is what is meant in Php 2:6 by morphē theou.44[Note: 4 44. μόρφη θεοῦ = form of God] This is not the same in every respect with ousia theou45[Note: 5 45. οὐσία θεοῦ = being of God] or physis theou.46[Note: 6 46. φύσις θεοῦ = nature of God] It is a personal form of the ousia47[Note: 7 47. οὐσία = being] or physis theou.48[Note: 8 48. φύσις θεοῦ = nature of God] God is self-conscious, self-knowing, and self-communing-in other words is personal-because he subsists in three individual distinctions. As an untrinalized nature merely and only, he is the impersonal unit of deism or pantheism; but as a nature in three persons, or a nature personalized by trinality, he is a unity: the self-conscious and “living” God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The eternal trinitarian processes of generation and spiration personalize the divine nature, as ordinary generation analogously individualizes the human nature. The one human nature or species is personalized gradually in time by division into millions of human individuals; and the one divine nature is personalized simultaneously in eternity by subsisting indivisibly and wholly in three divine hypostases. If the human nature were never individualized by ordinary generation, if it remained a mere nature in Adam though it would be human nature still and not brutal nature or inorganic matter, yet it would be impersonal for our minds. It would have no history and none of the interest and impression of individuality. And if the divine nature had no trinality in it-if there were no Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but only the one substance of pantheism or deism-the deity would present no personal characteristics appealing to man’s personal feelings and wants. To apply all this to the subject of Christ’s theanthropic person, we say that in the act of incarnation the Logos, who is already a conscious trinitarian person, takes into personal union with himself a human nature-what the Scriptures denominate the “seed of David,” the “seed of Abraham,” the “seed of a woman,” the “flesh and blood” of man. This human nature previous to this assumption is not a person (“for the personal being which the Son of God already had suffered not the substance which he took to be a person,” says Hooker), yet it is capable of being personalized and becoming an individual man. It is actually personalized and made to have an individual life and history by being miraculously quickened, formed, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin mother and assumed by the eternal Logos into union with himself. Hence Athanasius (Against the Arians 3.51) defines Christ as “a man impersonated into God” and describes Christ’s human body and soul as an instrument which the Logos appropriates personally (organon enypostaton idiopoiēse)49[Note: 9 49. ὄργανον ἐνυπόστατον ἴδιοποιησε] (Witsius, Apostles’ Creed, diss.16). The human nature thus becomes an integrant constituent of one complex person, the God-man, Jesus Christ. In the phraseology of Owen (Person of Christ, 18), “Assumption is unto [in order to] personality; it is that act whereby the Son of God and our nature become one person.” Francis Junius (Theological Theses, 27) similarly remarks: “His human nature, previously anhypostatic (anypostatos), was assumed in the unity of his person by the Logos (logō) and was made enhypostatic (enypostatos).”50[Note: 0 50. Natura humana, prius ἀνυπόστατος, in unitatem personae assumpta est a λόγῳ et facta ἐνυπόστατος.] Aquinas (3.2.2) contends that the human nature of Christ, by being personalized through assumption into union with a trinitarian person, obtained a more exalted personality in this way than it would have obtained by being personalized by ordinary generation; just as the animal soul, when personalized by its union with a rational soul, in the case of a man, is more excellent than when, as in the case of a dog or any mere animal, it is not personalized at all by union with a rational soul.
Still another point of difference between a “nature” and a “person” is the fact that a nature cannot be distinguished from another nature, but a person can be from another person. One fractional portion of human substance has no marks by which it can be discriminated from another portion. It is not until it has been individualized by generation that it has a personal peculiarity of its own that differentiates it. When human “flesh and blood” has acquired personal characteristics, it can then be distinguished from the parents and from the species. “Human nature,” says Owen (Person of Christ, 18), “in itself is anypostatos:51[Note: 1 51. ἀνυπόστατος] that which has not a subsistence of its own which should give it individuation and distinction from the same nature in any other person.” Says Hooker (5.52), “We cannot say, properly, that the virgin bore, or John did baptize, or Pilate condemn, or the Jews crucify, the nature of man; because these are all personal attributes. Christ’s person is the subject which receives them, his nature that which makes his person capable or apt to receive.” In the case of an ordinary human person, the body or the material nature is personalized by the soul or the spiritual nature within it. The body as a mere corpse, and separate from the soul, is impersonal. Similarly, the human nature of Christ considered as the substance of the virgin is personalized by the Logos uniting with it: “His human nature, as John of Damascus says, has its personality in Christ”52[Note: 2 52. Humana natura, ut Damascenus dicit, habet suam personalitatem in Christo.] (Aquinas, Summa 3.2.3). Viewed merely as the substance, the “blood” and “seed” of the virgin prior to its assumption, it was impersonal. It could not be distinguished as the particular individual man Jesus of Nazareth until the miraculous conception had individualized it. As the mere “substance” and “seed” of the virgin, it had nothing to distinguish it from the “substance” and “seed” of any other woman or from other “substance” of Mary herself, who could have conceived still other sons by ordinary generation. In the incarnation, the Logos did not unite himself with the whole human nature, but with only a part of it. The term human nature may signify the entire human species as it existed in Adam or only a part of it as it exists in near or remote ancestors. In the first case, it is the human nature; in the second, it is a human nature. The proper statement is that the Logos united himself with a human nature, not with the human nature. Whenever there is any conception of human nature, either ordinary or miraculous, there is abscission of substance. Turretin (13.11.10) speaks of Christ’s humanity as “material taken from the substance of the most blessed virgin.”53[Note: 3 53. Materiam ex beatissimi virginis substantia decisam.] The union between God and man in the incarnation is not a union with the human species as an entirety. At the time of the incarnation of the Logos, the human nature considered as an entire whole had been in the process of generation and individualization for four thousand years, and millions of separate and distinct individuals had been formed out of it. The Logos did not unite himself with this already propagated part of the human nature or species. Neither did he unite with that whole remainder of the common nature which had not yet been individualized by generation. This latter was latent and unindividualized in the population existing at the time of the incarnation. The Logos united with only a fraction of this remainder, namely, with that particular portion of human nature which he assumed from the virgin mother. The eternal Word took into a personal union with himself, not the whole human nature both distributed and undistributed, individualized and unindividualized, but only a transmitted fractional part of the undistributed remainder of it, as this existed in the virgin Mary.54[Note: 4 54. WS: It is at this point that the strongest objection to the traducian theory arises. How can unextended substance be subdivided? How can that have parts which has none of the geometrical dimensions? (see pp. 476-77).]
That theory of universal redemption which rests upon the hypothesis of a union of the Logos with the whole human species finds no support in Scripture, and we may add in reason or the nature of the case. The humanity of Christ was not a specific whole, but only a part of a specific whole: “It should be stated that the word of God did not assume human nature in general (in universali) but in an individual (in atomo), that is, individually (individuo), just as John of Damascus says (Orthodox Faith 3.7). Otherwise, any man whatever is the word of God, just as Christ is”55[Note: 5 55. Dicendum quod Verbum Dei non assumpsit humanam naturam in universali sed in atomo, id est, in individuo, sicut Damascenus ait, Orthod. Fid. 3.7; alioquin oporteret quod cuilibet homini conveniret esse Dei Verbum, sicut convenit Christo.] (Aquinas, Summa 3.2.2).
Sanctification of Christ’s Human Nature The human nature assumed into union with the Logos was miraculously sanctified, so as to be sinless and perfect: “The Word was made flesh and dwelled among us full of grace and truth” (John 1:14); “God gives not the Spirit by measure unto him” (3:34); “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of council and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:2); “Christ was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin”56[Note: 6 56. WS: In this passage, chōris hamartias (χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας = without sin) qualifies pepeirasmenon (πεπειρασμένον = having been tempted),showing that all of Christ’s temptations were sinless. He was not “tempted and drawn away by inward lust” (James 1:14).] (Hebrews 4:15); “such a high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners” (7:26); “that holy thing which shall be born [lit., which is being conceived, to gennōmenon]”57[Note: 7 57. τὸ γεννώμενον] (Luke 1:35); “butter and honey shall Immanuel eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good” (Isaiah 7:14-15); “a body have you prepared for me” (Hebrews 10:5); “this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17); “in him is no sin” (1 John 3:5). In accordance with these texts, the creeds affirm the perfect sanctification of the human nature in and by the incarnation. Westminster Larger Catechism Q.37 teaches that “the Son of God became man by being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance and born of her, yet without sin.” The Formula of Concord (“Concerning Original Sin”; Hase, 574), after saying that the Son of God assumed the “seed of Abraham,” adds: “Christ redeemed our same human nature (namely, his own work), he sanctifies this same human nature (which is his work), he raises this same nature from the dead, and he adorns it with enormous glory (which is his own work)”58[Note: 8 58. Eandam humanam nostram naturam (opus videlicet suum) Christus redemit, eandam (quae ipsius opus est) sanctificat, eandam a mortuis resuscitat, et ingenti gloria (opus videlicet suum) ornat.] (cf. Augustine, Enchiridion 36). With these statements of the creeds, the theologians agree. They assert the sinfulness of the virgin Mary, the consequent sinfulness of human nature as transmitted by her, and the necessity of its being redeemed and sanctified, in order to be fitted for a personal union with the Logos. Says Augustine (Letter 164)
If the soul of Christ be derived from Adam’s soul, he, in assuming it to himself, cleansed it so that when he came into this world he was born of the virgin perfectly free from sin either actual or transmitted. If, however, the souls of men are not derived from that one soul, and it is only by the flesh that original sin is transmitted from Adam, the Son of God created a soul for himself, as he creates souls for all other men, but he united it not to sinful flesh, but to the “likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3). For he took, indeed, from the virgin the true substance of flesh; not however “sinful flesh,” for it was neither begotten nor conceived through carnal concupiscence, but was mortal and capable of change in the successive stages of life, as being like unto sinful flesh in all points, sin excepted (see also Enchiridion 36-37).
Athanasius (Against the Arians 2.61) explains the clause firstborn of every creature (Colossians 1:5) as meaning the same as “firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8:29) and adds that Christ “is the firstborn of us in this respect, that the whole posterity of Adam lying in a state of perdition by the sin of Adam, the human nature of Christ was first redeemed and sanctified (esōthē kai ēleutherōthē)59[Note: 9 59. ἐσώθη καὶ ἠλευθερώθη] and so became the means of our regeneration, redemption, and sanctification, in consequence of the community of nature between him and us.” John of Damascus (Concerning the Faith 3.2) teaches the same doctrine. Says Anselm (Why the God-?Man 2:17), “Christ’s mother was purified by the power of his death. The virgin of whom he was born could be pure only by true faith in his death.” Anselm supposes that the virgin mother was perfectly sanctified, but does not hold the later dogma of the immaculate conception of the virgin. Yet he prepares the way for it by teaching her immaculateness by regeneration. Says Paraeus (Body of Doctrine Q.35):
It was not fitting for the Logos, the Son of God, to assume a nature polluted by sin. For whatever is born of flesh-that is, from a sinful, unsanctified woman-is flesh, falsehood, and worthlessness. The Holy Spirit well knew how to separate sin from the nature of man, the substance from the accident. For sin is not of the nature of man but was added to the nature from somewhere else, by the devil. The Holy Spirit separated from the fetus all impurity and infection of original sin.60[Note: 0 60. Non conveniebat λόγῳ (logō), filio dei, assumere naturam pollutam peccato. Quicquid enim natum est ex carne, peccatrice scilicet et non sanctificata, caro est, mendacium et vanitas. Spiritus Sanctus optime novit separare peccatum a natura hominis; substantiam ab accidente. Peccatum enim non est de natura hominis, sed aliunde a diabolo naturae accessit. Separavit a foetu omnem impuritatem, et contagionem peccati originalis.]
Says Ursinus (Christian Religion Q.35), “Mary was a sinner; but the mass of flesh which was taken out of her substance was, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, at the same instant sanctified when it was taken.” Says Pearson (On the Creed, art.3): The original and total sanctification of the human nature was first necessary to fit it for the personal union with the Word, who out of his infinite love humbled himself to become flesh and at the same time out of his infinite purity could not defile himself by becoming sinful flesh. Therefore the human nature, in its first original, without any precedent merit, was formed by the Spirit, and in its formation sanctified, and in its sanctification united to the Word; so that grace was coexistent and in a manner conatural with it.
Says Owen (Holy Spirit 2.4), “The human nature of Christ, being thus formed in the womb by a creating [supernatural] act of the Holy Spirit, was in the instant of its conception sanctified and filled with grace according to the measure of its receptivity.” Owen adds that the human nature, “being not begotten by natural generation, derived no taint of original sin or corruption from Adam, that being the only way or means of its propagation.” Says Quenstedt (3.3), “The same Spirit, in his most extraordinary presence and power, made Mary, ever virgin, fruitful for conceiving the Savior of the world. He extracted fecund (prolificum) seed from her chaste blood, purged it from all inherent sin, and provided the power to Mary by which she would conceive the very Son of God.”61[Note: 1 61. Idem Spiritus, singularissima praesentia et virtute, Mariam semper virginem ad concipiendum mundi Salvatorem foecundam reddidit, semen prolificum ex castis ejus sanguinibus elicuit, ab omni adhaerente peccato purgavit, ipsique Mariae virtutem praebuit qua conciperet ipsum Dei Filium.]
Ussher (Incarnation in Works 4.583) speaks of the effect of the incarnation upon the human nature of Christ, not merely in sanctifying it, but in preserving it from certain innocent defects: “As the Son of God took upon him not a human person but a human nature, so it was not requisite that he should take upon him any personal infirmities such as madness, blindness, lameness, and particular kinds of diseases which are incidental to some individuals only and not to all men generally; but those infirmities which do accompany the whole nature of manhood, such as are hungering, thirsting, weariness, grief, pain, mortality.” Says Gill (Divinity, 165), “Christ was made of a woman, took flesh of a sinful woman, though the flesh he took of her was not sinful, being sanctified by the Spirit of God, the former of Christ’s human nature.” Turretin (13.11.10), describing the operation of the Holy Spirit in respect to the incarnation, remarks that the Holy Spirit must prepare the substance abscised from the substance of the blessed virgin by a suitable sanctification, not only by endowing it with life and elevating it to that degree of energy which is sufficient for generation without sexual connection, but also by purifying it from all stain of sin (ab omni peccati labe) so that it shall be harmless and undefiled, and thus that Christ may be born without sin. Hence there is no need of having recourse to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary. For although there is no created power which can bring a clean thing from an unclean (Job 14:4), yet the divine power is not to be so limited. To this there is nothing impossible. This calls things which are not, as if they were.
Wollebius (1.16) says that “the material cause of Christ’s conception was the blood of the blessed virgin. The formal cause of Christ’s conception consists in the preparing and sanctifying of the virgin’s blood by the virtue of the Holy Spirit.” Edwards (Excellency of Christ) remarks that “though Christ was conceived in the womb of one of the corrupt race of mankind, yet he was conceived without sin.”
Marck (Person of Christ 11.14) teaches that the virgin’s substance was preserved from original sin. After saying that “Christ had his human flesh from the substance of the virgin Mary, since he is called her son in Luke 11:7, and Galatians 4:5 states that he was made of a woman,”62[Note: 2 62. Carnem humanam habuit Christus ex substantia virginis Mariae, cum ejus filius (Luke 11:7), et ex muliere factus (Galatians 4:5), dicatur.] he adds respecting the miraculous conception: “The action of the Spirit was exactly threefold: making the virgin’s seed fruitful, the formation of the human nature, and the preservation from every stain. From these facts it can well be concluded that Christ, supernaturally generated, was not bound (tenetur) by Adamic guilt and consequently could not be tainted with Adam’s stain.”63[Note: 3 63. Actio Spiritus fere triplex fuit; foecundatio seminis virginei, humanae naturae formatio, et ab omni labe praeservatio; quae inde bene derivari potest, quod Christus, supernaturaliter generatus, culpa Adamica non tenetur, hinc labe illius infici non potest.] Here nothing is said respecting positive sanctification, but only of preservation from corruption. De Moor, however, in his commentary upon Marck (19.14), adopts the statement of Alting in the following terms:
Alting observes that “that seed from which the body of Christ was formed, since it was taken from a sinful woman (peccatrice), was therefore infected with sin, at least as far as the disposition. But the Holy Spirit in preparing it purged it from every stain inhering in it. And so he separated from lawlessness and disorder (anomia kai ataxia) even the foundations of weaknesses, common to the entire species, which remained.”64[Note: 4 64. Altingius observat “semen illud, ex quo corpus Christi formatum est, ut a peccatrice decisam, sic peccato, saltem quoad dispositionem, fuit infectum. At Spiritus Sanctus praeparando illud repurgavit ab omni labe inhaerente; atque etiam principia infirmitatum, toti speciei communium, quae manserunt, ab ἀνομία καὶ ἀταξία secrevit.”]
Van Mastricht tends to the Semipelagian anthropology in asserting that the virgin’s seed was cleansed from physical not from moral corruption. In 4.10.5-6 he remarks that the Holy Spirit … cleansed, as it were (quasi), that virgin seed-not, indeed, from moral impurity or sin, seeing as how the seed, not yet animated, was not liable to it. But he cleansed it from an intemperate physical constitution (intemperie physica), from which, in its own time, sin could have resulted. At all events, he preserved the birth from every impurity, so that what would be born would be holy (Luke 1:35).65[Note: 5 65. Semen illud virgineum quasi defoecavit, non quidem ab impuritate morali seu peccato, utpote cui semen necdum animatum non est obnoxium; sed ab intemperie physica, a qua, suo tempore, peccatum potuisset resultare, aut saltem nativitatem ab omni impuritate praeservavit, ad hoc, ut quod ex eo nasceretur esset sanctum (Luke 1:35).]
In 4.10.6 he says:66[Note: 6 66. WS: The impossibility of harmonizing the Augustino-Calvinistic tenet that original sin as culpability is transmitted by propagation with creationism is here virtually acknowledged by Van Mastricht. Only physical corruption can be inherited, if only the body is propagated; but physical corruption without moral, as Van Mastricht teaches, is not peccatum (sin). And the cleansing from it is quasi cleansing. In 4.10.24 Van Mastricht assigns as the principal reason for the absence of original sin from the human nature of Christ that this nature though naturaliter in Adam, velut in capite et radice naturae humanae (naturally in Adam, just as in the head and root of human nature), was not foederaliter (federally) in him. But, in his reasoning, he apparently confounds the simple humanity of Christ with the composite θεάνθρωπος (theanthrōpos = God-man), who of course was neither naturally nor federally in Adam (see Dorner, Person of Christ 2.308, 341n).]
Moreover, that seed, although it was propagated through sinners to Mary, nevertheless was not liable to sin or to moral wickedness, since that wickedness would not fall on an inanimate and irrational thing. Nevertheless, the seed could have a natural intemperance, which soon could provide the occasion for sin. Consequently, we said that this intemperance was removed from Mary’s seed through the Holy Spirit.67[Note: 7 67. Istud autem semen, licet per peccatores ad Mariam fuerit propagatum; peccato tamen, seu malitiae morali, non fuit obnoxium, cum malitia ista non cadat in inanimatum et irrationale, licet intemperiem naturalem possit habere, quae postmodum peccato possit occasionem praebere, quam hinc, a semine Mariano, per Spiritum Sanctum sublatam diximus.]
That the human nature derived from Mary in itself and apart from the agency of the Holy Spirit in the incarnation was corrupt is proved by Romans 8:3 : “God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” This means that the “flesh” as it existed in the mother and before its sanctification in the womb was sinful. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6); “who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one” (Job 14:4); “how can he be clean that is born of a woman?” (25:4). The Formula of Concord (“Concerning Original Sin”; Hase, 644) says that “in the first moment of our conception, that seed from which a man is formed is contaminated and corrupted by sin.”68[Note: 8 68. In primo conceptionis nostrae momento, ipsum semen ex quo homo formatur peccato contaminatum et corruptum est.] It also condemns the Anabaptists who asserted “that Christ did not assume his flesh and blood from the virgin Mary,69[Note: 9 69. WS: Even if the Romish dogma of the immaculate conception of Mary were true, it would not follow that a human nature transmitted by her would also be immaculate. Regeneration and sanctification by the Holy Spirit are confined to the individual. They do not affect the specific nature in him. See pp. 91-92.] but brought them with him from heaven.”70[Note: 0 70. Quod Christum carnem et sanguinem suum non e Maria virgine assumpserit, sed e caelo attulerit.]
In the adoption controversy in the eighth century, Felix of Urgellis maintained that the Logos united with a human nature that was unsanctified, that Christ had a corrupted nature though he never committed actual transgression. He thought this to be necessary in order that Christ might be tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. But this implies that corruption of nature is not sin. He was opposed by Alcuin (see Güricke, Church History §107). The theory was revived about 1830 in Germany by Menken and in Great Britain by Irving.71[Note: 1 71. WS: Irving’s view is that Christ’s human nature after its union with the Logos was still fallen and “sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3) as it was before the union, but that by means of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit Christ repressed all stirrings of this sinful flesh, so that he not only never committed an outward transgression, but never exercised a sinful desire. At the same time, Irving contends that Christ experienced all the temptations which sinful man experiences. His words are as follows: Christ’s humanity “was flesh in the fallen state and liable to all the temptations to which [fallen] flesh is liable; but the soul of Jesus, thus anointed with the Holy Spirit, did ever resist the suggestions of evil. I wish it to be clearly understood that I believe it to be necessary unto salvation that a man should believe that Christ’s soul was so held in possession by the Holy Spirit and so supported by the divine nature as that it never assented unto an evil suggestion and never originated an evil suggestion” (Irving, On the Incarnation: Its Method, 1). This last assertion is inconsistent with the assertion that Christ “was liable to all the temptations to which sinful flesh is liable.” If his human nature “never originated an evil suggestion,” he could not have been tempted by inward lust, which is one species of temptation that sinful man experiences, according toJames 1:14. Irving’s view of Christ’s holiness seems to be that of spiritual regeneration by the Holy Spirit as in the case of a believer, rather than of a supernatural transformation by the miraculous conception. Only, the regeneration in Christ’s case completely subjects the inward corruption, while in the believer it imperfectly subjects it. According to the catholic doctrine, the corruption is entirely extirpated from the human nature of Christ; according to Irving’s doctrine, it remains, but is repressed and subdued: “They argue for an inherent holiness; we argue for a holiness maintained by the person of the Son through the operation of the Holy Spirit. The substance of our argument is that Christ’s human nature was holy in the only way in which holiness under the fall exists or can exist, namely, through inworking or energizing of the Holy Spirit” (Irving, Works 5.564).] Schleiermacher (Doctrine §97) departs from the Catholic doctrine in holding that Christ had an earthly father, but that by a supernatural operation on the embryo it was cleansed from original sin. The possibility of a perfect sanctification of the human nature of Christ appears from considering the mode of his conception and comparing it with that of an ordinary man. The individualizing of a portion of human nature is that process by which it becomes a distinct and separate person and no longer an indistinguishable part of the common species. A part of human nature becomes a human person by generation. In all instances but that of Jesus Christ, the individualization of a portion of human substance is accomplished through the medium of the sexes and is accompanied with sensual appetite. By ordinary generation, human nature is transmitted and individualized without any change of its characteristics, either physical or moral. The individual has all the qualities both of soul and body which fallen Adam had. There is no sanctification of the nature possible by this mode. Ordinary generation transmits sin: “That which is born of the flesh [in this manner] is flesh.” But in the instance of the conception of Jesus Christ, the God-man, there was no union of the sexes and no sensual appetite. The quickening of a portion of human nature in the virgin mother was by the creative energy of God the Holy Spirit. This miraculous conception, consequently, was as pure from all sensuous quality as the original creation of Adam’s body from the dust of the ground or of Eve’s body from the rib of Adam. As the dust of the ground was enlivened by a miraculous act and the result was the individual body of Adam, so the substance of Mary was quickened and sanctified by a miraculous act and the result was the human soul and body of Jesus Christ.72[Note: 2 72. WS: Here, we notice an important point of difference between traducianism and creationism. According to the former theory, both the soul and body of Christ were formed simultaneously and by one act of the Holy Spirit out of the psychico-physical substance of the mother. According to the latter, only the body was formed out of the virgin’s merely physical substance, the soul being subsequently created ex nihilo and infused into the body. Turretin presents this view in 13.11.11-15. As in the creation of Adam, God first made his body out of the substance of the earth and then by a second act created and inbreathed his soul, so, according to the creationist, in the origination of the humanity of our Lord two acts must be postulated: one by which his human body was conceived out of the substance of the virgin and another by which his human soul was created from nothing.]
The miraculous quickening of the substance of the virgin mother is not sufficient, alone and by itself, to account for its sanctification. As her substance, it was a part of the fallen and corrupt human species. Merely to quicken or vitalize it, even though miraculously, would not change its moral quality. Hence we must postulate a renewing and sanctifying operation of the Holy Spirit in connection with his quickening energy. Witsius (Covenants 2.4.11) quotes Cloppenburg as saying “that the miraculous impregnation of the virgin’s womb, of itself alone, could not secure, in the least, an exemption to the flesh of Christ from the inheritance of sin; for the origin of sin is not derived from the male sex alone, or male seed; nor did the apostle in Romans 5:1-21 so understand one man Adam as to exclude Eve: which is the leading error of some.” Similarly, Calvin (2.13.4) remarks that they betray their ignorance in arguing that if Christ is perfectly immaculate and was begotten of the seed of Mary by the secret operation of the Spirit, then it follows that there is no impurity in the seed of women, but only in that of men. For we do not represent Christ as perfectly immaculate merely because he was born of the seed of a woman unconnected with any man, but because he was sanctified by the Spirit, so that his generation was pure and holy, such as it would have been before the fall of Adam. The doctrine of the sinlessness of Christ is, thus, necessarily connected with the doctrine of the miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit. The one stands or falls with the other. Says Howe (Oracles 2.37):
It is a mighty confirmation of the natural descent of sin with the nature of man in the ordinary way, that when God designed the incarnation of his own Son, to avoid the corruption of nature descending to him, he then steps out of the ordinary course; a consideration that has that weight with it, that if anyone allow himself to think, it must overbear his mind, in that matter, that surely there is some secret profound reason in the counsel of God, whether obvious to our view or not obvious, that the descent of corrupt nature was in the ordinary way unavoidable: that when God had a design to incarnate his own Son, when it was intended God should be manifested in the flesh, to avoid that contagion and corruption which in the ordinary course is transmitted, he does in this single instance recede and go off from the ordinary natural course. Because the human nature had been corrupted if it had descended in the ordinary way, therefore the ordinary course of procreation is declined and avoided: a most pregnant demonstration that in the ordinary course sin is always naturally transmitted.
Although the human nature of Christ was individualized and personalized by a miraculous conception and not by ordinary generation, yet this was as really and truly a conception and birth as if it had been by ordinary generation. Jesus Christ was really and truly the Son of Mary. He was bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. He was of her substance and of her blood. He was consubstantial with her, in as full a sense as an ordinary child is consubstantial with an ordinary mother. And she was the mother of his human soul, as well as of his human body. All the stages in the process of generation and growth are to be found, from the embryo up to the mature man. The union of deity with humanity was first embryonic, then fetal, then infantine, then that of childhood, then that of youth, and last that of manhood. The God-man was conceived in the womb, grew in the womb, was an infant, a child, a youth, and a mature man.
Self-Consciousness of the God-man
Contemplating the mystery of the God-man in this way, as pointed out in Scripture, it is easier to see how only one person and one self-consciousness shall result. If we do not distinguish between nature and person-if we assume that there is no such reality as an unindividualized or nonindividualized nature and that we must think of a distinct individual or we must think of nothing-then we must say that the Logos united with a human person. This person must be a self-conscious ego and when united with the second person of the Godhead, which is likewise a self-conscious ego, must still have its own distinct self-consciousness. The God-man, consequently, must be two persons with two self-consciousnesses. But when it is said that the trinitarian person of the Logos assumes into union with himself a portion of human nature, which portion is not yet a distinct ego, but is capable by reason of its properties of becoming one, then the problem of the single self-consciousness of the God-man becomes much easier of solution. The human nature possessing on the psychical side all the properties requisite to personality, such as spirituality, rationality, and voluntariness, upon being assumed into union with the eternal Son is thereby personalized, that is to say, individualized. The properties of finite reason and finite will, potential in the human nature, now manifest themselves actively in the single self-consciousness of the God-man. He reasons like a man, thinks like a man, feels like a man, and wills like a man. These are truly personal acts and operations of Jesus Christ. But, unlike the case of an ordinary man, these are not the whole of his personal acts and operations. Over and besides these, there is in his complex theanthropic person another and higher series of acts and operations which spring from another and higher nature in his person. He thinks and feels and wills like God. And these are also and equally with the others the personal acts of Jesus Christ. In the one person of Jesus Christ, consequently, there are two different kinds of consciousness or experience: one divine and one human. But these two kinds of consciousness do not constitute two persons any more than the two kinds of experience or consciousness-the sensuous and the mental-in a man constitute him two persons. There can be two general forms or modes of conscious experience in one and the same person, provided there enter into the constitution of the person two natures that are sufficiently different from each other to yield the materials of such a twofold variety. This was the case with the God-man. If he had had only one nature, as was the case previous to the incarnation, then he could have had only one general form of consciousness: the divine. But having two natures, he could have two corresponding forms of consciousness. He could experience either divine feeling or human feeling, divine perception or human perception. A God-man has a twofold variety of consciousness or experience, with only one self-consciousness. When he says “I thirst” and “I and my Father are one,” it is one theanthropic ego with a finite human consciousness in the first instance and an infinite divine consciousness in the second. A man can have two forms of consciousness, yet with only one self-consciousness. He can feel cold with his body, while he prays to God with his mind. These two forms of conscious experience are wholly diverse and distinct. He does not pray with his body or feel cold with his mind. Yet this doubleness and distinctness in the consciousness does not destroy the unity of his self-consciousness. So, also, Jesus Christ as a theanthropic person was constituted of a divine nature and a human nature. Divine nature had its own form of experience, like the mind in an ordinary human person; and the human nature had its own form of experience, like the body in a common man. The experiences of divine nature were as diverse from those of the human nature as those of the human mind are from those of the human body. Yet there was but one person who was the subject-ego of both of these experiences. At the very time when Christ was conscious of weariness and thirst by the well of Samaria, he also was conscious that he was the eternal and only begotten Son of God, the second person in the Trinity. This is proved by his words to the Samaritan woman: “Whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. I that speak unto you am the Messiah.” The first-mentioned consciousness of fatigue and thirst came through the human nature in his person; the second-mentioned consciousness of omnipotence and supremacy came through divine nature in his person. If he had not had a human nature, he could not have had the former consciousness; and if he had not had a divine nature, he could not have had the latter. Because he had both natures in one person he could have both.73[Note: 3 73. WS: Shedd in Presbyterian Review (July 1881): 618-21.] (See supplement 5.1.8.) S U P P L E M E N T S
5.1.1 (see p. 615). God the Son can assume a human nature without thereby incarnating the Trinity, because he assumes a human nature into the unity only of his single person, not into the unity of the three persons. He has the essence only in one mode; and the humanity is united with the essence in this one mode to the exclusion of the essence in the other two modes of the Father and the Spirit. Only the second trinitarian person is humanized; the first and third are not. It is the simple hypostatic personality, not the complex trinal personality, that “becomes flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth.” The simple hypostatic person is the Son or Word; this assumes human nature by the miraculous conception. The complex trinal person is the Trinity or Godhead: this did not assume human nature. Three simple hypostatic persons make one complex trinal person, and three simple hypostatic consciousnesses make one complex self-consciousness. A hypostatic consciousness is not trinal and complex, but single and simple. God the Father’s hypostatic consciousness is only the consciousness of being the Father; God the Son’s hypostatic consciousness is only the consciousness of being the Son; God the Spirit’s hypostatic consciousness is only the consciousness of being the Spirit. There is no complexity of self-beholding, self-cognizing, and self-communing in the hypostatic consciousness. But the self-consciousness of the triune Godhead is trinal and complex. It results from the whole essence in one mode contemplating the whole essence in another mode, and the whole essence in still another mode perceiving the identity in essence of the other two. There is no trinalizing of a mode or person of the essence, but only of the essence. No one of the divine persons repeats the trinalizing process. The Father does not contemplate himself as Father and then reunite the duality in the second act. He contemplates himself in the Son. And so with the Son and the Spirit. The divine persons see themselves in each other, not in themselves.
5.1.2 (see p. 618). “The incarnation was not necessary in order that the trinitarian Son of God might be self-conscious.” “Self-conscious” here denotes only the hypostatic consciousness of a single divine person, not the self-consciousness of the Godhead as triune. No single trinitarian person can have self-consciousness in this latter sense, because this requires all three distinctions. Self-consciousness in the comprehensive sense is the resultant of the three hypostatic consciousnesses. Still, this hypostatic consciousness may, in a secondary sense, be denominated “self-consciousness” because it is that consciousness which one trinitarian person has of himself as distinct from the other two. This remark applies also to the statement on p. 640: “This person must be a self-conscious ego.…”
5.1.3 (see p. 619). Kidd (Eternal Sonship of Christ, chap. 11) thus describes the passive relation of Christ’s humanity to his divinity and the fact that the latter is omnipotently controlling in his person: “As the humanity of our Lord was formed for the express purpose of existing in his divinity, it was formed, in an especial manner, to assume the appearances and subjection consonant to the designs of divinity. It had no will of its own to assume any state; it could only exist according to the volition of divinity founded on the divine constitution. The subjection in its humiliation was therefore of two kinds: A necessary subjection to the Godhead in whatever condition it existed; and a peculiar subjection indicated by its sufferings in that particular state of humiliation. In relation to God this subjection was a devotion to the divine will and a particular devotion to that divine person in whom it subsisted. This devotion was essential to its very nature and was communicated in its original conformation. While its actions on earth were really those of humanity, they were those of a humanity whose procedure was in union with a divine person. They flowed from that person and were really his; yet they were not the actions of his divinity, but of his humanity subsisting in his divine nature. The Son of God could not suffer in his essential divine nature; yet his assumed human nature was humbled, was ‘made a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree.’ But while the Messiah experienced this temporary humiliation, the inherent glory of his [theanthropic] person was not and could not be lost. This humiliation was not natural to him, but was submitted to, that the glory which was natural to a man received into personal union by one of the persons of the Godhead might afterward be exhibited. When therefore the eclipse of the Messiah’s human nature was past, it appeared, when he ‘ascended up on high,’ in that splendor which was peculiar to its exalted state of existence as united with deity.”
5.1.4 (see p. 621 n.14 [Note: .1414. WS: The term occultatio (hiding, concealment) is used by Zanchi, Heidegger, Ursinus, and others to denote the self-emptying (heauton ekenōse, ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε = he emptied himself) of the Logos spoken of by St. Paul inPhp 2:7. The exinanition related to the use and manifestation of divine excellences, not to their possession. Traces of this are seen in Ambrose (On the Incarnation 1), who employs the terms retentio (keeping back, withholding) and retraxit (holding back). Van Mastricht uses subducere (to take away stealthily) with occultare (to hide). Francis Junius says: “In humana natura, gloriam et majestatem apud homines non exercuerit Christus ut post resurrectionem et ascensionem, sed veluti represserit et occultam continuerit: vel (ut loquitur Irenaeus) quieverit, ut humana natura tentari et mori possit, quamvis interim divinae naturae quaedam vindicia [sic] ad fidei confirmationem prodierint” [AG: Christ did not make use of his glory and majesty in his human nature among men as he did after his resurrection and ascension, but accordingly he restrained and kept them hidden-or, as Irenaeus said, he remained quiescent (quieverit). He did this so that the human nature could be tempted and die, although, meanwhile, certain vindicia of the divine nature appeared for the confirmation of faith]; Theological Theses: Concerning the Humiliation of Christ. The words of Irenaeus are the following: “As Christ became man in order to undergo temptation, so also was he the Word that he might be glorified; the Word remaining quiescent, that he might be capable of being tempted, dishonored, crucified, and suffering death” (Against Heresies 3.19, quoted by Paraeus in Christian Doctrines Q. 37). [AG: The word vindicia in the above passage from Junius may be an error in Shedd’s citation. If Shedd cited the Latin correctly, then vindicia probably carries the sense of “vindicating marks or evidences.” If the Latin word is actually indicia (evidences), then the text reads “certain evidences of the divine nature appeared.” Either way the meaning is nearly the same.] (See supplement 5.1.4.)] ). The later Lutheran doctrine of the exinanition of the divine nature differs from the Reformed in that it is a preparation for the union with the human nature, instead of being this union itself. The divine first “empties” itself before it assumes the humanity. According to the Reformed view, the assumption of the humanity is immediate, without any preparation, or kenosis, on the part of the divinity, and the union and incarnation is the kenosis. According to the Lutheran view, the Logos “took upon him the form of a servant” before, and in order to, being “made in the likeness of men.” According to the Reformed, “taking the form of a servant” was the same thing as being “made in the likeness of men.” Hilary, according to Dorner (Person of Christ 1.1046-47), seems to have held this view. According to him the Logos, prior to the incarnation, and in order to it, put off “the form of God” and put on “the form of a servant.” This forma is the facies (face) or countenance-that which appears to a beholder. The Logos emptied himself of the glorious form which belonged to him in the Trinity and assumed an inglorious form in order that he might then assume a human nature into union. Hilary supposes that the original resplendent “form of God” could not directly make such an assumption. According to the Reformed view, on the contrary, it could; and there is no need of an exinanition prior to the incarnation. In Hilary’s theory, also, the incarnation is not complete until the exaltation of Christ has occurred, that is, not until the human nature is united with the original resplendent form of God as well as with the humbled “form of a servant.” But this cannot take place until Christ passes from the estate of humiliation into the heavenly glory. In the Reformed theory the incarnation is complete the instant the human nature is united by the miraculous conception with the Logos in his original resplendent form of God, which by this union then becomes temporarily “emptied” and humbled and loses its full resplendence, until at the ascension it is exalted and glorified as at first.
5.1.5 (see p. 624). Owen (Person of Christ, chap. 19) compares the influence of the divine nature upon the human, in the complex person of Christ, to that of the soul upon the body, in the case of man’s complex person: “As to the way of the communications between the divine and human nature in the personal union between the Logos and his humanity, we know it not. The glorious immediate emanations of virtue from the divine unto the human nature of Christ, we understand not. Indeed, the actings of natures of difference kinds, where both are finite in the same person, one toward the other, is a difficult apprehension. Who knows how directive power and efficacy proceeds from the soul and is communicated unto the body, unto every the least minute action in every member of it; so as that there is no distance between the direction and the action or the accomplishment of it; or how, on the other hand, the soul is affected with sorrow or trouble in the moment wherein the body feels pain, so as that no distinction can be made between the body’s sufferings and the soul’s sorrow? How much more is this mutual communication in the same person of divers natures above our comprehension, where one of them is absolutely infinite!”
5.1.6 (see p. 626). Ursinus (Christian Religion Q.48) thus reasons respecting the Lutheran doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s humanity: “The Ubiquitaries object, (1) in Christ’s person the two natures are found in an inseparable union, therefore, wheresoever Christ’s deity is, there also must his humanity needs be. Answer: These two natures remain in such sort joined and united that their property remains distinct, and neither is turned into the other; which would happen if each nature were infinite and everywhere. Objection (2): Those two natures, whereof one is not where the other is, are sundered, neither remain personally united, but are separated. In Christ are two natures, whereof one, which is his humanity, is not where is the other, which is his deity; therefore the two natures in Christ are not united, but separated. Answer: The major is true, if it be understood of two equal natures, that is, either both finite or both infinite; but false of unequal natures, that is, one finite and one infinite. For the finite nature cannot be at once in more places than one; but the infinite nature may be at once both whole in the finite nature and whole without it. Christ’s human nature, which is finite, is but in one place; but his divine nature, which is infinite, is both in Christ’s human nature and without it and everywhere.”
5.1.7 (see p. 629). Dorner follows Schleiermacher, who (Glaubenslehre §97) denies the impersonality of Christ’s human nature prior to its assumption by the Logos. Schleiermacher does not recognize the distinction between specific and individual human nature. Human nature, he contends is only individual and objects that if the human nature of Christ prior to it assumption was impersonal, “it was different from and inferior to that of the rest of mankind.” The church doctrine on this point he describes as an error of Scholasticism: “The position that the human nature of Christ in and for itself is impersonal, or has no [personal] subsistence of its own, but subsists [personally] only through the divine [personality], in this Scholastic drapery is very obscure and embarrassing.” In connection with the denial of this tenet, which enters into all the church Christology, Schleiermacher (§97) also denies that Christ was born of a virgin. His view is that Christ must have been born in the ordinary manner by the union of both sexes in order to be a real man like other men; and also that in connection with this ordinary generation there must also have been a creative energy of God in order to cleanse away the original sin which would naturally accompany it. If Christ’s conception in the womb of Mary, he argues, took place without cohabitation with Joseph, this would not preclude sinfulness, because this would naturally issue from his mother, who was sinful. And the creative energy of God could as easily purge away a sinfulness that was derived from both father and mother as that derived from the mother alone. This is true; but the question is not what God could do, but what he did do. And this can be known only from the gospel account of the subject. This account, given by Matthew and Luke, Schleiermacher declares to be legendary and not historically credible. It is one of the inventions of the primitive church. For proof of this we have only his assertion, as is commonly the case when the received manuscript text of the New Testament is declared to be untrustworthy.
Schleiermacher exhibits the same arbitrariness of assertion in declaring that the creeds of the church, both ancient and modern, “are so phrased that they have no dogmatic aim” and do not warrant the deduction of an ecclesiastical doctrine from them. He cites only the ancient Roman and Constantinopolitan creeds and the modern Augsburg, Helvetic, Gallican, Anglican, and Belgic confessions which do not bear out his assertion: each and all being of a very positive dogmatic character. An examination of the individual and conciliar creeds of the ancient church will convince any unbiased mind that the doctrine of the virginal birth of Christ, which constitutes one of the principal articles of the Apostles’ Creed, has an ecclesiastical support as strong as any of the doctrines of the Christian faith. The following creeds, to none of which does Schleiermacher allude, contain explicit affirmation of it: Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Epiphanius, Basil, Constantinople, Aquileia, Augustine, Maximus Taurinensis, Eusebius Gallicani, Cassian, Chrysologus, Venatius, Alcuin, Etherius. The views of Schleiermacher respecting the virginal birth of Christ have recently been revived by Harnack, whose argument is substantially the same as his (cf. Shedd, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, 154-61). Coleridge also (Works 5.76,78-79, 532 [ed. Harper]) takes the same view of the Christopedia in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels.
There is no better account of this subject than that given by Charnock (Power of God): “Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin (Luke 1:35): ‘The Holy Spirit shall come upon you, and the power of the highest shall overshadow you’; which act is described to be the effect of the infinite power of God. And it describes the supernatural manner of forming the humanity of our Savior and signifies not the divine nature of Christ [namely, the Logos] infusing itself into the womb of the virgin; for the angel refers it to the manner of the operation of the Holy Spirit in the producing the human nature of Christ and not to the nature assuming that humanity into union with itself. The Holy Spirit, or the third person in the Trinity, overshadowed the virgin and by a creative act framed the humanity of Christ and united it to the divinity [namely, the Logos]. It is, therefore, expressed by a word of the same import with that used in Genesis 1:2 : ‘The Spirit moved upon the face of the waters,’ which signifies a brooding upon the chaos, shadowing it with his wings, as hens sit upon their eggs to form them and hatch them into animals; or else it is an allusion to the ‘cloud which covered the tent of the congregation when the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle’ (Exodus 40:34). It was not such a creative act as we call immediate, which is a production out of nothing; but a mediate creation, such as God’s bringing things into form out of the first [chaotic] matter, which had nothing but an obediential or passive disposition to whatever stamp the powerful wisdom of God should imprint upon it. So the substance of the virgin had no active, but only a passive disposition to this work; the matter of the body was earthly, the substance of the virgin; the forming of it was heavenly, the Holy Spirit working upon that matter. And therefore when it is said that ‘she was found with child of the Holy Spirit,’ it is to be understood of the efficacy of the Holy Spirit, not of the substance of the Holy Spirit. The matter was natural, but the manner of conceiving was in a supernatural way, above the methods of nature. That part of the flesh of the virgin whereof the human nature of Christ was made was refined and purified from corruption by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. Our Savior is therefore called ‘that holy thing,’ though born of the virgin. He was necessarily in some way to descend from Adam. God, indeed, might have created his body out of nothing or have formed it, as he did Adam’s, out of the dust of the ground; but had he been thus extraordinarily formed and not propagated from Adam, though he had been a man like one of us, yet he would not have been of kin to us, because it would not have been a nature derived from Adam, the common parent of us all. But now, by this way of producing the humanity of Christ of the substance of the virgin, he is of the same nature that had sinned, and so what he did and suffered may be imputed to us, which, had he been created as Adam was, could not be claimed in a legal and judicial way.
“It was not fitting, however, that he should be propagated and born in the common order of nature of father and mother; for whatsoever is so born is polluted: ‘A clean thing cannot be brought out of an unclean’ (Job 14:4). And our Savior had been incapable of being a Redeemer had he been tainted with the least spot of our corrupt nature, but would have stood in need of redemption himself. Besides, it had been inconsistent with the holiness of the divine nature to have assumed a tainted and defiled body [humanity]. He that was the fountain of blessedness to all nations was not to be subject to the curse of the law for himself, which he would have been had he been conceived in the ordinary way. Again, supposing that almighty God by his divine power had so perfectly sanctified an earthly father and mother from all original spot, that the human nature might have been transmitted immaculate to him, as well as the Holy Spirit did purge that part of the flesh of the virgin of which the body [humanity] of Christ was made, yet it was not fitting that that person, who was ‘God blessed forever’ as well as man, partaking of our nature, should have a conception in the same manner as ours, but different, and in some measure conformable to the infinite dignity of his person; which could not have been had not a supernatural power and a divine person been concerned as an active principle in it; besides, such a birth had not been agreeable to the first promise, which calls him ‘the seed of the woman,’ not of the man; and so the veracity of God had suffered some detriment: the seed of the woman only is set in opposition to the seed of the serpent.
“By this manner of conception the holiness of Christ’s human nature is secured, and his fitness for his office is assured to us. It is now a pure and unpolluted humanity that is the temple and tabernacle of the divinity; the fullness of the Godhead dwells in him bodily and dwells in him holily. Though we read of some men sanctified from the womb, it was not a pure and perfect holiness; it was like the light of fire mixed with smoke, an infused holiness accompanied with a natural taint; but the holiness of the Redeemer by this conception is like the light of the sun, pure and without spot: the Spirit of holiness supplying the place of a father in a way of creation. His fitness for his office is also assured to us; for being born of the virgin, one of our nature, but conceived by the Spirit, a divine person, the guilt of our sins may be imputed to him, because our nature in him is without the stain of inherent sin; because, by reason of his supernatural conception, he is capable, as one of kin to us, to bear our curse without being touched by our taint. By this means our sinful nature is assumed without sin in that nature which was assumed by him: flesh he has, but not sinful flesh (Romans 8:3).” Paul here says that Christ “condemned sin in his flesh,” not in his “sinful flesh.”
Augustine (Forgiveness and Baptism 2.38) thus describes the human nature of Christ as it was first in the virgin mother and as it was afterward when completely sanctified in the God-man: “The Word, which became flesh, was in the beginning and was with God (John 1:1). But at the same time his participation in our inferior condition, in order to our participation in his higher state, held a kind of medium between the two in his birth in the flesh. We were born in sinful flesh, but he was born in the likeness of sinful flesh; we were born not only of flesh and blood [human seed], but also of the will of man [human will] and of the will of the flesh [sexual appetite]; but he was born only of flesh and blood [the seed of the virgin], not of the will of man [human will] nor of the will of the flesh [sexual appetite], but of God. He, therefore, having become man, but still continuing to be God, never had any sin, nor did he assume a flesh of sin though born of a material flesh of sin [i.e., of a flesh which, prior to its miraculous sanctification, was sinful in the virgin mother, because propagated from Adam]. For what he then took of flesh he either cleansed, in order to take it, or cleansed by taking it. His virgin mother, therefore, whose conception of him was not according to the law of sinful flesh, in other words, not by the excitement of carnal concupiscence, he formed in order to choose her [as the mother of the God-man] and chose her in order to be formed from her.”
5.1.8 (see p. 641). The principal difference between the Reformed and the later Lutheran Christology lies in the difference between union and transmutation. The former affirms that Jesus Christ is constituted of two divers natures, united together without any change in the properties of either; the latter, that he is constituted of two diverse natures, one of which when the union takes place changes the other. The Lutheran asserts that divine nature communicates some of its properties, such as omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, to the human nature, thereby expelling the finite properties of confinement to locality, weakness, and ignorance; the Reformed denies this. And this substitution or transmutation of natures for union of natures arose from an erroneous conception of personality. The Lutheran assumed that if there is to be only one person there must be only one nature. Hence his conversion of the two natures into a third single one. This was also the erroneous opinion of the ancient monophysitism. If two natures, then two persons; if one nature, then one person. This was the assumption. But a self-conscious person may be simple or complex in his constitution; he may have one nature or two natures or three natures. A trinitarian person, for example, is constituted of only one nature, namely, the divine. He is wholly spiritual, immaterial, and infinite. The second person in the Godhead, prior to his incarnation, is the divine essence in a particular mode or form of subsistence. He is pure spirit without body, parts, or passions. A human person, again, is constituted of two natures: an immaterial soul and a material body. A man is not, like the unincarnate Son of God, purely and only spirit. He is composed of two substances or natures as diverse as mind and matter. And yet there is only one self, only one self-consciousness, only one person. One and the same man is conscious of the spiritual feelings of his soul and of the physical sensations of his body. The former issue out of his immaterial nature, the latter out of his material; and both are equally and alike the experience of but one person. Having double natures he has a double form of consciousness or experience, with only a single self-consciousness. In this respect a human person differs from a trinitarian person. The latter can have only one form or mode of consciousness, namely, a spiritual. The former can have two; one spiritual and one sensuous and physical. A divine person has one mode of consciousness and one self-consciousness; a human person has two modes of consciousness and one self-consciousness. And yet even a human person, like a trinitarian person, may for a time have self-consciousness or personality with only one nature. When, for example, the human body is separated from the human soul at death, the self-consciousness continues, but only one form of conscious experience is now possible. The soul without the body cannot feel physical sensations. The experience or consciousness of the disembodied state must be wholly mental and spiritual. There can be no sensuous elements in it, because the body with the five senses is temporarily separated from the soul. The man must now get all of his conscious experience through his immaterial nature. There may be, and is, a memory of past sensuous experiences, but no present actual sensation through the bodily senses. Not until the resurrection of the body and its reunion with the soul can both modes of consciousness-the physical and the mental-be experienced again together. This proves that a single self-consciousness or personality is possible either with one or with two natures; only the elements in it will not be so various in one case as in the other. A theanthropic person, again, is yet more complex than a human person. He has three diverse natures, each yielding their diverse experiences or modes of consciousness, and yet only a single self-consciousness. The Lord Jesus Christ is constituted of three substances, distinct and different in kind from each other. He is constituted of one infinite spirit, one finite spirit, and one finite body. The God-man is composed of the divine essence in its filial form (Php 2:6), a rational human soul, and a human body. Why should such a diversity in the components of the one theanthropic person be thought to be incompatible with a single self-consciousness? If two natures or substances, as different in kind from each other as a man’s immaterial spirit and his material body, can constitute only one person and yield a single self-consciousness with its doubleness of experiences or consciousnesses, why is it so difficult, as the later Lutheran asserts it is, to believe that three natures or substances as diverse as the divine essence, a man’s spirit, and a man’s body should likewise constitute only a single person and yield only a single self-consciousness with its threefoldness of experiences or consciousnesses, namely, those of the divine essence, of a rational soul, and of a sensuous body? If it is not necessary to assume that spirit is transmuted into body, or body into spirit, in order to account for a single self-conscious personality in the instance of a man, why is it necessary to assume that the human nature must be transmuted into the divine in order that there may be a single self-conscious personality in the instance of a God-man? If complexity of natures is not incompatible with self-consciousness in human psychology, why is it in theanthropic psychology? Had more attention been given to the complexity and diversity of natures found in ordinary human personality, the assumption that began in Apollinarianism and has run through the whole kenotic controversy, namely, that personality necessarily implies simplicity of structure and singleness of nature and is incompatible with complexity of structure and duality and trinality of natures, would have been invalidated more readily. If two points are kept in view, namely, that the divine and human natures in Christ’s theanthropic person are united but not transmuted and that the human nature is assumed into union in its unindividualized state, there need be no logical difficulty in the construction of Christ’s single personality and self-consciousness. The fathers at Chalcedon did this, and so did leading Schoolmen like Aquinas. The Reformed theologians did the same; while some of the later Lutheran divines showed a tendency toward the ancient monophysitism, a tendency which in some of their latest speculations has gone to even a greater extreme than those of Apollinaris and Eutyches. And finally, if the important distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness had been perceived and employed, the conscious experience of the person at a particular moment, such as a physical sensation or a mental emotion, which is transient and gives place to a multitude of similar experiences like it, would not have been mistaken for the permanent and immutable ego whose self-consciousness lies under all this stream of consciousness or experiences and combines them into the unity of a person.