The act whereby the Son of God assumed the human nature; or the mystery by which Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word, was made man, in order to accomplish the work of our salvation.
See NATIVITY, and Meldrum on the Incarnation.
The assumption of the human nature by Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity
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INCARNATION
Introduction.—The idea of union with God: (1) in the ethnic faiths; (2) in Greek philosophy—(a) the Stoics, (b) Philo; (3) in the religion of Israel.
The message of Christianity—Union with God in the Person of Christ.
A. The Character of Christ.—
1. Perfect goodness.
(1) Relation to God: (a) perfect knowledge, (b) perfect love.
(2) Relation to men: perfect knowledge and love.
2. Absolute sinlessness: evidence of contemporaries; His own consciousness; inference as to His Person.
B. The self-witness of Jesus: the method of His self-disclosure.
i. His claims:
1. Teacher: (1) the solitariness of the office, (2) the note of authority, (3) the originality of the teaching, (4) the future of the teaching.
2. Legislator.
3. Messiah: His conception of Messiahship. Illustrative passages: (1) the Baptism, (2) the sermon at Nazareth, (3) the reply to John the Baptist, (4) the estimate of John the Baptist, (5) the threefold call of the disciples, (6) the answer to Peter, (7) later or more explicit announcements.
4. Saviour: (1) the function, bestowal of forgiveness and of life; (2) the response, personal trust.
5. Lord.
6. Worker of Miracles.
7. Creator of the New Israel.
8. Judge.
ii. His self-designations.
1. Son of Man: (1) Whence did Jesus derive the title? (2) How did He use it? (3) What does He reveal as to His own Person in it?
2. Son of God: (1) use by demoniacs, (2) use by high priest, (3) ascription by Peter, (4) our Lord’s use, (5) Divine attestation.
Inference as to the constitution of our Lord’s Person.
C. The witness of the Apostles.
The primary fact, a living experience. Then, the Christologies.
i. The earlier chapters in the Acts of the Apostles.
ii. The minor Christologies:
1. James.
2. First Epistle of Peter.
3. Jude and 2 Peter.
4. Apocalypse.
iii. The Christology of St. Paul: (a) its origin in his experience, (b) its relation to the common belief of the Church, (c) its development.
1. Christ in His relation to God.
2. Christ in His relation to men.
3. Christ in His relation to the Cosmos.
iv. Hebrews.
v. Fourth Gospel: Prologue, use of the term Logos.
Conclusion and Outlook: Christ known in history and experience as God and Man.
1. The Person of Christ, the solution of the problem of union with God.
2. The Person of Christ, a problem for faith. The knowableness of Christ.
(1) Christ known as God
(2) Christ known as Man.
(a) The origin of His earthly life.
(b) The relation of the human and Divine aspects of His personality. Theories under control of dualism. Psychological theories.
Literature.
Introduction.—Christian theology has employed many ruling ideas in order that, by means of them, it might harmonize and systematize the mass of material presented in Scripture and in experience. Each of these, e.g. ‘the Fatherhood of God,’ or ‘the Kingdom of God,’ has meaning and value; but they all lie within the supreme and commanding truth, which is the declaration of Christianity, viz. union with God. This truth has both a personal and a cosmic aspect. God is the life of man. Only as man thinks the Divine thoughts, wills the Divine will, and acts in the Divine strength, does he reach the truth of his own nature, or realize his ideal self. When man is most truly himself, he finds himself to be a partaker of the Divine nature; and what he is most profoundly conscious of is not himself, but the God in whom he lives, who is the source of all that is most truly human in his personal activities. The end, in attaining which life and satisfaction for the individual and for the race are to be found, is God. God is also the life of the universe. Christian theology has thrown off the blight of the old Deism, listens with delight to the expositions of Science, and names the thought, reason, law, life, force, whose operations science can trace, but whose essence she can never define, God, the same God who is the life of man. Between the power manifest in the physical universe and the power operative in the spiritual sphere there is no opposition. Both are expressions of the same Divine energy.
(1) What is thus stated as a Christian doctrine is found to be present either implicitly or explicitly in all the great productions of the human spirit, which are also, most surely, productions of the Divine Spirit, as it impels and quickens the mind of man. Union with God is at once the presupposition and the promise of the great religions, which have awakened the emotions and determined the aspirations of men.
Therianthropic polytheism, as in the religion of Egypt, however gross and repulsive it may seem to be, finds its strength in the demand for vital union with the Divine source of life. Anthropomorphic polytheism, as in the religion of Greece, even though its religious aspect may be overlaid by its aesthetic beauty, has yet its roots in the elemental demand for union with the Divine principle of being. In those religions which for good or evil have recoiled from all contact with space and time, as in the pantheism which is the substratum even to-day of the Hindu consciousness, the demand has become clear and passionste. For this purpose shrines are multiplied and austerities practised, that the soul of the worshipper may be united with the God, and so he carried on the tide of a lesser Divine life to the Diviner ocean of absolute Being. The whole field of Comparative Religion, from polydemonism up to the highest ethical and universal religions, might be laid under contribution to illustrate and confirm the conclusion that the deepest passion of the human heart has ever been union with God.
(2) The idea of union with God is, further, the presupposition and the ruling category of philosophic thought. To think at all, implies that there is present to the mind the ideal of a unity in and to which the manifold details of the universe exist. Philosophy is simply the verification and application of this ideal. Philosophy, accordingly, however great its quarrel may be with any existing religion, is itself fundamentally religious. It seeks to accomplish, in thought and for thinkers, the harmonizing of all reality in and with God.
This is the effort of early Greek thought, though as yet the distinction of spiritual and material had scarcely emerged. From Xenophanes, with his assertion that nothing is save Being, and Heraclitus, with his counter assertion that all is flux, the problem of the higher synthesis is handed on to thinkers who, philosophizing imperially, seek to exhibit the ultimate unity of the universe as ‘the Good,’ or ‘Thought of Thought.’ From them, again, it has descended, in ever deepening complexity, to the days when the absolute idealism of Hegel is met by the demand to do justice to the reality and independence of the Self. And, in general, union with God is the need and aspiration of the human spirit. The deepest fact regarding human personality is that it is imperfect even in the broadest-minded, largest-hearted specimens of our race, and that consequently, in spite of its intense consciousness of itself, the human self is ill at ease till it enters into the life of the universal Self, and becomes its organ and its reproduction. This fact forces its way to intense conviction and impassioned utterance in every human family which has reached a certain stage of spiritual culture. In India the date may be picturesquely fixed in Buddha’s ‘great renunciation.’ For the Western world the hour had come in the 1st cent. of our era. Two systems, the one born on Greek soil, the other on Jewish, occupied the minds of educated men, and supplied them with the instruments of thought.
(a) One was Stoicism. The systems of Plato and Aristotle had been pierced by dualism, which these masters had sought in vain to overcome. Their supreme merit is, that they did not disguise the intensity of the opposition between the rational and the irrational, between form and matter. To Stoicism, speculation is growing weary of the effort to heal this schism of the universe, and is hoping to make things easy for itself by seizing one of the opposing elements, and making that supreme. The Universal, the Rational, is the ultimate principle. Differences, the obstinate facts of a world which contains so much that is evil and irrational, are not so much resolved or harmonized with the supreme good, as resolutely denied or ignored. Stoicism begins at the furthest extreme from the universal, in an intense individualism. It directs the individual to turn away from a political sphere which has no longer a true, satisfying life to offer him, and to turn inward on himself. It promises, however, that there, in the inner world of his spirit, he will find a rational universal element which is identical with the life and being of the universe. Thus, as the Master of Balliol has pointed out (Theol. in Gr. Philos., Lect. xvii.), Stoicism passed by one step from individualism to pantheism. It laid passionate hold on the conception of one all-embracing principle, one all-comprehensive, ever victorious good. High above the world, with its evil and its irrationality, is the realm of truth and goodness. To it the good belong. The message of Stoicism accordingly is, ‘Live in accordance with this Reason, or Logos, which is immanent in the universe and germinally present in every man.’ Such a faith as this was bound to have great issues, both in lives made sublime by cherishing it, and in wider achievements. The benefits conferred by Stoicism on civilization are patent and imperishable. At the same time, simply because it was no more than faith in an idea, it was bound to fail. Its most strenuous exponents toiled at what they knew was a hopeless task, and though they carried their burden nobly, their hearts were pierced with the sorrow of their failure. Belief in a purpose which links all the discords of the world into one plan, conquers all things evil, and makes them subservient to good, requires some surer basis than the meditations of a philosopher, however true or noble these may be. The failure of Stoicism is obvious now; but in the Hellenic world, in the early years of the Roman Empire, it permeated educated society like an atmosphere, and supplied thinking men with a point of view whence they might look out on life not wholly dismayed or despairing.
(b) The other system, which expresses the demand of the age for union with God, and which helps us to understand the attitude of the Greek mind toward Christianity, when it came forth with its great message of reconciliation accomplished, was that which originated with Philo, and which at a later stage, as elaborated by Plotinus, presented itself as a rival to Christianity. Philo’s idea of God is Jewish only in name. It is essentially Greek; and yet it is Greek with a difference. The ‘idea’ of Plato and the ‘pure form’ of Aristotle have alike proved incapable of gathering into one the diverse elements of the universe. Philo rises not only above the anthropomorphism of the OT, but even above the intellectualism of Greek philosophy. God is indescribable by any forms of thought. Everything which could determine His being must be laid aside, for to determine is to limit. God is thus the indeterminable. To Him no predicates apply. Philo’s dualism is thus wider and deeper than that of the Greek thinkers. It is a dualism, not between God conceived as pure thought and the world condemned as material, but between the transcendent God who is too high to be expressed in the loftiest category of thought and the realm of the finite as such. His problem, accordingly, is to find a medium of transition from this remote transcendent God to the time and space world. This bridge, if we may so describe it, Philo built of elements borrowed both from Judaism and from Greek philosophy. In Jewish theology, as the ethical qualities of God are subordinated to the supposed majesty of His transcendence, Divine acts are attributed to personified metaphysical properties. In particular, there is a tendency to hypostatize the Word of God and to ascribe to it almost as to a person the functions of creation and of judgment. At the same time Philo, as a student of Greek philosophy, found in Stoicism the conception of the Logos or immanent reason of the universe. From this twofold attitude of mind, Jewish and Greek, Philo reached the conception of a principle which is Divine and yet distinct from God, which serves as mediator between the transcendent God and the material world. To this principle he gave the name Logos, which thus gathered to itself the import of the double lineage of thought from which it is descended, and thus to Jew and Greek alike came laden with not entirely dissimilar associations. This famous designation stands as the symbol of the highest effort the mind of man has ever made to reach a synthesis of the seemingly discordant elements of the universe, and to discover a medium whereby the spirit of man can ascend into union with the distant incomprehensible Deity. The situation in the 1st cent. is not adequately described by saying that a great many individuals were adherents of the Stoic philosophy, or of the Alexandrian theology; rather must we imagine an intellectual atmosphere full of the speculations which find a shorthand expression in the term Logos. This phrase is continually on the lips of men. It tells at once of what they sought and of what they thought they had found. Any new message coming to such a world must reckon with this phrase and all it stood for. That the Logos doctrine, whether in its Stoic or Philonic aspect, failed to solve the problem which awakened self-consciousness was stating so fully, and failed to regenerate either the individual or society, is the obvious fact. The reason of its failure is that the reconciliation which it offers is in idea merely, not in historic fact; in thought, and not in life. The opposition between God and the world is so stated as to make the conquest of it not merely difficult, but impossible. On the one side is God, conceived as pure thought, or as something still more remote, ethereal, indescribable. On the other is the universe of matter, in which man is immersed, finding in his body and its relations with the material world his sepulchre and his shame. How shall these two ever meet? The Logos bridge which God throws across the gulf cannot reach to the other, the lower side. The Logos is too ethereal, too Divine, to take to itself any particle of the material world, or to redeem any life which is bound up with matter. Man, for his part, cannot reach, stretch or leap as he will, even the extremity of that gleaming bridge. Matter will not be so easily got rid of. In the semi-physical ecstasy, which was man’s last effort to reach the confines of the spiritual world, the flesh found itself still the victor. God and man belong to too disparate universes. They cannot be at one.
(3) In order to complete even so hasty a sketch of the spiritual situation in the Hellenic-Roman world at the advent of Christianity, it is necessary to note the fresh and more hopeful point of view presented by the religion of Israel. (a) Its presupposition is not the contrast, but the affinity of God and man. On the one hand, God is like man. Anthropomorphism is not false, for human nature is the reflex of the Divine, and the attributes of man do therefore, inadequately but not falsely, represent the attributes of God. On the other hand, man is like God, capable of communion with Him, as one person is with another, finding in that fellowship his true life. The Greek dualism of God and the universe, of form and matter, is unknown to the OT. Whatever mediation is wanted is found in man himself, who is creation’s crown, to whom nature is bound by community of substance, in whose destiny, for weal or woe, nature is profoundly implicated. (b) Its analysis is wholly different from, and far deeper than, the Greek. It lays bare, not distance between God and man, as between two disparate natures, but a breach, as between two persons who ought to have been at one, but are now, through the action of the dependent personality, woefully opposed. The gulf to be bridged, therefore, is not that between form and matter, but between will and will. To overcome this no one of the Divine attributes, but God Himself alone, will suffice. (c) The goal of the religion of Israel, accordingly, is the indwelling of God in man. The coming of Jehovah in His fulness is the end to which the prophets of Israel look. When He comes, Israel will be restored, and the universe, sharing the blessing, will itself be renovated. They conceived this coming of the Lord without perspective, and in the forms belonging to the world of their own day. In this way alone could the hope of the coming of the Lord have sustained and comforted their own spirits; only in such forms could they have proclaimed it to others who, like themselves, waited for the consolation of Israel. The spiritual history of the devout in Israel, accordingly, is one of continual disillusionment. Form after form broke like mist; and still the perfect form in which the presence of Jehovah would be fully realized did not come. It is little wonder, therefore, that the hope of Israel did not retain its purity and spirituality, save in the hearts of an inner circle of whom the theologians and politicians of the time took no account,—the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the pure in heart. Comparison between the two lines of development, that of Greek philosophy and that of the religion of Israel, shows that the ruling idea of both was union with God, and, through this, the unifying of all the elements of the life of man and of nature. On neither line had the goal been reached. In the one there was at best an occasional and intermittent experience of ecstasy. In the other there was, in the deepest natures, a hoping against hope, that God would yet visit His people.
Into such a world, Jewish and Hellenic, Christianity entered, with the declaration that what men had been seeking had come to pass, that union with God was no longer a mere dream or a wistful hope, but an accomplished fact. God, so the announcement runs, has united Himself with one Man, so that all men may, in this Man, who is both Christ and Logos, become one with God. The reconciliation of God and man is effected not merely in idea, but in a historic Person. He is both God and man, through Him men have access to God, in Him man and the universe are gathered into unity, and are perfected in their being. He is, with respect to the Divine purpose, at once
1. The first is positive, His perfect goodness. This quality is to be sought, and is found, in all the relations in which Jesus stood to His fellowmen and to God. (1) Between Him and God the relations were such as never existed in the case of any other man. They include: (a) perfect knowledge, (b) perfect love. Jesus knew God directly and fully, with the complete intimacy of a Son, nay, of one who, in comparison with all other men, is the Son (Mat 11:27). He beheld Divine realities with immediate vision, and reported what He had seen and heard (Joh 1:18; Joh 6:46; Joh 8:38; Joh 15:15). We see in Jesus one whose vision of God was absolutely undimmed, whose intercourse with God was unhindered by any incapacity on His part to receive, or to respond to, the communications of God to Him. Jesus, moreover, loved God with the strength of a nature which had never been injured by any breach with God. In His love for God there is no trace of the compunctions, the heart-breaking memories, which make the love of the redeemed a thing compounded of tears and pain, as well as of adoration and gladness. It shows itself in serene and unbroken trust, which continually depends on the Father’s gifts (Joh 5:20; Joh 5:30; Joh 7:16; Joh 14:10; Joh 14:24), and in perfect and comprehensive obedience, which owned no other will than the Father’s (Luk 2:49, Joh 4:34; Joh 6:38). Thus loving God, He was aware that God loved Him, and did continually pour upon Him the fulness of a Divine love which found no limitations in the spiritual receptivity of its object. The Divine love, which returns from every other object restrained by incapacity or wounded by misunderstanding, is concentrated upon Christ, abides and has free course in Him, and returns to its source in God completely satisfied and rejoicing with eternal joy. Nothing less than complete mutual indwelling and perfect mutual joy of fellowship are unveiled to us in the communings between Jesus and God, to which the narratives reverently admit us.
(2) Between Jesus and His fellow-men the relations are no less perfect. It is true, He could not realize in His own case all possible circumstances in which a man might be placed. But He could, and did, hold such an attitude to men as would enable Him to enter with perfect sympathy and entire appropriateness into any situation into which Divine Providence might conduct a man. In a word, He loved men. It is abundantly evident that He knew them, both in the broad qualities of humanity and in the individual features of the lives which came before Him. The amazing fact, accordingly is, that, in spite of such knowledge, He loved men, believed in their high destiny, yearned to save them, and was ready to give the supreme proof of His love by dying for them.
We conclude, then, that Jesus was good, not merely as being one of a class of men upon whom we may pass this verdict without setting them thereby apart from their fellows, but as standing alone in the completeness of His ethical achievement. His character bears the mark of attainment and finality. All other goodness is to be estimated by the measure in which it approximates to His. This is not matter of dogma but of observation. It is a clear inference from the moral history of the race subsequent to His appearing. It is a fact that He is the ethical head of humanity. To say this, however is to define Him as more than man. However we may construe His person, it will be impossible to confine ourselves to a merely humanitarian interpretation of it. ‘He who alone stands in this universal relation to humanity cannot be merely a member of it’ (Forrest, Christ of History, etc. p. 66).
2. The second is negative, His absolute sinlessness. The evidence of the portrait constrains us to conclude, not merely that Jesus was a very good man, in whom there was ‘the minimum of sinfulness’ and ‘the maximum of holiness,’ but that in Him was no sin. The testimony of His contemporaries might not suffice to establish this result, though it is, indeed, most impressive to note how those who knew Him intimately bear unanimous and most solemn testimony to His sinlessness, and ascribe to Him an office which could be held only by an absolutely holy person (1Pe 1:19; 1Pe 2:22; 1Pe 3:18, 1Jn 2:1; 1Jn 3:5, Act 3:14; Act 7:52; Act 22:14). The weight of proof lies in His own consciousness. It is beyond question that in that consciousness there was no sense of personal unworthiness, of shortcomings or failures, even the slightest. He who taught others to pray for forgiveness, and never besought it of the Divine mercy for Himself; He who proclaimed the necessity of regeneration for all men, and Himself never passed through any such phase of experience; He who in tenderest sympathy drew close to the sinner’s side, and yet always manifested a singular aloofness of spirit, and never included Himself among the objects of the Divine compassion; He who made it His vocation to die for the remission of sins, must have been, in actual fact, sinless:—either that, or He must have been sunk in a moral darkness more profound than sin ordinarily produces, even in the worst of men. The sinlessness of Jesus is a fact whose possibility ought not to be questioned through mere unwillingness to admit the inferences which follow from it. If Jesus is sinless, He stands alone in the moral history of the race. He cannot be classed along with other men, however good and great. They are approximations to an ideal. He is the Ideal. This uniqueness, moreover, cannot be interpreted as that of a lusus naturae, or a special product of creative power. The difference between Jesus and other good men is this, that while He has produced a conviction of sin immeasurably more profound than they have evoked among their admirers, He has also awakened a confidence and a peace which they have never wrought in their closest imitators. Unnumbered multitudes of human souls have come under regenerative and sanctifying influences, which, without doubt, have emanated from His personality, and which have wrought in them a type of character which is the reflex of His. There is only one place in which a reverent and open-minded study of the character of Christ can set Him, and that is beside God, as essentially Divine. He is certainly human. The closer we draw to Him, the more clearly do we discern His humanity. There is nothing, sin excepted, to divide us from Him. Pain and sorrow, temptation and conflict, discipline and growth,—He knows them all. In His universality all the endless variety of human experiences is comprehended; so that He is kinsman of every family on earth, contemporary of every generation, neighbour and friend of every soul that breathes and suffers. Yet this very humanity is the unveiling of Divinity. If, because of His humanity, we have been inclined to draw Him into our ranks, we soon find that He will not be thus classified. He is man, yet more than man—the Holy One of God. He was born a man, yet His birth was not the inevitable product of physiological and racial conditions; it was the entrance into humanity of one whose home and native air were elsewhere. They were within the circle of Divinity. See, further, art. Sin, § 7.
A study of the character of Christ does not provide us with a ready-made dogma of the constitution of His person. Two things, however, it does effect: (a) it sets the person of Christ in the centre of Christianity as its main declaration and its most cogent proof; (b) it makes a merely humanitarian construction of His personality for ever impossible. We are constrained to conceive of the sinless Christ, not as the bloom and efflorescence of humanity, but rather as One who has entered into humanity on an errand of profound significance for the moral history of the race. We turn, therefore, once more to the portrait in the Gospels, to see if the consciousness of Jesus reveals any traces of a uniqueness of personal constitution corresponding to the uniqueness of His character. If such there be, they will both sustain the impression of His sinlessness, and derive from it their true interpretation. Supernatural functions and gifts would mean nothing for mankind apart from ethical perfection.
B. The self-witness of Jesus.—It is noteworthy that Jesus does not discuss the constitution of His Person, and gives none of the definitions with which theology has been rife. This is an indication of the truthfulness of the narrative, and shows that it has been to a wonderful degree untouched by the doctrinal development which we know had preceded its earliest written form. It suggests, moreover, that the very highest construction that can be put on the words of Christ is no more than the truth. If, in truth, Jesus be the highest that is said of Him, this is precisely the method which He would adopt in order to disclose the transcendent aspect of His being. He would make no categorical statements regarding it, but would leave it to be apprehended through the total impression of His personality.
i. His claims.—As soon as we return to the portrait, we are impressed by the extraordinary claims which Jesus makes on His own behalf. He is perfect in humility; and yet, combined with the utmost gentleness, the most winning loveliness, there is an assertion of His own supreme importance, which is at once profound and sublime. These claims are sometimes stated explicitly; more frequently they are implied in what He says and does. In any case, they are inseparable from what He believes Himself to be. They enter into the very texture of the narrative. They are wrought of the very fibre of the personality of Him who makes them. Whatever quality of being is required to make them valid, we must impute to Him who deliberately advances them. Without presuming to make a complete enumeration, we note the following among the offices and functions which Jesus avowedly claims to hold and fulfil.
1. Teacher.—In Jesus’ discharge of this office, certain features at once attract attention.
(1) The solitariness of the office. There were in Jesus’ day many teachers of religion, and the title of Rabbi, commonly given to them, He accepted (Mar 14:14, Joh 13:13-14). These others, however, were prepared to be followed by successors who might wear their title and inherit their honours. But Jesus claimed to be a teacher in a sense in which He could not be followed by any of His disciples, however learned and pious (Mat 23:8). He did not aim at raising up men who should succeed Him in this office. His office of teacher is His alone. No doubt there came to be in the Church certain men upon whom the Spirit of God conferred a special gift of knowledge, who were accordingly recognized as ‘teachers’ (1Co 12:28). But teachers after the pattern of Christ were not to be instituted, and were not needed in the new Society (1Th 4:9, 1Jn 2:27). This solitariness of His office is a remarkable fact. He was, then, the bearer of a message which could not be pronounced by other lips than His, which originated in the depths of His consciousness, and owed all its significance and value to the personality of Him who declared it.
(2) The note of authority.—This could not be missed, and, in one who had not received the special training of a school Rabbi, it was profoundly impressive. When the people heard His first sermon in Capernaum, ‘they were astonished at his teaching: for he taught them as having authority, and not as the scribes’ (Mar 1:22). The source of this authority lies in the quality of His mind, which directly sees things Divine. His teaching is not the issue of a dialectic process; it is of the nature of a report, and implies that the Teacher lives in a habitual intercourse with God, such as no other man ever enjoyed (Joh 3:11). His authority, therefore, is His own absolutely. He quotes no other Rabbi, leans on no human opinion, however sound and wise. Move amazing still, He does not use the formula which marks the supernatural authority of a prophet, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ For this He substitutes the simpler, more astounding phrase, ‘I say unto you.’ ‘He speaks at all times with the same absolute conviction and consciousness of His Divine right. There is majesty in His least utterance, and it is nowhere more easily recognized than in the unvarnished record of the Gospel according to St. Mark’ (Swete, Studies in the Teaching of our Lord, p. 64). Many men have been intoxicated by their own conceit; but the swelling vanity of their tone has easily been detected. When Jesus employs the note of authority, He is simply being true to His own inner consciousness, which, to its inmost core, is clear, genuine, and reliable.
(3) The originality of the teaching.—It would be a mistake to attribute to Jesus the independence of a mind which excluded all possible sources of information or instruction, and operated only in a medium of its own imaginations or conceptions. Relations may be traced between the teaching of Jesus and ideas which found lodgment in other minds than His; yet His originality is not thereby infringed. Thus, for instance, His teaching was couched in the terminology and in the forms of thought common to the religious teaching of His day. A parallel might easily be drawn to illustrate this (cf. Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the NT, p. 71 ff.). This, however, in no way lowers the value of the teaching of Jesus. Ideas are not necessarily valueless, because found in Rabbinical theology. By taking them up into His larger and loftier thought, Jesus has placed upon them the stamp of His authority. The central idea of the teaching, moreover, is not borrowed from contemporary thought. The spirituality of the Kingdom of God is Jesus’ special contribution to the religious life of His day. This conception is all His own, and is the organizing power of all His teaching. Attempts to set aside certain parts of His teaching as derived from external sources, and as being, therefore, of no permanent value, wreck themselves upon the fact that He was certainly no eclectic, and that His teaching has none of the features of a patchwork. His originality consists in the synthetic, transforming power of His mind. Again, His teaching is not independent of, rather is it rooted in, the OT. He Himself repudiated the idea that He was breaking with the religion of Israel. He does claim, however, to ‘fulfil’ the Law and the Prophets (Mat 5:17).
Law and Prophets, which are thus conjoined in Jesus’ speech (Mat 7:12; Mat 11:13; Mat 22:35-40), are equivalent to the OT taken as a whole, and viewed, in its ethical and spiritual significance, as the utterance of the Divine mind regarding the relations of God and man. This, therefore, i.e. the inspired record of God’s revelation, Jesus claims to fulfil, to preserve and perfect, to retain and develop. We are not to water down the implicit claim. Who can undertake to give the true inwardness of the Divine thought, and carry to completion the eternal purpose? Through the prophets God speaks ‘by divers portions.’ When He speaks finally and fully, His spokesman can he none other than His Son (Heb 1:1).
Once more, the originality of Jesus appears most strikingly in the fact that He traces all His teaching to His Father (Joh 7:16). The very refusal of the claim to be independent of God is itself a claim of the most stupendous kind. He whose words and deeds are entirely the speaking and acting of God in Him, between whom and God there is complete intimacy and uninterrupted reciprocity of thought and purpose, stands apart from all human teachers, even the most brilliant and the most original. His teaching is not His own. It is the message of Another, even of Him who sent Him to carry it to the human race.
(4) The future of the teaching.—Teachers die: their great thoughts perish not. Socrates passed from the market-place; but Plato and Aristotle, those real Socratics, took up the threads of thought, and wove them into systems which have dominated the intellectual world ever since. It is noticeable, however, that this has not been the history of the ideas of Jesus. He uttered them, and then passed from the scene of His labours. But no disciple took them and expanded them into a system. No philosophical or theological system to-day can claim to be His. He Himself predicted a much more remarkable future for His teaching. He would have a successor, indeed, but not St. Peter with his vigour, or St. John with his speculative gift. The successor of Jesus in the teaching office is none other than the Spirit of God (Joh 16:12-15). He will take the thoughts of Jesus and unfold their meaning, and apply their vitalizing power to the questionings of all successive generations of men, till, finally, all uncertainties are resolved in the light of the eternal day. It is certain that He who ‘sat thus by the well’ and talked with a woman, who preached in synagogues, and taught in the Temple, had this consciousness of Himself as initiating a teaching which was destined to continue, through the power of the Spirit of God, unfailing, imperishable, and indefeasible. In respect of this also, Jesus stands apart from and superior to all other teachers of men.
2. Legislator.—Jesus is more than a teacher, whether of the type of a Jewish Rabbi or of that of a Greek philosopher. The disciple band is more than a group of docile souls, who may be expected to assimilate and propagate the ideas of their Master. The analogy of the Schools fails to give us Jesus’ point of view. He has before Him the Kingdom of God, which has existed throughout the past ages of Israel’s history, and is now about to pass into a new stage of realization. He speaks, accordingly, not so much in the character of a communicator of new ideas, as in that of a legislator laying down principles upon which the community of God shall be built or rebuilt, delivering laws which shall guide it in its future history. The tone of Jesus is not that of a prophet who, standing within the Kingdom, a member of it, like those whom he addresses, speaks out of the circumstances of his age, and addresses to his fellow-citizens words of warning, of counsel, of rebuke, and of hope. Jesus stands consciously on a far higher platform, and does not class Himself with those whom He addresses, as though He and they bore the same relation to the Law. They are not His fellow-citizens. They are His subjects, citizens of the community of which He is head and lawgiver. The laws of the Kingdom He promulgates by His own personal authority. Six times in the Sermon on the Mount He sets aside ‘that which was spoken to them of old time,’ and substitutes a rule of His own. In doing so, however, He is no mere revolutionary, He is taking the inner spiritual principle of the old Law, and liberating it from the restrictions which had protected it in the time of man’s pupilage. After the same manner He interprets and applies the Sabbath law (Mar 2:27-28). In dealing with perversions of the Law He is still more peremptory and drastic; e.g. as to fasting (Mar 2:18 ff.) and ceremonial purification (Mar 7:5 ff.). The consciousness of One who thus legislates for the Kingdom is not that of a prophet, not even of the greatest of the prophets, who was God’s instrument in the first founding of the community, and received the law at His hands. It is rather that of One in whom God comes to His people, who is the Divinely appointed King in Israel, whose relation to God is closer than any mere man’s can be, who speaks, therefore, with the very authority of God Himself.
3. Messiah.—The sense in which Jesus claimed the title of Messiah is certainly not to be gathered from any views regarding the Messiah entertained by His contemporaries. The clue is to be sought in Jesus’ attitude towards the OT. (a) He regards the OT as a unity. Critical questions are not before His mind, and upon them He pronounces no judgment. ‘David, ‘Moses,’ ‘Isaiah’ are simply terms of reference. What He does lay hold of is the unity of the revelation. One mind is revealed. One self-consistent purpose moves amid these varied scenes and ages. (b) He conceives the Divine purpose in the OT to be redemptive. The heart of the OT is union with God, the formation of a spiritual fellowship in which God is fully known and men enter upon the position and privilege of sons. In this connexion He preaches the Kingdom not merely as at hand (Mar 1:15), but as present in commanding power (Mat 12:28). Thus He appropriates to Himself as descriptive of His own work the picture language of Isa 61:1-4. So also in the most solemn hour of His life, when He was on the verge of laying it down, He claimed redemptive efficacy for His death in accordance with the oracle of the new covenant (Mat 26:28, Jer 31:31). This was central in the consciousness of Jesus. An eschatology, no doubt, He had; but it was subordinate to the spiritual conception of redemption, and represented in terms of current thought the consummation of redemption in the world to come. Messiahship, accordingly, meant for Jesus the vocation in which the redemptive purpose of God, which had been growing to completion through the history of Israel, would be fulfilled. We can understand, therefore, how unwilling He would be to receive such a title, when its meaning in the minds of those who used it differed widely from His own conception of it; how glad He would be to accept it when it was applied to Him, not because of His supposed fulfilment of popular requirements, but in spite of His obvious non-fulfilment of these demands; and how careful He would be to train those who clung to Him as Messiah in the apprehension of His own transformed idea of it.
The passages which may be adduced as proof of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus all exhibit His own interpretation of Messiahship, as the calling of the agent of a Divine work of redemption.
(1) The Baptism.—(For discussion of Baptism and Temptation, see art. Character of Christ, p. 285f.) This is evidently much more than installation into a prophetical office. It was the solemn acceptance by Jesus of the vocation of Messiah interpreted with reference to the taking away of sin. For such an office, a personal rank superior to that of all other men, and a personal endowment of the Spirit in a measure which no other man could receive, were essential.
(2) The sermon at Nazareth. Here the Messianic era is described in terms of intense spirituality; and the Speaker claims to be the Messiah in a sense which identifies Him with the Servant of the Lord (Luk 4:16-30).
(3) The reply to John the Baptist. To the question ‘Art thou he that cometh?’ He makes a reply which is at once an affirmation and an interpretation. He is the Messiah, not after a political sort, employing external or catastrophic instrumentality, but of a far higher order, employing means which reach to the depth of man’s necessity (Mat 11:2-6, cf. Isa 35:5-6).
(4) The estimate of John the Baptist. In Mat 11:10 John is the messenger of Mal 3:1 who prepares the way for Jehovah, or for the Angel of the Covenant, who is identified with Jehovah. In Mar 9:12-13 John is Elijah, the precursor of the Messiah; while in Mar 1:2-3 he is identified with the ‘voice’ of Isa 40:3-5. The implied claim on the part of Jesus, which the Evangelist repeats, is to a personal dignity not less than that of One whose coming is, at the same time, the coming of Jehovah to His people.
(5) The threefold call of the disciples. The call mentioned in the Fourth Gospel (Joh 1:35-41) is necessary to render intelligible that which is mentioned first by the Synoptists (Mar 1:16-20, Mat 4:18-22, Luk 5:10-11). The third call in the ordination to Apostleship (Mar 3:13-14) is the culmination of the series. Messiahship and Apostleship thus receive progressive interpretation. The Kingdom, the King, and high rank even like that of prince in a tribe of Israel, are all to be interpreted in a manner that confounds and contradicts popular theory.
(6) The answer to Peter. Into one moment of intense emotional strain and profound spiritual instruction are compressed (a) joyous recognition of faith’s insight and grasp (Mat 16:17); (b) solemn illumination of the truth which faith had thus, with little intelligent apprehension, made its own (Mar 8:27-31). The Messianic calling has an aim which is reached through death and resurrection. He who is competent to carry out such a scheme does not stand in the same rank of being with other men. Jesus’ doctrine of His person is never dogmatically announced. It is none the less, rather all the more, impressively taught, because He allows it to grow upon the minds of believers as an irresistible inference.
(7) It is significant that Jesus’ claims to Messiahship become more explicit toward the close of His career. No doubt the explanation is that misapprehension was scarcely now possible. If He be—as He is—a King, it is through humiliation He passes to His glory (Mar 11:1-11; Mar 11:15-19; Mar 13:5-6; Mar 14:61-62; Mar 15:2).
4. Saviour.—(1) Jesus’ view of sin, in respect of its guilt, and power, and pollution, was the very gravest. Yet He did not hesitate to announce Himself as able to save men from an evil for which the OT provided no institute of deliverance. He forgave sin (Mat 9:6). He restored the outcast (Luk 7:48-50; Luk 19:10). He died to make good His claims as Redeemer (Mat 26:28). This negative form of salvation, however, is not that upon which alone, or even usually, He dwells. He dwells rather on the positive aspect of salvation, and claims to be able to bestow upon men the highest blessing of which the OT revelation can conceive, viz. life. Not merely does He promise it in the future, but He bestows it in the present. He possesses life (Joh 5:26). He bestows life (Joh 6:57). His words convey life (Joh 6:63). Those who believe in Him are media of life to others (Joh 7:38). Life consists fundamentally in knowledge of God, and of Himself as the Christ (Joh 17:3). If we admit that the Fourth Gospel has reproduced the teaching of Jesus with substantial accuracy, it is impossible not to recognize the superhuman nature of Jesus’ self-consciousness. The Jews might well strive with one another (Joh 6:52) as to what His words meant. They certainly conveyed a claim which no mere man could offer in his own behalf.
(2) There is only one possible response on the part of men to the Divine saving act, viz. faith, as personal trust. There can be no doubt that Jesus did require faith in Himself, and, in so doing, consciously stood toward men in a place that can be filled by God only. It is true that the words ‘believe in me’ occur but rarely in the Synoptics (Mar 9:42, Mat 18:6). But if they have not the phrase, they have the fact. In Beyschlag’s well-known words, ‘the conduct of those who sought His help, to whom He says so often “thy faith hath saved thee,” is, at bottom, a faith in Christ.’ So also, confessing Him (Mat 10:32), praying in His name (Mat 18:20), coming to Him and learning of Him (Mat 11:28-30), are, in essence, religious acts. What is implicit in the Synoptics becomes explicit in the Fourth Gospel (Joh 11:25; Joh 12:46; Joh 14:1; Joh 16:9, in which cases the use of
6. Worker of Miracles.—If we take the standpoint of monism, that there is only one substance, and only one set of laws appropriate to it, or that of dualism or parallelism, that spiritual and material facts belong to two distinct and incommunicable orders of being, we shall find it impossible to believe in miracle; and we shall condemn, as mistaken, Jesus’ evident belief that He was able to seal His redemptive activities by works of superhuman power in the realm of physical nature. If, however, we hold the theistic position, which Jesus Himself held, that between God and the universe there is neither pantheistic identification nor dualistic separation, but that God maintains constant contact with the world which He has made, and directs the activities of which He is the source, towards ends in harmony with His own nature, then we shall find it possible to believe in those interventions of spiritual power in the domain of physical nature, which we call miracle. The only question we shall ask—apart from that of evidence—is that of need. In a perfect universe there might be no need for miracle. In the universe as we know it there is abundant need. Redemption is needed, at once ethical and cosmical. The Kingdom of God is miraculous in its very nature. Miracles, therefore, naturally will attend its advent into the realm of time and space. They are altogether congruous with the mission of Jesus. They are ‘signs’ of the Kingdom, the characteristic ‘works’ of Him in whom the Kingdom comes. Such, in any case, was the conviction of Jesus. Before the forces of nature, and of the obscure spirit-world that borders on the physical, in presence of disease and death, He did not own Himself conquered. He bore Himself as Master, as One to whom God’s universe lay open, so that its powers were at His disposal for the furtherance of the cause committed to Him. This commanding authority of His was an element in that impression of supernatural greatness which He made on those who came under His influence (Mar 1:27, Luk 5:8).
7. Creator of the New Israel.—The word
8. Judge.—Our view of eschatology will depend on our conception of history. If we believe in the progressive accomplishment of a Divine purpose we shall anticipate a climax, in which the whole movement will be complete. In that case we shall not be able to set aside ‘Messianism’ as irrelevant to the essence of religion. Our Lord certainly regarded redemption as a process to be continued through a lapse of time, whose culmination would form the completion of the world’s history; and, at the highest point of that culmination, He placed Himself. Amid the many difficulties, textual and other, which surround the eschatology of Jesus, it seems clear that He keeps close to the OT representations, without committing Himself to the details elaborated in later literature. In one all-important point, however, He modifies the OT representation; where the OT placed Jehovah, Jesus places Himself as Judge (Mat 7:21-23; Mat 13:30; Mat 13:41; Mat 16:27; Mat 25:11-12; Mat 25:31 ff., Luk 13:25-27).
In the Fourth Gospel there is another judgment, one which belongs to the present time, and is carried out through the presence or the word of Christ (Joh 3:17-21; Joh 12:47-48). This, however, is not inconsistent with a final judgment, but is rather its precursor; while the final judgment itself is not absent from the representations of the Fourth Gospel (Joh 12:48; Joh 5:27-28; cf. 1Jn 2:28; 1Jn 4:17).
Here, then, is the climax of our Lord’s self-assertion. There is manifest in this claim a consciousness which we should pronounce insane were it not that of the humblest and sanest man the world ever saw. Nothing can warrant such a claim, nothing justify such a consciousness, save the hypothesis that Jesus had a higher being than appertains to men, and that, as arising from this constitution of His person, He had universal functions which none other than Himself could exercise.
ii. His self-designations.—The claims of Jesus, accordingly, direct us to conclude that He believed Himself to be human indeed, yet at the same time One who was related to God, in the ground and origin of His being, as no other man could be. From this consciousness the functions He claimed relative to humanity must have been derived. It must have been on the ground of what He was, and knew Himself to be, in the inherent quality of His being, that He set Himself forth as tailed and enabled to do certain acts in and for mankind.
It was impossible for men to listen to His claims without inquiring as to His person. Nay, He Himself stimulated the inquiry, and displayed, if one may so say, an anxiety to know what men were thinking of Him. What help, if any, does He give us in seeking for an answer? It is certain that He will not give us definitions after the style of the creeds, or analytic descriptions in the manner of a modern handbook of psychology. The most, and the best, He can do for us, is to grant such unveilings of what was and must remain His secret, as shall enable us, under the requisite spiritual conditions, to know Him and to trust Him. Christ is not a proposition to be proved, or an object to be dissected. He is a Person to be known. By what names, then, does He will to be known? Among the titles or descriptive phrases by which He designates Himself, two are of supreme importance. The discussions regarding their meaning form a kind of register of the history of modern Christology. If the Person of Christ be the centre of the Church’s faith, and the apprehension of it be the note of the Church’s growth, these discussions cannot be expected to reach scientific finality. The titles stand for all that Christ means in the experience of His disciples, and their wealth of meaning is, therefore, too rich for our exegetical skill to tabulate.
1. The Son of Man.—Three questions are pertinent to our present purpose.
(1) Whence did Jesus derive the title?—It would not have been necessary to ask this question—the title might have been at once accepted as invented by Jesus Himself—were it not that a phrase, suggestive of it, occurs both in the later apocalyptic literature and in the OT, in unmistakably Messianic connexions. It is inconceivable that Jesus should have adopted this title, and not have meant it to designate Himself, as the personal realization of what was but vaguely suggested in the indefinite phrase of Dan 7:13. We infer, therefore, that the title ‘Son of Man’ stood on Jesus’ lips as equivalent to the title ‘Messiah,’ which He would not use unless and until His use of it could not be misapprehended.
The title, moreover, is not arbitrary or empty. It suggests the type of Messiah which Jesus believed Himself to be, and the kind of actions through which He intended to fulfil His Messianic vocation. The passage in Daniel, taken as a whole, turns on the contrast between two kinds of sovereignty—that which is won by brute force, and that which belongs to a being not brutal but human. But this is precisely Jesus’ conception of His Messiahship, viz. a sovereignty to be won through service. There is another passage which ought not to be forgotten when we ask for the sources of Jesus’ idea of the Son of Man, viz. Isaiah 53. It may be too much to say that Jesus intended ‘Son of Man’ to be a synonym for ‘Servant of the Lord,’ though His use of the title in Mar 9:12 is significant. But it is certain that He filled the phrase ‘Son of Man’ with the contents of that other conception, and meant by ‘Son of Man’ to identify ‘Messiah’ with the Servant who, in the prophetic vision, passed through suffering to glory.
(2) How did He use it?—Let the relative passages be placed before us, as is done in Driver’s great art., ‘Son of Man’ in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , and at once a twofold use reveals itself. One class of passages describes the work which Messiahship entails upon Him, His manner of effecting it, and His relation to those for whom it is done. It is a redemptive work; it is performed in lowliest service and profoundest suffering; its motive is deep, true sympathy with men in their needy condition. The other class contains references to the sovereignty which is now hidden by the lowliness, though in no sense inconsistent with it (Mar 10:42 ff.), which, when the ends of humiliation are achieved, will be demonstrated in the face of the universe. Together these passages set forth a Messiah whose work is the redemption of men, through a life of service and suffering, and a death which has in it the quality of an atonement, a Messiah whose faithfulness to His vocation will be crowned with royal honours.
(3) What does He reveal as to His own Person in it?—The interpretation of the title as ‘representative ‘or ‘ideal’ man is surely too modern to be an accurate reflexion of Jesus’ own mode of thinking. We shall not be in error, however, if we read in the title Jesus’ identification of Himself with men, His profound insight into their condition and His acceptance of it as His own, His taking upon Himself the griefs from which they suffer, and His achieving, in the depths of His suffering, their deliverance. The title, accordingly, sums up the relations in which Jesus stands to men. He touches human nature at every point. It is true He is sinless; but this fact, so far from hindering His perfect sympathy with men, is its necessary pre-condition. Just because He is sinless, His identification with men can be complete, and He can be to men what no other can be. He can do for men what not one of themselves can do. The fulness of His humanity distinguishes Him from all individual members of the race. He is not ‘a man’; He is ‘the Son of Man,’ the kinsman of every man, the Head and King of redeemed and reconstituted humanity.
Here is a gracious fact, verifiable in the experience of every man who will yield his heart to this Saviour and Lord. This very fact, however, opens depths of mystery within itself. Who is He who is perfect man? What is the basis of this human sonship? It cannot be a Personality, limited as ours is, needing, as ours does, some bond beyond itself to connect it with God. He who can stand in this unique relation to men must stand also in a unique relation to God. See also art. Son of Man.
2. The Son of God.—This title, as Jesus used it or accepted it, is plainly derived from the OT, where it is applied to the theocratic people (Exo 4:22, Hos 11:1), to the theocratic King (2Sa 7:14, Psa 89:26-27), and to the Messiah (Psa 2:7). The OT usage evidently is not barely official, but shows a growth in spirituality of connotation and in definiteness of application. It would be too much to suppose that any OT prophet clearly discerned the Divinity of the Messiah; but at least the prophetic vision catches sight of One who should stand in a spiritual relation to God closer than that which can possibly be occupied by any member of the theocracy. The title, accordingly, as it applies to the Messiah, does not express barely His office, but rather some quality of His person which is superhuman, and is the source of reverent awe in the minds of those who contemplate the thought of Him. There is a vagueness in it which excludes either a dogmatic definition of His Divinity, or a merely humanitarian view of His person. When it occurs in the NT, we cannot get rid of it by pointing out that it simply means ‘the Messiah.’ No doubt it means the Messiah; but it connotes that in the man who claims to be the Messiah which lifts Him above the level of mankind.
(1) We cannot draw any definite inference from the use of it by demoniacs, or by Satan in the Temptation narrative. Probably, however, as the idea of the ‘subliminal’ sphere which engirdles our conscious life makes its way into psychology, men will he more likely to give weight to narratives which imply that between such unhappy beings and Jesus there existed mutual knowledge, and that He exerted over them a peculiar and direct authority, in that case the title on their lips would certainly be a description of the superhuman dignity and power which He possessed.
(2) Neither can we base a doctrinal proposition on the expression used by the high priest (Mar 14:61, Mat 26:63), for the charge of claiming to be ‘the Christ’ did not carry with it the verdict of capital punishment. The addition ‘Son of God ‘or ‘Son of the Blessed’ looks like a climax, in St. Luke’s narrative (Luk 22:66-71) the question, ‘if thou art the Christ’ (Luk 22:67), is separated from the second, ‘Art thou then the Son of God?’ (Luk 22:70), by Jesus’ claim to Divine honours (Luk 22:69). The impression made by the scene is that our Lord’s judges understood Him to be claiming superhuman dignity. This claim they regarded as blasphemous, and it formed ipso facto the warrant of the death sentence.
(3) Peter’s ascription in Mat 16:16 has some doubt thrown on it by the absence of the clause ‘the Son of the living God’ from the parallel passages in Mark and Luke. Yet an argument based on omissions is precarious. St. Matthew had access to special sources. His version has the ring of genuineness; and it is to be noted that the benediction upon Peter is not found in Mark and Luke, where the ascription of Sonship is also awanting. If, then, we may accept the genuineness of the saying, we cannot, indeed, attribute to Peter a doctrine of his Master’a person which he could reach only through experience of the risen Christ; but, certainly, we note that he is far in advance of the momentary impression of Mat 14:33. He cannot mean less than that He to whom he speaks is the Son of Jehovah, having an intimacy with Him possessed by no other man, revealing Him as no other can, not even the greatest of the prophets. Peter knows nothing of dogma, but he has flung the plummet of his faith far into the depths of his Master’s being. In that moment of supreme spiritual uplift a revelation has been made to him which will carry him far in after days, of which the opening verses in Hebrews and the prologue to the Fourth Gospel will be no more than the adequate expression.
(4) When we turn to our Lord’s own testimony as to His Sonship toward God, we are at once lifted high above the merely official aspect of the designation. In the Synoptic Gospels He never uses the title ‘Son of God’; but His filial relation toward God is not for a moment in question. A son’s devotion to his father, a son’s utter trust in his father, a son’s joyful intercourse with his father—all these, raised to an immeasurable degree, are the characteristics of Jesus’ bearing toward God, If the phrase had never occurred in the OT, or fallen from any human lips regarding Him, none the less would any sympathetic view of the Figure portrayed have yielded the inference; Here is a man who in very deed is Son of God, in a sense to which no other man ever attained or could attain. The unique Sonship which Jesus knew Himself to possess gains express utterance in three great sayings (Mar 13:32; Mar 14:36 [cf. Luk 23:34; Luk 23:46] and Mat 11:27). The first of these sets the rank of the Son in a move conspicuous light, because Jesus is disclaiming a knowledge which, on the supposition that He was God’s Son, it might have been expected that He would possess. The second unveils the mystery of the Passion, the profound acceptance of the Father’s purpose in the midst of a suffering which the Father Himself appoints. The third, with its strongly Johannine phrasing, brings Jesus and the Father together in unique mutual knowledge. The loftiest Christology lies implicit in these words; and, in the consciousness which they express, the invitation which follows, addressed to all the weary and heavy laden, promising them rest, can alone find its warrant. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus is represented as using the exact phrase, ‘Son of God’ (Joh 5:25; Joh 9:35; Joh 10:36; Joh 11:4). In one of these passages, however, there is uncertainty as to the correct reading, and in the others the possibility that the author may have imported into the narrative phraseology of later date, may be admitted. But the correlative terms ‘the Father’ and ‘the Son’ abound; and no reader of the Fourth Gospel, whatever his critical views or theological prejudices may be, doubts that the deep consciousness of Jesus, revealed in such utterances (e.g. Joh 5:18, Joh 10:30; Joh 10:38, Joh 14:11, Joh 17:21) is that of a Sonship toward God which belongs to Himself alone of all the human race. Few, also, will be found to deny that the representations of the Fourth Gospel are not in excess of the portraiture of the Synoptic Gospels.
(5) The Divine attestation.—At the Baptism and the Transfiguration God solemnly attested the Divine Sonship of Jesus in words which reproduce the language of the OT (Psa 2:7, Isa 42:1). It is needless to discuss the ‘objective’ aspect of the communication. In any case, the attestation was, made direct to the consciousness of Jesus. The language is that of Messianic prophecy; but as it fell on Jesus’ inward ear, it was not a mere certification of His Messiahship, but rather a gracious assurance of that which interpreted for Him Messiahship, and made its achievement possible, viz. a relation toward God which lay deep in His being, and was the primary element in His self-knowledge.
How, then, are we to conceive the Sonship of Jesus toward God? Let us avoid modern abstractions, which were certainly not present to the mind of our Lord, or to any of those who came under His influence and have recorded their convictions. In particular, let us not be coerced by the supposed contrast between ‘ethical’ and ‘metaphysical,’ and by the alternative, which some writers would force upon us, of regarding the Divine Sonship of Jesus as being ethical merely, or of imputing to Him a metaphysical Sonship which is an importation from Greek philosophy. Ethical the Sonship of Jesus undoubtedly was. It manifested itself in knowledge of God and love to God, together with trust and obedience and other lovely qualities and experiences. The Sonship to which believers in Him are introduced is of this type, and is marked by the same characteristics. He Himself claims them as His brethren (Mar 3:35). But does this mean that He and they are of one class? Does His Sonship differ from theirs merely in degree? Is He unique only in the measure in which He realized the privileges of a filial standing, which, however, belongs to men simply as men? Is this the utmost impression that the whole portrait makes upon us? It certainly was not all that His Jewish auditors inferred from His self-witness. They declared that He was making Himself equal to God, and they would have killed Him for His blasphemy (Joh 5:18; Joh 8:59; Joh 10:31-33). Were they mistaken? He does not say so. His retort (Joh 10:34 ff.) is no earnest disclaimer; rather is it a reassertion of His essential unity with God. Surely this is the impression we gain from the record, that along with His intense nearness to men, there is a note of aloofness from them as of a Being of another order. Surely there are qualities in His Sonship that are incommunicable to men, aspects of it which can never be found in theirs. Could any of them ever say, ‘I and the Father are one?’ Could it be said of any one of them, that ‘to see him was to see the Father’? It is noteworthy, and ought to be final on this subject, that Jesus never classes Himself along with His disciples as if He and they were alike children of the Heavenly Father. He distinguishes Himself as the Son from all other sons of God (cf. Mat 6:32; Mat 10:29 with Mat 18:35, Mat 20:23). They become sons, He is the Son. The correlation between ‘the Father’ and ‘the Son’ is absolute, and excludes any other son of God from that unique and perfect; fellowship. When we weigh these things, the distinction between ethical and metaphysical becomes meaningless. The Sonship of Jesus has an ethical uniqueness which carries with it essential relations to God. His self-witness carries us to equality of being with God. As ‘Son of Man’ means humanity in the broadest, truest sense, so ‘Son of God’ means Divinity in the deepest signification of the term, which will require for its statement and defence the utmost range of reverent thought, while yet it cannot be comprehended or set forth in any formula.
This is the self-witness of Jesus. He is a Divine Being. His life in time under the conditions of humanity is not His whole life. He has come from a sphere wherein He dwelt with God, a conscious Person in equality with God. He entered into this world to execute a purpose which involved His complete oneness with humanity, and a sympathetic appropriation of a complete human experience; He had before Him, throughout His experience as a man, His return to the abode which He had left. His regaining the glory which, for purposes of infinite love, He had laid aside. He knew ‘that he came forth from God, and goeth unto God’ (Joh 13:3). These were facts which, in the nature of the case, could not be proved by any external evidence. Sympathetic hearts and open minds would be prepared for them. Narrow-minded, unspiritual, and prejudiced persons would reject them. The truth regarding His Personality stands or falls by His own self-witness: ‘Even if I bear witness of myself, my witness is true; for I know whence I came, and whither I go.’ Or, if another witness is wanted, there is Another who witnesses along with Him, even the Father in whom He abides (Joh 8:12-19). Of a mode of being which He had with God antecedent to His earthly life He could not speak freely. Necessarily, He could not but observe the utmost reticence regarding it. Nevertheless, His recollection of it was continually with Him, and occasionally, in great moments, for example in conflict with His critics, or in communion with His Father (Joh 6:62; Joh 8:58; Joh 17:5; Joh 17:24).
It will be said that this highest reach of the self-witness of Jesus opens out into sheer mystery; and attempts are continually being made to bring down the teaching of Jesus regarding Himself to the terms of mere humanity, with the view of making the record more intelligible, and making Jesus Himself more accessible to our imaginations. Such attempts wreck themselves through over-strenuousness of criticism and over-ingenuity of exegesis. Moreover, they defeat their own end. If Jesus is no more than man, the Gospel narrative is for ever unintelligible; and Jesus Himself remains behind in the past, at best a pathetic memory, at worst a mere enigma. The faith which regards Jesus as ‘the only-begotten Son,’ or ‘God only-begotten’ (Joh 1:18), is a just deduction from the narrative of His life and from His own self-witness. It supplies, moreover, the explanation which is wanted for the whole representation as it is given not merely in the Fourth Gospel, but in the Synoptic Gospels as well. The humanity of Jesus, with its completeness and universality, could belong only to One who was Son of God as well as Son of Man. The Messianic redemptive work of Jesus, in its efficacy, as sealing the new covenant, could be undertaken and discharged only by One who was, and knew Himself to be, the Son of God.
C. The witness of the Apostles.—The disciples of Jesus, even when He was with them as their Master and Teacher, were not a mere school. They were a community, enjoying the unexampled privilege of fellowship with the most wonderful Personality which ever impressed itself on human souls. For a brief space, which must have seemed an eternity of pain, they thought He had left them. Then He astounded, rebuked, and blessed them by His risen presence. Thus the disciples were reconstituted as a community, the secret of whose unity and vitality was fellowship with the unseen yet living Lord. This is their experience: Christ is risen; no hallucination, dream, or vision, but the Lord Himself as they had begun to know Him, and now know Him as they could never have known Him had He tarried through lapse of years in flesh among them. Now that He is risen they are less than ever a school; they are an Ecclesia, His Ecclesia, as He had said Himself (Mat 16:18), a fellowship of human beings, the hidden source of whose privileges and gifts is fellowship with the ever present Saviour and Head. To Him they owed that ‘loosing’ from sin which the elaborate institutes of the OT had failed to accomplish (Rev 1:5). From Him they derived that life which was the choicest privilege of the OT, but which could not be perfectly possessed till God was fully known (Joh 17:3). Christianity as it is presented in the NT is life in fellowship with Jesus Christ. Such an experience cannot be stationary. It must be a growth in the grace and the knowledge of Jesus Christ. The NT throbs and thrills with life, exultant, buoyant, hopeful; expanding, deepening, increasing in energy; not without weaknesses, relapses, defects; but ever correcting its faults, cleansing its stains, renewing its vitality through fellowship with Christ, who is its unfailing source. It is important to remind ourselves that the primary fact in the NT is an experience living and increasing; lest we be tempted to go to it as to a volume of philosophy, or a systematic statement of theology, demanding from it intellectual completeness, and feel proportionately disappointed if it provide not an answer to every question which may rise in our minds. Such a doctrinaire view, whether held by the destructive critic or the constructive theologian, is erroneous and misleading. The NT is experimental to its core, and is fundamentally a witness borne to Him with whom believers are united in an ever-increasing fellowship. ‘That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with us: yea, and our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ’ (1Jn 1:3). When, accordingly, we approach the records of this testimony, we anticipate that the notes of experience will be found in it, viz. (a) variety, created by differences in the spiritual history of the individual writers, as well as by differences in the occasion and circumstances of their writing; (b) development throughout the whole period covered by the NT literature, the earlier stages being marked by attention mainly to the conspicuous activities of the risen Saviour, the later being characterized by a deeper insight into the personal relations of Christ to God and to man and to the world; (c) unity, fundamentally the same view of Christ being present in all the writings, earlier and later, inasmuch as all Christian experience, in its origin as well as in its progress, is rooted and grounded in the same almighty Saviour, the same exalted Lord. The witness may be briefly summarized as follows.
i. The earlier chapters in the Acts of the Apostles.—In the midst of much critical discussion of these chapters, it can scarcely be questioned that they reproduce, with substantial truth, the type of life and teaching in the primitive Church; and give us ‘a Christology which must have come from a primitive source’ (Knowling, Testimony of St. Paul to Christ, p. 171). How, then, did Peter and his associates preach Christ?
Three points seem plain. (1) They lay the basis of the gospel in the humanity of Christ. They do not grudgiogly admit His humanity, as though it presented an intellectual difficulty, nor do they dogmatically insist on it, as though it had been denied by some Docetic scheme. They use His human name. They dwell on His human life and character. He whom they preach as the Christ is the Jesus of that historic past which is so fresh in their memories, so lovely in their hearts. Upon what He had been and done as a man, all that He now is and accomplishes is founded (Act 2:22; Act 3:6; Act 4:10; Act 10:38).—(2) They set the fact of the Resurrection in the forefront of their preaching. That event carries the weight of the greatest doctrines of the faith. This is the message which conveys the glory of God’s accomplished purpose of mercy: ‘He is risen; we are witnesses’ (Act 2:25; Act 2:32). The Resurrection is not merely the miracle of a dead man raised. It is a great historic act on the part of God, who hereby authenticates the mission and vindicates the claims of Jesus. It is not merely that Jesus survives a tragedy. Through death He passes to a higher seat than that of His father David, even the throne of the Divine Majesty (Act 2:34, Act 5:31, Act 7:55). In doing this for Jesus, God did not take a mere man and make Him what a man cannot be, or set Him where a man could not breathe. Jesus is placed in the position which is His by right, to which His person perfectly corresponds. The earliest preaching is in complete harmony with Rom 1:4. The idea of pre-existence, though not explicitly stated, is one of the implications of this teaching, even as it is of the Synoptic portraiture.—(3) They apply to Him titles which describe Him as the fulfilment of the highest reach of OT prophecy, and carry with them, in some instances, a distinctly Divine rank of being: Messiah, in Jesus’ own interpretation of Messiah and His mission (Act 3:16-20; Act 4:25-28); Lord (Act 1:2, Act 2:34; Act 2:36, Act 10:36), i.e. the OT name of Jehovah, which could be borne only by a Divine being, though, it may well be, the theological bearings of such ascription were not fully present to their minds; Prophet (Act 3:22), Saviour (Act 5:31, Act 4:12), Prince (
The Divinity of Christ is not discussed by these missionary preachers. They are concerned with the facts regarding Christ, His power, His promises, His benefits. They do not unfold the doctrine of His person which is implied in their statements: their own conceptions of it were, probably, at a very early stage of development. They held and taught such things regarding Him as implied that conception of Christ which was set forth by later teachers. Those brethren who wrote at a later date, and more explicitly, were not moving away from the historic Christ. They were, rather, getting nearer to Him, and seeing Him more clearly, than had been possible to those who bore their witness at an earlier period.
ii. The minor Christologies.—Some NT writings have scarcely advanced beyond the point of view of the Acts. They are mainly occupied with the saving functions of the Messiah, and do not enter deeply into the consideration of His Person. With respect to the simplest of them, however, it remains true that the place of Jesus in religious experience is central and supreme. He is the object of faith, the source of every spiritual blessing.
1. James.—His Epistle has sometimes been animadverted on as though it were little better than Jewish-Christian. We may content ourselves with Hort’s more generous estimate: ‘Unlike as it is to the other books of the NT, it chiefly illustrates Judaistic Christianity by total freedom from it’ (Judaistic Christianity, p. 151). We may refer also to Dr. Patrick’s recent volume, James, the Lord’s Brother, p. 98 ff.
The doctrinal scheme of the Epistle is very simple, and deeply religious. God is the absolutely good One (Jas 1:5; Jas 1:13; Jas 1:17). Man is made in His image (Jas 3:9), and is meant to be separate from the world (Jas 1:27), and wholly given up to God (Jas 1:8). Sin is the forswearing of this allegiance, and the choice of the world instead of God, and leads to death (Jas 1:14-15). For men, under the power of sin, deliverance lies in the act of God, who quickens them into a new life. This He effects by His word (Jas 1:18; Jas 1:21); and this word comes through the mediation of Christ, by whom the old law is transformed into a new law, a royal law, a law of liberty (Jas 2:8; Jas 2:12). Christ, accordingly, is the Saviour to whom we owe our salvation. He is the object of saving faith, which we must not belie by any inconsistent life (Jas 2:1).
To St. James, as to all Christians, Jesus is also Lord, ranked along with Jehovah in honour and dignity (Jas 1:1, Jas 2:1). To Him belongs ‘the honourable name’ (Jas 2:7). He will shortly come for judgment (Jas 5:8-9). Dorner’s summary is borne out by the whole Epistle: ‘Both in soteriological and in Christological form, James acknowledges the absoluteness of the Christian religion’ (System, vol. iii. p. 159).
2. The First Epistle of Peter.—There is distinct advance in this Epistle beyond the statements in St. Peter’s speeches reported in the Acts, though even yet the Christology is not so rich and full as in St. Paul or St. John. The sinlessness of Jesus is clearly stated (1Pe 1:19; 1Pe 2:22); and this gives an impression of the Personality of Christ which is inconsistent with a merely humanitarian view of His person. The death of Christ, which had once offended Peter, but which in his preaching he had declared to be part of Messiah’s redemptive work, he now glories in as the ground of salvation, and he describes it in its atoning efficacy with rich variety of phrase—covenant blood (1Pe 1:2), ransom (1Pe 1:18 f.), sin-bearing (1Pe 2:20 ff.), substitution (1Pe 3:18). One who ascribed such efficacy to the death of Christ must have taken an exalted view of His Person. Lordship in the usual Christian sense is ascribed to Him (1Pe 1:3, 1Pe 2:13, 1Pe 3:15). Sonship toward God is implied in 1Pe 1:3. Resurrection, exaltation, supremacy have their wonted place in St. Peter’s thoughts, as in all Christian faith (1Pe 1:21, 1Pe 3:22). The wording of 1Pe 1:11 and 1Pe 1:20 scarcely allows us to regard these passages as distinctly teaching a personal pre-existence of Christ, although such an interpretation of them is certainly legitimate, and is, besides, much more characteristic of St. Peter’s non-speculative cast of mind than the ideal pre-existence which is held by some interpreters to be the meaning. In any case, Christ is to St. Peter a Being far more than man or angel; and this means, since the thought of a demi-god is impossible to a Jewish monotheist, that St. Peter placed his Lord side by side with Jehovah, sharer with God in Divine rank and worship. This he did with the memory full and clear within him of his Master’s human life. That St. Peter, who so often spoke frankly and plainly to Jesus, and once rebuked Him and once denied Him, should have come to adore Him as Divine, is a fact most wonderful, and fraught with far-reaching consequences.
3. Jude and 2 Peter.—In these brief and, from many points of view, difficult writings, there is no Christological discussion. Both Epistles, however, assume the Lordship of Christ, and look forward to His coming as Judge. In 2Pe 1:2, He is conjoined with the Father as the object of religious knowledge; and in the previous verse He is described as ‘our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.’
4. Apocalypse.—Whatever view we take of the composition of this book, the key to which has so long been mislaid, there is no doubt that its pages glow with the glory of Jesus. It contains abundant recollections of the human life of Jesus [e.g. Rev 5:5; Rev 22:16; Rev 21:14; Rev 11:8). It is the exalted, glorified, victorious Lord, however, who chiefly fills the seer’s gaze. To Him the writer desires the eyes of the persecuted Church to turn, that she may be certified of her vindication and reward at the hand of Him whom she adores.
He is included in the sacred Threefold source of blessing (Rev 1:4; Rev 1:6). The radiant Figure of the vision in Rev 1:12-20, whose self-designations are ‘the first and the last’ and ‘the Living one,’ to whom belong ‘the keys of death and of Hades,’ is no mere earthly Being who has undergone apotheosis. He is a Divine being, who came out of eternity, entered into time, and on earth suffered and died, and now, within the unseen world, lives and reigns as God; who, also, will one day return for judgment (Rev 14:14-16, Rev 22:20). He is on the Throne (Rev 3:21, Rev 7:17, Rev 12:5, Rev 22:1; Rev 22:3). Worship is paid to Him as God (Rev 7:10, Rev 5:12; Rev 5:8). He is the Son of God, as none other can be (Rev 1:6, Rev 2:27, Rev 3:21). He is a pre-existent and eternal Being (Rev 1:17-18, Rev 3:14, Rev 21:6, Rev 22:13); such is the interpretation which is required by these passages in view of the Christology of the book as a whole. See discussion in Stevens, pp. 538–540. To Him belongs the incommunicable Name (Rev 3:12, Rev 19:12). It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of the adoration of Jesus which pervades all the NT literature, and is so intense and sincere in this book. ‘Although the writer is plainly a Jew of Jews, his mind saturated with Hebrew literature and Hebrew modes of thought, a true son of the race with which monotheism had become a passion, and the ascription of Divine honour to any other than the supreme God a horror and a blasphemy, he nevertheless sets Jesus, the man whom he had known in the flesh, side by side with God’ (C. A. Scott, The Book of the Revelation, p. 27).
The NT books are not efforts of solitary thinkers evolving schemes out of their inner consciousness. The Christian Ecclesia, the fellowship of Christ, the communion of saints lived by such thoughts and spiritual activities as these. Its members knew nothing of the subtleties of post-Nicene Christology; but they knew Jesus, the Lamb of God, who died for them, the Living Lord in whose right hand were seven stars, who walked amid the candlesticks.
iii. The Christology of St. Paul
Amid the manifold discussions of this topic, three positions seem to be attracting to themselves an increasing volume of consentient opinion.
(a) St. Paul’s Christology in the outcome of his experience. He had seen the Risen Christ. The simplest, most obvious, interpretation of 1Co 9:1; 1Co 15:5-9 is surely the truest. Attempts to assimilate St. Paul’s sight of Christ on the road to Damascus with ecstatic experiences, which he also records, betray, by their very ingenuity, the a priori assumption that a fully objective revelation of the kind alleged is impossible. St. Paul’s sight of Christ was of the same nature as that by which the faith of the Eleven was first established. If the ‘vision hypothesis’ does not do justice to the facts in their case, neither will it account for the sudden and complete revolution which took place in the life of St. Paul. That he had seen the Risen Christ, in the same sense, with the same convincing ‘objectivity,’ as St. Peter had seen Him, is the source of Paul’s authority as an Apostle. It is the source, also, of his Christian faith. It warrants the utmost and the greatest which Paul can ever say regarding the wonderful being of his Lord. From that date, the hour when he heard the words ‘I am Jesus,’ he had been ‘in Christ.’ Christ had been a present reality to him, and out of his fellowship with Christ had come every grace of his character, every privilege of his soul, every activity of his career. ‘That I may know him’ (Php 3:10) is the passion of his life, and his so-called ‘Christology’ is not a philosophy of the ‘logos,’ or ‘avatar,’ or any other type. It is the testimony he bears, incidentally, as the needs of his converts demand, to the Christ whom he knows.
(b) St. Paul’s conception of Christ does not stand wholly apart from the views entertained by the primitive Church. His experience, remarkable as it was, did not differ in kind from that of other believers. The Church was from the beginning a fellowship with Christ. Every member of it is united to Christ by faith. There were others who had been ‘in Christ’ before St. Paul bad gained that blessed privilege (Rom 16:7). The knowledge which he possessed of Christ was common to the fellowship of believers, and had been theirs while Paul was raging against the Church in persecuting fury. In fact, it was precisely the lofty claims advanced by the disciples of the Nazarene on behalf of their Master, which called the young zealot to destroy a movement which he saw clearly was an invasion of the supremacy, not of Caesar, but of Jehovah. When, in later days, he himself is glorying in the lofty attributes and Divine dignity of Christ, he is well aware that he is setting forth no novelties, but is speaking out of the fulness of a personal knowledge possessed by his readers as well as by himself. Dr. Sanday’s words, commenting on 1Th 1:1, are most memorable: ‘An elaborate process of reflexion, almost a system of theology, lies behind those familiar terms.’ Dr. Knowling’s weighty and balanced statement ought to he borne in mind by every student of St. Paul’s thought: ‘The evidence to he gathered from the Apostle’s own writings is not to be judged as if it was only of a reflective character upon the events of the life of Jesus seen through a long retrospect of years: in some particulars it carries us up to the earliest period of the existence of the Christian Church; in other particulars it is plainly incidental, it is used as occasion demands, and it justifies the inference that it has behind it a large reserve of early teaching and tradition’ (Testimony, etc., p. 211).
(c) To say that St. Paul’s Christology is more developed in his later Epistles than in his earlier, is only to note the fact that his personal acquaintance with Christ grew richer as the years of his inner life and of his missionary activity passed over him. But this advance was not determined by accretions from without. He had not to wait till theosophical speculation suggested it to him before he ascribed the loftiest, most comprehensive position and dignity to Christ. Such ascription belongs to his earlier as well as to his later writings. Prof. Bacon has strongly emphasized the presence of Paul’s later thoughts ‘in a partly developed form in the earlier Epistles’ (Story of St. Paul, p. 208); and Dr. Knowling’s great work, already referred to, is largely devoted to an illustration of this fact (e.g. pp. 48, 90 f., 206, 211 f., 502).
1. Christ in His relation to God
(1) He is a Divine Being.—St. Paul is an OT believer, utterly removed from polytheism, and wholly incapable of believing in demi-gods. He is not a Greek philosopher; impersonal abstractions or principles have no meaning for him. He of whom he speaks is ‘Christ,’ which with St. Paul is a proper name, the official designation being lost in the personal appellative. If, then, he ascribes to Christ the qualities which a Jewish monotheist, a member of the Old Covenant, attributed to Jehovah, he can mean nothing else than that this same person, Jesus Christ, is a Divine Being, equal with God and one with God.
(a) He attributes Lordship to Christ (2Co 4:5); and uses the title ‘Lord’ habitually in connexion with the historic and personal names ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ.’ It is no courtesy title; it is used in the sense in which the LXX Septuagint uses it of God, and it has the ‘connotation of Godhead.’ Passages of the OT, accordingly, which belong to Jehovah are applied to Christ (Rom 10:13, 1Co 10:22). To the Lord, therefore, as to God, worship is offered, and prayers are addressed by St. Paul and by all Christians (2Co 12:8, 1Co 1:2, Rom 10:13). (b) He designates Christ as ‘the Son of God.’ The teaching of St. Paul on this subject is in harmony with the other NT representations. Believers in Christ enter upon the status of sons of God, and St. Paul even calls them
(2) He is one with the Father.—The relation of the Divine Christ to the Godhead became an insoluble problem for subsequent thought. Let the presupposed conception of God be abstract simplicity and unity. Let Him be conceived as Pure Being, Pure Form, Pure Thought, the Idea, or Substance. Then let the claim be advanced on behalf of a historic person that he is God. The result will be a problem which, in the nature of the case, must be insoluble. With such a Deity, the Divinity of the historic Christ is utterly incompatible. Christ must be lowered to the rank of a demi-god, or He must be etherialized into an impersonal principle.
Suppose, however, that God be differently conceived; in that case the claim of Divinity advanced on behalf of one who lived a human life may not lead to intellectual impossibilities. It is certain, however, that neither St. Paul nor any other NT writer held any such speculative idea of God as was prevalent in Greek Philosophy. To the men of the NT, God was the God of the OT, the living God, a Person, loving, energizing, seeking the accomplishment of an everlasting purpose of mercy, the satisfaction of His own loving nature. When, accordingly, the facts of the character and claims and resurrection of an historic person compelled them to recognize Him as Divine, they were constrained greatly to enlarge their thought of God; but they were saved the labour of stretching a logical formula to cover facts wholly irreconcilable with it, for the simple reason that no such formula had any place in their thoughts. They set the Divine Christ side by side with the Divine Father, and thus found a manifoldness in the being of God which did not destroy its unity. St. Paul, therefore, includes Christ in the Divine circle (1Th 3:11-13, 2Th 2:16-17, 1Co 8:6, 2Co 13:14). ‘Abstract monotheism’ has ceased, and has been ‘replaced by a Theism which finds within the one Godhead room for both Father and Son’ (Fairbairn, Place of Christ, p. 309). Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the monotheism of the OT was never abstract, because the God of the OT was never a conception, or a substance, but always a Person. Personality, indeed, has never the bare unity of a monad. It always makes room for distinctions; and reaches its greatest wealth of meaning in the fellowship of person with person. Between an abstraction and a historic person there can be no unity. Between two historic persons there may be unity of the profoundest kind. St. Paul, moreover, is not thinking of a mere quantitative equivalence between the Divine Christ and God. He is true to the conception of Sonship. The relation of Christ to the Father is that of a real son, including dependence and subordination (1Co 3:23; 1Co 11:3; 1Co 15:24-28). To the Son, as reward of obedience, is given a glory and a fulness which enable Him to fulfil His mediatorial function (Php 2:9-11, Rom 14:9, Col 1:19). This, however, in no sense lowers the Divine being of the Son, or shuts Him out of the Godhead. The glory He had with the Father from eternity, and the glory gained as He returns to the Father, are not inconsistent. Without the former, indeed, the latter would be impossible.
2. Christ in His relation to mankind
(1) Pre-incarnate.—The Being who thus existed from eternity as God has affinities in His very nature with men. Had He been a demi-god, a tertium quid, the passage from Him to us and from us to Him would have been impossible. It may seem an ingenious plan to effect the union of God and man by inserting between them a being who is neither God nor man. Really, it makes the problem insoluble. St. Paul knows nothing of the supposed differences between the Divine and the human natures which make a tertium quid appear necessary to bring them together. God and man resemble one another in their constitution as personal beings. The problem at once of religion and of philosophy is to bring two persons together, not to force two disparate natures into an unreal unity. This problem, the problem of the human spirit, is solved in the Person of Christ. The heart of His eternal being is Sonship. He lives in a filial relation toward God, and upon the model of that relationship ours is formed (Gal 4:4-6, Rom 8:29). Our very existence depends on Him (1Co 8:6). What we are to be is determined by what He is (Eph 1:4; Eph 2:10). The deepest relations of man to man find their guarantee in the relations in which He stands to God and to man (1Co 11:3, Eph 5:22-31). Even before the fulness of time He was not utterly unconnected with the problem of redemption. So, at least, we may interpret the mystic utterance of 1Co 10:4
It is in connexion with the incarnate stage of Christ’s career that the problem of the constitution of His Person presses most acutely. Questions press as to the relation of His Divinity to His humanity, of His knowledge as God to His knowledge as man, of His personality as a Divine Being to His personality as a human being, of His activities in the flesh to His contemporaneous activities in the Cosmos and in the circle of the Godhead. It is noteworthy that St. Paul does not discuss these questions, seems, indeed, to be scarcely conscious of them. He wonders and adores as he thinks of the love which led Christ to that stupendous sacrifice. He contemplates with delight and worship the Person of his glorified Lord, and throws his being open to the gracious influences of His Spirit. He has no other ambition on earth save to know Christ; but when he speaks of knowing, he means such spiritual intimacy as person has with person, and in particular a growing appreciation of, and entrance into, the power of Christ’s resurrection, the fellowship of His sufferings, and conformity to His death (Php 3:10). But to dissect the Person of Christ, to lay out the Divinity on one side and the humanity on the other, and to discuss a communicatio idiomatum, does not lie within the four corners of Pauline thought. This fact may suggest the doubt whether questions such as the above are rightly conceived. They evidently proceed from the point of view of dualism, according to which one nature is contrasted with another; whereas Paul’s views of God and of man and of the God-man, are all synthetic. Personal unity, and not logical dualism, is the key to the thought of St. Paul. Between God and man, there is the unity of moral likeness; between the Father and the Son, the unity of being and fellowship; between the pre-incarnate and the incarnate periods of Christ’s experience and action, the unity of one continuous life; between Christ and those whom He saves, the unity of reciprocal indwelling.
(3) Post-incarnate.—Having become man, Christ remains human. In the Kingdom whose Lord He is, He is Jesus who was so named in His earthly life. Mediator between God and man, He is Himself man (1Ti 2:5). From Him, as the Head, life streams down to all members of the body (Col 1:18, 1Co 12:27, Eph 4:12-13). In Him the members are ‘complete,’ receive fulness of satisfaction (Col 2:10). In Him human nature finds itself raised to its highest perfection, hence in Him there can be none of the barriers that divide man from man (Col 3:11, Gal 3:28). This is the point of the comparison in Rom 5:12-21 and 1Co 15:45-47 between the first Adam and the Second. In one sense Adam is the head of the race, in another the Risen and Exalted Christ is the Head, and from Him all life comes. This is the very heart of St. Paul’s experience, and therefore also of His Christology. Christ is living. St. Paul presupposes the pre-existent Christ; his Christ could not begin to be in time. He is acquainted with the historic life through which Christ gained His glory. But that which St. Paul gazes upon with endless adoration is the Person of the Risen and Glorified Lord. Between the living Christ and him there is such union as surpasses power of language to express. Christ dwells in the believer in His complete human-Divine personality, and imparts Himself in growing fulness to the believer; and there is thus developed identity of experience and identity of character, which will ultimately to crowned by identity of outward condition (Gal 2:20, 2Co 3:18, Php 3:21).
3. Christ in His relation to the Cosmos.—The intellect of the time was much occupied with speculations regarding the relation of God to the world. To Greek dualism this was really an insoluble problem. The gulf between God and the universe yawned impassable. The place of a solution was taken by a mythology of ‘powers,’ ‘principalities,’ and the like supposititious beings, who existed only in the jargon of the philosophical sects. On Jewish soil this mythology was changed into a hierarchy of angels. Wild as these dreams are, they represent a real need of thought and of religious experience. The problems of creation and redemption cannot be held apart. The creative purpose must include redemption, and redemption must have cosmic bearings. We cannot rest in a harmony with God which leaves the universe outside, unreconciled, possibly the abode of forces against which the redeeming agency would he powerless to defend us. St. Paul’s view is that the universe has a part in the history of man. Injured by human sin, it will come to its completion when the children of God enter on their heritage (Rom 8:21). Christ, the Redeemer of men, accordingly, is Lord of the universe. Nothing lies outside His gracious sway. The clumsy machinery of angels, or powers, or whatever these needless creations are named, is replaced by the one Person, who is the Agent of God alike in creation and in redemption (Col 1:15-17). Christ, who is the manifestation of God, is of infinitely higher rank than all the creatures. All things, whatever their place and dignity, owe to Him their existence, and find in Him their goal. This exalted Person is also Head of the Church, and Agent in reconciliation (Col 1:18-20). That is to say, the work of redemption can be accomplished only by One who is also the Creator. The Redeemer must be God absolutely, else there will be needed a Mediator for Him also. The Redeemer cannot have, in our apprehension, the value of God, unless He is God in His own proper being.
The testimony of St. Paul to Christ contains great heights and depths, but it exhibits no inconsistency with Jesus’ self-witness. It is not a mosaic of Jewish and Hellenic elements. It is the product of experience, developed under the conditions of that Divine assistance which Jesus Himself described, Joh 16:12-15.
iv. Hebrews.—In this Epistle the Christian faith is defended against any attempt to belittle the person and office of the Redeemer. However glorious other agents of the Divine purpose might have been, ‘this man’ is more glorious by far in the dignity of His person and in the vastness and finality of His redemptive work. To Him, therefore, is applied the familiar Christian designation of Lord (Heb 2:3; Heb 7:14; Heb 13:20). The characteristic name applied to Him, however, is Son (Heb 1:1-2, Heb 7:28, Heb 5:8, Heb 1:8, Heb 6:6, Heb 7:3, Heb 10:29, Heb 4:14). This title expresses His Divine and eternal being. The author of this Epistle follows the example of the Apostle Paul in describing the Christian salvation under the aspect of a history of the Son of God. This history moves in three stages.
(1) The pre-existent state.—Not much is said on this mysterious topic. The NT writers are concerned to allude to it only in order that, in the light of it, the earthly life of Jesus may be discerned in its marvellous condescension as an act of self-sacrifice, and in order that His present position of equality with God may be intellectually credible.
In this pre-existent state the Son is the effulgence of God’s glory, the very image of His substance (Heb 1:3). Without formally discussing the question of the being of God, the writer has already surpassed any mere monadism. God is not bare abstract unity. With God there is One who exactly corresponds to Himself, who gives back to Him the glory which is His. Between Him and God there is perfect oneness. Between these two there is no room for a mediator. The functions of the Son in this state are not described further than to indicate that no department of the universe is outside the scope of His power (Heb 1:3). There is no room, accordingly, for any being, other than the Son of God, to whom worship or gratitude is due.
(2) The incarnate life.—This writer, like the Apostle Paul, passes by all the questions, so abundantly discussed in later theology, as to ‘two natures,’ etc. His whole interest is concerned with the heart-subduing fact that the birth of Christ is the descent of a Divine Being from heaven to earth, the definite assumption by Him of a complete and true humanity (Heb 2:9, Heb 10:5, Heb 2:14). To this writer the humanity of Jesus is wonderful and glorious. A Being truly Divine has become man, and has entered fully into human experience. There is nothing human that is not His, sin excepted. Temptation, suffering, death—He passed through them all. All this He endured in pursuance of the vocation with which He entered humanity. Before Him lay His task. Beyond shone the glory. Not once, for so great a glory, would He evade one human sorrow. It was all wanted to perfect Him in His vocation (Heb 2:10, Heb 5:8-9). The resemblance to St. Paul’s line of thought in Php 2:5-11 is obvious.
(3) The exaltation.—The position of majesty which the Son now occupies is described in two aspects. (a) Its possibility is due to what He was in Himself, antecedently to His human experiences. He has been appointed heir of all things, both because He is the Son of God and because, through Him, God made the worlds (Php 1:2). He has sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high, because He is, in His very nature, the effulgence of God’s glory and the very image of His substance. No being less than God, in His own person, could occupy such a place. (b) Its attainment is due to His discharge of His redemptive mission, and is of the nature of a reward for His fidelity. His present position presupposes His pre-existent place and function, and yet is distinct from them. It is that of King in God’s realm of redemption.
Here, just as in connexion with the incarnate condition, questions arise which this writer does not discuss. ‘The relation of this rule to the primary rule of God, or to His own primary upholding of all things by the word of His power, is not indicated’ (A. B. Davidson’s Com. p. 78). It is enough for faith that, in the universe of being, there is no other power than that of the exalted Redeemer.
v. The Fourth Gospel.—St. John’s Christology, like that of St. Paul, is the transcript of his experience. He makes plain his object in telling the story of the life of Christ (Joh 20:30 f.). Out of all the mass of material which his memory provides, he selects those incidents which may be most useful in proving to generations which had not the privilege of direct vision, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. The principles of selection, and the insight into the meaning of words and deeds which are reproduced, are due to a lifetime of thought and communion, as well as to the continual illumination of the Spirit of Christ. St. John’s conception of Christ is summarily set forth in the Prologue to the narrative (Joh 1:1-18). No doubt these much-debated verses are meant to provide the point of view which the reader of the narrative is to occupy; but equally without doubt they do not present an idea, formed in speculation, and then employed to determine the narrative, to invent the incidents, and to create the discourses. The narrative, with the words and signs, logically precedes the Prologue, which presents us with the extracted meaning of the history. The Person portrayed in the narrative is One of whose history, in the wider sense, the earthly career is but a part. He had a being with God before He was seen on earth. He had a Divine mode of existence and exercised Divine functions, before He appeared as a man and wrought His deeds through human organs of action. At the set time He entered into humanity, and, through living intercourse with men, revealed to them the glory of His person, and interpreted for them the character of the invisible God. The remarkable feature of the Prologue is its use of the term Logos to designate Him whom the narrative leads us to know as the Son. It is certainly not the key to the narrative, which is to be read from the point of view of the Divine Sonship, which it reveals. It is not used in the narrative, though it reappears in the First Epistle of John. It is certainly not taken over from Philo, and intended to create a new religious philosophy. Probably its presence is to be explained, as are the references in St. Paul’s letters, by the technicalities of prevalent philosophy or theosophy. Christianity appeared when the problem of the relation of God to the world had reached its fullest statement; when, also, the utmost that human thought could do had been done in the way of a solution. The last and most strenuous effort of human thought to meet the demand of the human spirit had found expression in Philo’s Logos speculation, which owed its origin partly to developments of Hebrew thought as to the word and wisdom of God, and partly to ideas which had been the motive power of the whole history of Greek philosophy. It was not possible for Christianity to ignore the problem. Christianity is more immediately concerned with the problem of the redemption of man; but this cannot be dissociated from the wider problem of the relation of God to the world. The key to the one must unlock the other also. St. Paul and St. John, accordingly, take up the technical terms most in vogue, with whatever they stand for, and say in effect: What human thought has endeavoured to achieve by its machinery of angels or powers, or by its hypostatization of the Logos, has been accomplished in the Person of the Son of God. He is the life of the redeemed. He is the life also of the whole universe of God. There is but one purpose in creation and redemption, and that is summed up in Christ. He is the Logos.
The term Logos, accordingly, is used by St. John to express the identity of Him whom we know as Jesus Christ, with the personal Wisdom and Power of God, who is God’s agent in creation, who alone could redeem men, and who achieved this in the only way possible, by Himself assuming human nature, and dwelling for a space with men. The term, having served the purpose of presenting Christ as the goal of the immemorial quest of the human spirit for union with God, is not again employed in the Gospel.
It is not necessary to attempt here a detailed analysis of the Prologue (see Westcott’s Com.; Dods in Expos. Gr. Test.; and a valuable paper by Principal Falconer in Expositor, v. v. [1897] 222). The leading ideas are plain—(1) The eternity of the Logos (Joh 1:1-2, cf. Joh 17:5, Joh 8:58, 1Jn 1:1). The Logos had a being coeval with God, and did not come into existence at a point in time, and therefore is not a creature. (2) The fellowship of the Logos with God. The Logos is personal, has a life of His own, which yet is directed toward God, so that He finds His life in God, and is ‘in the bosom of the Father’ (Joh 1:18). (3) The Divine nature of the Logos, as identical in being with God, while yet distinct as a person. (4) The creative function of the Logos (Joh 1:3; Joh 1:10, cf. Col 1:16, Heb 1:2-3). (5) The revealing function of the Logos (Joh 1:4 f.). (6) The historical manifestation of the Logos (Joh 1:6-13). (7) The incarnation of the Logos (Joh 1:14; Joh 1:18). This is the climax to which the Prologue has led up. This is the event of which the whole Gospel narrative is the record and description. The Logos, the same Being who had dwelt in the circle of the Godhead, left the glory which He had with God (Joh 17:5), and, retaining His personal identity, became ‘flesh,’ i.e. became man, assumed human nature in its fulness, and dwelt among men as a man.
The problems with regard to the life of the incarnate Logos, which press so heavily on our minds, are not discussed by St. John any more than by St. Paul. He is wholly occupied with the glorious fact. It is amazing, but it has happened; and in that great event the whole purpose of God, creative as well as redemptive, has reached its consummation. Revelation is complete. No one can declare God save One who is God, and this is He, Jesus Christ, ‘God only-begotten’ (Joh 17:18).
From the simple missionary preaching of the Acts to the high intense thinking of the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel is a long movement. It is a movement, however, not away from the facts, but toward their inward, spiritual, universal, and eternal meaning. This movement, moreover, has not been dependent on unaided human reflexion, nor are its results mere guesses or inferences. It has been conducted under the guidance of Christ’s own self-witness and the illumination of Christ’s own Spirit; and its conclusions express the wealth of Christian experience, and in experience find their ultimate demonstration.
Conclusion and Outlook.—A study of the character of Christ, and a close and reverent attention to His self-witness, compel the inference that His Person, completely and really human though He is, is not constituted like that of other men. It is to be admitted, however, or rather it is to be urged, that what the facts suggest and demand cannot be fully apprehended by any merely intellectual process whatever. What Christ is, in His own Person, can be known only by those who know Him; and personal knowledge has conditions which are not satisfied in any exercise of the mere understanding, however careful and exact. Such conditions are an attitude or direction of the human spirit, and an immediate operation, at once illuminating and quickening, of the Divine Spirit. When these conditions meet and interact, in that profound region where the Spirit of God and the spirit of man touch and interpenetrate one another, there is produced that knowledge of God and of Christ which our Lord describes as life. There is no other knowledge of Christ; and if Christology is supposed to be an intellectual process, governed by forms of discursive thought, and issuing in propositions for which is claimed the cogency of a logical demonstration, it stands condemned as being out of all relation to Christian experience. But this personal experience is knowledge of Christ. He is as really known in this spiritual fellowship as one human person is known by another, and is known more closely and fully than one man can be known by another. Christianity, accordingly, presents to the world the solution of its problem, the answer to its need; while, at the same time, it has before itself a constant problem, the answer to which it seeks, not with ever-growing weariness and sense of defeat, but with ever-renewed energy of faith and love.
1. The problem of the world, the more or less conscious and articulate demand of the human spirit, is, as we noted at the outset, union with God. This union is, primarily, personal—an ethical fellowship, in which God shall fully disclose His character, and impart Himself, to man; in which man shall freely open his being to the communications of God, and find in God his life and development. Such personal union, however, carries with it cosmical union also, or the harmonizing of all those differences from God which are implied in the existence of the created universe, and find their most acute expression in the self-assertion of man against God. The reconciling of man is the reconciling of all things. The solution of a problem, thus fundamentally personal, must be itself personal. Christianity, accordingly, met the problem of the early centuries, as it meets the same problem in the twentieth century, by the preaching of the personal Christ. He is the Son of God; and therefore, also, He is the Son of Man. In Christ, God is fully present; through Him, God is perfectly known; with Him, God is one. In Christ, human nature is fully realized in all that it was meant to be, both in respect of its complete dependence upon God and of its complete fulfilment of spiritual function. In Christ, accordingly, the history of creation is complete. He stands at the head of a universe reconciled to God. He is its reconciliation. Wherever the problem of union with God takes expression in concrete facts—in the sense of guilt in the individual conscience; in death, which closes human life with a pall of impenetrable darkness; in the antagonism of man to man, manifested in personal animosities, or the war of nation with nation and class with class—in facts whose gloom no pessimism can exaggerate: there, the knowledge of Christ supplies the solution. To know Christ is to be at one with God and with man. Christianity is thus both religion and ethic. It is an intense individual experience, which is the impulse of boundless social service.
And when the same problem finds the precision and articulateness of philosophical expression—as it did, for instance, in that Neo-Platonism which had such strange affinities to Christianity while it was also its bitterest opponent; or as it does to-day, in that Absolute Idealism which, in some aspects, is the noblest ally of the Christian faith, and, in others, its proudest and least sympathetic rival—the key to its solution will still be found in the conception of a Personality at once Divine and human, a life lived under historic conditions, which was at once the life of God in man and the life of man in and through God. The words of the Master of Balliol apply to the present as well as to the primitive position of Christianity:
‘It contained implicitly the key to all the antagonisms of thought that had been developed in Greek philosophy—the antagonism of the material and the spiritual, the antagonism of the phenomenal and the ideal or intelligible world, the antagonism of the finite and the infinite, the antagonism of the temporal and the eternal. In a word, it contained in itself the principle of an optimism which faces and overcomes the deepest pessimism, of an idealism which has room in itself for the most realistic consciousness of all the distinctions and relations of the finite’ (Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, vol. ii. p. 351).
2. The Incarnation of the Son of God is therefore the article of a standing Church. It is, at the same time, the abiding problem of a living Church. It is not, however, a problem which is suggested by one faculty to be handed over to another for solution. Faith does not receive Christ, and then appeal to intellect to tell us who He is, and how His Person is constituted. It has been the profound error of Scholasticism, both before and since the Reformation, to suppose that faith supplies a mass of crude amorphous facts and experiences, upon which the intellect exercises its analytic, systematizing genius, distinguishing, defining, separating, and then tying into bundles by means of formulae. The result of such a method, applied to the problem of the Person of Christ, is a Christology in whose dogmatic construction the living Christ of history and experience is wholly unrecognizable. The Reformation was the protest of Christian faith against this attempt to rob it of the personal Saviour, whom it appropriates, whom the believer knows directly and truly. Ritschlianism, however incomplete its constructive work may be, is nevertheless, as a protest against formalism, in harmony with the spirit of the Reformation.
The value of such a protest, however, will be greatly lessened if it lend colour to the supposition that our knowledge of Christ is confined to His benefits, while He Himself, in the secret of His being, belongs to some supposed noumenal sphere, inaccessible to human knowledge, so that it is impossible either to affirm or deny His Divinity. ‘Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia ejus cognoscere’ is a proposition true if it mean that no one can know Christ who is not vitally one with Him, and therefore a partaker of His benefits; but certainly false if it mean that, beyond His benefits, there is a supposed substratum of being, about which nothing can be known, which may or may not be Divine (cf. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 63). Thus does the misapplied category of substance take revenge upon the critical method, which, while denying its validity, retains it as a kind of metaphysical phantom. To know the benefits of Christ, to live in fellowship with Him, to carry out His commission, is to know Himself. No shadow of unreality lies upon that knowledge, any more than it lies upon the knowledge we have of the friend whom we know better than we know ourselves. This does not mean, of course, that any believer, or the whole community of believers, now knows, or ever will know, all about Christ. Personality, even human personality, is a great deep; and the joy of friendship is the progressiveness which is the mark of personal knowledge. Much more is this true of the personality of Christ. Knowledge of Christ is boundlessly progressive; what more is to be known of Him than the Church at present apprehends, depends on those conditions belonging to the whole personal life which make any knowledge of Him possible. In short, the problem of the Person of Christ is presented by that faith, which is already knowledge, to that knowing power, which is simply faith itself, as it grows in apprehension of Christ. Christ is not divided; and there is no division in the faculty which apprehends Him, though the stages of its exercise and its acquisition advance endlessly from less to more. It follows that Christology, which is simply the reflective expression of the knowledge of Christ gained in actual experience, must not subject the fulness of its material to any form of thought borrowed from an alien sphere; or if, in the exigencies of a defensive statement, it uses loan-words derived from philosophy, it must never for a moment imagine that these explain or exhaust the living reality with which it is dealing. These words float, like derelicts, on the ocean of the Church’s thought, and many a promising speculation has struck thereon and foundered. Especially ought modern Christology to be on its guard against that dualistic mode of thought, with the terminology which it employs, which is the damnosa haereditas bequeathed to theology by Greek Philosophy, the shadow of which fell upon Kant, and has not departed from the new Kantians of recent times. The task of Christology at the present day is to restate and to defend two certainties of Christian experience.
(1) To Christian experience, educated and informed by Scripture and by the Spirit of truth, Christ is known as God. The problem of the relation of the Divine Christ to the Divine Father is thus necessarily raised, and will not be evaded. If, however, the conception of absolute Godhead be modelled upon the forms of Greek dualism, the mystery becomes an insoluble problem, confounding thought and troubling faith. Within a Godhead conceived as abstract unity there is no room for the Divine Christ. The best that thought can do is to place the Son outside God, though as near to Him as possible. But this is straightway to deprive faith of its object, and to imperil the fact of reconciliation. The Church, accordingly, would have none of the Arian honorific titles applied to Christ on the presupposition that He was less than God, and would be content with nothing less than the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. The term
(2) To Christian experience, maintained in fellowship with the living Christ, He is known as man. Faith apprehends Him as incarnate, i.e. as a Divine Being, who became man, entered into the sphere and conditions of human life, and passed through a complete human experience. Humanity, therefore, reaches its consummation in His Person; and human beings, divided though they may be from one another, find no impassable barriers between themselves and Christ. Christian experience, accordingly, is vitally concerned with the earthly life of Christ, as recorded in the Gospels. Docetism and Ebionism are both false to the conviction of faith. Between the Divinity and the humanity of Jesus Christ, faith finds no abstract opposition. Christ is known as at once Divine and human.
As soon, however, as faith seeks to make clear to itself its convictions, and to state and defend them in view of inquiry or attack, certain questions regarding the human-Divine life of the Lord inevitably arise.
(a) The problem of the origin of this life presented itself very early to the minds of those who had learned to see in Jesus Christ the Son of God. He is man, yet He is related to God as no other man can be. Is it possible that He could have come into the world, as other men do, as a child of a human father and mother? The answer to be found in two of the Gospels is that He did not; that the Holy Ghost came upon His mother, and the power of the Most High overshadowed her; that her Son had no human father. The truth of the narrative of the supernatural birth is challenged, in many quarters, on critical and on metaphysical grounds. In view of these objections, it ought to be freely admitted that the Incarnation might have taken place under normal human conditions. We are not in a position to determine a priori what course Infinite Power and Love shall take. It is impossible, therefore, to place the mode of the Incarnation, through a virgin-birth, on the same footing of religious or theological importance as the great fact of the Incarnation itself. If, however, from a study of the data presented in the NT, i.e. from a consideration of the character of Christ, of His claims and self-witness, as well as of the testimony of His disciples, apart from the narratives of His infancy, we have arrived at the conviction of His unequalled and supreme greatness; and if we then return to a study of these narratives, we cannot fail to find in them an ethical purity and a spiritual fitness which command our glad acceptance. Their value for Christian thought lies in their providing a physical fact, correspondent to the conviction which a study of the person of Christ has wrought in us, viz. that He is not the product of a natural evolution from humanity, but is a Divine Being who has entered into the conditions and experiences of human nature.
The supernatural birth of Jesus is not our warrant for belief in His Divinity and His sinlessness. But belief in His Divinity and His sinlessness is our warrant for regarding the supernatural birth as being not merely possible or credible, but as being wholly congruous with the uniqueness of His personality, and, therefore, as serving as a welcome illustration and confirmation of the contents of Christian experience.
(b) In studying the record of the life of Christ, many questions arise in connexion with the relation of the Divine to the human aspects of His personality. Are not the notes of Godhead absoluteness, finality, completeness, independence of all the means by which human character is developed? How, then, are we to understand the evident facts of our Lord’s life on earth, that He inquired, and learned, and was ignorant; that He passed through the stages of a temporal development, moving toward His goal through conflict and suffering; and that, in His communion with His Father, He employed the means of grace which are ordained for men—reading the Sacred Scriptures, and being much in prayer?
In considering such problems, Christian thought has been much hindered by the domination of metaphysical conceptions such as ‘nature,’ and by the controlling influence of a dualism which has opposed the Divine and human natures, regarding them as possessed of contrary attributes. The history of Christology consists, mainly, in a series of attempts to bring into harmony with one another, in the unity of the person, ‘natures’ which, it is presupposed, are fundamentally opposed in their characteristics and activities. Eutychianism brings them so close together as to confound them in a result which is a compound of Divine and human. Nestorianism holds them so far apart as to make them almost the seats of independent personalities. The formula of Chalcedon can scarcely be called a theory; it is rather an enumeration of the contrasted elements and a mere assertion of the unity which comprehends them. The Lutheran Christology seeks to reduce the dualism of Divine and human to the lowest possible degree by the deification of Christ’s human nature. The Kenotic theories of more recent times have sought to reach the same result by the idea of a depotentiation of His Divine nature. However remarkable these schemes may be as intellectual efforts, and whatever value they may have in directing attention to one or another element in the complex fact, it is certain that they all fall under a threefold condemnation. (i.) They are dominated by metaphysical conceptions which are profoundly opposed to the ideas which prevail throughout Scripture; being dualistic to the core, whereas the ruling ideas of Scripture are synthetic, and are far removed from the distinctions which mark the achievements of the Greek mind. (ii.) They do not correspond with, or do justice to, the knowledge which faith has of the personal Christ; separating, as they do, what faith grasps as a unity, while their attempted harmonies are artificial, and not vital. (iii.) They fail to reproduce the portrait of Christ presented in the Gospels; they utterly fail to give adequate utterance to the impression which the Christ of the Gospels makes upon the minds which contemplate Him. This is true even of the Chalcedonian scheme, which, in substance, is repeated in many modern creeds and confessions.
‘A Being who combines in an inscrutable fashion Divine with human properties, and of whom, consequently, contradictory assertions may be made, while His dual natures hold an undefined relation to one another. This is not a scheme to satisfy either head or heart’ (Principal Dykes, papers on ‘The Person of our Lord’ in Expos. Times, Oct. 1905–Jan. 1906).
Christian thought, accordingly, must abandon the dualism which has so long impeded its efforts. It can never, indeed, emphasize too strongly the lowliness of man, both as creature and as sinful creature, and must never, even in its most spiritual exercises, forget the reverence that is due from man to God. But it must reject as misleading all theories which presuppose a generic difference between the Divine and the human natures. It must, therefore, reject the ‘two-natures’ doctrine of the Person of Christ, in the form in which it has hitherto prevailed; and must start in its study of Christ from the Biblical point of view of the essential affinity of the Divine and the human natures.
In recent literature the influence of Psychology upon Christological study is deeply marked. Instead of two natures, two consciousnesses are suggested as giving the adequate conception of our Lord’s life on earth. The Son of God became the Son of Man; and had a true human experience in respect of knowledge, will, and every other aspect of normal human life; while at the same time He remained the Logos, retaining the attributes of Deity, such as omniscience. He lived, so to speak, in two universes at once, the macrocosm of creation at large and the microcosm of human life. This double life and double consciousness, it is suggested, are to be interpreted in the light of recent psychological experiments, which seem to establish the conclusion that there is a vast subliminal sphere, where the larger part of our life is lived, that which emerges in consciousness being but a section of the greater whole.
It may well be that such psychological hints are not to be thrown away. Yet it may be doubted whether success on this line is surer than under the old metaphysical control. There are curiosities of Psychology as well as of Metaphysics; and the idea of a subliminal sphere may prove as inadequate to explain the mystery of the Incarnation as the old ‘bloodless’ categories of ‘substance’ or ‘nature.’ The soul of Jesus is not on the dissecting table, and a psychology of it is impossible. In particular, it must be asked whether the representation of Jesus as being ordinarily absorbed in His human experiences, while having occasional visitations of His own Logos consciousness, is true to the portrait of Christ in the Gospels. Is there any suggestion in the narrative of a movement on the part of Jesus, to and fro, between the sub-conscious and the conscious spheres? Is not the deepest note in His character the continuousness of His conscious fellowship with God as of the Son with the Father? Is there a hint anywhere of a shutting off of His Divine consciousness during the greater part of His human experience? There is certainly no indication of the shock which a merely human consciousness would receive if it were suddenly invaded by a Divine consciousness. Is not the dualism of two consciousnesses as fatal to the harmony of the life and character of Christ as that of the ‘two natures’ ever was? Or, at least, are not the two consciousnesses really coincident, the Divine being the root of the human, the human being penetrated, formed, and inspired by the Divine?
In any case, whatever value we may attach to theories of the Person of Christ, whether metaphysical or psychological, and whatever may be our forecast of the issues of fixture Christological study, certain conclusions have established themselves as of permanent importance for Christian thought and experience. (i.) It is possible for a Divine Being to have a truly human experience. There is nothing in the nature of God or of man to forbid this. Scripture knows nothing of such disparity between the Divine and human natures as to make the idea of Incarnation an intellectual impossibility. Without doubt, the fact of Incarnation must be a theme of unending wonder and praise: but our view of it ought not to be confounded by the intrusion of speculative difficulties which do not belong to the actual situation. The Son of God became man. He was born, grew, thought, willed, prayed, rejoiced, suffered, died; and in and through all these perfectly human experiences He was, and was conscious of being, the Son of the Father. This Divine consciousness would, no doubt, profoundly modify, in His case, these experiences. The effect, for instance, of His sinlessness and of His filial relation to God upon the exercise of His intellectual faculties must have been such as to raise His knowledge high above that of other men, and would give to it what has been called ‘intensive infinitude.’ But the Divine consciousness would not make the human experiences other or less than human. Surely it ought to be admitted, once for all, that humanity, as we know it, is not complete, and that it gains completeness only as it approximates to the Divine nature. It is not so correct to say that Jesus Christ was Divine and yet human, as to say He was Divine and therefore human.
(ii.) It follows that the human experiences of such a Being constitute at once a veiling and a manifestation of the Divine glory. In the thinking, feeling, acting, suffering of the Son, the Father is drawing near to His creatures, and achieving for them the purpose both of creation and of redemption. We are to look for the Divinity of Christ, not apart from His humanity, but within it, in the facts of His character, and in those actions which He performs and those sufferings which He endures in closest fellowship with men. His human experiences, so far from casting doubt on His Divinity, or seeming to be inconsistent with it, will be its chief demonstration, and will constitute God’s mightiest work for us, His most moving appeal to us. This Man is the Word of God incarnate.
(iii.) Knowledge of Christ, accordingly, is personal, and, like all persona knowledge, is ethically conditioned. All constructive statements regarding the Person of Christ, accordingly, must be, to a degree not attained in the older formularies of the Church, synthetic and concrete. We rise from a study of the life and character of Jesus, and of the experience of those who have come under His saving influence, with the conviction of His essential Godhead. We confess Him to be the Son of God. But His Godhead is not to be regarded in abstract separation from His humanity. It is the Godhead of One who is profoundly and truly human.
It is Godhead, as it discloses itself in humanity, which presents itself for our reverent study, and our no less reverent doctrinal statement.
From this point of view alone can the facts of the life of Christ be apprehended. In this light alone can Christ be presented to this generation as the answer to its need, the age-long need of the human spirit, for personal union with God.
Literature.—(a) Greek Philosophy: Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (1894); Zeller, Stoics and Epicureans; Lightfoot, Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, ‘St. Paul and Seneca’; Drummond, Philo Judaeus, and art. ‘Philo’ by same author in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , Extra Vol.
(b) Religion of Israel: Theol. of the OT, by Schultz, Davidson, Oehler; Drummond, Jewish Messiah; Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah; Kautzsch’s art. in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , Extra Vol.
(c) Character and self-witness of Jesus: NT Theol. of Weiss, Beyschlag, Reuss, Stevens; Wendt, Teaching of Jesus; Dalman, Words of Jesus; Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, and Authority of Christ; Shailer Mathews, Messianic Hope in the NT (1905); Adamson, Mind in Christ; Bruce, Training of the Twelve, Kingdom of God, Galilean Gospel; Swete, Studies in the Teaching of our Lord (1904); Zockler’s art. ‘Jesus Christus’ in PRE [Note: RE Real-Encyklopädie fur protest. Theologic und Kirche.] 3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] ; Sanday’s art. ‘Jesus Christ’ in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible ; Driver’s art. ‘Son of Man,’ and Sanday’s ‘Son of God,’ ib.; Westcott, Revelation of the Father, Christus Consummator.
(d) Testimony of the Apostles: NT Theol. as above; also Shailer Mathews as above; Bacon, Story of St. Paul: a Comparison of Acts and Epistles (1904); Knowling, Testimony of St. Paul to Christ (1905), note copious literature of recent date referred to in Lecture xxiv.; Patrick, James, the Lord’s Brother (1906).
(e) Development of Doctrine: Harnack, Hist. of Dogma; Loofs, Leitfaden4 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] (1906); Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism; Dorner, Doctrine of the Person of Christ; Ottley, Doctrine of the Incarnation; Réville, Hist. du dogme de la divinité de Jésus Christ; Schultz, Die Lehre von der Gottheit Christi (1881); Herm. Schmidt, Zur Christologie; Loofs’ art. ‘Christologie’ in PRE [Note: RE Real-Encyklopädie fur protest. Theologic und Kirche.] 3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] ; Kunze, Die ewige Gottheit Jesu Christi (1904); Orr, Christian View of God and the World, Progress of Dogma, God’s Image in Man (1905); Bruce, Humiliation of Christ; T. C. Edwards, The God-Man; Liddon, Divinity of our Lord; Gore, Bampton Lecture, and Dissertations; Walker, The Spirit and the Incarnation; Dods, Incarnation of the Eternal Word (1849); Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine, Divine Immanence; D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology; Sturt and others, Personal Idealism; Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, Philosophy of Christian Religion.
T. B. Kilpatrick.
See LOGOS, THE.
See Memra; Philo; Wisdom.
INCARNATION.—It is a distinguishing feature of Christianity that it consists in faith in a person, Jesus Christ, and in faith or self-committal of such a character that faith in Him is understood to be faith in God. The fact on which the whole of the Christian religion depends is therefore the fact that Jesus Christ is both God and man. Assuming provisionally this fact to be true, or at least credible, this article will briefly examine the witness borne to it in the hooks of the OT and NT.
1. The Incarnation foreshadowed in the OT.—Early religions have attempted to explain two things—the existence and order of the universe, and the principles of conduct or morality. The Hebrews attained at an early period to a belief in God as the creator and sustainer of the universe, but their interest in metaphysic did not go beyond this. It is in their moral idea of God that we shall find anticipations of the Incarnation. (a) The OT conception of man. Man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:26; Gen 9:6). Whatever may be the exact meaning of this expression, it appears to imply that man has a free and rational personality, and is destined for union with God. (b) God reveals Himself to man. A belief in the self-manifestation of God, through visions, dreams, the ministry of angels, the spirit of prophecy, and in the possibility of personal converse between God and man, is apparent upon every page of the OT. The ‘theophanies’ further suggest the possibility of the appearance of God in a human form. It is also remarkable that, although the sense of the holiness and transcendency of God grew with time, the Jews in the later periods did not shrink from strongly anthropomorphic expressions. (c) Intimations of relationships in the Deity. Without unduly pressing such particular points as the plural form of Elohim (God), or the triple repetition of the Divine name (Isa 6:3, Num 6:23), it may at least be said that the idea of God in Jewish monotheism is not a bare unit, and ‘can only be apprehended as that which involves diversity as well as unity.’ Moreover, the doctrine of the Divine Wisdom as set forth in the Books of Proverbs and Wisdom (Pro 8:22, Wis 7:23-25; Wis 8:1 etc.) personifies Wisdom almost to the point of ascribing to it separate existence. The doctrine was carried further by Philo, with assistance from Greek thought, and prepared the way for St. John’s conception of the Logos, the Word of God. (d) The Messianic hope. This was at its root an anticipation of the union of Divine and human attributes in a single personality (see Messiah). It developed along several distinct lines of thought and expectation, and it will be noted that these are not combined in the OT; but Christianity claims to supply the explanation and fulfilment of them all.
2. The fact of the Incarnation in the NT
(a) The humanity of Christ. It is beyond dispute that Christ is represented in the NT as a man. He was born, indeed, under miraculous conditions, but of a human mother. He grew up with gradually developing powers (Luk 2:52). The people among whom He lived for thirty years do not appear to have recognized anything extraordinary in Him (Mat 13:55). During the period of His life about which detailed information has been recorded, we read of ordinary physical and moral characteristics. He suffered weariness (Mar 4:38, Joh 4:6), hunger (Mat 4:2), thirst (Joh 19:28); he died and was buried. He felt even strong emotions: wonder (Mar 6:6, Luk 7:9), compassion (Mar 8:2, Luk 7:13), joy (Luk 10:21), anger (Mar 8:12; Mar 10:14); He was deeply moved (Joh 11:33, Mar 14:33). He acquired information in the ordinary way (Mar 6:38; Mar 9:21, Joh 11:34). He was tempted (Mat 4:1-11, Luk 22:28). And it may be further asserted with the utmost confidence, that neither in the Gospels nor in any other part of the NT is there the smallest support for a Docetic explanation of these facts (that is, for the theory that He only seemed to undergo the experiences narrated). (b) The Divinity of Christ. Side by side with this picture of perfect humanity there is an ever-present belief through all the NT writings that Christ was more than a man. From the evidential point of view the most important and unquestionable testimony to the early belief of His disciples is contained in St. Paul’s Epistles, especially those to the Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians, which are among the earliest books of the NT, and of the most undisputed genuineness. In these Epistles we find Jesus Christ ‘co-ordinated with God in the necessarily Divine functions, in a manner impossible to the mind of a Jewish monotheist like St. Paul, unless the co-ordinated person is really believed to belong to the properly Divine being.’ In the Gospels we have an account of how this belief arose. The Synoptic Gospels supply a simple narrative of fact in which we can mark the growing belief of the disciples; and the Fourth Gospel definitely marks stages of faith on the part of Christ’s adherents, and of hatred on the part of His enemies. The following points may be specially noted in the Gospels:—
(1) Extraordinary characteristics are constantly ascribed to Christ, not in themselves necessarily Divine, but certainly such as to distinguish Christ in a marked degree from other men. There is a personal influence of a very remarkable kind. This is naturally not described or dwelt upon, but every page of the Gospels testifies to its existence. The earliest record of Christ’s life is pre-eminently miraculous. In spite of economy and restraint of power, mighty works are represented as having been the natural, sometimes the almost involuntary, accompaniments of His ministrations. Two special miracles, the Resurrection and the Virgin-birth, are noticed separately below. He spoke with authority (Mar 7:29). He claimed to fulfil the Law—a law recognized as Divine—to be Lord of the Sabbath, and to give a new law to His disciples. In all His teaching there is an implicit claim to infallibility. In spite of His being subject to temptation, the possibility of moral failure is never entertained. There is nothing that marks Christ off from other men more than this. In all other good men the sense of sin becomes more acute with increasing holiness. In Christ it did not exist. The title of ‘Son of Man’ which He habitually used may have more meanings than one. But comparing the different connexions in which it is used, we can hardly escape the conclusion that Christ identifies Himself with the consummation and perfection of humanity.
(2) He claimed to be the Messiah, summing up and uniting the different lines of expectation alluded to above. As has been pointed out, the Messianic hope included features both human and Divine; and although this was not recognized beforehand, it appears to us, looking back, that these expectations could not have been adequately satisfied except by the Incarnation.
(3) Of some of the things mentioned above it might be a sufficient explanation to say, that Christ was a man endowed with exceptional powers and graces by God, and approved by mighty wonders and signs. But even in the Synoptic Gospels, which are for the most part pure narrative, there is more than this. In the claim to forgive sins (Mat 9:2-6), to judge the world (Mar 14:62-63), to reveal the will of the Father (Mat 11:27), in His commission to the Church (Mat 28:18-20, Mar 16:15-18, Luk 24:44-48), and above all, perhaps, in the claim of personal adhesion which He ever made on His disciples, He assumes a relationship to God which would not be possible to one who was not conscious of being more than man.
(4) In the discourses in the Fourth Gospel, Christ plainly asserts His own pre-existence and His own essential relation to the Father. If these discourses represent even the substance of a side of Christ’s teaching (a point which must be assumed and not argued here), He explicitly bore witness to His eternal relation to the Father.
(5) What crowned the faith of the disciples was the fact of the Resurrection. Their absolute belief in the reality of this fact swept away all doubts and misgivings. At first, no doubt, they were so much absorbed in the fact itself that they did not at once reason out all that it meant to their beliefs; and in teaching they had to adapt their message to the capacities of their hearers; but there can be no question about the place which the belief in the Resurrection took in determining their creed (see Jesus Christ, p. 458a).
(6) One miracle recorded in the Gospels, the Virgin-birth, naturally did not form part of the first cycle of Apostolic teaching. The Apostles bore witness to their own experience and to the growth of their own faith, and they knew Jesus Christ first as a man. Apart from the evidence for the fact, it has seemed to most Christians in all ages that the idea of a new creative act is naturally associated with the occurrence of the Incarnation.
3. Purpose and results of the Incarnation
(a) Consummation of the universe and of humanity.—St. Paul (Eph 1:10) speaks of the purpose of God ‘to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth’ (cf. Heb 2:10). This is a view which is not often explicitly dwelt upon in the Scriptures, but the idea appears to pervade the NT, and it is conspicuous in Eph., Col., and Hebrews. Christ is represented as fulfilling the purpose of humanity and therefore of the universe, as being its first and final cause, ‘for whom are all things, and through whom are all things.’ It is hardly necessary to point out that the modern teaching of evolution, if not anticipated by Christianity, at least adapts itself singularly well to the expression of this aspect of it.
(b) Supreme revelation of God.—Christians have always believed that even the material universe was destined ultimately to reveal God, and St. Paul appeals to the processes of nature as being an indication not only of the creative power, but also of the benevolence of God (Act 14:17, cf. Rom 1:20). The OT is the history of a progressive revelation which is always looking forward to more perfect illumination, and the whole history of man is, according to the NT, the history of gradual enlightenment culminating in the Incarnation (Heb 1:2, Joh 14:9, Col 1:14).
(c) Restoration of man.—It has been a common subject of speculation in the Church whether the Incarnation would have taken place if man had not sinned, and it must be recognized that to such a question no decisive answer can be given. As a fact the Incarnation was conditioned by the existence of man’s sin, and the restoration of man is constantly put forward as its purpose. Three special aspects of this work of restoration may be noticed. (1) Christ offers an example of perfect and sinless humanity: He is the unique example of man as God intended him to be. The ideal of the human race becomes actual in Him. His life was one of perfect obedience to the will of God (Mat 17:5, Luk 3:22, Joh 8:29). (2) He removed the barriers which sin had placed between man and his Creator. This work is invariably associated in the NT with His death and resurrection. It is described as an offering, a sacrifice, of Himself (Heb 9:26), which takes away the sin of the world (Joh 1:29). Many metaphors are used in the NT to describe the effect of His death and resurrection, such as redemption, which conveys the idea of a deliverance at a great cost from slavery; propitiation, or an act or process by which sin is neutralized; salvation, or bringing into a condition of health or safety; reconciliation with God, and remission of sin (see Atonement). (3) These two parts of Christ’s work for man were accomplished by His earthly life, death, and resurrection. But they do not comprise all that the Incarnation has done for the restoration of man. The completion of His work Christ left to His Church, the society which He founded, and in which He promised that He would dwell through the Holy Spirit. The Church, St. Paul says, is His body, living by His life and the instrument of His work. Thus the Kingdom of God which Christ brought to the earth, and which He constantly speaks of both as being already come and as still to come, is visibly represented in His Church, which is ‘the Kingdom of heaven in so far as it has already come, and prepares for the Kingdom as it is to come in glory.’
4. Relation of the NT doctrine to that of the Councils.—It has been seen above that the disciples knew our Lord first as a man, and that they advanced by degrees to a belief in His Divinity. Men educated in Jewish habits of thought would not readily apprehend in all its bearings the Christian idea of a Person who could be both God and man. It is therefore not surprising that there should be in the NT a diversity of treatment with regard to the question of the Person of Christ, and that it should he possible to recognize what may be called different levels of Christological belief. Before our Lord’s death the disciples had recognized Him as the Messiah, though with still very inadequate ideas as to the nature of the Messianic Kingdom which He was to set up. The Resurrection transformed this faith, and it naturally became the central point of their early teaching. The conception of Christ prominent in the earliest Apostolic age, and emphasized in the first part of the Acts and in the Epistles of 1Peter , James, and Jude, regards Him primarily as the Messiah, the glory of whose Person and mission has been proved by the Resurrection, who has been exalted to God’s right hand, and who will be judge of quick and dead. St. Paul in his earlier Epistles regards Christ’s Person more from the point of view of personal religion, as One who has bridged over the gulf which sin has caused between God and man, and in whom man’s desire for reconciliation with God finds satisfaction. St. Paul’s later Epistles, as well as the Ep. to the Hebrews and St. John’s Gospel, deal with the cosmological and mystical aspects of the Incarnation, and contain the most definite statements of the Divinity of Christ.
It has been further maintained that the definitions of the doctrine made by the great Councils and embodied in the Creeds show an advance upon the doctrine contained in the NT. This was not, however, the view of those who drew up the definitions, for they invariably appealed to the NT writings as conclusive, and believed themselves to be only formulating beliefs which had always been held by the Church. The language of the definitions was undoubtedly to some extent new, but it has never been shown that the substance of the doctrine expressed by them in any respect goes beyond what has been represented above as the teaching of the NT. If the NT writers really believed, as has been maintained above, that Christ was a Person who was perfectly human and who was also Divine, there is nothing in the dogmatic decrees of the 4th and 5th centuries which asserts more than this. What these definitions do is to negative explanations which are inconsistent with these fundamental beliefs. It is not surprising that men found it difficult to grasp the perfect Divinity as well as the perfect humanity of Christ, and that attempts should have been made to explain away one side or other of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The attempt which met with the widest success, and most threatened the doctrine of the Church, was that of Arius, who taught that the Son of God was a created being, a sort of demi-god. This teaching found ready support and sympathy among men who had not shaken off pagan habits of thought, and in opposing it the Church was contending for a true Theism, which cannot endure the multiplication of objects of worship, no less than for Christianity. But although a word was used in the definition finally accepted, the celebrated homoousion—‘of one substance with the Father’—which was not used by any NT writer, it was used unwillingly, and only because other attempts to assert beyond the possibility of cavil the true Divinity of Christ had failed. Again, when the Divinity of Christ was fully accepted, the difficulty of believing the same Person to be both God and man led to attempts to explain away the perfect humanity. Apollinaris taught that the Word of God took the place of the human mind or spirit in Christ, as at a later period the Monothelites held that He had no human will; Nestorius practically denied an Incarnation, by holding that the Son of God and Jesus Christ were two separate persons, though united in a singular degree; Eutyches taught that the manhood in Christ was merged in the Godhead so as to lose its proper and distinct nature. These explanations contradicted in various ways the plain teaching of the Gospels that Christ was a truly human Person, and they were all decisively negatived by the Church in language which no doubt shows a distinct advance in theological thought, but without adding anything to the substance of the Apostolic doctrine.
J. H. Maude.
(Latin: in, in; caro, flesh)
The word used to express the union of the Divine nature of the Son of God with human nature, in the Person of Jesus Christ. The Apostle, Saint John, says: "The Word was made Flesh" (John 1). The Word is the Son of God; by flesh in Scripture is meant mankind, human nature, man, body and soul, as in Luke 3: "And all flesh shall see the salvation of God." The Son of God assumed our flesh and dwelt among us like one of us in order to redeem us. His Divine nature was substantially united to our human nature. In the old calendars the feast of the Annunciation was called feast of the Incarnation. In the Orient the mystery is commemorated by a special feast, 26 December. The third versicle of the Angelus is: "The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us."
See Christ, Christology.
The word ‘incarnation’ is commonly used to denote the truth that God became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ. The word itself is not found in the Bible, but comes from a Latin word meaning ‘in flesh’. In relation to Jesus it means that, in him, God took a bodily form (Joh 1:14; 1Ti 3:16). (For details see JESUS CHRIST, sub-heading ‘God in human form’.)
The addition of human nature to the nature of God the second person of the Trinity. It is where God became a man (Joh 1:1; Joh 1:14; Php 2:5-8). It was the voluntary act of Jesus to humble Himself so that He might die for our sins (1Pe 3:18). Thus, Jesus has two natures: Divine and human. This is known as the Hypostatic Union.
The doctrine is of vital importance to the Christian. By it we understand the true nature of God, the atonement, forgiveness, grace, etc. It is only God who could pay for sins. Therefore, God became man (Joh 1:1; Joh 1:14) to die for our sins (1Pe 2:24) which is the atonement. Through Jesus we have forgiveness of sins. Since we are saved by grace through faith (Eph 2:8-9) it is essential that our object of faith be accurate. The doctrine of the incarnation ensures accuracy, the knowledge that God died on the cross to atone for sin and that the God-man (Jesus) is now in heaven as a mediator (1Ti 2:5) between us and God.
Jesus came to reveal the Father (Mat 11:27; Luk 10:22), to do His will (Heb 10:5-9), to fulfill prophecy (Luk 4:17-21), to reconcile the world (2Co 5:18-21), and to become our High Priest (Heb 7:24-28). (Contrast with Kenosis.)
Literally, “in flesh”; theologically, the doctrine that in Jesus of Nazareth God took on human flesh and became the God-man. Historically, the doctrine of incarnation was central in the christological debates of patristic times and has recently come to the fore again in academic circles. Biblically, it expresses the mystery of Jesus’ identity.
New Testament Testimony
The Synoptic Gospels
The Gospel of Mark has no account of the Incarnation and stresses Jesus’ messiahship more than his deity. As a result, some believe that it represents an earlier stage in the development of the church’s theology, before the doctrine of incarnation had evolved. That is doubtful for two reasons: Incarnation passages like the Philippians hymn (Phil 2:6–11) probably antedate Mark’s Gospel, and Mark has a well-developed theology of the two natures of Christ. Although he stresses Jesus’ humanity, Mark accents it with an emphasis on divinity. Jesus was called the “beloved Son” by a heavenly voice at his baptism and transfiguration (Mk 1:11; 9:7); demons called him divine (3:11; 5:7), as did a Roman centurion (15:39). Jesus’ “Abba” prayers (14:36; cf. Mt 26:39; Lk 22:42) indicate his sense of divine identity, and at his trial he was charged with claiming the title “Son of the Blessed” (14:61–62). Thus, though the Incarnation is nowhere explicitly stated in Mark, it is implicitly affirmed.
Matthew and Luke express the Incarnation. The birth narratives, of course, stress the event itself, with Matthew emphasizing Jesus’ royal messiahship, and Luke, the divine witness of the Holy Spirit. Matthew’s Gospel is Christ-centered; Luke concentrates on Christ as Savior, or more precisely, on salvation-history. Although Matthew presents Jesus’ humanity, he emphasizes his lordship (Mt 23:6–10) and divine sonship. The Incarnation thus becomes the means whereby the divine becomes human in a universal sense (1:23; 18:20; 24:14; 28:18–20). Luke shows the greatest interest of the three in Jesus’ earthly life. Nevertheless, his Gospel does not stress the human side of Jesus as much as Mark’s. Luke portrays Jesus primarily as the divine Savior within history (Lk 2:11; 4:16–30). He combines Jesus’ messianic office and divine nature, showing that the incarnate Son of God suffered and was exalted in order to bring people to God.
John’s Writings
The apostle John’s doctrine of incarnation is more explicit than any of the others, teaching not only Jesus’ God-man status but also his preexistent “glory” (Jn 1:1–18). Central in this presentation is the oneness between Jesus and God the Father (10:29–30; 14:8–11; 1 Jn 2:23). The “I am” (the expressed Christ, taken from the OT title for the one true God and probably signifying God’s personal name, Yahweh) came to reveal God to his people (Jn 1:4–5, 14, 18). Yet John also has the most balanced presentation of the Incarnation. The divine Logos or Word (1:1–18) is the exemplar of perfect humanity; he “became flesh” (v 14) to enlighten people (vv 5, 9) and generate in them “eternal life” (3:14–18; 1 Jn 1:1–3; 4:9).
Paul’s Epistles
The apostle Paul presented the Incarnation as Jesus’ path to suffering and redemption. In Galatians 4:4–5 the Incarnation (“born of woman”) came “in the fullness of time” or at the apex of salvation-history, to “redeem those who were under the law.” In the Philippians hymn (Phil 2:6–11, quotes from nasb), the Incarnation is seen in terms of preexistence (“though he was in the form of God”), humiliation (“emptied . . . humbled”), and obedience (“becoming obedient to the point of death”). The goal of the Incarnation was the cross (“even death on a cross”), and its result was Christ’s exaltation. The hymn is perhaps the supreme theological statement on the Incarnation in the NT. Jesus’ human life was an “emptying,” a refusal to seize the prerogatives of his deity (“did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped”).
Paul described Christ as a second Adam (Rom 5:12–19; 1 Cor 15:45–47), who brought humanity a new possibility to attain what Adam had forsaken. Through assuming the form of a man, Christ became the Redeemer who reconciles people to God (Rom 3:25; 2 Cor 5:19; 1 Tm 1:15). Paul stressed even more, however, that the exalted Christ provides newness of life (Rom 6:4–6; 2 Cor 3:17–18; Col 3:1–4). A hymn in the Letter to the Colossians (1:15–20) employs ideas from Jewish wisdom speculation, and possibly Greek themes, to show Christ as the “firstborn” and the “fullness of God.” The one who always existed as God, through his sacrificial death, became the exalted Lord and brought humankind to God (see also the “flesh-spirit” theme in Rom 1:3–4; 1 Tm 3:16).
Hebrews
The Letter to the Hebrews strongly speaks of the Incarnation. The opening hymn (Heb 1:1–3) accents Christ’s exalted status as “the very stamp” of God’s image and the radiance of his glory. Christ is superior to the angels (1:4–9), yet he became a man in order to suffer for human salvation (2:9; 5:7–9). The Incarnation is aligned with sinful humankind’s need for a Savior. The purpose of Hebrews is to show Christ’s incomparable superiority to the OT sacrifices, and at the same time to stress his work of salvation. His real temptation (2:18; 4:15) combined with his sinlessness (4:15; 5:9; 7:26) is the human remedy for human sin. The Incarnation was Christ’s path to final, once-for-all atonement and victory over sin (7:28; 9:26).
Historical Development
The first group to challenge the traditional doctrine of incarnation was the Gnostics, who in the late first century denied that Jesus was truly human. Their Greek belief that the physical creation was evil led them to deny the Incarnation. They believed Christ to be a quasi-spiritual being who merely appeared human. The theologian Marcion (d. c. 160), trained by Gnostic teachers, also accepted a docetic interpretation of Christ (his humanity was only apparent). Marcion taught his doctrine as an antidote to the OT or Jewish-oriented Christianity in his day. After his excommunication in AD 144, Marcion founded his own church, and his views were widely disseminated in the next two centuries. Partly in reaction to Marcion’s christological heresy, the orthodox churches unified their doctrine.
The next challenge to the orthodox view came through the Arian, Apollinarian, and Nestorian controversies in the third and fourth centuries. Arianism held that the Incarnation was total, so that Christ the Logos was no longer fully God. At the same time, he was not fully human, so Christ was someone between two natures. The Council of Nicaea (AD 325) affirmed that Jesus was indeed both God and man. A further question soon arose, however, as to the relation between his two natures. Apollinarius (310?–390?) taught that only the body of Jesus was human; his soul was absorbed completely into the divine Logos. Nestorius (c. 381–451) taught that the two natures must always remain distinct in the person of Christ; they functioned together but were separate in his being. The Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) affirmed the unity of the two natures in Jesus. Many opponents of Chalcedon arose, called Monophysites, who believed in one divine nature in Jesus, who was only in a sense human. That movement caused serious political and religious divisions, and the Council of Constantinople (680–81) reaffirmed Chalcedon and established the orthodox incarnation theology.
In the eighth century, Spain and France were centers of the “adoptionist” controversy. Adoptionism taught that at birth Jesus was human, but at his baptism he underwent a “second birth” and was “adopted” as Son of God. It was condemned in a series of synods and never gained many adherents until modern times. During the scholastic age, Peter Lombard (1095?–1160) advocated what became known as “nihilism.” The Incarnation supposedly caused no fundamental change in Jesus’ deity, but his human nature was both insubstantial and unessential. That view likewise was condemned by Pope Alexander III (1159–81). Another debate at that time centered on the relationship between the fall and the Incarnation. Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) concluded that there was a cause-effect connection; the Incarnation was necessitated by sin rather than predestined apart from the fall.
The Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformers follow basically the same orthodox teaching about the Incarnation. The conflict in the Reformation centered more on soteriology (the doctrine of salvation). Several aberrant antitrinitarian movements took advantage of the breakdown in ecclesiastical authority, however. Michael Servetus (1511–53) taught a pantheistic view of the Incarnation, focused on the divine Spirit becoming manifest in the human form of Jesus. Thus the Logos is not a distinct person in the Godhead, nor is it fundamentally different from a “divine spark” in every person. At the same time Laelius Socinus (1525–62) and his nephew, Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), taught a unitarian system. The Incarnation was not a transferral of the divine essence but a communication of divine authority and revelation. Christ thus did not die as an atonement but as a moral example. Both Servetus and Socinianism were condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike.
In the 17th and 18th centuries “kenoticism” (from Greek for “empty”) taught that in the Incarnation the Logos totally “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7) of the divine attributes. That doctrine represented the final phase of a dialogue from the scholastic period about the exact communication between Jesus’ two natures. Was his human nature omnipotent? If not, how did the man Jesus exercise the divine attributes? The kenotic school believed that Jesus was fully human and that his divine nature was quiescent until after the Ascension. His miraculous powers were external, given by the Spirit. Against that view, the majority of theologians argued that Jesus was at all times both God and man, and that in Philippians 2:6–8 Jesus did not lay aside the attributes of deity (he still exhibited the “form of God”) but rather the majesty associated with deity.
The 19th and 20th centuries have given rise to a view that the Incarnation was a “myth,” a pictorial way of describing how God spoke through Jesus. The virgin birth was not historical, nor did any of the supernatural events of the Gospels ever take place. Rather, the stories in the Gospels were concoctions of the later church, efforts to portray Jesus’ impact on the movement. The Gospels, however, have too strong a flavor of accurate history for such a view to prevail (see Lk 1:1–5; Jn 19:35; 21:24).
Conclusion
The NT teaching on the Incarnation balances the humanity and divinity of Christ. Those two facts must harmonize in any theological system, for both are absolutely necessary parts of God’s redemptive plan. In the Incarnation, Jesus became a perfect human being. As God in human flesh, he suffered the divine penalty for sin as an innocent substitute. Being both God and man, Jesus simultaneously revealed God’s will for human life and reconciled sinful people to God through his own perfect life and death. Because of the Incarnation, therefore, those who believe in Christ have peace with God and new life from God.
See also Christology; Jesus Christ, Life and Teachings of; Genealogy of Jesus Christ; Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Aquifer Open Bible Dictionary © 2026 Mission Mutual, an adaptation of the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The assuming by God of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. The incarnation is the fixed and permanent physical dwelling of God in his world, as opposed to the temporary manifestation of the divine presence and power in a theophany.
God the Son assumed human nature
JHN 1:14 See also JHN 1:9, JHN 8:56; 1TI 3:16; 1JN 1:1–1:2, 1JN 4:2; 2JN 1:7
Jesus Christ's incarnation involved a supernatural conception
LUK 1:35 See also ISA 9:6; MAT 1:18; JHN 14:9 The incarnation was such that the Son was the exact representation of the Father; ROM 1:4; COL 1:15, COL 1:19; HEB 1:2–1:3
Jesus Christ Chist's incarnation involved a virgin birth
MAT 1:22–1:23 See also ISA 7:14; LUK 1:34; ROM 1:3; GAL 4:4; PHP 2:8; HEB 2:14
The cost of the incarnation
PHP 2:6–2:7 See also 2CO 8:9; HEB 2:10 The incarnation involved Jesus Christ's suffering.
The necessity of the incarnation
ROM 8:3 See also ROM 5:17–5:19; 2CO 5:19; COL 1:22; 1TI 2:5 Only a person who is fully human and fully divine can be the effective mediator between God and humanity; HEB 2:17–2:18, HEB 4:15
Dictionary of Bible Themes © 1999 Martin H. Manser. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.