"I give: theft: JBSoiii
for. the. founding if a. College Bvifflg-palony!

•YALE-waiiviEissinnf-

Bought with the income
of the
Alphonso Taft Fund

ftbe 3nternationaI Gbeological Xibrarp.

EDITED BY
CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.LlTT.,
Graduate Professir of Theological Encyclopaedia and Symbolics, Union Theological
Seminary, New York;

THE LATE STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D.,
Principal^ and Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament Exegesis*
United Free Church College, Aberdeen.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST.
By H. R. MACKINTOSH, D Phil., D.D.

International Theological Library

THE DOCTRINE

OF THE

PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST

H. E. MACKINTOSH, DTiiil., D.D.
PBOFESSOR OF THEOLOGY, NEW COLLEGE
EDIKBURQH

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1912

TO THE MEMORY OF
(gtarcue ©ode
I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK

PREFACE.
It may not be unnecessary to inform the reader that the
present book is designed chiefly as a student's manual,
which, with a fair measure of completeness, should cover
the whole field of Christology. This so far excuses two
of its more prominent features : the large space given to
historical narration, and a certain frequency of allusion to
modern literature. My purpose was not simply to formu
late the results reached by a single mind — results, as I
give fair warning, in no sense original or extraordinary —
but also to furnish what might be considered a competent
guide to the best recent discussion, in this country and
Germany. If these pages should have helped any student
to take his bearings in the world of Christological thought,
or suggested fruitful lines of new inquiry, their object will
have been fully achieved.
Nothing in the book, it is probable, may seem so inde
fensible as the more or less speculative tone of the con
cluding chapters. Some, I fear, will judge that, all pro
testations notwithstanding, I have added one more to the
vain attempts to explain in detail how God became, for our
redemption, incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. I
am conscious that a problem of method is indicated here
on which opinions are widely divergent, and are likely to
remain so. To abstain from all efforts to reach a con
structive synthesis of the data which faith apprehends would,
as is known, have been in harmony with well-marked and
ably championed tendencies of our time. I can only plead
that, while it certainly " has not pleased God to save His

Vlll PREFACE
people by argument," it nevertheless does not seem possible
to hold or vindicate the absoluteness of Christ as an intel
ligent conviction except by passing definitely into the
domain of reasoned theory. It is not that Dogmatic starts
where faith ends. It is rather that Dogmatic is called to
fix in lucid conceptual forms the whole rich truth of
which faith is sure. The revelation and self-sacrifice of
God in Christ — which forms the very heart of the New
Testament message — cannot really be presented to the
mind without raising problems of an essentially speculative
character. Hence there will always be metaphysic in
theology, but it is the implicit metaphysic of faith, moving
ever within the sphere of conscience.
My sincere thanks are due to my friend and colleague,
the Eev. Professor H. A. A. Kennedy, D.D., who has helped
me to revise the proofs, and has guided me at many points
by valuable counsel and suggestion. I am also indebted to
the Editor of the Expositor for permission to use some
portions of an article lately contributed to its pages.

H. R. MACKINTOSH.

New College, Edinburgh,
6th June 1912.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.
CHRISTOLOGY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
INTRODUCTION.
Main types of apostolic thought, 1. Motives leading to Christ-
ology, 2. CHAPTER I. FAG!
Christ in the Synoptic Gospels ..... 5-35
The Synoptics as Gospels, not biographies, 5. The human portrait
of Jesus, 9. Messiahship of Jesus, 14. Son of man, 19. Son of
God, 25. The personal authority of Jesus, 31.
Note on the Sinlessness of Jesus, 35-39.
CHAPTER II.
Primitive Christian Belief ..... 39-48
Early speeches in Acts, 39. First Epistle of Peter, 44.
CHAPTER III.
The Christology of St. Paul ..... 49-77
Genesis of the Pauline Christology, 50. The glorified Lord, 52.
Christ and the Spirit, 57. The historic Christ, 62. The Son of God,
65. Pre-existence, 66. Cosmic activity of Christ, 69. Subordina
tion of Christ to God, 71. Advance of Paulinism on primitive
Christian belief, 74. CHAPTER IV.
Cheistology in the Epistle to the Hebrews . . 78-87
Christ as High Priest, 78. The human Jesus, 79. Sonship of
Christ, SO. Pre-existence, 83. Subordination, 84. Comparison with
Pauline view, 86.

X CONTENTS
CHAPTER V. PAGE
Christology in the Apocalypse .... 88-93
Messianic symbolism, 88. Heavenly glory of Jesus, 89. Relation
of Christ to God, 90. CHAPTER VI.
The Johannine Christology ..... 94-121
Messianic interest, 94. Christological design, 95. Humanity of
Jesus, 99. Son of God, 102. Pre-existence, 103. The risen glory,
106. Son of man, 108. Christ-mysticism, 110. Simple modalism,
112. Teaching of the Prologue, 115. First Epistle of John, 120.

BOOK II.
HISTORY OF CHRISTOLOGICAL DOCTRINE.
CHAPTER I.
Christology in the Sub-Apostolic Age . . . 122-139
Introduction, 122. The Apostolic Fathers, 127. Ignatius, 129.
Gnostic Christology, 134. The Apostles' Creed, 136.
CHAPTER II.
Beginnings of the Christological Dogma . . . 140-158
The Greek Apologists, 140. Irenaeus, 144. Monarchianism, 147.
Sabellius, 151. Tertullian, 154.
CHAPTER III.
The Ascendancy of the Logos Doctrine . . . 159-174
Neo-Platonism, 159. The Alexandrian Theologians : Clement, 161.
Origen, 164. Correspondenceof theDionysii, 170. Paul of Samosata,
171. CHAPTER IV.
The Aman Controversy ..... 175-195
The heresy of Arius, 175. The Nicene Creed, 179. Athanasius,
183. Marcellus of Ancyra, 189. Movements of Semi- Arianism, 191.
The Cappadocian Divines, 192. CHAPTER V.
Controversies as to the full Humanity of Christ . 196-222
Apollinarianism, 196. Nestorianism, 201. Cyril of Alexandria
205. Eutychianistn, 209. Dogmatic Epistle of Leo, 211. Council
and Creed of Chalcedon, 212. Monophysite Controversy, 215.
Monothelite Controversy, 219. John of Damascus, 222.

CONTENTS XI
CHAPTER VI. TAGS
Later Christology in the West .... 228-229
Augustine, 223. Spanish Adoptiariism, 225. Middle Ages, 226.
Thomas Aquinas, 228. Duns Scotus, 229.
CHAPTER VII.
Christology of the Reformation Churches . . 230-246
Luther, 230. Christology of the Lutheran Church, 237. Reformed
Christology, 242. Socinianism, 245.
CHAPTER VIII.
Christology in the Nineteenth Century . . . 247-284
Theocentric and Anthropocentrio Interpretations, 247.. Schleier-
macher, 250. Hegel and his School, 256. Kenotic Theories, 264.
Dorner, 272. Christology in Britain and America, 275. Ritschl and
the Ritschlians, 278. Modern Radical School, 281.

BOOK III.
THE RECONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT OF
THE DOCTRINE.
PART I.
PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS.
CHAPTER I.
The Intellectual Need for a Christology . . 285-305
What Christianity is, 285. Objections to Christology, 286. Jesus
as hero or genius, 287. Literal fidelity to Chalcedon impossible, 292.
The doctrine of Two Natures, 294. The reconstruction of Christology,
299. Metaphysics in Christology, 302.
CHAPTER II.
Christology and the Historic Christ . . . 306-320
Jesus the point of departure, 306. History and the Gospel, 307.
Herrmann's view of the historic Christ, 315. The risen Lord, 317.
CHAPTER III.
Christ's Person in Relation to His Work. . . 321-344
Christ known through His saving influence, 321. His ethical
supremacy, 325. His work of Atonement, 329. Union with Christ,
333. His revelation of the Father, 340. His work illumined by His
person, 341.

Xll CONTENTS PART II.
THE IMMEDIATE UTTERANCES OF FAITH.
CHAPTER IV. PAGE
Christ the Object of Faith ..... 345-362
The simplest starting-point, 345. Faith in Christ and faith in God,
345. Such faith central in New Testament, 349. Faith to be inter
rogated at its highest stage, 353. Jesus as merely Subject of faith,
353. History and an Absolute personality, 355. Forgiveness medi
ated through Jesus, 357. " Jesus-religion," 359.
CHAPTER V.
The Exalted Lord . . . . . . 363-382
The Christ of faith a transcendent Person, 363. Did His influence
cease at death ? 367. The resurrection a point of transition, 369.
Christ as Giver of the Spirit, 373. His intercession, 376. Mysticism,
378. Sovereignty of Christ, 379.
CHAPTER VI,
The Perfect Manhood of Christ .... 383-406
Docetism, 383. Jesus an individual man, 385. Yet universal, 391.
Integrity of Christ's manhood, 394. Its sinless quality, 400. Sig
nificance of His humanity for faith, 404.
CHAPTER VII.
The Divinity of Christ ..... 407-426
Modes of approach, 407. Giving Christ the right predicate, 410.
Godhead the ultimate ground of His sinlessness, 41 2. Of His unshared
Sonship, 415. Of His risen Life, 418. Is "Godhead" the right
word ? 419. The incarnation as core of the Gospel, 424.

PART III.
TEE TRANSCENDENT IMPLICATES OF FAITH.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Christian Idea of Incarnation .... 427-444
The transcendent problems of Christ's person, 427. Ethnic beliefs
in incarnation, 428. Incarnation and Divine immanence, 431.
Absolute immanence of God in Christ, 434. Incarnation and evolu
tion, 437. Incarnation remedial in purpose, 440.

CHAPTER IX.
3on
Pre-existence an inferential conception, 445. Objection to it on

The Pre-existence of the Son . 445-4 ko

CONTENTS Xlll PAGH
grounds of history, 449. Objection on grounds of theory, 450. Ideal
pre-existence, 454. DiflBculties of conception as a whole, 457. Its
religious value, 458. CHAPTER X.
The Self-Limitation of God in Christ . . , 463-486
Recent Kenotic thought, 463. The basal principle or idea, 466.
Data of problem, 469. Moralisation of categories, 472. Analogies in
human life, 474. Transposition of attributes, 477. The self-reduced
Life in history, 479. Limits of the present discussion, 482. Criticism
made by Ritschl, 485.
Note on Dr. Sanday's Psychological Theory - . . 487-490
CHAPTER XI.
The Self-Realisation of Christ .... 491-507
Development in the Incarnate person, 491. Stages in Christ's
development, 493. Objections considered, 496. Mutual approach of
God and man in history, 499. Moral correlation of Divine self-limita
tion and self-fulfilment, 504. The charge of inconceivability, 505.
CHAPTER XII.
Christ and the Divine Triunity .... 508-526
Christianity a new form of monotheism, 508. Experimental idea
of the Trinity in New Testament, 509. Economic view of the Trinity,
512. An immanent construction permissible, 515. Objection that
this is to think God in abstraction, 515. Objection that the world is
God's other, 519. Objection that an intra-divine duality means
ditheism, 523. Conclusion, 526.
Appendix, Jesus' Birth of a Virgin , % . 527-534
INDEX ........ 635

Dca.DG..EGT. HDB.RE.. ZTK.

ABBREVIATIONS.
. Hastings' Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels (1906-1908).

Expositor's Greek Testament (ed. Sir W. R. NicoU, 1897-
1910).
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible (1898-1904).
Eeal-Encyclopadie filr protest. Theologie u. Kirche3 (ed.
Hauck, 1896-1909).
Zeitschrift fii/r Theologie und, Kirche.

THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST.
BOOK I.
CHRISTOLOGY IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT.
INTRODUCTION.
It may be well to state clearly that in the sketch of New
Testament Christology which follows, I have advisedly
made no attempt to expound the numerous minor phases
of opinion. On the contrary, my range has been confined
somewhat severely to the main types of apostolic doctrine.
These, we may compute, are six in number : the Synoptic,
the primitive (which here includes 1 Peter), the Pauline,
the types represented by the Epistle to the Hebrews and
the Apocalypse, and the Johannine. It is not assumed
that all six types are totally independent of each other,
but only that in a broad way they are capable of being
distinguished. By the Synoptic type, in the enumeration
just given, is denoted the mind of Jesus Himself as it may
be gathered from the Synoptic Gospels ; with this explana
tion, the order of types may be taken also as approximately
Literature on the New Testament Christology as a whole — The text
books on New Testament Theology by Baur, Feine, Holtzmann, Schlatter,
Stevens, Weinel, and B. Weiss ; Beyschlag, Die Christologie des Neuen
Testaments, 1866 ; Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 1908 ; Granbery, Outline
of New Testament Christology, 1909 ; Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Sope
in (he New Testament, 1905 ; J. Weiss, Christus, die Anfange des Dogmas,
1909 (Eng. tr. 1911) ; Clemen, Beligionsgeschiehtliche Erklarung des
Neuen Testaments, 1909.

2 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
chronological. Nothing has been said about Christology
in Deutero-Paulinism or in the less prominent Catholic
Epistles (James, Jude, 2 Peter). These are of course
matters which demand to be carefully investigated in
their own time and place, but the aims of the present
treatise, I felt, would be best attained by keeping to the
main stream of Christological statement and reflection.
That there is a main stream, that the authors of the
New Testament are eventually one in their view of Christ,
with a unity which is powerful enough to absorb and
subdue their differences of interpretation, is not indeed
to be lightheartedly assumed. But it is rendered ex
tremely probable by the simple experimental fact that
the Church has always found it possible to nourish her
faith in the Bedeemer from every part of the apostolic
writings. Further, this natural presumption is vindicated
by a closer scrutiny of the facts. Two certainties are
shared in common by all New Testament writers : First,
that the life and consciousness of Jesus was in form com
pletely human ; second, that this historic life, apprehended
as instinct with the powers of redemption, is one with the
life of God Himself. In Christ they find God personally
present for our salvation from sin and death. Yet in spite
or rather because of this basal agreement it is the more
impressive to contemplate the sovereign freedom with
which they surveyed Christ, telling what they saw in books
which have been quite justly described as literature, not
dogma. Each looked at Jesus with his own eyes ; each
spoke out of his own mind ; and to force their words about
Him into a mechanical and external harmony is simply to
misconceive the genius of Christian faith.
We may venture to determine the motives operating
within the New Testament mind and leading its spokesmen
to " christologise " in modes which transcend the theocratic
ideas of Judaism. In the main, they appear to have been
four in number.1
(1) Beading the Old Testament with Christian eyes,
1 Cf. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte*, i. 92.

CHRISTOLOGICAL motives 3
they felt that its revelation terminated in Jesus. His
person, His deeds, His fate and subsequent victory were
recognised as constituting a real and even a precise fulfil
ment of prophecy. From the days of the fathers God had
foretold His advent and prepared His way. * God had
foreseen and pre-ordained Him, and in Him the Church,
and had committed to Him the task of establishing the
Divine Kingdom. How great then must this Man be, and
how inevitable that minds like St. Paul should seek to
express His greatness under the highest forms provided by
first-century thought.
(2) The characteristic Christian faith in Jesus'
exaltation to a place of supramundane and universal
power impelled to reflection those who held it. Their
sense of His Lordship concerned the present and it
concerned the future. It signified the joyous assurance
that the Holy Spirit given by Him was powerfully
energising in believers and begetting in them a tran
scendent life ; it signified also that He would come at last
in glory, that in the final scene of all He would be revealed
as central and omnipotent. This consciousness of the
Spirit and this hope of the Parousia form the vital heart
of the primitive Christology. But if Jesus is now so great,
can He have reached this place by becoming ? Must not
the antecedents of His career be such as harmonise with
His present dignity ?
(3) Thought was stimulated by the success of mission
ary enterprise. Apostolic men went out beyond the
Jewish circle, and found everywhere that the Gospel
made its own impression. With ever -increasing vividness
it became clear that Jesus was for the whole world. His
significance was as universal as the hunger for God and
righteousness. He must therefore be defined in absolute
and universal terms.
(4) Finally, the witness of Jesus to Himself could not
but quicken thought regarding His consciousness of a unique
Sonship and the presuppositions on which it rested. The
time came when searching questions were put by hearers

4 THE PERSON OP JESUS CHRIST
of the Gospel respecting Jesus' right to faith, and Jewish
monotheists could not decline the challenge. Just as little
could they omit to attach fundamental importance to the
Lord's own words concerning His relationship to God.
These four kinds of impulse represent with tolerable
completeness the religious forces by which the Christological
activity of the first generation was controlled and inspired.
And in a real sense, though in different measures, each of
the four still retains its old value. " The New Testament
writers," it has been said, " did not think of Christology
and of the Atonement without sufficient motives, and as
long as their sense of debt to Christ survives, the motive
for thinking on the same subjects, and surely in the main
on the same lines, will survive also." 1
1 Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 101.

CHAPTER I.
CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS.
Our point of view in this study of Jesus' personality, as
depicted in the Synoptic Gospels,1 is determined chiefly
by two facts, each important in its own way. To begin
with, we are interested more in convictions than in the
Literature — Scott, The Kingdom and the Messiah, 1911 ; Holtzmann,
Das messianische Bewusstsein Jesu, 1907 ; Porter, The Messages of the
Apocalyptical Writers, 1905; Bruce, The Kingdom of God2, 1890;
Sanday, The Life of Christ in Recent Research, 1907 ; Dalman, Die Worte
Jesu, 1898 (Eng. tr. 1902) ; Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 1908
(Eng. tr. 1910) ; Steinbeck, Das gbttliche Selbsibewusstsein Jesu nach dem
Zeugnis der Synoptiker, 1908 ; Monnier, La mission historique de Jisus,
1908 ; Titius, Jesu Lehre vom Reiche Gottes, 1895.
1 Jesus is presented from much the same point of view in Mark, Matthew,
and Luke, the broad impression being identical (cf. our familiar phrase, ' ' the
Jesus of the Synoptics"), though in each case a variation of light and shade
is observable. Thus the standpoint of Mark is indicated by l1 : "The
gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." He has a specific Christology ;
Jesus was Son of God (i.e. one with God in nature) even while on earth,
and is so addressed at the Baptism, the first recorded incident of His life.
Mark draws Him as He appeared to contemporaries, living out the truth
of Divine Sonship. There is no story of birth or infancy. While the
general conception has close affinities with Paulinism and the Fourth
Gospel (cf. J. Weiss, Das aci 'teste Evangelium, 42 ff.), the human limitations
of this Divine personality are not forgotten — witness the report of His
inability to do mighty works in Nazareth (65). In Matthew, on the other
hand, Jesus appears as the fulfilment of Old Testament hopes and
Messianic predictions ; He is the Son of David and of Abraham. But
though the true Christ of prophecy, with a special mission to Jews, He has
been rejected by His own nation and has in consequence established a
Kingdom of all peoples. The name Immanuel (Godrwith-us) belongs to
Him. Matthew strongly inclines to omit statements of Mark which might
seem incongruous with a proper reverence for Jesus' person (see Allen's
Commentary, xxxi ff.), and gives prominence to our Lord's place as future
Judge. Luke, while not obtruding a Christology (he resembles Q in this),
seizes every opportunity to accentuate the universality of Jesus' mission.

6 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
mental processes by which they were attained. We wish
to know what the writers of the first three Gospels
believed concerning Jesus ; it is for us a less urgent
question how far we can ascertain the exact order in
which the varied elements of this belief arose, or the
influences under which it was formulated in words.. That
the Evangelists should have regarded Jesus as Messiah is
obviously a fact of much greater significance than anything
now discoverable as to the successive stages of their faith.
Once we have made out their convictions, we are justified
in pleading that the content of an idea must not be con
fused with its history, inasmuch as " things are what they
are, not what they came from." Whatever the story of
its genesis, these writers had gained a wonderful impres
sion of Jesus; this impression they enshrined in books
which now are in our hands ; and from these books we
may catch that impression on our own minds without a
too disturbing pre-occupation with matters of chronology
or the affiliation of conceptions.
But indeed — and this is the second decisive fact —
the character of the Gospels is of a kind which makes
chronological exactitude quite impossible. We cannot
date any of the three with certainty, nor can we arrange
their contents in a temporal order which commands any
thing like unanimous assent. To a considerable extent
the investigation of the life of Jesus, in recent times, has
been stultified by a radical error in method ; the error
of supposing that the Gospels are biographies in the
He is the Son of God, seeking all men ; hence His genealogy is traced not
merely to Abraham, but to Adam. The evangelist's chief interest centres
in His supernatural healing ministry. Both Matthew and Luke narrate
the ViTgin-birth, thus apparently referring Jesus' special Sonship to His
birth from the Spirit.
Q is an entity so hypothetical and nebulous that any attempt to draw
V out its Christology must be. in a high degree precarious. Harnack makes
an interesting contribution to the subject in his Sayings of Jesus, 233 ff. ,
based, of course, on his special construction of Q. . He finds that the com
piler of Q regarded Jesus as the Messiah, consecrated as Son of God at the
Baptism ; also that he never calls our Lord 6 Kipios, but . simply Jesus, or
"the Christ."

GOSPELS NOT BIOGRAPHIES 7
modern sense. It is true that biography involves much
more than a precise system of dates based on careful
inquiry into the relation of different episodes to each
other, yet it is totally inconceivable apart from some
such chronological framework. We have only to glance
at the Synoptics to perceive that they have not been com
posed on this plan. Their purpose is simply to convey
the impression of a great Personality, but they make no
attempt to cover the entire life. The available sources
of information are not subjected to an exact scrutiny, in
the manner of a modern scientific historian ; nor are the
person, experience, and beliefs of the central Figure
exhibited as conditioned by the circumstances of His
milieu. Details, whether of the career of Jesus, or of
the modes in which the whole image of His person
stamped itself on the minds of His disciples, are treated
broadly, with the essential selective freedom of the
preacher. They depict Jesus, in short, as any onlooker
of goodwill might have watched Him in Palestine. Two
things stand out boldly in their narrative — the portrait
of Jesus as He lived in His familiar habit among men,
His personality laden with Divine grace to the sinful ; and
on the other hand, the believing response to this personal
ity more and more evoked in human souls. But in.
neither case can we fix the exact progress of events.
The course alike of Jesus' self-revelation and of the
disciples' adhesion to Him is only discernible in part.
And yet it scarcely matters. The character and work
of Jesus, in its unique redemptive significance, and the
reflection of it gradually formed in the apostolic mind,
may be more than sufficiently realised and interpreted
by means of the evangelical memoirs we possess.
This being so, we may justly put aside here most of
the difficulties in the Gospel record which modern criticism
has unearthed. The difficulties, or many of them, are
there undeniably; but their importance may easily be
overestimated. It makes comparatively little difference in
our view of Jesus, for example, whether the cleansing of

8 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the Temple belongs to the commencement of His career
or to its close. No one can be quite sure whether His
public ministry lasted three years or one ; in either case
our belief regarding the greatness of His person is the
same. Similarly, we must not exaggerate the importance
of the question how far the picture of Jesus furnished
by the Synoptics has been substantially affected by later
Christian experience. The possibility of this cannot
be denied. But it is only upon the hypothesis that the
Christian view of Jesus is mistaken that the incidence
of this modifying force would form a legitimate subject of
complaint. If in some transcendent way He was Son of
God, those who believed in Him must have required a
certain period of time to realise fully the magnitude of His
person. When their eyes were opened, in consequence
of the resurrection, what they beheld was no free and
independent creation of religious fancy ; it was the deeper,
eventual truth of facts now appreciated for the first time.
Faith, in other words, did not incapacitate the evangelists
as narrators ; it showed them, rather, how infinitely the
life of Jesus deserved narration. The impulse to select,
to fling upon words or incidents a light answering to the
later situation of the Church, is natural and intelligible ;
what is not so is an impulse to deform or to fabricate.
" Fidelity to the historical tradition," a sympathetic writer
has said, " was undoubtedly the chief aim of the Synoptic
writers. Their work may here and there bear traces of
theological colouring, but their first interest was in the
facts. Their part was not to interpret, but simply to
record." 1
We assume, then, the substantial correctness of the
Synoptic portrait. It appeals to the mind of the true
seeker with self-evidencing and harmonious power. The
writers have nothing of pose, of doctrinal inflexibility,
of mis-timed literary artifice. Their subject has been
given to them ; it would be against nature for them to
take liberties with its essential meaning. Besides, the
1 Professor E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel, 2.

JESUS HUMAN CHARACTER 9
uniform quality of the whole guarantees its truth; its
pure originality constitutes a certificate of origin. As the
fragrance dwells in each rose-leaf, so all the uniqueness
of Jesus is present in each word. In j'eder Aemserung
stecht der game Mensch.
To repeat, our task is interpretative rather than
historical in the narrower sense. It is to take a cross-
section of the Synoptic view of Jesus, with the object of
differentiating the elements which blend in it, so register
ing the composite impression held and fixed in tradition.
Now in the deepest sense, the Synoptic view of Jesus is
simple, with the simplicity of nature. He is greater,
indeed, than any record of His life ; yet it also has caught
from Him the consistent tone of simple majesty. On the
other hand, within this great unity we encounter differ
ences, contrasts, individually distinguishable aspects, each
of which contributes a vital element to the whole. His
person is exhibited in a variety of relations to God and
man. Very specially what He claimed to be was expressed,
by Him or on His behalf, in a few profoundly significant
titles. In these titles are gathered up the ideas which
believers, by the time our Gospels were composed, had
come to cherish regarding Jesus, but which, as they held,
sprang originally from His own self-consciousness. To
understand what such names or titles mean is perhaps to
solve the hardest and most elusive problem in Synoptic
Christology. But first we must scrutinise the human
portrait the evangelists have drawn.
In contemplating Jesus the man, as mirrored in the
Synoptics, we must safeguard ourselves against the
tendency to signalise in His character those features
exclusively which attract the modern mind.1 A not
1 Harnack has a scathing passage on " the extreme and mutually
exclusive " views of Jesus' individuality to be found in modern literature
(Sayings of Jesus, p. xiii). On the humiliating controversy as to the
"mystical" Christ and the "historical" Jesus, see Muirhead's articles in
the Review of Theology and Philosophy, vol. vi. 577 ff., 633 ff.

10 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
unnatural revolt has taken place from the mediaeval
image, which sank deep into the common heart, and
which had represented Him chiefly as a mild and lowly
Sufferer, quiet, patient, averse to conflict, whose life and
death breathed only gentleness and calm. To-day, the
pendulum bids fair to reach the opposite extreme. In
many a modern sketch, Jesus is given a fiery and imperious
temperament, with a capacity for indignant or scornful
passion which now and then escapes from His control.
For the idol of our time is strength, and the supreme
religious personality must be all compact of power and
energy. The Gospels confirm neither of these opposed
delineations. Indeed, the fashion in which different minds
draw from the same record widely differing conceptions of
the central Character is surely a suggestion that in His
person there met, wondrously, the most diverse attributes
and dispositions elsewhere manifested only in disparate and
one-sided forms.
The evangelists nowhere seek to prove Jesus' manhood ;
it is for them a tacit and self-evident assumption. He
is revealed to us within the lines and dimensions of human
experience; and the general trustworthiness of the
narrative may be reckoned from the fact that His
higher being, though accepted by the writers, is never
obtruded incongruously or at random. Church history is
rich in evidence that Christians forgel the manhood of
their Lord with amazing ease; but they have done so
only because they read the Gospels with veiled face.
Jesus' bodily and mental life plainly obey the rules
of natural human development. Luke sums up the
scanty recollections of His childhood in the statement
that " Jesus continued to advance in wisdom and stature,
and in favour with God and man " (262) ; and the words'
enunciate a principle that covers the entire life. It is
impossible to conceive a point at which the evangelists
would have held that He had nothing more to learn of
His Father's will. In the physical sphere He is authen
tically man. When the Temptation was past, He

THE PIETY OF JESUS 11
hungered ; on the cross He thirsted and longed to drink ;
He slept from weariness in the boat upon the lake. His
career closed in pain and death and burial. And His
soul-life is equally normal. There were hours when He
rejoiced in spirit; the unbelief of His own countrymen
moved His astonishment ; He marvelled at the centurion's
faith ; glimpses of His heart break out in His compassion
for the unshepherded multitude or for the widow of Nain,
in the brief anger with which He drove the money
changers from the Temple, in the desire for the com
panionship of the Twelve, in His tears over Jerusalem.
Every wholesome emotion touched Him, finding fit outlet
in word or act. Most significant of all, His piety is
human. The Baptism and Temptation were scenes of
prayer ; He was found by disciples praying in secret ; it
was with prayer on His lips that He healed the man
deaf and dumb, that He fed the multitude, that in the
garden He wrestled through the agony and at the end
gave up His spirit. No shadow of estrangement fell on
His communion ; yet the unquenched longing with which
He resorted to the Father betokens a deep, consuming
sense of need.
Three characteristics of Jesus' personal religion are
placed by the Synoptic Gospels in strong relief.
First, His faith, His conscious trust in God. Here lay
the source of the felt power in which He accomplished
every duty. It rested, doubtless, on the consciousness
that the Father and He were bound by unseen ties, yet
as it filled and controlled thought and act we feel" it to
be something which we are being called to imitate, because
ideally and distinctively the faith of man. So He was
enabled to cast His burden on the Lord, all the more
completely as the Cross drew near. Nowhere does Jesus'
trust in God appear more wonderful than in presence
of the catastrophe which, in outward semblance, was to
sweep down His person and His cause to common ruin.
If He triumphed in prospect of a death for sin, it was
through a confident reliance on the Father. And from

12 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
this flowed His peace. The untroubled calm of soul we
mark in Him was manifested less during His passion,
when He was faced by His foes, than in the more testing
hours just before, when He parted from His friends. But
frequently in the course of His public ministry there is
visible a profound contrast between tumult and uproar
round about Him and the interior calm of a heart at rest
in God. This inward rest He strove to impart to others
(Mt ll28; cf. Jn 1627). Finally, He was actuated by an
infinite love, which may be said to have formed the very
substance of His nature. It was primarily love to God,
in whom were the well-springs of His life, but it over
flowed in a comprehensive love to man.
Jesus felt keenly the pressure of temptation. The
impulse of self-preservation could not become O)nscious
without inducing the distress of moral conflict. We find
Him wrestling with the desire to evade pain, to enjoy
things wholesome and lovely, to command success and
acquire influence. Had He not shrunk from death, He
would have belonged to another race than ours. And in
the struggle thus forced on Him, He knew the power of sin
so far as it may be known apart from self-identification
with its evil ; so far, yet no further. Christendom speaks
of " the Temptation," as if that which followed His baptism
were an isolated fact. But the pressure lasted to the
end; and few things in the Gospels are more subduing
than the words in which Jesus gratefully acknowledges
the fidelity of those who had remained with Him through
out His trials (Lk 2228£-).
The Jesus of the Synoptics shares in the common
secular beliefs of His own time. His human faculties
operate in media coloured and impregnated by the great
movements of the past. He appears on the page of history
as a Jew of the first century, with the Jewish mind and
temperament. To interpret His message we need not
travel out beyond the Hebrew frontier; nothing is here
from the wisdom of Buddha or Plato, nothing even from
the fusion of Hellenism and Hebraism in the crucible of

LIMITATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE 13
Alexandria. He was nurtured in Galilee, where He must
have encountered some impressions of the larger world ;
but little in His teaching recalls Greco-Boman civilisation.
Nevertheless, the universality of His spirit has affinities
with the nobler mind of Greece. In the main His soul
drew its nourishment from prophet and psalmist; yet
there was that in Him, He knew, which would make Him
comprehended and efficacious in the world outside Palestine.
" The character of Jesus, " it has been said, " does not
reveal Jewish traits merely, but such also as are Hellenic
in the larger sense, so that in Him these definite types of
manhood wonderfully complement and balance each other.
The fulness of the times had come." 1
It has gradually become clear that to make Jesus
responsible for such things as the details of an ethico-
political system, valid for all time, or to invest His words
with legal authority in matters of Biblical criticism and
history, is wholly misleading and irrelevant. The realm
of scientific knowledge is one in which He became
like unto His brethren. Incontestably He exhibits at
different times a wholly abnormal penetration, a perception
of men's thoughts which far outstrips the insight even
of prophets. But we cannot speak of His omniscience
except as we desert the sources. " Of that day or that
hour," He said plainly, "knoweth no one, not even the
angels in heaven, nor yet the Son, but the Father "
(Mk 1332) — a declaration of ignorance which, it is sug
gestive to note, is not insisted on after the resurrection
(Ac l7). Along with this goes the fact that He makes
inquiries and manifests surprise ; but that in doing so He
was acting a part is credible only to the incurably docetic
mind. It also appears from the Synoptic narrative that
the mighty works of Jesus were not done out of (as it
were) independent personal resources, but through power
received from God. The Father had bestowed on Him
the Messianic Lordship over all things embraced within
1 von Soden, Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, 110.

14 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
His life-work ; this delegated authority He exercised in
faith and acknowledged with thanksgiving. He ascribes
the glory of His miracles to the Father. At the same
time, the verdict passed on Nazareth to the effect that,
owing to the unbelief He encountered there, Jesus could
work no miracle (Mk 65), has often been misconstrued.
The meaning is not that the people's mistrust, deprived
Him of Messianic power ; it is rather that the ethical con
ditions of reception being absent, a moral impossibility
existed that He should put His power in active operation.
Christology of an a priori tendency has too often been
permitted to encroach upon the interpretation of the first
three Gospels, with results equally disconcerting and
incoherent. Attempts, for example, to vindicate for Jesus
a '' double consciousness " or a " double will " — the one
human and beset with limitations, the other infinite and
Divine — merely impose on the evangelic data a dogmatic
schematism of much later origin, thus gravely impeding
the work of objective inquiry. Not only do they break
the marvellous unity of impression created by His person ;
they are the outcome of a tendency, mistaken though
devout, to reflect on these earthly years the radiant
glory of the exalted Christ. But this is to ignore the
well-marked New Testament distinction in the mani
fested being of Jesus before the resurrection and after.
To the apostolic mind, the life of the Ascended One was
no mere prolongation of the earthly career. It was an
existence charged with a higher power, because invested
with new and universal attributes. To ignore the human
conditions of the historic life, therefore, is to miss the
contrast of earthly humiliation and ascended majesty. It is
also to miss the vast redeeming sacrifice of God ; for these
circumstances of self-abnegating limitation form the last
and highest expression of the love wherewith the Father
bowed down to bless us in the Son.
A constitutive element in the faith of Israel had long
been the hope of the Messiah, conceived not as a second

JESUS THE MESSIAH 15
God, but as the Saviour-representative of Jehovah. This
Messianic faith is a projection into history of faith in the
living God. It is natural, accordingly, that the first
article of the new Christian creed should have been the
Messiahship of Jesus, the crucified and risen Nazarene.
In the Synoptics the name " Christ," the Greek equiva
lent of Messiah, is always an official, never a personal,
name. The problem of the Messiahship, however, entered on a
quite new phase when certain recent scholars, and particularly
Wrede, taking up the suggestions of Lagarde and Volkmar,
put forward the contention that the Messianic claim was
never made by Jesus, but was read back into the history in
the sub-apostolic age. The hypothesis cannot be regarded
as a happy one. We can point to a series of incidents
which make it virtually certain that Jesus felt Himself to"
be Messiah, and declared His consciousness of the fact to
others.1 Proof positive is furnished by the narrative of
the Temptation, which is meaningless except as related to
a preceding Messianic experience ; by His message to the
Baptist in prison (Mt ll2fl>); by the epoch-making words
of Peter at Csesarea Philippi (Mk 829) ; by Jesus' solemn
entry into Jerusalem ; by His open confession before the
high priest ; by the mocking cries flung at Him during the
crucifixion ; finally, by the inscription placed above His
head. Even the view defended by certain recent writers,
to the effect that Jesus claimed Messianic dignity only
for the future, as Messias designatus, but refrained from
asserting it as an actually present fact, fails to satisfy the
recorded data. It brings out the cardinal truth, however,
that for Jesus' own mind the future coming of the Messiah
in glory constituted His most characteristic and decisive
1 This is quite compatible with the view that, prior to the resurrection,
it was only in hours of specially heightened feeling that His disciples
recognised His Messiahship, that they used the name with only a partial
consciousness of its implications, and that as He hung on the Cross their
faith was eclipsed (cf. Lk 242'). Von Soden has a fine passage on the.
experimental basis of the disciples' faith in Jesus as Messiah in Theologische
Abhandlungen Weizsacker gewidmet, 167 f.

16 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Messianic work. Death would invest Him with the full
exercise of His official power.
A more important question yet remains: Jesus
believed Himself to be Messiah ; where lay the meaning
of this title for His mind ? We are so far able to
determine its meaning for His contemporaries. In Jewish
religion (cf. Ps 2) " the Christ " denotes the anointed Head
and Lord of the Divine Kingdom, ruling over a redeemed
people in bliss and majesty. The Messiah was conceived
now as a superhuman figure, now as a man chosen and
endowed for His unique task. Bousset remarks that the
Messianic hopes of the Jews in our Lord's day must have
oscillated between the poles of pure earthliness and pure
transcendence. No universally acknowledged type of
faith prevailed. Even John the Baptist, with his robe
of camel's hair and his thundering prophecies of judgment,
could be taken for the Messiah. But in general the
function of the Coming One was believed to be the
inauguration of the new Kingdom, a catastrophic judgment
being the essential prelude to His work.
Jesus' attitude to this ancient hope may be defined by
saying th^t while retaining the traditional outline of the
idea, He infused into it a fresh and spiritual content. It
still pointed to the King of the Divine Kingdom ; it still
involved the redemption of the subjects by One anointed
for the task ; but the significance both of " kingdom " and
of " redemption " underwent a radical transformation. His
reading of the name was new even when compared with
the prophetic thought of the Old Testament. Every
political suggestion fell away, every hope of national
predominance ; the office was conceived for the first time
in spiritual and ethical — even if eschatological — terms.
At this decisive point, therefore, Jesus broke with tradi
tion. His purpose declared itself at the Temptation, when
He turned once for all from the received Messianic ideal to
identify Himself with a conception till then unheard of.
Thenceforward to be Messiah signified for His mind not
the work of a religious Teacher, or of a new Lawgiver, but

RESERVE OF JESUS 17
the vocation of One who must bring complete salvation for
sinful men, opening the Kingdom of God to all believers.
His life and death are the only worthy comment on His
thought. " Jesus was greater than any name, and we
must interpret the names He uses through the Person and
His experiences and powers, and not the Person through a
formal definition of the names." l
The consciousness that He was the Messiah must have
come to Jesus not later than His baptism. No other
point of time has any claim to rank as the commencement
of the fully recognised vocation. We cannot tell through
what inward experiences this certainty took possession of
Him ; and it is vain to guess. The vision vouchsafed to
Him at the Jordan was such that He Himself must be
regarded as the source of the main elements of the
narrative. In that hour He knew Himself summoned by
the Father to fulfil the Messianic work, and was filled with
the power and knowledge requisite for His task by the
reception of the Holy Spirit.
It is at first disconcerting to find that Jesus' self-
avowal as Messiah was characterised by singular reserve.
Nor is this explicable by the inadequacy and unspiritu-
ality of the traditional conception ; for, as we have seen, it
was still open to Jesus to make of the title what He chose.
It has been suggested that Jesus was silent concerning His
Messiahship simply because it was for long a problem to
His own mind ; we ought to think of it as dawning on
Him gradually, through a process of doubt and struggle.
But this seems to be incompatible with the decisive im
portance of His baptism, which called Him to a task He
must have regarded as Messianic. The true explanation
appears to lie in the familiar consideration that Jesus'
novel conception of the Kingdom, as the reign of the loving
and holy Father, entailed also a novel conception of His own
function. His partial concealment is therefore due to the
1 Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 208. On the ethical side, we get our
clearest look at what our Lord meant by Messiahship in His message to the
Baptist in prison (Mt ll2ff-).

18 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
all but insurmountable difficulty of proclaiming Himself as
the Messiah without stirring into flame passions of a kind
which would have rendered the people deaf to His unique
message. Thus it is significant that in Nazareth (Lk 424)
He is represented as assuming the role simply of a prophet.
The confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi was in all
probability the first occasion on which the Messiahship of
Jesus was made the subject of conversation by the Master
and the disciples. It does not follow that Jesus' real
dignity then for the first time suggested itself to the
Twelve. There are facts (cf. Jn 1) which indicate that the
possibility of His being the Messiah may have occurred
to His followers from the very outset. What is new in
Peter's confession is its personal assurance and devotion ;
and it is this, not its being a flash of religious genius,
which evoked the unusual emotion vibrating in Jesus'
answer. Here then, in Holtzmann's phrase,1 lies the true
peripeteia of the drama, on which the entire action turns.
Jesus now explicitly accepts the Messianic^name ; nay
more, in the fact that it has been attributed to Him He
finds clear evidence that the Twelve were beginning to
attain true convictions on the subject of His person. Yet
there remained the possibility of further misconception;
and Jesus therefore at once proceeded to check the forma
tion of too secular hopes by uttering a definite prediction
of His death (Mk 831). But it was only by His entry into
the city and during the trial before Caiaphas that He
announced His Messiahship to the world at large.
In Jesus' hands the idea of Messiahship came to be
associated with unprecedented claims. " By His heathen
judge He was condemned," Dalman writes, " as a usurper
of the throne; by the Jewish tribunal, as One who
pretended to such a place as had never been conceded even
to the Messiah." 2 In short, for Jesus to use the title was
ipso facto to supersede it. While therefore it is true that
the Messianic claim was indispensable as a mode of express-
1 Das messianische Beviusstsein Jesu, 86.
8 Die Worte Jesu, i. 257.

UNPRECEDENTED CLAIMS 19
ing our Lord's vocation within the lines of Jewish religious
history, the title in itself is the product of a special develop
ment, and was bound to give place to forms more adequate
and universal.1 This is this truth which has been put
falsely, or at least confusedly, by saying that Jesus always
felt Messiahship a burden, and would have dispensed with
it if He could. The hand which Jesus laid upon traditional
Messianism was that of a creative master. At each point
He was free of the conceptions of the past.
It was especially through His anticipation of the Cross
that Jesus rose above the limits of the older thought.
How early this anticipation visited His mind we have not
the information to decide ; but the view expressed by
Holtzmann,2 that any one who regards the story of the
baptism as containing really credible recollections of a
definite point at which Jesus' Messianic consciousness was
born, and who holds also that His conception of " Messiah "
is related to Dn 7, may reasonably believe that our Lord
had the prospect of death before Him from the first, is a
noteworthy concession to the inherent probabilities of the
case. However this may be, at all events it is certain
that Jesus was the first to make'-, current coin of the idea
of a suffering Messiah. In pre-Christian Judaism, Is 53
had never been interpreted in a Messianic sense. In that
sublime picture of vicarious pain, however, there lay truths
which found a perfect echo and fulfilment in Jesus' soul.3
Thus it was, we may surmise, that for Him the ancient
conception of Israel's national Messiah was so glorified as
to pass into that of the Bedeemer of the world.
We now turn to what has justly been described as the
most confused and intricate problem in New Testament
1 But as Peter used it, it expresses in its own way the same idea of
uniqueness and absoluteness as we find elsewhere in the names vlos and
Kvpios. 2 Op. cit. 88.
" Cf. Professor H. A. A. Kennedy's articles in the Expository Times for
1908. Is 53 also contains the idea of the Servant's resurrection and His
subsequent career of effectual activity.

20 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Theology. This is the meaning given by Jesus to the name
" Son of man." From the point of view both of ideas and
of history we are still engaged with the preceding topic,
since the adoption of the title " Son of man " may itself
stand for a quite definite interpretation of Messiahship.
It broadens and universalises a conception which had
shown itself capable of very narrow limitations.
> " Son of man " is only used by Jesus in the Synoptics,
virtually always as a self-designation. It is at least
obvious that the evangelists understand it so. The name
occurs as early as Mk 210. Many scholars believe that
Jesus employed it only after Peter's great confession ; but
it is possible that He had used it long before. Not till
His trial, however, did the significance of the claim dawn
upon the wider public. Its total absence from New
Testament writings other than the Gospels (except Ac 766)
is easily explained by its practical inconvenience, since it
is " as curious a phrase in Greek as in English," x and would
be familiar only to Jews. But the later disappearance of
the name at once puts out of court the suggestion that in
the Synoptics it is due to interpolation.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke the title is found on
Jesus' lips about seventy times, representing forty occasions
more or less. The notion that it properly means " some
body" may be put aside. In such verses as "The Son
of man is come eating and drinking" (Mt ll19), and
"Betrayest thou the Son of man with- a kiss?" (Lk 2248),
it is manifestly applied by Jesus to Himself. That our
Lord should speak of Himself in the third person is not
necessarily unnatural, for St. Paul does the same thing
(2 Co 122); besides, the title was tolerably familiar as a
title. We have no guarantee, of course, that all these
three-score texts give a perfectly accurate report of Jesus'
words; and allowance must be made for the possibility
that " Son of man " has in some cases been inserted by the
evangelist. But the necessary deductions under this head
are so few as to leave the main result unaffected. It is
1 Burkitt, Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus, 64.

SON OF MAN AS A TITLE 21
noticeable, further, that the passages containing the name
fall naturally into two groups according as they refer
(a) to Jesus' earthly work, especially as it culminates in
suffering and death, or (b) to the final glory of His
Parousia. Speaking broadly, " Son of man " occurs more >
frequently towards the close of the; Gospel story, while the
proportion of passages tinged with eschatology mounts
rapidly at the end. These facts are themselves a valuable
indication that some intimate relationship existed in Jesus'
own mind between the name " Son of man " and His
impending death.
The first source of the name is irrecoverably lost in i
far-past ages,1 but we are justified in believing that its
nearer, proximate source is Dn 713. This, it may be
noted, is one of the few points on which scholars have
reached virtual agreement. We are carried back, then,
to the Danielic vision in which, after the bestial forms
symbolising the four heathen empires, there emerges a
symbolical human Figure on whom the universal Kingdom
is conferred. "Behold, there came with the clouds of
heaven one like unto a son of man . . . and there was.
given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all
the peoples, nations, and tongues should serve him."
Whether " one like unto a son of man " denotes the ideal
Israel or an individual is uncertain, though the former view
is more convincing. But in the Similitudes of Enoch, as
Professor Burkitt puts it, " the figure of Daniel, the Son
of Man who was with the Ancient of Days, is personified
and individualised. From of old this Son of Man, this
celestial human being, has been hidden with the Most
High, but one day He will be revealed."2 Jesus was
probably familiar with this circle of ideas, and nearly
everywhere His use of the name is only intelligible if it
denotes an individual person. It has indeed been argued
that the distinction which exists in Greek between " man "
1 For the " religionsgeschichtlich " view, see Weinel, Biblische Theologie
des NT (1911), 30 ; Bousset, Hauptprdbleme der Gnosis, 149 ff.
2 Op. cit. 65.

22 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
simply and " Son of man " could not have been expressed
by one speaking, as Jesus did, in Aramaic; and that
accordingly the phrase for Him must have really meant
nothing more than " man in general." In the first place,
however, the linguistic facts are doubtful. Dalman, with
whom Dr. Driver agrees, has stated what seem excellent
reasons for denying that "man" could be expressed
in Aramaic in no way except this ; " Son of man," it is
possible, may be a literal rendering of an independent
Aramaic phrase. Apart from this, however, even if we
concede that the Aramaic term was equivalent to " man "
simply, still " the Man," used by Jesus as a title for Him
self or His office must have been employed in sensu
eminenti; must have meant the special, or well-known,
or unique " Man." l Nor can Dr. Sanday's suggestion be
overlooked that, since Jesus may have spoken Greek, 6 vib?
tov avdpdnTrov may have been one of His own phrases.
¦+ But what does the term mean ? To begin with, it is
almost certainly unbiblical to explain it as equivalent to
" man in idea " or " the ideal man." Baur, slightly modi
fying this, takes it as equivalent to one qui nihil humani
sibi alienum putat ; Wellhausen thinks it equal to " man
normal in relation to God," although, since Jesus was
neither a Greek philosopher nor a modern humanist, this
signification, in his judgment, proves sufficiently that the
phrase was never used by Jesus. He is at least right in the
contention that ideal humanity is a Greek or modern, not
a Jewish, conception ; and while it is undoubtedly embodied
in the character of the Son of man as realised in Jesus,
it forms no part of the connotation of the term. On the
other hand, there is no foundation for the older dogmatic
theory that our Lord's intention, in using the title, was
to assert distinctly His real manhood ; for of His real
manhood the audience could not be in doubt. The truth,
so far as I can judge, appears to be something like this :
Jesus took the name, in a spirit of complete freedom,
from the familiar Danielic verse, possibly being influenced
1 Cf. Bousset, Die Religion des Judenthums (1 Aufl), 252.

THE TITLE A PARADOX 23
in some degree also by the Similitudes of Enoch. He
began by using it to denote His own special or repre
sentative humanity, as appointed to future glory and
transcendent sway ; but with this, especially in the later
months, He combined a note of sharp contrast, defining
and enriching the primary signification by the added
thought of suffering.1 In any case, contrast is of the
very essence of the truth. Triumphant glory, over-against ,,
which is set utter self-abasement and humiliation — this,
on the whole, is the meaning fixed for us by a careful
scrutiny of the Synoptic usage.
It is not too much to say, indeed, that Jesus, in His "
selection of the name, had an educative purpose. It was
a spiritual mystery, a problem not less than a disclosure.
Tradition had defined the title only imperfectly ; it awaited
final interpretation : and this Jesus gave by stamping on
it the impress of Himself. As the marble takes shape
under the sculptor's chisel, masses of rejected matter fall
aWay ; so Jesus drew forth from the potentialities of the
conception that which harmonised with His own higher
thought. In His hands the name provoked reflection.
While in no sense an obvious appellation of the Messiah —
otherwise the question of Mt 1613: "Who do men say
that the Son of man is ? " would be inept — it yet proved
suggestive of Messiahship to those who cared to search
deeper. Into the title furnished by tradition He poured '
a significance of His own which transcended the past ;
for in affirming, e.g. that the Son of man had power on
earth to forgive sins (Mk 210), He rose above inherited
and conventional ideas. The name was designed to
indicate not so much the nature as the vocation of its
Bearer ; it signalised the transcendent place and function
still awaiting Him. Of the available modes of self-
description it was the least political, and as on other
occasions He appears to deprecate the title " Son of David " -
as too provocative, or at least as irrelevant to the true
conception of Messiahship, so Jesus chose the apocalyptic
1 We must never lose sight of Is 53 ; cf. Feine, Theologie d. NT, 68.

24 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
name of Son of man, especially near the end, as one which
laid the required emphasis on the future greatness thus
far concealed under obscurity and destined to be still
more darkly eclipsed in death. And the solution of this
apparent antinomy He found in the decisive significance
of His cross. So far from rendering His future glory
impossible, it was to be the gate of entrance to His
consummation. v In the Synoptics, accordingly, our Lord's usage of the
title " Son of man " constitutes a paradox. Just as
the idea of the Kingdom points to a transcendent
order of things which, though future, is none the less
actually present ; x so the correlative name of Son of man
embraces likewise the "hereafter" and the "here." Its
point of departure is the thought of coming glory, but
that eventual triumph is mediated through suffering and
death. It unites anticipation with reality. Yet this
seeming contradiction is vital to the inward spiritual
coherence of the idea. It is through indignity and pain
and death that He who must reign passes to His Kingdom.
As it has been put : " The ' Son of man,' in the mature
mind of Jesus, is the Person who unites a career of utmost
service and suffering with a sure prospect of transcendent
glory. And herein we touch at once the depth and height
of His originality."2 The work of Jesus, in a large
measure, came to consist in training the disciples to under
stand this novel thought of Messiahship, to perceive and
appreciate inwardly the mystery of the fact that " not in
spite of His death, but in and through His death, He was
to assert Himself as Son of man." 3 When therefore
they at length seized His drift, what their minds fixed upon
as forming the vital content of the title He had chosen
was the Divine destiny which lay veiled in the future, and
1 Kaftan has put it excellently : " Only a paradoxical formula will cover
the ascertained historical facts. It must run thus — The future salvation is
become present, yet has not ceased to be future " (Jesus und Paulus, 24).
2 Mnirhead, Eschatology of Jesus, 203.
* Scott, The Kingdom and the Messiah, 243.

THE NAME "SON OF GOD " 25
the experience of self-sacrifice through which it must needs
be attained. The Son of man must suffer many things
ere He comes with the clouds of heaven.
The last of the special titles predicated of Jesus in
the Synoptics is " Son,,; or, in its fuller form, " Son of
God." We cannot, of course, ascribe precisely the same
meaning to every instance of its use. In the lips of the
possessed (Mk 311), of unbelieving Jews (Mt 2740), of the
centurion at the cross (Mk 1539), and, by implication, of
Caiaphas (Mt 2663), it obviously carries something less
than its full significance. From the words of the centurion,
" Truly this man was a son of God," we may judge that
he found in our Lord a man of such sublime courage and
righteousness as indicated a greatness more than human.
How near this poetic or symbolic usage may have ap
proached to theological conviction, it is less easy to deter
mine. But in the majority of cases belonging to this class,
our wisest course is to regard " Son of God " as-a-S-ynQn-vm
of_MessJah. Even when at the baptism a Divine voice
hailed Jesus as " My beloved Son," what stands out most
clearly is His consecration to the Messianic task.
In the. Old Testament, we may note, the title " Son of
God" is given a varied application — to angels, to the
chosen people, to the theocratic king who reigns over and
represents them, to the Messianic Deliverer of the future.
The promise to David concerning Solomon is most typical :
" I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever ; I will
be his father, and he shall be My son" (2 S 713"u). In
this passage and others like it, the name guarantees to its
bearer the special protection and love of God, a relation
ship which in Ps 2 is actually represented under the
symbol of paternity. The outer side of the relation was
represented by the certain possession of Divine glory and
power; the inner consisted in the peculiar enjoyment of
His love as its chosen object.
It was primarily on this inner aspect that the mind
of Jesus dwelt. Nowhere in the Synoptic records does

26 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
He adopt for Himself the fully-phrased name "Son of
God," perhaps as finding in it a too familiar designa
tion of the Messiah, or one too certain to evoke political
expectations. Everything goes to prove that His supreme
conception of His own person was expressed simply in
the name "Son." Not merely does it occur in two ex
ceptionally striking words, of indubitable authenticity
(Mt ll27, Mk 1332, cf. 837); certain other pieces of
indirect evidence bear directly on the same point. Such
are, for instance, a veiled allusion to His special Sonship
in the parables of the Vineyard and the Marriage Feast;
His question to Peter about the taxing of kings' sons;
and His conversation with the scribes as to the relation
between David's Son and David's Lord. We may perhaps
catch the tone of unique filial self-consciousness in His
custom of naming God the " Lord of heaven and earth,"
but never His Lord. However this may be, no one can
miss the significance of the name " My Father " so
frequently applied by Him to God (Mt 721 1032 1250
etc.); a deliberate and selected phrase which sets His
personal relation to the Father in a distinct place by
itself. No parallels from pagan thought are of the least
use in illustrating this ; the Hellenic conception of the
Divine Fatherhood, for example, starts not from ethical
but from cosmic presuppositions. Nor is any real
equivalent to be found in the religion of the Old Testa
ment. If ethnic ideas leant with more or less decision
to a naturalistic pantheism, Judaism had long stood in
peril of the petrifying rigidities of deism. Jesus' incom
municable consciousness of filial oneness with the Eternal
is a new thing in the world.
In his second chapter, Luke represents the conscious
ness of this unique Sonship as already present at twelve
years (240-52). There can be little doubt that from this
indication and others we are justified in concluding that
Jesus knew Himself Son before His call to the Messiah-
ship. The sense that His life flowed from God directly,
having in Him all its well-springs, laid upon Him more

JESUS' FILIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 27
commanding obligations than those of earthly affection.
In the narrative as it stands there is no suggestion that
the episode formed the birth-hour of Jesus' special con
sciousness of God and Himself; one is rather led to think
of processes only now becoming visible upon the surface.
The grace by which He lived brooded over His develop
ment. As He stands in the Temple, not answering
questions merely but asking them, the curtain's edge is
for a moment lifted from a hidden life which we must
conceive of as sustained and informed perpetually by the
clear knowledge that the Father and He belonged wholly
to each other. To Him the word came unceasingly : " Son,
Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is Thine."
But the study of our Lord's filial consciousness must
always centre in the great words of Mt ll27: "All things
are delivered unto Me of My Father ; and no one knoweth
the Son, save the Father ; neither doth any know the
Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son
willeth to reveal Him."1 These words, the most im
portant for Christology in the New Testament, were
apparently spoken on the return of the disciples from
their first preaching mission. They are instinct with a
high and solemn joy. As commentators have remarked,
the whole passage has a Johannine quality which is
unique, or all but unique, in the first three Gospels. The
words come home to us not so much as the sudden flash
of a transient emotion as rather the overflow of an habitual
mood of feeling. To question their authenticity is a
desperate expedient, and it is difficult to take seriously
the insipid suggestion that they are more than half a
quotation from the Son of Sirach. What it is of
supreme moment for us to note is " the unqualified
correlation of the Father and the Son " these words pro
claim. We are brought face to face with a relationship
of absolute intimacy and perfect mutual correspondence,
1 On Harnack's argument in favour of the "Western" text, so far as it
changes the present (iriyiviiiTKei.) into the aorist (iyva), see Denney, Jesus
and the Gospel, 272 ff. ; Kiihl, Das Selbstbevmsstsein Jesu, 21 ff.

28 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
which is untransferable by its nature. Not merely is the
' Father's being, to its inmost secret, open to the soul of
Jesus, without that sense of mystery and inscrutable
remoteness of which the greatest prophets had been
/ conscious; not merely is the Son's knowledge of the
Father complete, final, and inaccessible to every other
save those to whom the Son is mediator : along with this
goes the fact that Jesus' inmost being is known to the
y Father, and to none else. " Between-Jesus and God, one
may say, all is common." x This is not to repudiate Old
Testament revelation as worthless ; it is to declare that
nothing, which can be called revelation of the Father is
worthy to compare with the knowledge given in and
through the Son. The revealing medium has an absolute
and exclusive harmony with that which is revealed. All
others become children of God by way of debt to Jesus ;
in His case alone Sonship is the constitutive factor of
' His being. The life of the Father and the Son is one
life, and either can be known only in the other. In
these inexhaustible words, accordingly, there is presented ¦
( something far greater than a new conception ; the con-
, ception is expressive of a new fact beyond which religion
/ cannot go, for "the sentence as a whole tells us plainly
I that Jesus is both to God and to man what no other can
be."2 It was a final intimation of truth which the
apostles kept ever after in their heart. Never again
could they attempt to realise the Divine Fatherhood but
there rose before them the person of the Son, as life and
death had revealed Him; in like manner, to possess the
Son was literally to possess the Father also. Looking
both at Jesus' own mind and at Christian experience,
there is no reason why we should not use the word meta
physical to denote this special Sonship, not as though
metaphysical stood in contrast with ethical, but to mark
the circumstance that this Sonship is part of the ultimate
realities of being. 1 Goguel, L'apMre Paul et Jisus-Christ, 199.
' Denney, op. ait. 272.

SONSHIP AND KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 29
Harnack has unduly minimised this aspect of the truth
in his too categorical statement that " the name of Son
means nothing but the knowledge of God."1 Jesus'
relation to God, he urges, consists merely in the fact
that He knows God thus and thus, that He has come to
recognise the sacred Being who rules heaven and earth as
Father, as His Father. Yet we may not thus reduce
what is evidently presented as a mutual unity of life to
a phenomenon of religious knowledge ; and if Jesus could
declare (Mk 1332) that He stands closer to God than even
the angels, whose nature is heavenly, it is scarcely credible
that in Mt ll27 He is not claiming a place in an order
of things far transcending all mundane relationships.2
Knowledge of God, moreover, in Harnack's sense, is some
thing which begins to be ; if Sonship, then, is constituted
by this knowledge, it also must begin to be ; but can it be
reasonably held that Jesus would have confessed His filial
relationship with God to be a fact of temporal origin ?
I cannot think so. Every attempt to conceive of Him
as becoming the Son of God makes shipwreck on the
unconditioned character of His self-consciousness. It is
quite in accord with this that the Jesus of the Synoptics
nowhere affirms His pre-existence. He simply refers the
origin and secret of His personality to the perfect love
of God, His mind moving always within the limits of the
human fact. For deeper truth, if deeper truth can be
expressed in speech, we must turn to the Fourth Gospel.
On a careful estimate, our results up to and including
this point are these : Neither in the self -disclosure of
Jesus nor in the faith of disciples have we encountered
anything which could even plausibly be described as a
theory of incarnation, or of two natures hypostatically
united in a single person. The Christology of Jesus and
His followers yields rather the picture of One who by
a career of faith, service, and mighty works; — a career
culminating in death — is cognizable as the perfect revela-
1 What is Christianity? 128.
a Cf. Titius, Jesu Lehre vom Reich. Gottes, 118.

30 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
tion of the Father and the destined Sovereign of the
world. The terms of description are so far immanent,
while yet it is clear that His consciousness of unique Son-
ship lifts Him beyond the plane of normal human life. By
His chosen name of Son He proclaims what He is to God
and for God ; of the fact that He occupies this place no
doctrinal interpretation is offered, nor is the fact analysed
in its eternal implications, before and after. These im
plications, we ought to note, are neither denied nor asserted ;
and it is quite conceivable, even from the present stand
point, that they may yet emerge as welcome or even
necessary elements of deeper Christian thought. There are,
to say the least, points of attachment for what apostles may
yet divine as to the pre-existent glory of " the Son " or
" Word " and His place within the Godhead. Nevertheless,
it remains true that the self-consciousness of Jesus was, in
the main, historically conditioned. When He spoke of
Himself as Son par excellence, the name indicated a perfect
and redemptive filial life which took shape and form in
unclouded fellowship and ethical solidarity with the Father.
For the mind of Jesus this unshared Sonship is the
supreme reality. All other facts concerning Him receive
from it their whole value and meaning. In particularly;
shed a revealing light on His personal vocation. It was
not that He awoke to find Himself Messiah, rising after
wards on this stepping-stone to the consciousness of Son-
ship. Exactly the reverse is the truth ; He was Son of man,
Messianic Head and Sovereign of the Kingdom, in virtue of
the still more fundamental conviction that He was Son of
God.1 This, and this only, interprets to us such things as
His magisterial criticism of the Law ; and makes it all but
impossible to believe that His view of the Kingdom did not
quite consciously embrace the whole world. The ground of
1,1 With the most careful and reverent application of psychological
methods, it is obvious that our's Lord's consciousness of Sonship must
have preceded in time His consciousness of Messiahship, must indeed have
formed a stepping-stone to the latter. In spite of all that has been deduced
from the apocalyptic and dogmatic Messianic conceptions of the times we
must assert that the consciousness of Divine Sonship and of Messiahship

AUTHORITY CLAIMED BY JESUS 31
His vocation, then, lies in the uniqueness of His nature.
Because He is God's Son, He does and can do God's
work. Yet in the last resort these two are inseparable.
As human life mounts in the scale of greatness, vocation
and personality become more and more coincident; in the
case of Jesus the coincidence was absolute.
Apart from these select titles or modes of self-descrip
tion, we must glance at the evidence contained in, the
Synoptic Gospels of a peculiar and indeed unexampled
authority to which Jesus habitually laid claim. He
assumed a place within the relations of God to man, as
of man to God, which none but He could occupy. Thus
it is not too much to say that He Himself, as King,
came by degrees to displace the Kingdom as the main
subject of His teaching. Meek and lowly of heart, He
yet displayed an incomparable majesty of bearing, which
gave sanction to each new commandment by a simple
"Verily, I say unto you." This elevation of tone and
mien was recognised on every hand. The possessed, the
crowd at Nazareth, the Pharisees of the capital, His own
disciples — all were conscious of it. But more ; the utter
loyalty He demanded was instinctively accorded. If the
claims of Jesus to personal obedience are felt to he amazing,
not less wonderful is the free and joyous acquiescence with
which men responded to His call.
The secret of this overwhelming impression lay not
in His miracles, obviously ; for according to Mark His
first disciples had been gained ere the first miracle was
wrought. It lay rather in Himself. Somehow He was
able to impart the certainty that in Him men were face
to face with God. In His voice sounded a tone — we
can still hear it — of boundless and unconditioned power.
could not have existed together from the beginning ; for the consciousness of
Messiahship never meant anything else for our Lord than a consciousness
of what He was about to become. In His soul the consciousness of what He
was must have come first, and only when this had attained to the height
of consciousness of Sonship could the tremendous leap he taken to the
consciousness of Messiahship " (Harnack, Sayings of Jesus, 245-246).

32 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Amongst the founders of religion He is unique in the fact
that His claims were not so much argued as presupposed.
Without explaining His title or reasoning about His place
as Divine Bedeemer, He announced that in His person the
saving power of God was present ; present to make all
things new. Never does He refer, like the Baptist, to
one who should come after Him and complete His task.
He was Lord, not only of all things for the Kingdom's
sake, but of the very Kingdom as such. He had the keys ;
with Him it rested to declare for men the conditions of
entrance. How completely He refused to be one in a
series we gather most clearly from His attitude to the
ancient Law. August and sacred as were its precepts, He
put them royally aside, setting in their place the perfect
principles of the transcendent Kingdom over which He
should come to reign.
In recent years it has been emphatically denied that
Jesus claimed to forgive sin, yet on grounds which must
be pronounced insufficient. To the guilty who sought Him
out, His presence formed the medium of pardon. Few
episodes are more obviously authentic than the healing of
the paralytic (Mk 2), where the narrative simply falls to
pieces if we strike out Jesus' self-presentation as Forgiver.
His rejoinder to the angry protest of the scribes would
be pointless, but for the implied assertion that His gift
of pardon was as real and as immediately verifiable as His
gift of bodily strength. From the incidents of the woman
with the issue of blood and the dying malefactor, it appears
that our Lord frequently made use of this power. The
significance of this can hardly be overestimated. By
coming forward as incarnate pardon He proclaimed His
ability to lead the sinful, there and then, into the
Father's presence. His person, as they saw it, was a sure
guarantee of God's mercy. But when we think it out,
clearly forgiveness is a Divine miracle, something which
in its infinite marvel is inexplicable by the resources of
nature or humanity ; it presupposes the very grace and
might of the Eternal. By the claim to impart peace of

JESUS THE JUDGE 33
conscience, therefore, Jesus laid His hand, with quiet
assurance, on a unique prerogative. And by its exercise
He opened the Kingdom of heaven to believers.
Jesus, then, was habitually conscious that in His
person Divine power had entered the world for the accom
plishment of all that can be called salvation. He was the
Chosen One, by whose presence evil was already overcome
in principle ; the predicted Deliverer who should save
many by His death ; the Victor who should conquer the
last enemy by rising from the grave and in due time
appear in glory as Judge of all mankind. His claim to be
Judge in the great future has occasionally been denied, but
in one who knew Himself to be the inaugurator of the per
fect Messianic age it is in fact neither novel nor incredible.
One who remits sins on earth in the consciousness that
God's holy love is present in His person, may well dis
charge that solemn function at the End. Bousset has
argued that the steps are even yet discernible by which
the later Church mounted to this ascription of Judgeship ;
but it may be pointed out that even in the most primitive
form of the tradition — "Whosoever confesseth Me before
men, him will I also confess before My Father who is in
heaven" (Mk 1032) — Jesus definitely takes a place as
Intercessor or Advocate in the heavenly world which is
certainly not less superhuman in significance than the
claim to be final Judge of men. The uniqueness of Jesus
for His own consciousness could not be more startlingly
demonstrated than by this fact, that He who forbade
His followers to judge each other should have foretold
that He Himself will judge the world.
Thus with ever-increasing power it was borne in upon
the disciples that no comparison or parallel could be insti
tuted between Jesus and the great figures of the past. No
prophet had invited men to confess his name ; no prophet
had declared that the relation of men to himself would
fix their destiny in the future Kingdom ; no prophet had
dared to ' say : " All things have been delivered unto Me
of My Father." For these great souls it had been enough
3

34 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
to announce, " Thus saith the Lord." Jesus, however, as
it has been put, " knows no more sacred task than to point
men to His own Person" x He is the object of saving
faith ; this we may conclude with whole-hearted assur
ance, albeit the phrase " believe in Me " occurs seldom or
never in the Synoptics.2 No serious mind will miss the
significance which was bound to be assigned to such
professions by all who gave them credit. The disciples
could not but have their own thoughts regarding One who
made such claims and wielded such power over the spirits
of men. And it is a crucial circumstance that Jesus, who
must have perceived the trend of their reflections, welcomed
with joy the absolute religious trust and incipient worship
of the Twelve.
In the foregoing pages we have studied the main
features in the Synoptic representation of Jesus Christ.
Our materials have been derived partly from the manifest
self-consciousness of our Lord, partly from the impression
He produced on other minds. As regards the witness of
Jesus to Himself, it is at all events such as to demonstrate
the futility of saying, with Bousset, that He simply ranks
Himself by the side of struggling humanity, or with
Wellhausen, that He nowhere assigns a central place to His
own person. So far from this, He may be better described
as having identified the Gospel with Himself.3 Moreover,
the impression made by Him on others was of such a
kind that far-reaching questions in regard to His ultimate
identity could not be evaded ; and when once these ques
tions as to what lay behind His -redeeming influence, and
explained it, had been asked, it was inevitable that the
attempt should be made to furnish an intelligible and
coherent answer. This answer, as it took shape in the
apostolic mind, is present in solution in the Epistles and
the Fourth Gospel. It was no false metaphysical scent
which drew St. Paul and his successors into the difficult
1 Herrmann, Communion with God, 93.
2 Cf. Feine, Die Theologie d. A'T, 26-34.
8 Cf. Mk 8™, " Me and My words."

HIS SINLESSNESS 35
paths of Christologieal reflection; it was a resolute en
deavour to set forth convictions which had been borne
into their hearts with an irresistive force of evidence — the
conviction, above all, that in the life of Jesus God had
been personally present in their midst. The question
whether they were well or ill advised in their affirmation
of His Divine being is one which necessarily is insoluble
by the methods of historical science. Then as now,
only those could attain to evangelical faith in the God
head of Jesus who knew that in Him they had met with
the Father. Nothing but irrefragable religious experience
will explain the amazing fact that, without a tremor of
hesitation, the apostles took the responsibility of asking
men to believe in Christ as Son of God from all eternity.
NOTE ON THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS.
The testimony to Jesus' sinlessness which may be gathered
out of the Epistles rests on no a priori dogma, but is a transcript
of convincing facts of which we have a clear view in the
Synoptics. Historical argument will not of course carry us all
the way, yet it does prove that Jesus thought of Himself as sinless.
It also permits us to believe that in affirming His sinlessness the
apostles cannot have heen at war with their recollections of His
life, " suppressing defects in His character which they had
observed, or acknowledgments of shortcoming made by Himself."1
The Synoptics certainly record no explicit claim to moral
purity on Jesus' part ; nothing so direct as the question, " Which
of you convicteth Me of sin 1 " ( Jn 846). But neither do they
anywhere eulogise Him or attempt to prove His innocence;
they offer simply a plain tale of His words and works. Various
minor traits of bearing and conduct, however, reveal undeni
ably His own conviction. When we recollect that His mission
opened with a call to repentance, that He condemned "the
righteous " unsparingly, that He urged personal confession on
His followers yet was Himself a stranger to the language of
contrition, we can explain this only by the supposition that He
reckoned Himself inwardly pure. This absence from the mature
mind of Jesus of any consciousness that sin had tainted Him is
1 Forrest, Authority of Christ, 26,

36 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the really decisive fact. He stood without fear or shame in the
light of God. There is no trace of healed scars, no memories
of defeat. He was no penitent, like St. Paul or Augustine,
nor does He confess sin when He is dying. Men may of course
be sinful unawares, but not such men as Jesus. The intense
moral pain that vibrates in His rebuke of Peter (Mt 1623) implies
an exquisite sensitiveness to the presence of evil. Not only so ;
as Goguel has remarked, a personality of this depth and ethical
intensity, had He felt conscious of sin in even the slightest
degree, would have been overwhelmed by feelings of poignant
and consuming grief.1 Further, in view of the obligation resting
on Him to dispel erroneous impressions, His persistent silence,
notwithstanding the presence within Him of a bad conscience,
would have been the last hypocrisy. Finally, on every page of
the Gospels, we encounter such imperial demands for obedience,
as well as gracious promises of help and pardon, as it would have
been an enormity for a sinful man to utter.
Traces of moral imperfection have nevertheless been dis
covered at various points in His career. His denunciation of
the Pharisees has been characterised as harsh and unfeeling;
His behaviour to His mother and brethren has been censured
for a grave lack of affection ; and to some His cleansing of the
Temple has appeared as a blameworthy excess of zeal. Still
more graceless accusations have been based on other narrated
acts. Most readers will feel that His conduct on each of the
occasions specified is a quite intelligible manifestation of fidelity
to His Messianic task. It was a task which provoked resistance,
necessitating counter-resistance in its turn; and it would have
been a vice in Jesus, not a virtue, to shrink from the painful duty.
Enough that such a one as He was conscious, even in these and
similar instances, of complete adequacy to His own ideal.
Against the view that Jesus had no interior experience of
sin, it is illegitimate to urge His self -subjection to baptism. For
in His case also acceptance of the rite signified the definite resolve
to associate Himself with the Messianic community in expectation
of the Kingdom and in the corresponding passion for righteous
ness; but while for the people the advent of the Kingdom
demanded penitence and the abandonment of known sin from
Jesus it asked self-consecration to the Messianic activity by
which the Kingdom was to be brought in. Jesus' baptism, in
1 Op. cit. 202.

HIS SINLESSNESS 37
short, formed a crucial stage in His deepening self-identification
with sinful men — "a great act of loving communion with our
misery," as it has been described, in which He numbered Him
self with the transgressors and took all their burdens as His
own. More difficulty will be felt in interpreting His reply to
the young ruler, whose salutation, " Good Master," He waved back
with the uncompromising rejoinder, "None is good save one,
even God" (Mk 1018). The words cannot be a veiled confession
of moral delinquency, which certainly would not have taken this
ambiguous and all but casual form. What Jesus disclaims,
rather, is God's perfect goodness. None but God is good with
a goodness unchanging and eternal ; He only cannot be tempted
of evil, but rests for ever in unconditioned and immutable
perfection. Jesus, on the contrary, learnt obedience by the
things which He suffered, being tempted in all points like as we
are (He 58 415). In the sense of transcendent superiority to
moral conflict and the strenuous obligation to prove His virtue
ever afresh in face of new temptation and difficulty, He laid no
claim to the " absolute " goodness of His Father. Which reminds
us emphatically that the holiness of Jesus, as displayed in the
record of His life, is no automatic effect of a metaphysical sub
stance, but in its perfected form the fruit of continuous moral
volition pervaded and sustained by the Spirit. It is at once
the Father's gift and progressively realised in an ethical experi
ence. This follows from the moral conditions of incarnation.
It may also be held, with much reason, that Jesus' words to
the young ruler must be interpreted exclusively in the light of
the incident itself. In that case, they are simply meant, like so
many of Jesus' utterances, to throw the man back upon his own
mind. And accordingly they cannot be relevantly cited in a
discussion of our Lord's sinlessness.
For some recent thinkers the concept of sinlessness is dis
qualified by its unduly negative character, and they accordingly
propose to replace it by the idea of Jesus' perfect fidelity to His
vocation. Sinlessness, if predicated of a child, might mean no
more than incapacity for conscious transgression. Now not only
does the concept of fidelity to vocation bring out a characteristic of
fundamental importance in Jesus' personality, but several New
Testament passages usually quoted under the head of sinlessness
might be still more fitly placed under the other category (e.g.
1 P 221 Ph 27, 8, 1 Jn 36). Nevertheless, the specific thought of

38 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
sinlessness is one which we cannot afford to lose. We need a pre
dicate which bears directly, not merely on Jesus' fulfilment of His
task, but on the inner life which made this fulfilment possible — ¦
the private hidden stream of thought, feeling, and volition which
flowed out of a stainless development dating from very birth.
" In a so-called civil vocation," writes Haering, " it is possible
to be faithful apart from perfect inward purity ; in the case of
Jesus fidelity was possible only through an unperturbed com
munion with the Father in the hidden deeps of the heart." 1
Such moral perfection is to us inexplicable; yet, as Mr.
Bradley has said, " not to know how a thing can be is no dis
proof that the thing must be and is." Ethical psychology, based
on the experience of sinners, must ever find sinlessness a mystery.
We are sure of the fact ; sure also that the fact was mediated in
ethical and spiritual modes. Jesus alone was sinless, because He
felt as we do not the powerlessness and insufficiency of the
human will to sustain itself in goodness ; also because He felt
as we do not man's sheer dependence on the Holy Father whose
response to simple and complete faith passes understanding.
1 Der christlkhe Glaube, 398.

CHAPTER II.
PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN BELIEF.
The initial stage of primitive Christian thought is reflected
most typically in the early speeches of the Book of Acts.
Especially in their Christology, it is agreed, these Petrine
sermons are of the highest value, containing as they do
precisely the kind of teaching that might be expected from
men for whom the resurrection of Jesus had created a new
world of feeling and anticipation. We can see the apostolic
mind begin to adjust itself slowly to a great and novel
situation, though naturally a considerable time was to
elapse before an effort could be made to formulate the
doctrinal conclusions implied in their practical religious
attitude. St. Peter's message may be briefly summarised in the
statement that Jesus — a person well known to his Jewish
hearers — is the Messiah ; that His Messianic dignity has
been proved by resurrection from the dead ; and that He
will return presently to bring in the last consummation.
In simple outlines he pictures the Prophet whom their
leaders put to death. "Jesus of Nazareth," we read,
" a man approved of God to you by mighty works
and wonders and signs, which God did by Him in the
midst of you" (222), by the side of which we may
place a later verse : " God anointed Jesus of Nazareth
with the Holy Spirit and with power: who went about
Literature — "Weizsacker, Das apostoliscke Zeitalter*, 1902 (Eng. tr.
1894-5) ; McGiffert. History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age, 1897 ;
Gunkel, Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes3, 1908 ; Spitta, Christi Predigt
an die Geister, 1890 ; Monnier, La premiere epUre de I'apStre Pierre,
1900 ; Wernle, Die Anfange unserer Religion2, 1904 (Eng. tr. 1903-4).

40 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the
devil; for God was with Him" (1038). But this Man
whom they had slain is now vindicated marvellously ;
the hopes set upon Him have become certainties. As we
read in a verse the importance of which for the primitive
Christology we cannot overestimate : " God hath made
Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified "
(236). These words reveal the secret of the new faith.
For the first time it has broken on human minds that
Jesus is Lord. It is by resurrection that He has taken
His place openly as the Christ. We need not interpret
the words as meaning that He was not Messiah previously,
a position which makes a chaos of the Synoptic narrative ;
but certainly we may affirm that not till after death and
resurrection was He the fully manifested Christ, in a
perfect manner all that which the Christ was to be. This
is in harmony with the general conviction expressed
throughout the New Testament (cf. Bo l4) that resurrection
opens a new transcendent stadium in the career of Jesus.
He was the Christ even during His lifetime on earth, and
was acknowledged in that character by faith ; yet His true
status could be then disclosed only in a restricted and
conditioned measure. " The fact that He was raised from
the dead did not make Jesus the Christ; but it showed
Him to be such." 1
Thus the gospel preached by St. Peter may be con
densed in the one truth that Jesus, crucified and risen, is
the promised Christ of God. He is attested by miracles
wrought by Himself or done later in His name, but
supremely by the amazing miracle of the resurrection.
This appeal to Jesus' miracles, it is worth noting, is the
1 Mathews, Messianic Hope, 130. The name of J. Weiss is prominently
associated with the opinion that for the primitive faith the earthly Jesus
was not yet Messiah, but even he is unable to carry through so drastic an
interpretation. Thus we find him conceding that the disciples who preached
after Pentecost "must have known or believed that Jesus in some form or
other regarded Himself as the fulliller of the prophecy (Dt 1818), the final
messenger of God to Israel, in some sense or other the Messiah " (Christ: the
Beginnings of Dogma, 23).

EARLIEST FORM OF DOCTRINE 41
only direct and concrete allusion to the events of His
earthly life. Even His work as Teacher is barely
mentioned (1036). The speaker's mind is drawn irresistibly
to other topics. Less than we might have expected is
said as to the bearing of Jesus' death on the forgiveness of
sins ; though His death is described freely as foreseen and
pre-ordained of God ; and, what is very significant, it is
distinctly alleged to have been necessary, presumably as a
part of His redeeming work (223). But what absorbs the
preacher is Jesus' deliverance from the grave and entry
into glory. " This Jesus did God raise up," he declares,
" whereof we all are witnesses " (232). He is speaking not
merely in view of the resurrection appearances, but in the
power of that ineffaceable impression left by Jesus in the
long intercourse of their discipleship. The Easter faith is
the living resultant of the vision of the Eisen One acting
on and harmonising with the pure and sublime image of
Jesus which had been stamped upon their memory. The
hall-mark of New Testament religion, faith in an exalted
Lord, is thus shown firm and clear at the very outset. Men
who had been daily in Jesus' company knew that they
were still in relations to Him. He was still the same
Person they had known and loved ; death and resurrection
had not impaired His individuality. " We ate and drank
with Him after He rose from the dead" (1041). Even if
a saying of this kind may reveal traces of unconscious
materialisation, at all events it proves how different the
intercourse of the risen Christ with His followers is felt to
be from a merely subjective and transitory vision. As it
has been put : " There is no such thing in the New
Testament as an appearance of the Eisen Saviour in which
He merely appears. He is always represented as entering
into relations to those who see Him in other ways than by
a flash upon the inner or the outer eye : He establishes
other communications between Himself and His own than
that which can be characterised in this way."1 To be
related thus to the exalted Lord is the differential feature
1 Denney, Death of Christ, 67.

42 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of Christianity. His presence inspired believers, and so
trustfully did they lean on it that death was nothing more
terrible than falling asleep (760).
Various epithets have been appended to this first sketch
of Christological doctrine. By some writers it has been
roundly described as humanitarian ; but every sympathetic
reader must feel that in the conceptions of " Christ " and
" Lord " there lay from the beginning a wealth of content
and of implication far transcending the limits of mere man
hood. Others, in view of a passage like Ac 232-36, prefer to
speak of it as Adoptionist ; and in this questionable terminus
technicus, better reserved for the view which dates Jesus'
special Sonship from the baptism at the Jordan, there is at
all events this much truth, that Jesus is represented as
entering on full Messianic dignity at the resurrection, and
as having first manifested His new sovereign power by the
outpouring of the Spirit. But a better adjective than
either is " rudimentary." The total absence of the idea of
pre-existence, for example, is significant for the theological
naivete" of the belief.
At the same time, there are positive features which
prove that Jesus was already viewed as having His place
somehow within the sphere of Godhead. To be raised to
God's right hand is to participate in the Divine power and
¦ glory. The gift of the Spirit is bestowed by Him, and
this Spirit is the Spirit of God. We ought not to forget
that this claim to possess the Spirit was largely an appeal
to something which even the onlooker could recognise and
verify. The acceptance of Jesus as Christ manifestly led
to a new experience. Spirit-filled men rose up to proclaim
a gospel of salvation from sin, death, and all diabolic powers!
and it was impossible to deny that their inspiration was
really due to their connection with Jesus. In other
ways also His person had the religious value of God.
Prayer is offered to Him as well as in His name,1 and God
1 7s9 ; possibly l24 also, for just before St. Peter speaks of Him as Lord.
Cf. 2 Co 128, Rev 513, Jn 1413'-, and on the whole subject Zahn, Skizzen
aus dem Leben der alten Kirche, 1894, 271 ff.

PRAYER TO CHRIST 43
is said to have appointed Him judge of quick and dead.
He is Himself the theme of gospel preaching, the object of
faith, the source of penitence and forgiveness. Over and
over again, His name, i.e. His person as revealed and
known, is proclaimed as sole medium of redemption
(238 316 412 1943)_ Most signincarit 0f all is His
possession of the title " Lord," a familiar Old Testament
designation of Jehovah. In the same way, verses from
prophecy or psalm which at first referred to God are
applied directly to Jesus, and the conception of Him as
occupying the throne of Israel is merged in the vaster
thought that He is King of the world. As Feine has
pointed out,1 these lofty predicates are only intelligible if
we suppose that the disciples in retrospect were conscious
that even Jesus' earthly life revealed traces of His higher
being. Even then He had been anointed with the Holy
Spirit, and had been " holy and just " ; even then He was
known by the sublime name of the " Son of Man " (766).
The primitive Christology can be best interpreted as the
fruit of adoring memory quickened by the experience of a
risen and glorified Eedeemer.
We are now in a position to consider the suggestion
that in the earliest faith two forms of faith in Christ went
side by side, in peaceful rivalry : that to which He was
but a prophet and forerunner, and that to which He
already appeared as authentically Divine in majesty and
redeeming power. If this means that these forms of
Christological belief were held respectively by two different
groups of Christians, it must be said at once that so far as
the New Testament is concerned the hypothesis is without
foundation. Both estimates were held by all Christians.
Jesus was indeed " a prophet mighty in word and deed "
(Lk 2419),2 but also from the very outset He was the
Messiah-King who had been vindicated by His rising from
the dead and. reception of universal authority. From which
1 Theologie d. NT, 203.
2 The term «us (3IS, 427) is " Servant" rather than "Son," and all but
certainly contains an allusion to Is 53.

44 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
we may draw two inferences : first, that the difference of
view between St. Paul and the primitive apostolic society
was not one of principle, but of degree, since the risen
Jesus was never regarded as an ordinary man. And
secondly, that it is needless to have recourse to a supposed
"Messianic dogmatic" for the august epithets from the
first attributed to Christ. They are sufficiently accounted
for by the appearances of the risen Lord.
This primitive conception of Christ is pervaded by
an intense eschatological feeling. While it is an exaggera
tion to speak of Jesus' earthly life as being for St. Peter
no more than " a preliminary career," yet there is certainly
a startling preoccupation, or rather absorption, of mind in
the hope of the Parousia, which may break on the world
any moment. The impending return of the Messiah is the
keynote of the whole. " Bepent ye, therefore, and turn
again . . . that He may send the Christ who hath been
appointed for you, even Jesus" (319- 20). The period of
waiting will be short. Men still think in the forms of
national Messianism.
Into these forms, however, rudimentary though they
be, a new and infinite content has been poured. We find,
indeed, scarcely an effort to create a system of conceptions
adequate to the revolutionising experience through which
the witnesses of the glorified Lord had passed. Doctrine
could not begin till men had first lived themselves into the
new thought of Christ. But already their attitude is that
of faith and worship. Jesus' nature is seen to be universal
and absolute in the sense that everything which can be
called salvation is mediated by His power. Exaltation
has set free His influence from all limits, whether of place
or time ; He is now available everywhere and always. It
could only be a question of time until a theological master
mind should rise to set forth the unsuspected significance
of these elemental facts of faith and life.
Turning now to the First Epistle of Peter, we find a
writer who is interested, it may be fairly said, rather in

FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 45
the salvation accomplished by Christ than in theoretical
problems relating to His person. The Epistle, like the
speeches in Acts, rests on and revolves round the contrast
of the passion of Jesus with His present sovereignty, " the
sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow "
(l11). In both the evidence of Old Testament prophecy is
appealed to, and more than once the same quotations
occur. Both emphasise the Divine fore-ordination of the
Cross ; both refer to the sinless perfection of the self-
sacrificing Victim. We may gather the writer's favourite
thought of Christ from the fact that " Jesus " is never used
by itself, while " Christ " has become a proper name.
Weiss is probably correct in explaining this as " due to the
fact that the person of Jesus is contemplated by the
Christian always and exclusively in His specific quality
as Mediator of salvation." 1 It is a point in Christology
where a slight change of accent has taken place as
contrasted with the Petrine speeches.
Is there a further advance in l11 ? When it is said
that the Spirit of Christ in the prophets " testified before
hand to the sufferings of Christ," and in a related verse
(l20) that Christ " was foreknown indeed before the
foundation of the world, but was manifested at the end of
the times for your sake," may we conclude that the writer
believed in the pre-existence of Christ ? The arguments on
either side will be found in the commentaries ; here it can
only be said that the language of l11 by itself apparently
means no more than that the Divine Spirit, now so much
identified with Christ as properly to be called His Spirit,
moved also in the prophets of old time. The principle of life
and power that filled the manifested Christ was operative
even prior to His coming. But on this view the passage
after all marks a stage towards the full assertion of pre-
existence, though it does not assert it quite directly. The
Spirit in which the inmost being of Jesus was constituted had
pointed on to the sufferings that befell Him. On the other
hand, l20 is distinctly more significant. While the word
1 Biblical Theology of the New Testament, i. 226.

46 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
" foreknown " (irpoeyvcoafievov) in no way involves the
pre-existence of Christ, since it is used even of Christians
in l2, yet the unusual combination of " foreknown " with
" manifested " may justly be considered as placing the
matter beyond doubt. Only that can be manifested which
was in being before manifestation. Thus, even though the
point is not insisted on, the person of Christ is already lifted
clear of the contingencies of time, viewed as the embodi
ment of a Divine Spirit, and given a place within the
redeeming world-plan of God. More and more the
historical is being fused with the eternal.
The Christ so characterised, then, was revealed in the
last times. We have a vague hint as to the constitution
of His person in the difficult phrase (318), " being put to
death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit " ; where
the two datives (aapici and Trvev/Mari) are exactly parallel.
The flesh is the sphere or element in which death took
place ; similarly, the spirit is the sphere of resurrection,
the element of life that made it possible. In virtue of
one aspect of His being, Christ died ; in virtue of the other
and higher, He was raised again.1 The verse at first
sight comes very near to the orthodox doctrine of the Two
Natures ; what it really does, however, is to contemplate
the personality of Christ from two different points of view,
as capable of death on the one hand, and on the other of
resurrection. Spirit means here the Divine vital principle,
in a higher potency than it attains in man, and thus
characterised by an essential and indestructible energy.
The evidence that Christ's spirit was laden with vast
abnormal powers is that " He went and preached unto the
spirits in prison" (319 46). Whatever this means, it
proclaims that wherever men are, Christ can save. Even
in the region of the dead He must have, manifested His
power.2 Formerly, in Ac 224, the ground of Jesus'
resurrection had been found merely in Old Testament
prediction, but now the step is taken of attributing it to
1 In a sense Ro l8i 4 may be compared.
8 Cf. Demiey, Jesus and the Gospel, 48.

THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST 47
the energies inherent in His nature and due to the unction
of the Messianic Spirit.
We are entitled to say, I think, in view of these data,
that First Peter exhibits a form of Christology slightly
more developed than that of the first chapters of Acts.
Yet its tone is thoroughly primitive ; there is nothing in
the way of precise analysis or speculation. If the epistle
was written by St. Peter, as it may well have been, we
must recollect that a man of his type would probably care
little for reasoned theories regarding the loved person of
His Lord. He lived amid the memories of the past and
the ardent hopes of a near and glorious future.
Nevertheless, there can be no reasonable doubt that he
shared the specifically Christian estimate of Jesus. The
Spirit of God, as we have seen, is definitely spoken of as
" the Spirit of Christ " — in itself an amazing fact. ." Son of
God " is nowhere used, but we meet with the significant
and full-toned phrase, " the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ" (l3), with an undeniable implication of
Christ's special Sonship. The declaration that angels and
authorities are subject to Him (322) does more than assert
His risen glory ; it affirms that He is personally participant
in the sovereignty of God, whom angels serve as messengers.
The somewhat unusual phrase, " Sanctify in your hearts
Christ as Lord " (313), echoes Is 813, where " Lord " has
reference to Jehovah. And in 411 we read : " Through
Jesus Christ, whose is the glory and the dominion for ever
and ever." The balance of the verse is in favour of an
interpretation which ascribes the doxology to Christ, but
in the last chapter (511) virtually the same form is used
in reference to " the God of all grace."
Details of this kind can never be quite conclusive, but
at all events they, mark with some clearness the direction
of the stream. The primitive apostolic Christology lays
due stress on the subordination of Jesus Christ to God the
Father, while yet already He begins to fill the sphere
of the Divine. He is believed in with adoring trust, as
monotheists can believe in none but God. If this is

48 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the attitude taken by men of unspeculative minds, the
fact is only the more full of suggestion. It implies
that the normally Christian intelligence cannot refrain
from predicating of Jesus Christ the religious value
of God. Not metaphysics in the wrong place, but faith
conscious of its own significance and therefore reaching
out to a clear expression of its proper content, has been
responsible for the high Christology to be found even in
the first origins of our religion.1
1 The materials for an exhaustive treatment of the primitive Christology
would of course have to be drawn also from St. Paul (e.g. 1 Co 153ff-) and
the synoptic Gospels. But I have not entered °n this field, my object
being merely to sketch the main distinguishable types of Christology present
in the New Testament.

CHAPTER HI. v^. -
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. PAUL.
In the following statement of St. Paul's view of Christ
it has not been thought necessary to make a sharp dis
tinction between the four great Epistles — to the Galatians,
Bomans, and Corinthians — and the later group, known as
the Epistles of the Imprisonment. For one thing, excel
lent critical opinion may be quoted for the statement that
all the Imprisonment Epistles are genuine, so that post-
Pauline developments, say in Ephesians, need not so far be
allowed for. Moreover, if we have already in Eo 95 — and
perhaps even in 2 ThTl12 — J an explicit assertion of Christ's
deity, it is plain that quite early the apostle had expressed an
estimate of our Lord's being beyond which it was impossible
to go, and we may discount the hypothesis that in his later
years he gave himself up to unbridled and fantastic specu
lation, of a sort wholly alien to his previous thought.
This means that chronological charts of St. Paul's advance
in Christian knowledge, which have pleased no one but
their authors, may be laid aside. It is a better plan to
attempt a comprehensive view of his thought in its plastic
and vivid unity. Enough if we mark here and there a
difference of accent in earlier and later formulations.
Literature — Schmidt, Die paulinische Christologie, 1870 ; Somerville,
St. Paul's Conception of Christ, 1897 ; Moffatt, Paul and Paulinism, 1910 ;
Olschewski, Die Wurzeln der paulinischen Christologie, 1909 ; Goguel,
L'apdtre Paul et Jisus Christ, 1904; Weinel, PaulUs der Mensch und sein
Werk, 1904 (Eng. tr. 1906) ; Wrede, Paulus*, 1907 (Eng. tr. 1907) ; Kaftan,
Jesus und Paulus, 1906 ; Feine, Jesus Chrislus und Paulus, 1902 ; Bruckner,
Die Enstehung der paulinischen Christologie, 1903 ; Kiilbing, Die gelstige
Wirkung der Person Jesu auf Paulus, 1906.
1 von Dobschiitz, Kommentar (1910), in loc.

50 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Is a genetic account of St. Paul's view of Christ
possible ? Can we tell what set his mind a-working on
the subject, or what quickening influences shaped his
beliefs ? Holsten, preceded by Baur, long maintained that
we must take the apostle strictly as a theologian, whose
letters are brief statements of dogmatic. He wrote primarily
as a logician, only in the second place as a missionary. Like
his other doctrines, Christology took form in his mind as
the outcome of a reasoning process, of pure logic applied to
the fate of Jesus. Confronted by the Messiah's death on the
cross, an event, as he felt, laden with the Divine redemptive
purpose, St. Paul, yielding to a strictly intellectual com
pulsion, gave up the theological system of Judaism and
replaced it by one in which Christ appeared as a synthesis
of historical tradition and Hellenistic doctrines of a pre-
existent " Heavenly Man." It is a theory deeply marked
by the influence of Hegelian dialectic. On such terms
St. Paul's gospel, as Kaftan puts it, is simply the gnosis
of the Messiah's death ; not the fruit of a great religious
experience, but the cold, rational production of a patient
theorist. More recently the place of Holsten's purely imman-
ental theory has been taken by that of a large and active
school of writers, united by keen devotion to the methods
of scientific history of religion. Their interest for the most
part has lain in tracing the descent of ideas. And the gist
of their conclusions, so far as we are now concerned with
them, has been expressed with admirable clearness in
Weinel's somewhat audacious words: "The Christological
dogma already existed in all essential particulars before
Jesus was born. Jewish Messianic speculations had
already imagined a picture for the completion of which
nothing was wanting but the Nicene dogma that the
Father and the Son were of the same substance. . . . Even
the statement that, the world was created by the Son of
God was as current an opinion among the Jews as every
thing else that Paul tells us of Christ's life from the
beginning of the world until His second advent in judg-

HOLSTEN AND WEINEL 51
ment." * The value of this may be gathered from the single
fact that in Jewish Messianism the ideas of a redeeming
death and triumphant resurrection are nowhere to be found.
Apart from this damaging circumstance, however, it is of
interest to note that, according to Bruckner, Wrede, and
other scholars, the elements even of the Judaistic " Chris
tology " had mostly been taken over from Oriental myths.
In various lands and faiths the yearning dreams of salvation
had created, in wavering outline, the imaginative figure of
a "Saviour"; and the different features of the sketch
came to deposit themselves, like crystals in a supersatu
rated solution, on the head of the Messiah hoped for by
Jews. St. Paul, who fell heir to this creation of apocalyptic
fancy, merely added the name of Jesus, and at once his
Christology was complete. Instantly he felt that Jesus
must have been and have done all things portrayed in the
Messianic dogmatic. The Christ of the Pauline Epistles,
therefore, has no relation at all to the historic Jesus. We
need scarcely hesitate to regard St. Paul, indeed, as the
real founder of our religion.
It is obviously an intellectualistic theory, as much so
as that of Holsten. Waiving the fact, conceded frankly
by Gunkel,2 that of this pre-Christian apocalyptic " Christ "
we are in complete ignorance, the entire hypothesis rests
on the a priori assumption that there can have been
nothing genuinely new and creative in the apostle's view of
Christ. His ideas on the subject must all have come to
him from outside sources : as for attributing the vital core
and heart of his Christology to a vast, revolutionising
experience, it is not be dreamed of. No doubt the
Damascus vision counts for something ; but what happened
to him then, apparently, was not that he knew himself
redeemed, but that he formed a reasoned opinion. He
merely learned to -give the name " Jesus " to the Divine
heavenly being if whom he believed already. There is
nothing to be said about this except that it is preposterous.
If anything is siire about St. Paul, it is that his theology
1 St. Paul 313. I 2 Zum religionsgesch. Verslandnis d. NT, 94.

52 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
is, as Wernle puts it, " the theology of a converted man."
Every idea is a Christian idea. At Damascus there oc
curred a real event which changed his life from the centre
to the circumference, and once for all caused him to forget
the things that were behind. It is vain to interpret his
Christology, therefore, by the hypothetical contents of his
mind in earlier years ; as vain as to " explain " Shakespeare's
historical plays by the materials he may have found in
North's Plutarch or Holinshed's Chronicles. To suppose
that the Pharisee became the Christian apostle merely in
consequence of an intellectual readjustment, or that he
could have induced the primitive society to tolerate, let
alone adopt, a view of Christ thus generated, appears to
me a theory out of all intelligible relation to human life.
This is not to deny that certain inherited conceptions may
have influenced the periphery of the Pauline doctrine, or
determined the wording of some few phrases of description.
But it is lost labour to start from these things. St. Paul's
,' Christology is based on the experience of the glorified Lord
vouchsafed to him in the hour of his conversion, illustrated
and confirmed by the Spirit-sustained life of fellowship
with Christ which was then begun. When he speaks of
Christ, he is not combining ideas, but transcribing in
wardly reported fact. For him the basis of true religion
was not made by man, but given by God ; and the knowledge
of Jesus the Christ, through which he had peace with God
and was become a new creature, he owed to a transforming
spiritual experience.1
The living and dynamic centre, then, of the Christology
of St. Paul is his experience of the glorified Lord, by
whom he had been " apprehended." In this respect he is
1 The drift of opinion away from Wrede and Bruckner's view of St.
Paul's indifference to the historic Jesus has been illustrated in a startling
manner by the suggestion of J. Weiss, based on 2 Co 516, that the apostle
came in contact with Jesus at Jerusalem prior to the crucifixion (Paulus
und Jesus, 1909). Much more attractive is Moffatt's explanation of the
passage, according to which "the knowledge of Christ after the flesh is
probably the Messianic belief of Pharisaic theology such as Paul had

CHRISTOLOGY DUE TO CONVERSION 53
in agreement with the primitive society. Both he and
they looked upward, not backward. The staple of his
thought comes not from inherited ideas as to the Messiah,
but from a wonderful inward sense of possession by the
sovereign grace of Cnrist. As we shall see, it is impossible
to fuse too intimately his doctrine of Christ and of the
Spirit. Yet, on the other hand, this exalted One is
identical with Jesus who died for sin. The apostle cannot
think of Christ and not think also of the cross He bore ;
" I determined," he writes to the Corinthians, " to know
nothing among you but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified "
(1 Co 22). We must conclude that his mind started from
the Eisen One who encountered him in glory at Damascus,
moved thence to the cross, which the Lord had endured,
and came finally to rest on the person of the Crucified.
His present experience of Christ is decisive as to what
he must think of the death undergone by the Messiah ;
on the other hand, the fact that such a reconciling death
was possible is an index of the inherent dignity of Him
who suffered. The full truth, accordingly, is not to be
expressed either by saying that St. Paul's view of Christ's
person is derived from his doctrine of atonement, or, con
versely, that his Christology fixed his doctrine of the
atonement. In reality person and work define each other.
The exalted Lord, known from the first as such, would not be
Lord unless He had died " for our offences " (Eo 424f-) ;
on the other hand, what Christ inherently is to God accounts,
in the apostle's view, for the supreme religious value of
His acceptance of the Cross.
St. Paul, like all the writers of the New Testament,
is convinced that the exalted Jesus is " the Christ " or
Messiah — " Christ " for him still keeps a flavour of its
shared in his pre-Christian days " (Paul and Paulinism, 18). If this be
so, we may be said to have from the apostle's own lips a protest in advance
ao-ainst the modern radical derivation of his Christology. He is telling us,
as in Gal l16"17, that "from the very outset, a better knowledge of Christ's
nature had shone upon him." The whole question of the genesis of his
Christologioal ideas is very ably discussed by Olschewski, Die Wurzeln der
paul. Christologie, 1909, whom I have followed in some points.

54 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
official sense — but also he transcends ab initio the current
Messianic idea, perceiving the cardinal significance of
Jesus, not for Jews merely, but for mankind. He nowhere
employs the title "Son of Man." The Kingdom of God
he virtually merges in the person of Christ. The phrase
"Kingdom of God" itself, which seldom occurs, was so
completely Jewish in origin and associations that he
must have found it unhelpful in his missionary work.
At the same time, its eschatological reference is still
retained in what the apostle means by " salvation " and
" eternal life " ; for he never ceased to look yearningly
towards a consummation in which death, sin, sickness,
demons, and every godless principality and power should be
overcome and annihilated. Jesus the Christ was already
clothed with universal power, and would ere long appear
once more to bring all things to completion. Those
who had accepted Him as Messianic King would at His
appearance be made perfect members of the Messianic
Kingdom, and thus be, in the full sense of the word,
saved. In tracing now his conception of Christ we shall
endeavour to follow as far as possible the movement of his
own mind, beginning with the thought of the exalted Lord,
and passing back thereafter to the historical, and what
may be called the eternal, antecedents of Christ's present
glory. It was due to his amazing experience of conversion
that St. Paul's faith came to be fixed steadily, and from
the very outset, on the risen and glorified Eedeemer. He
habitually conceives of Christ as clothed in the 86%a or
Divine radiance in which he first beheld Him at Damascus.
That moment was for him a piercing glimpse of a new
world ; his sight of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ he can compare with nothing but that first creative
hour when God said: "Let there be light!" (2 Co 46).
Here is the basis of his faith. From day to day he is
preoccupied with the risen Lord, the Son whom it had
pleased God to reveal in him (Gal l16). The attitude is

THE RISEN SAVIOUR 55
one, of course, really common to all New Testament
writers, but St. Paul's unique experience lent to it a
peculiar intensity and passion. All redeeming influences
are streaming out from Christ's risen power to fill the life
of the believer. He is not to be separated, whether in
thought or prayer, from God Himself. It is with this
one purpose that He has been exalted, that in the Spirit
He should bring home to men the universal reconciliation
with God once for all accomplished on the cross. He is t
Head of the Church, which is His body ; yet not of the
Church alone, for His omnipotence, like His knowledge and
His love, is complete and all-embracing. God has set
Him far above all rule and authority and power and
dominion, not only in this world, but also in that which
is to come (Eph l21). The hour of doom struck for the
power of darkness when He rose from the grave. Even
yet He has not attained the full victory, which will cul
minate only in His final advent, when the last enemy
shall be vanquished and God will fulfil His purpose to
sum up all things in Christ, both things in heaven and
things in earth. Nevertheless, this glorious, royal Lord
is not far away from His people, too high for human
need or for that sympathy and care on which they are
dependent while yet in the body. On the contrary, He
is within and beside them always, to guide, comfort, warn,
inspire, so that the apostle could literally speak of himself
as being in Christ, of his life as being his own no longer,
but the life of Christ living in him (Gal 220), and could
pray for his converts that Christ might dwell in their
hearts by faith. Thus in Eo 831fl- the strain of confidence
and praise sweeps up from point to point with gathering
intensity; from the death of Christ to what is greater
still, His rising from the dead, from His rising to His
session at the right hand of God, and finally, as to a
height at which imagination fails, to His work of inter
cession. This is the Christ before whose face St. Paul
lives from day to day, and to whose advent he strains
forward with keen desire.

56 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
No part of the apostle's teaching has a more vital
bearing on his thought of the Exalted One than his mystic
conception of the believer's union with Christ.1 Bound
this idea his religious feeling crystallised. The phrase
"in Christ" or "in the Lord" occurs nearly 240 times
in the Epistles we have accepted as genuine, and it is
used with reference to every side of experience. " I am
persuaded in Christ," he writes (Eo 1414); "if there be
any consolations in Christ " (Ph 21) ; " the dead in Christ "
(1 Th 416). It is as though Christ were the air or
element in which the Christian moved and had his being,
thinking with His mind and willing with His will. The
believer has absolutely become the organ or instrument
of the Lord, and is drawn, spirit, soul, and body, into His
dominating and recreating life. It is a relation of spirit to
spirit, yet not a relation individualistically realised ; for —
and this point is particularly accentuated in Ephesians —
the Church is the body of Christ, in which old divisions of
Jew and Gentile are done away. This final turn of thought,
however, he has prepared for by the earlier conception
of Christ as the Head of the body, of which individual
Christians are the members ; " we, who are many," he
writes to the Church in Bome, " are one body in Christ."
(125). The bond uniting Christ and Christians is such
that the same predications can be made of both. In His
death we also die, only to rise in His resurrection to
newness of life. His power is made perfect in our
weakness ; and it is no contradiction of this, but its true
expression, that the apostle bears about in his body the
dying of the Lord Jesus (2 Co 410), for only in proportion
as the private forces of the believer decay can his natural
capacities be absorbed and utilised by the higher power
of Christ. The fact that St. Paul conceived this union
or communion as mediated by the Spirit may possibly
explain how he feels at liberty to change from the phrase
" in Christ '' and speak of Christ dwelling in us ; for the
1 It has been expounded with a fine sympathy by J. Weiss, DieNachfolge
Christi, 83-98.

UNION WITH CHRIST 57
interpenetration between the Spirit-life of believers and
the Spirit of Christ is perfectly reciprocal. Plainly this
faith-mysticism lets in a flood of light on the Pauline
Christology. A single verse like 2 Co 57, " If any man \
be in Christ, he is a new creation," reveals in a flash the
last ground of his religious conviction about the Lord.
He with whom men can be thus in a relation of mutual
vital possession has obviously a nature which is more than
human ; that entrance of His life into us, met and appro
priated by our absorption in Him — whereby we are able
to denude ourselves of an unrighteous past and live anew
to holiness — involves on His side something of the uni
versality and transcendence of God Himself. It has been
argued that this synthesis of personality and spiritual im
manence in the Christ of St. Paul is in reality unthinkable,
inasmuch as the two sides of the combined idea are
irreconcilably opposed, and to take the combination seriously
can only lead to the depersonalising of Christ in a quasi-
pantheism. But we may reasonably urge that this is to
beg the question of His divinity, in a negative sense. The
figure of the head and the members (Col l18) seems
peculiarly fitted to represent the relation of Christ to
His people in both lights — as characterised equally by
transcendence and by mystic vital union.1
There is nothing more luminous or creatively original
in St. Paul's thought than his living correlation of Christ
and the Spirit as they are manifested in experience. It
is not merely that the phenomena of the Spirit are for
him a decisive proof of Christ's Messianic position ; still
further, the presence of the Spirit as a fact of power in
the believing life is a self-communication of the Lord
Jesus, who as Spirit dominates the new order of being
into which Christian men have been translated. Spirit
means supernatural power, yet not for St. Paul power
revealed most typically in ecstatic rapture, but the ethical
force from which spring such normal Christian graces as>
love, joy, peace, long-suffering, and kindness (Gal 522),
1 Cf. Olschewski, op. cit. 153-54.

58 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
which he sees to be more wonderful by far than speaking
with tongues.1 In Dr. Moffatt's words, " his first experi
ence of the Lord was a vision of Jesus as the risen and
exalted Christ. The reality of Christ's nature was Spirit,
on his view; Jesus was installed or constituted Son of
God with full powers by the resurrection, which revealed
and realised his true nature as life-giving Spirit. His life
in the flesh had limited him. It was a phase of being
which could not do justice to him. But when that
temporary impoverishment of nature was over, the
heavenly reality shone out in its fulness. The Spirit
radiated on men, it was poured into their hearts, as the
Spirit of one who had died and risen for the sake of men.
We must extinguish, however, the misconception that
Paul regarded the Spirit as acting on the lines of a natural
force in the evolution of the religious life. To him it
meant the gracious power of God which evoked faith
in Jesus as the crucified and risen Christ, and then
mediated to the receptive, obedient life all that the Lord
was and did for his own people." 2 Life " in the Spirit,"
his characteristic term for personal religion, can have its
source only in the exalted or spiritual Christ, so that,
when he describes- men as being "in Christ" or "in the
Spirit," he is thinking not of two rival or parallel realities,
but of one revolutionary experience seen from two points of
view ; for life flows to men from Christ and the Spirit in
differently. The ground of this epoch-making combination
is clearly to be sought in his conversion. He had met the
Exalted One face to face; and that spiritual event, in
which the Spirit was energising, had had the Lord Jesus
for concrete and substantial content. This once for all
fixed his conception of the Spirit, lending it precision of
outline, and protecting it against the wandering and
unethical fancies of paganism. The Spirit of God, long
promised for the latter days, was now known to be the
1 His perception of this difference of value marks a forward step in the
history of religion.
2 Paul and Paulinism, 37-38.

CHRIST AND THE SPIRIT 59
very Spirit of Jesus. It is a salient example of how God
reveals new truth through the medium of life. Not only
so; but we are thus once for all secured against the
temptation to explain the Pauline Christology either as
the product of mere theological reflection or as a mosaic
of fragments borrowed from the traditions of Jewish
apocalyptic. In point of fact, it is the offspring of
creative religious intuition, working upon the felt
realities of experience. "This inner fusion with the
conception of the Spirit," as Olschewski puts it, " con
stitutes the specific and distinctive essence of Paul's
Christology, and just on this account we must hold
that its roots lie in the fundamental experience of
Damascus." 1
At the same time, the relation of Christ and the
Spirit is not that of identity, but of vital unity. The
opposite view has been taken strongly. '' He could not
distinguish the Son from the Holy Ghost," Weinel says ; 2
a statement the force of which is naturally lessened by
its retractation on the next page. The wording of 2 Co S17^
may seem to decide the question ; " the Lord," the apostle
avers plainly, "is the Spirit." Yet the following clause
faintly reaffirms the distinction in the words, " Where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." No one can imagine
that " Christ " and " the Spirit of Christ " mean the same
thing precisely. Not to speak of the fact that St. Paul
does not regard Jesus as the incarnate Spirit of God, but
affiliates his ideas on this subject to other lines of ancient
thought, various minor data are significant. The person
who died upon the cross, and rose again, and will come
at last to judgment, is nowhere named " Spirit." Christ,
moreover, gives the Spirit in its fulness. And in the
triple blessing of 2 Co 1314, the Spirit is co-ordinated
with Christ and God as a separately discernible element
in the one redeeming agency. It is important to recollect
that the theological ideas of Christianity came first, and
1 Op. dt. 161.
1 St. Paul, 326 ; cf. Schmiedel, Hand-Kommentar, ii. 192.

60 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
that only afterwards were they fitted with more or less
exact verbal distinctions, so that usage might for a con
siderable time show a certain fluidity or free play of
expression. By the form of identification St. Paul indicates
just the familiar experiential fact that Christ, by whom
God saves men, and the Holy Spirit, in whom He conveys
to them Divine life, are so indissoeiably one in significance
and operation and media that from the point of view of
practical faith they are seen as true equivalents of each
other. Yet within the unity there is distinction. As it
has been put, "Christ in you, or the Spirit of Christ in
you ; these are not different realities ; but the one is the
method of the other." 1
We have already encountered the principle that on
St. Paul's view the Lordship of Christ first came to full
reality at His exaltation to the right hand of God. There
is a sense in which His glory is superior even to His
pre-existent life. He is now possessed of the Name above
every name. It is represented as somehow a reward of
His voluntary sacrifice : " He humbled Himself . . . where
fore God also highly exalted Him " (Ph 29). The classic
passage for this side of the Pauline teaching is Bo 1*
which declares that He was constituted or declared Son
of God with power, in virtue of the Spirit of holiness, by
rising from the dead. The Divine energy which effected
the resurrection set Christ free from the confining limits
of life in the flesh, and gave untrammelled and complete
expression to His proper Sonship. With this we may
compare Bo 149, a verse which points to the authority
of Christ as now covering all men, in this life and the
next. Similarly, it is always the risen Lord who bestows
the Spirit. In these statements it appears to be implied,
first, that Christ has ascended to be Lord of all things,
taking this place subsequently to and as a result of the
resurrection ; and in the second place, that originally His
personal nature was such as to qualify Him for this
transcendent place. Presently He will come to judge
1 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 194.

THE LAST ADAM 61
the world in God's name. But in strictness no sharp line
of distinction is drawn between God and Christ as regards
this judicial act or function. The two names occur jointly,
or as alternatives.1 God, or Christ, or God through Christ,
will judge men and work the last great change on believers.
But we must not play off the future against the present,
as if even for St. Paul the believer " never is, but always
to be, blest.'' He shares to the full the ardent primitive
hope of Jesus' return, as inaugurating the final consumma
tion ; none the less on his view salvation is already real
through the present activity of the Lord who became
incarnate, died, and rose again. The crucifixion had been
the ruin of the hostile cosmic powers ; having disarmed and
exposed them, Christ triumphed over them in the cross
(Col 215). The Kingdom of God, which is righteousness,
and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Eo 1417), is actual
even now. Christ died once, but the redemptorial virtue of
His death is in Him for ever.
The relation of the exalted Christ to men as Life-
giver leads the apostle, in one place, to designate Him by
the title of "the last Adam" (1 Co 154S). Adam was
head, representative, and type of the race derived from
him ; through transgression this race became carnal and
subject to death : so in like manner, Christ as risen is Head
of a new redeemed race made one with God by His death
and raised above the power of the flesh by contact with
the Spirit. Adam was earthly, Jesus heavenly ; Adam a
transgressor, Jesus obedient ; Adam only a living soul,
Jesus a quickening spirit, " a Being above nature, who had
life and was capable of giving it."2 The new spiritual
principle that came with Him is made incorporate with
all who trust Him, thus vivifying their whole being in its
relation to God, self, and all things else. The Spirit of
holiness being the inmost reality of Christ, He becomes
the organic head of a new spiritual creation ; and as grace
and life are more potent than sin and death, His reign
1 Cf. Sanday and Headlam, Romans, 389.
s Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 811.

62 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
will far exceed in scope and triumph the doom entailed
by ancient transgression.1
So deeply absorbed is St. Paul in the risen Lord that it
has not infrequently been held that he was indifferent to
the historic Jesus, his gospel only beginning when Jesus'
career on earth had ended. This, however, is gravely
misleading. To his mind the distinction of earth and
heaven, so wide for modern thought, was relatively small.
While he had no personal knowledge of Jesus like that
enjoyed by the Twelve, it may be taken as an assured fact
that he was acquainted with the evangelical tradition, and
indeed knew about Jesus what the ordinary Christian knew.
In Arabia, after his conversion, he need not have lived
wholly apart from Christians. Besides, he had spent a
fortnight with St. Peter in Jerusalem, and it will be
admitted that much may be told in a fortnight if Jesus
is the subject-matter, and the learner an apostle. There
is nothing inconsistent with this in the striking language
of Gal l11 : " The gospel preached by me is not according
to man ; for neither did I receive it from man, nor was I
taught it, except by revelation from Jesus Christ " ; which
is but a forcible declaration that the Messiahship of Jesus
was once for all disclosed to him by no human intermediary,
but by a vision of the Lord Himself. Jiilicher, with a
pleasing vigour, has observed that "an apostle of Jesus
Christ who had no desire to know about the Messiah's
earthly life, and for dogmatic reasons passed by with Bcorn,
as mere carnal weakness, everything revealed by God's
Son in the form of a servant, is not the Paul of history,
but a monstrosity of modern logic." 2 As Drescher shows,
it is possible to draw a fairly complete sketch of Jesus,
and especially of His character and disposition, from the
1 From all this we may gather what St. Paul would have said regard
ing the modern attempt to put him alongside of Jesus as part founder of
Christianity. "Paul is not the second after Jesus," Deissmann remarks
finely, "but the first in Christ."
3 Jesus und Paulus, 55.

ST. PAUL'S KNOWLEDGE OF JESUS 63
Pauline materials.1 At the same time, the interest which
guides his pen is not purely or even mainly historical.
There is no reference to Jesus' miracles, His faith, His
prayerfulness, His habits as a man amongst men. Certain
words of Jesus are cited as authoritative, chiefly on minor
points. His birth, His sinlessness, His institution of the
Supper, His death on the cross and rising on the third
day — these things are reported with a few lesser details.
The reason for this comparative reticence must lie in the
apostle's mind being engrossed chiefly with the great
decisive fact of redemption as an experience. But it is
clear that unless certain facts concerning Jesus were
known to him, through historical tradition, the confession
"Jesus is Lord" would have meant nothing. Hence it
is an axiom for St. Paul that Jesus lived and was true
man. He was made of a woman, born of the seed of
David according to the flesh. He is the last Adam,
founding a new humanity. There might appear to be a
docetic undertone in the statement (Bo 83) that God
sent His Son " in the likeness of sinful flesh " ; but the
meaning is simply that while Christ's flesh is as . real as
ours, and as human, it was not like ours sinful. The
flesh of man, with this one exception, was the pattern of
His flesh, but in Him alone it may be seen in a perfected
relation to the Spirit. But Jesus' sinlessness — St. Paul
knew of it, as of His unique self-consciousness, from the
impression made on the disciples and conveyed by them
to the new convert — was not the mere absence of moral
fault. The fulfilment of the law is love, and the figure
of the Nazarene who bore the cross for sinners must have
shone upon him with the radiance of ineffable and self-
abnegating grace. A complete moral identity links the
present Lordship to the past humiliation.
Yet the life lived by Jesus on earth, as St. Paul dis
cerned, was a form of being wholly inadequate to His
1 Das Leben Jesu bei Paulus. For some admirable pages on the
harmony of detail in St. Paul's picture of Jesus and that of the primitive
society, cf. Feine, Theologie d. NT, 200 ff.

64 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
true nature. It confined Him within limits ; it prevented
the full manifestation of all that which He really was.
For His origin lay in a higher world, that of eternal being,
from which by a voluntary act He came amongst men,
taking the form of a servant. To the original disciples
the astounding paradox had been, that the Jesus whose
companions they had been, and who had died in shame,
was now raised to the right hand of God ; to St. Paul
the paradox was rather that the Exalted One, proved by
resurrection to be the Son of God and of heavenly nature,
should have taken flesh and died at Calvary. They saw
the resurrection against the lowly ministry with its still
more lowly end ; he viewed the earthly life in bold relief
against the glory of ascension and pre-existence. The
mere fact that Christ should have accepted human life, to
surrender it in death for our sake, thrills him with a
wondering gratitude.
The unique personal constitution of Jesus, during His
earthly lifetime, consisted of a body of flesh and blood,
and, in addition, of that which the apostle denominates
" Spirit." The two elements are mentioned side by side
in Bo Is- * ; on which Dr. Denney has observed that
" the expression Kara irv^vfia ayioiavvr)? characterises
Christ ethically, as Kara crdp/ca does physically. Not
that it makes the sonship in question ' ethical ' as opposed
to * metaphysical ' : no such distinctions were in the
apostle's thought. But the sonship, which was declared
by the resurrection, answered to the spirit of holiness
which was the inmost and deepest reality in the Person
and life of Jesus." x It was a " Spirit " which sealed Him
with a specific character ; not merely energising as Divine
power in His life, but supplying the efficient ground of
His victory over death. To it St. Paul's mind recurred,
most probably, when his mind dwelt on the theme of
Christ's pre-historic life; "Spirit" was the element or
medium, so to speak, of that life, in virtue of which there
was continuity between the different phases of His career.
1 EGT. ii. m loc.

THE SON AS ETERNAL 65
In eternity, on earth, and now in the present and unending
glory, His unity with God was a unity in or through " Spirit."
In the first paragraph of Eomans, as in the great
verses we have just examined, Jesus Christ is designated
the " Son of God," a title never used by St. Paul save
with a certain grave solemnity.1 It is no longer a
Messianic name of honour merely ; it has been assigned
the loftier function of expressing the original and inherent
unity of life by which Christ is conjoined with God. Accord
ing to the usage of the Old Testament, he was specifically
God's Son on whom God's love was set, but in St. Paul
this is a mode of thought transcended, even if not cancelled.
If we take verses like Eo 832 : " He that spared not His
own Son," or Col l13: "the Son of His love," we can
only agree with Weiss that " it would be a mistake to
interpret these passages as though ' sonship ' were merely
another way of expressing love ; because God so loved
this being, therefore he was the Son of God. The reverse
is true : Because he is the Son, therefore God loves him." 2
Son of God by eternal nature — it is in this character that
He comes into the world. Already in that unbeginning
life He had been the image of the invisible God (Col l15).
We are not entitled to make the apostle responsible for
an explicit doctrine of " eterrral^generation " ; but unques
tionably he does mean that the relation of Christ to God
is increate and essential. It has been inferred from
Eo l4, where the Sonship of Christ is put in connection
with His rising from the dead, that the Pauline Christ is
Son only after the resurrection. But the words really
mean that only then was His Sonship fully and actually
manifested ; He is known as Son from that point onwards,
but by inference the mind passes beyond and behind that
fact to the Sonship which is superior to time.
1 " With scarcely an exception it is only used in such portions of the
letters as are marked by an especial elevation of style " (Weinel, St. Paul,
324). Examples are Ro 832, 1 Co 1», Gal 220.
2 J. Weiss, Christ : the Beginnings of Dogma, 66.
5

66 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
It is observable that St. Paul touches on our Lord's
pre-existence, always or nearly always, in a quite incidental
manner. This does not prove that the idea was no part
of his "gospel" — a point on which so far we have no
evidence — but it proves, at all events, that pre-existence
was an idea so familiar to Christians as to require no
explanation or apology. Nowhere is his tone that of the
sponsor for a doctrinal novelty.
As to particular texts, undue weight must not be
placed on Gal 44, " God sent forth His Son," although the
phrase is significant enough (cf. Bo 83). Somewhat more
explicit is 1 Co 10 4, where it is asserted that the Bock
which followed the Israelites in the desert, and of which
they drank, was Christ ; He is conceived, that is, as having
played a real part in Old Testament history. And there
is general agreement that 2 Co 89 bears not upon the
" poverty " of Jesus' lifetime on earth, but on His sacrifice
in being born ; for the " poverty " and " riches " in question
must obviously be correlative, and since He neither was
Himself rich in the literal sense, nor made others so, it is
impossible to take literally the poverty here ascribed to
Him. The verse is one which in import transcends the
phenomena of time and space, announcing not merely that
Christ's earthly life was inferior in glory to His prior
condition, but — a yet more sublime thought— that He
entered upon the lower state by His own volition.
Finally there is Ph 25~7, a passage "marked by epic
fulness and dignity," the amplest and most deliberate of
all St. Paul's declarations on the theme. Lightfoot has
thus paraphrased vv.6 and 7: "Though existing before
the worlds in the Eternal Godhead, yet He did not cling
with avidity to the prerogatives of His Divine majesty,
did not ambitiously display His equality with God; but
divested Himself of the glories of heaven, and took upon
Him the nature of a servant, assuming the likeness of
men." x Christ, that is, came into our world from a
previous state of Divine existence ; in that estate He
1 Philippians, 110.

THE CONCEPTION OF PRE-EXISTENCE 67
possessed self-conscious independent life, with a will that
ruled itself ; a will that might have been exerted in other
modes, but actually was exerted in this mode of self-
abnegation. It is asserted — and on the assertion hinges
the thrilling moral appeal of the passage — that before
He came as man Christ's life was Divine in quality ;
not merely like God, but participant in His essential attri
butes (/j,op^)i]). The crucial fact is that the apostle, even
though refraining from speculation as to the relationship
to God of the Eternal Son, does not scruple to describe
Him as subsisting in, and then giving up, " a being so in
the form of God that to be equal with Him is a thing of
nature." He took a life of manhood through the abdication
of infinite glory. And the motif of the passage — meta
physical only so far as it is ethical — lies in the subduing
thought that when it was open to Christ so to employ
the powers of His inherently Divine dignity as to insist on
being worshipped as God, He chose to reach this supreme
position, of Lordship acknowledged universally, by the
path of lowliness, obedience, and death. Thus His descent
reveals the vastness of His love, and justifies His later
exaltation. This exaltation is undoubtedly conceived as in a real
sense the reward of the great sacrifice that went before ;
on the other hand, to talk of " deification " is out of
all keeping with the apostle's mind. To a Jew the notion
that a man might become God would have been flat
blasphemy. Ascension only served to bring out in full
actuality what was originally implicit ; it but unfolded the
essential glory and dignity of Christ's person. Pre-
existence and Lordship, therefore, are in strictness relative
to each other.1
It is of course possible to discount the impression
made by such declarations. The first believers, it may be
said, vied with one another in finding or inventing names
1 Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, EGT. hi. in loc. Too much importance should
not be ascribed to Deissmann's interesting suggestions as to the influence on
St. Paul of language associated with the worship of the Emperor.

68 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
by which to enhance Jesus' glory. But whether they spoke
of His birth of a virgin or His eternal Sonship, it was only
a hyperbolical attempt to utter His spiritual greatness.
The idea of His pre-existence, Jiilicher has surmised,
may have been helped into currency by the widespread
contemporary belief in the transmigration of souls. "If
I have been man already, innumerable times, why should
Jesus not have lived in heaven for centuries as the Son
of God ? " 1 In other quarters it has been maintained that
for St. Paul's mind, as for the mind of his fellow-Christians,
the thought of Christ's pre-existence was no more than a
subordinate and ancillary symbol. It is obvious that
whatever names St. Paul might use would have had their
own previous history, but we must not beg the question
whether he could or could not fill them with a new
significance. Further, it is vain to urge that the con
ception of pre-existence is either peculiar to St. Paul or
of merely peripheral importance for his view of Christ.
It is present conspicuously in Hebrews and in the
Johannine writings; there is some reason to believe,
indeed, that it derives ultimately from Jesus. In the
presence of these facts, it is gratuitous to plead that the
writers of the New Testament attached to it only minor
religious value, and would have waived it readily to satisfy
an objector. The origin of St. Paul's thought of pre-existence has
been sought especially in the alleged Jewish-Hellenic
idea of a pre-existent "heavenly Man," the archetype
and pattern of created manhood. Following the Alex
andrian theory, as various scholars have maintained
since Baur, he taught that Christ pre-existed in heaven
as a human personality, inclusive of a body. The evidence
for this startling hypothesis is of the slenderest. In
Bo 5 the parallel between Adam and Christ is more an
illustration than anything else; it is St. Paul's way of
saying that Christianity is the absolute religion. And
in 1 Co 1544"49 — the locus classicus — all likelihood of
1 Paulus und Jesus, 32.

THE HEAVENLY MAN 69
Alexandrian influence, except possibly by way of implied
polemic, is negatived by two main considerations : that the
" heavenly Man " whom Philo names " the First Man " is
emphatically named " the Second Man " by St. Paul, and
that the passage is throughout concerned not in the least
with the pre-existent but with the exalted Christ. It was
only in virtue of resurrection that He became the arche
type and head of a new race. It would be arbitrary to
deny that the apostle's mind may have owed something to
such floating conceptions of transcendence as the Philonic,
but it is still more unfounded to describe it as in any intel
ligible sense the germ or organic core of his Christology,
since in point of fact it is mentioned merely in one chapter of
one epistle. A minor but equally decisive circumstance is
its incompatibility, in its Alexandrian form at all events,
with other Pauline statements as to the pre-existent One.
A being who was from eternity in the form of God could
not also be said to have eternally worn a human body.
The notion, however, that St. Paul's view of Christ started
from the idea of the "heavenly Man" will always fasci
nate those who are resolved to interpret his " gospel " in
exclusively humanitarian terms.
The pre-existent Christ is further conceived as having "
mediated by personal Divine agency in the creation of the
world (1 Co 86, Col l15fl-). If there be a reference to
Gnosticism in the latter passage, as is probably the case,
it is by way of recoil, not of imitation. I quote again
Lightfoot's paraphrase: "He is the perfect image, the
visible representation of the unseen God. He is the
Firstborn, the absolute Heir of the Father, begotten before
the ' ages ; the Lord of the Universe by virtue of primo
geniture, and by virtue also of creative agency. For in
Him and through Him the whole world was created,
things in heaven and things in earth, things visible to the
outward eye, and things cognizable by the outward per
ception. His supremacy is absolute and universal. All
powers in heaven and earth are subject to Him. This
subjection -extends even to the most exalted and most

70 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
potent of angelic beings, whether they be called
Thrones or Dominations or Princedoms or Powers, or
whatever title of dignity men may confer upon
themi Yes, He is first and He is last. Through Him,
as the mediatorial word, the universe has been created;
and unto Him, as the final goal, it is tending. In Him
is no before or after. He is pre-existent and self-existent
before all the worlds. And in Him as the binding and
sustaining power, universal nature coheres and consists."1
In this picture of Christ, stimulated it may be in part by
the Philonic conception of the Logos, the apostle moves
onward from historical to cosmic modes of interpretation.
We may single out the three main statements : first, Christ
is the organ of creation, absolute in function and eternal
in existence ; secondly, in Him all things are held together,
cohering in that unity and solidarity which make a
cosmos ; thirdly, as all things took rise in Him, so they
move on to Him as final goal. The aorist tense is used
to affirm that Christ created all things, for the writer
is thinking of the pre-existent One ; but the fact that he
lapses into perfects and presents is a suggestive hint that
he contemplates this pre-existence through the medium,
so to speak, of the exalted Life. Or to put it otherwise,
Christ is conceived as creator of the world qua the Person
in whom the universe was in due time to find its organic
centre in virtue of His work of reconciliation ; He was
the initial cause of all things, as being destined to be
their final end. His function as Creator is proleptically
conditioned by His achievement as Saviour. The apostle's
mind, here as everywhere, starts from the risen Lord, and,
as Professor Peake observes, " the work of the Son in His
pre-existent state is referred to, that the true position of
the exalted Christ may be understood." 2 It is interesting
to compare an earlier form of the same idea. This is in
1 Co 86 : " To us there is one God, the Father, of whom
are all things, and we unto Him ; and one Lord, Jesus
Christ, through whom are all things, and we through
1 Colossians, 144. 2 EGT. iii. in loc.

CHRIST AND CREATION 71
Him." Christ is the agent in creation, yet He is here
designated not as Son, but by the title usually applied to
the risen Saviour. As in Colossians, the ideas of creation
and redemption are united — redemption being the present
fact from which thought begins, and in the light of which
alone creation can be interpreted. The Son before all time
is visible through Christ's historic work in grace. On
the other hand, what is last in knowledge may be first in
reality. In the Colossian passage, therefore, we can dis
cern also this inferential counter-movement of thought ;
redemption is a fruit of, and has its basis in, Christ's
place and work in nature. The same oscillation of mind
between the poles of eternity and time may be seen in
the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel and in the opening
paragraph of Hebrews.
In view of this exalted estimate of Christ, it is at
first disconcerting to read plain statements in the same
author which affirm His distinct subordination to God
the Father. A candid exegesis will acknowledge, I
think, that now and then the matter is too clear for
dispute : Christ is given a place inferior to God, and His
work as Mediator and Beconciler is eventually traced to
the Father as originative cause. As examples we may
take " God sent forth His Son " (Gal 44), " He that spared
not His own Son" (Eo 832), "God hath highly exalted
Him " (Ph 29), " It pleased the Father that in Him should
all fulness dwell " (Col l19) ; and it should be noted that
these phrases are selected indifferently from the earlier and
later writings. The gift of Christ to men, His sacrifice in
death, the saving content of His life, and the bestowal on
Him of the glory of exaltation are in turn asserted to be
due to God. The whole career of Christ, in short, with
its vast issues, is regarded as having redounded supremely
to the glory of God the Father (Ph 2U). To this we
scarcely need to add the explicit statement of 1 Co 11s:
" The head of the woman is the man, and the head of
Christ is God," with which the great climax of 323 may

72 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
be compared : " All things are yours . . . and ye are
Christ's, and Christ is God's." Even more striking, per
haps, is a third verse in the same epistle, where St. Paul
anticipates the final surrender of the kingdom by the
Son : " Then shall the Son also Himself be subjected to
Him that did subject all things unto Him, that God
may be all in all " ( 1 528). As Loof s has shown, it is a
verse the mystery of which laid a spell on many of the
Greek and Latin Fathers.1 It appears to contemplate a
point of time when Christ, having put all enemies under
His feet, will abdicate and submit even Himself to the
Most High. There is no parallel to this anywhere in the
New Testament.2 It may possibly be a relic of Jewish
belief as to the destiny of the Messiah ; and at a later
stage, as in Col l16, the apostle seems to have put it on
one side.3 But at all events it is proof of the subordina-
tionist aspect of his view of Christ.
Whatever inference we build on these expressions,
they are at least no evidence that St. Paul was an early
Arian. To say that " Christ is not God, but the Son of
God," or that " The Son was called into life and endowed
with power by God for the creation and redemption of
mankind," is to signalise but one side of the Pauline
Christology, and not the most remarkable. We are justi
fied in saying that his view was not simply incoherent.
But it is certain that he held the deity of Christ. If
he nowhere puts it with dogmatic precision, at least
the doxology in Bo 95 is significant; also his habitual
use of " Lord " as the proper title of the exalted Christ,
and his frequent bracketing of Christ with God as the
fount of all grace and peace. The mere fact that he could
write Col 29: "In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the
Godhead bodily," is really decisive; for the words mean
1 Cf. article " Christologie," RE. iv.
2 WeizBacker long ago suggested Jn 162S— " in that day ye shall ask Me
nothing"— but a precise exegesis scarcely bears him out (see Jahrb. f.
deutsche Theologie, 1857, 183-84).
* Cf. Titius, Die neutest. Lehre von der Seligkeit, 2 Abtheil. 35.

THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SON 73
that in Christ there is to be found, as a unity or in
organic relation, the entire sum of qualities and attributes
by which the being of God is constituted. The subordina
tion of Christ, therefore, was on his view compatible with
His having a place within the sphere of Godhead. It
was a subjection by which the unity of God was exhibited,
not destroyed.
In the solution of this antinomy, St. Paul affords
less aid than we might expect. In common with the v,
primitive apostolic society, he looks to Christ equally
with God for all things in the present or the future,
representing now the one, now the other, as Judge, Saviour,
and Lord without any sense of facing a painful problem,
much less a contradiction. Questions on which a later age
fastened had not arisen in his mind. One simple mode of
relieving the strain has indeed been recommended. It is
to identify the Pauline dualism in Christology with the
twofold interpretation of Christ which has been felt to
pervade the New Testament as a whole. The first or
historical view moves always within the human fact of
Jesus' life on earth, finding in His unique manhood the
perfect vehicle of Divine grace. The other or transcendent
view fixes upon the higher nature manifest in all Christ's
life and work, and from, this recurs to His pre-incarnate
life in God and as God. Are not subordinationist phrases
more easily intelligible (it is said) if we relate them simply
to the former, or historical, interpretation ? This would
virtually be the theory of Calvin, who comments on
1 Co 323: Hcec subjectio ad Christi humanitatem refertur.
Jesus Christ, as a historic person, who was entrusted with
a vocation in and for mankind, and submitted Himself to
God in the discharge of it — how else than in subordina
tionist terms could St. Paul speak of His relation to the
Father ? I do not wish to deny the force of this, which
would indeed be quite convincing but for certain state
ments that unquestionably plant the subordination
predicated of Christ within the eternal and transcendent
sphere. The pre-incarnate One and the Eisen Lord

74 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
equally are pictured as subject to the rule of God the
Father (Gal 44, Col l19). The Son is personally one with
God, yet also subordinate in the sense indissociably bound
up with the very thought of sonship. And St. Paul, so
far as can be seen, would not have consented to reduce
either of these two forms of truth to the other — Christ
and God are of one Divine nature, yet within this unity
there obtain relations of higher and lower.
-% It will be seen that St. Paul's view of Christ represents
a noteworthy advance on the primitive apostolic conception
as indicated by the Petrine speeches in Acts. He was
the first to speak of Christ as agent in creation, and
to draw together closely the Spirit and Christ's inmost
being. He led the way also in teaching a mysticism
which has its pivot or point of departure in the Christian's
union with Christ. In this sense his Christology is in
dependent and unique. This originality has been turned
into a grave charge against the credibility of his conclusions
by those who argue that we cannot really expect a true
estimate of the person and work of Christ from one who
had not been an immediate disciple. Whether he did or
did not spin Christology freely out of his own mind, at
least we are unable to control the statements for which he
makes himself responsible.
It is a striking fact, however, that his estimate of
Christ never became, so far as we know, the subject of
controversy in the primitive Church.1 Men who dissented
violently from his interpretation of the Law found no
difficulty in his conception of the Saviour. His was one
true way, they felt, of stating the impression made on him
and them alike by the crucified and exalted Lord. He
nowhere betrays a feeling that the idiosyncrasies of his
thought are leading him on to dangerous ground where he
must move with a tender regard for others. He can
count on sympathy and comprehension. The categories he
1 Not that controversy would discredit his interpretation ; but in point
of fact there was none.

ST. PAUL'S VIEW ORIGINAL 75
employed were such as to gain the confidence and approval
of Christian men.
Nevertheless, it may be argued that the aptness of the
Pauline Christology to the first century is precisely the
reason why it is impossible for us. Owing to the provi
dential advance of human thought we have irrecoverably
lost his point of view. The fact that primitive believers
welcomed his estimate of Jesus is, moreover, no evidence
of its real truth. Naturally all views of Christ that
enhanced His glory or gave worthy expression to His
redeeming influence were pleasing to their minds ; but
they would certainly have greeted a different set of
thought-forms with equal fervour, provided they rose to
the same level of imaginative and ideal power.
This is true no doubt in the sense that some im
portant elements in the Christology of St. Paul are even
yet of partially dubious interpretation ; it is a vain ques
tion whether we accept them, for we cannot tell what they
mean. Who will claim to know for certain the whole
import for the apostle's mind of such phrases as " the form
of God " and " the form of a servant " (Ph 25fl-), as they
are predicated successively of the pre-existent and the
incarnate Christ ? Nor can we deny that several pre-
Christian influences — Jewish theology, Philo, Stoicism —
may have left their mark on his language. Yet it is
an unseeing criticism which finds in these anything more
than the outward setting of the picture.1 If the gospel
1 Cf. a valuable page in Reischle, Theologie und Religionsgeschichte,
40. Harnack's recent statement is also worth quoting : " It is utterly
improbable that St. Paul arrived at the central conception of a Son of God,
who died and rose again, through the myths of Western Asia ; the premises
of his reasoning and the historical premises which lay in the death on the
cross and the belief in the resurrection of Jesus must of themselves have
led him up to it. But it is quite possible that the idea underlying those
myths had won some influence over him, without his beiug aware of it, not
only upon the cosmological development of the idea, but also upon the
determination and power with which the apostle advanced it" (Fifth
International Congress of Free Christianity, 1910, p. 104).
Similarly, how much had been done by the progress of Hellenistic religious
thought to prepare the term o-wti}/) for Christian usage we may learn from the

76 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
was for the men of that age, it must be conveyed in
the vernacular of their minds, by those to whom con
temporary ideas formed a natural and vital atmosphere.
On the other hand, it is in no way fatal to the validity
of an idea — that of pre-existence, for example — that it
should have had a previous history in Jewish thought.
The revelation of God in Christ, if interpreted at all,
must of course be interpreted by ideas already present in
the world; ideas, we may believe, not altogether un-
moulded by a higher wisdom for the service they were
to render. If in addition we contemplate the Pauline
Christology as a whole, we perceive that in every age it
has gained the free recognition and assent of the Christian
mind. The thought, for example, that Christ by essential
nature is such that He gathers men into union with
Himself, opening the gates of His spiritual being to receive
us as only God can ; that in eternal love He bowed down
to earth to bear man's sin ; that the destinies of His
Church and of the world are in His hands for ever — •
can we dismiss these things as the outworn formulas of a
remote past, in which there remains no substance or value
any more ? On the contrary, they rise spontaneously in
the intelligence of those who to-day are impressed by
Jesus as they were who first believed in Him. But
more, the Christology of St. Paul is possessed of that
sublime and inexhaustible quality which is native to
enduring truth. His loftiest descriptions of the Lord
Jesus, far from having faded into obsolescence, still evoke
our reflection, as they elude it, by their very greatness.
researches of men like Paul Wendland (cf. his article in the Zeitschrift fur
neutest. Wissenschaft, 1904, 335 ff.). Christians, we can see, employed that
term to express the glorious fact that in Jesus they had found everything
which can be called salvation— from sin, from death, from judgment, from
the tyranny of demons. In the case of New Testament writers, however,
it is scarcely questionable that the old form has been filled with a new spirit.
Indeed, it may be argued that they " consciously and deliberately opposed
the Xarfip who had appeared to them, and His influence, to the earthly
o-oiTrjpes and their false titles of honour." This certainly holds true of the
Apocalypse (see Moffatt's Commentary in the Expositor's Greek Testament,
v. 307-17). Cf. Harnack, Reden und Aufsdtze, i. 299 ff.

ELEMENTS OF PERMANENCE 77
They are still beyond us as of old ; we can but throw out
our minds at an infinite reality; and to the last the
believing consciousness will vainly strive to know the
depth and height beheld by the apostle in Christ Jesus as
he wrote : " In Him were all things created, in the heavens
and the earth, things visible and things invisible ... for
in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." /

CHAPTER IV.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE EPISTLE TO
THE HEBREWS.
In point of time, the Epistle to the Hebrews is the first
systematic sketch of Christian theology. A very complete
picture of Christ is drawn, line after line being added to
fill out the majestic introductory representation (l1-4).
His person is contemplated throughout as the source or
presupposition of the work accomplished by Him as the
High Priest of men. Jesus, we read, is " the Mediator
of a new covenant" (1224, cf. 915 and 86); this is His
essential function ; and the pre-eminence of the new
covenant over the old, as well as its lasting glory, is due
to the incomparable dignity of the one eternal Priest.
Christ is like Aaron in certain ways : His commission is
from God, not self-assumed, and for all His unique superi
ority He keeps touch with the needs and frailties of the
people, one with them in suffering and temptation. But
still more He is unlike Aaron : He abides a priest con
tinually (723) ; being holy, guileless, undefiled, and separate
from sinners, He needs not to offer sacrifice for His own
sin, as in the old order (725). Formerly men were made
priests without an oath, whereas in constituting Jesus the
Son a priest for ever " the Lord sware, and will not repent "
Literature — Riehm, Der Lehrbegriff des Hebraerbriefs2, 1867;
Menegoz, La thiologie de Vepitre aux Hebreux, 1894 ; Davidson, Hebrews,
1882; Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 1899; Milligan, The Theology of
the Epistle to the Hebrews, 1899 ; Bousset, Die Religion des Judenthums2,
1906 ; Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 1893 ; Drummond, Phiio
Judoeus, 1888. 78

THE HUMAN JESUS 79
(721). With His life and death a new dispensation has
opened : " In Him the shadows of the Law
Are all fulfilled, and now withdraw."
His sole earlier type is Melchisedec, that ancient and
mystic figure in whom king and priest are one, " the
direct creation of God, without any of the accidents of
time," independent alike of descent and posterity. Already
we can see that Christology is the doctrinal centre of the
Epistle. The writer makes no profession of having been an eye
witness, yet his picture of Jesus is singularly vivid and
arresting. He must, one feels, have had access to good
original tradition. Nowhere in the New Testament is
the humanity of Christ set forth so movingly; for "not
even all the Gospels show us Jesus in the weakness
of His flesh side by side with the purity of His spirit,
as He is exhibited here. " 1 We see Him proclaiming
salvation (23), agonising in prayer (57), embracing the
Cross with joy and faith (122), suffering the last penalty
without the city gate (1312). The name " Jesus " occurs
by itself at least ten times. Sprung from the tribe of
Judah, He passed through the normal development of
human life, learning obedience, even though a Son, by the
things which He suffered (58). Into His course there
entered sinless frailty and dread temptation ; no aspect
of His life or character escaped the assault of evil. And
thereby He was schooled in sympathy. Yet no corrupt strain
existed in His nature to which temptation could appeal.
His sinlessness is definitely affirmed, more particularly as
a supreme qualification for His work as Saviour and Inter
cessor. A frank emphasis, without . parallel in the New
Testament, is laid on His human virtues. These constitute
the ethical life of the Son of God. . There are allusions to
His fidelity (32), His trust in God (213), His piety (57),
His patience under reproach (123). The strong crying
and tears with which He is said to have prayed " to Him
1 Bruce, Epistle to the Hebrews, 443.

80 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
that was able to save Him from death " are as unlike as
possible to the ontological impassivity that has been
ascribed to the Christ of Hebrews. When He is said to
have been " made perfect " (59), it is not meant that He
overcame fault or defect, but that He realised to the full
what He had it in Him to be. He became perfect through
experience, as the bud is perfected in the flower. Potencies
of absolute goodness were evoked by a moral discipline
which made Him the High Priest of mankind. Such
unity with the will of God, however, finally expressed in
death, is not something which He gradually acquired ; in
principle it is something which He brought with Him
when He came (105-7).
Along with this realistic portrait of Jesus goes a Christ
ology at least as lofty as that of Paul. Hebrews, like the
rest of the New Testament, begins from the exalted Lord ;
" We have such a high priest," the writer sums up at one
point, " who sat down on the right hand of the Majesty in
the heavens " (81). It is the distinctive work of Christ to
be Priest within the veil, " a minister of the sanctuary,
and of the true tabernacle " (82). From the stress put
upon exaltation we gather that Messianic ideas still come
naturally to the writer's mind, but they are receding from
the foreground, and other than Messianic terms are about
to replace them for purposes of interpretation. Assuming,
then, the present glory of Jesus, the writer's argument as
to His personal dignity is regressive. He goes back, to
the original nature which renders possible the present
majesty. From the first Christ was capable of what He
now is.
In the exordium of the first chapter, accordingly, Christ^
is set forth as " Son," a name which defines His nature as
in essential relation to the Father. In the character of
Son, He is " the effulgence of God's glory and the very
impress of His substance" (l3). If "effulgence" or
reflected brightness hints at essential unity between light
at the centre and light diffused, "impress" or image or
facsimile points to a distinctness in which one side of the

CHRIST AS SON 81
duality is a perfect, yet dependent, reproduction of the
other.1 The language is no doubt that of the schools;
but the writer is master of his terms, not their slave,
and can mould them to the spirit of his exposition.
" Son " is itself a metaphor, and there appears to be no
good reason why an apostolic writer should not elucidate
its meaning by other metaphorical expressions current in
his own day. The Divine place of the Son is signalised by
the fact that in Is He is said to uphold all things by the
word of His power, and in Is is actually addressed as
"God." Possibly in view of Jewish beliefs as to the
mediation of angels, the writer is at special pains to
emphasise their inferiority to the Son. They are bidden
to adore Him ; no angel has ever been named Son, as He
is, or placed on God's right hand. He is also above
Moses and the prophets.
In spite of this transcendence, Jesus on earth was made
a little lower than the angels (29). It was a temporary but
real humiliation, for the life to which He stooped in His
redemptive purpose formed but an imperfect medium of
His higher being. He assumed flesh, not only that He
might be apprehensible, but in order to suffer by tasting
death for every man ; and there is more than one
pathetic reference to the ignominy of the Cross. Nowhere
is the writer's religious feeling more penetrating than
when he insists (214-16) that at His coming into the world
the Son did not stop half-way, but chose a veritable
share in our lot. " Since then the children are partakers
in flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner took
part of the same . . for verily not of angels doth He
take hold, but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham."
We are led to think of a descent on His part, even if
nothing is said, here or elsewhere, regarding the effect on
His previous form of existence produced by this sublime
act. Thus He became High Priest (56), and His complete
and perfect priesthood is the outcome of His having been
made like men in all things, in suffering, in self-oblation
1 Cf. Fairbairn, Christ im, Modern Theology, 324.
6

82 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
(727) — all leading up to and culminating in that death and
victory by which He overcame the devil and accomplished
an eternal salvation (912). God set the seal upon His work
by crowning Him with glory and honour (29).
It has been held that in Hebrews the term " Son "
takes on a certain speculative colour, and that the obviously
ethical significance of the name as used by other New
Testament writers tends to give place to a sense more
explicitly metaphysical. Some justice there may be in
this; yet the distinction of ethical and metaphysical, is
not one which we can press, at least to the extent of
construing the two ideas as disparate alternatives. It
is begging the question to say that because " Son," as
applied to Jesus, denotes primarily a relation of special
intimacy and fellowship, the psychological coefficients of
which we can in some degree conceive, it cannot also
mean a relation which is essential and transcendent. If,
as all will concede, the name " Father " is not incapable
of a sense equally ethical and metaphysical, may the same
not be true of " Son " ? There is a theological positivism
which would deny even to apostolic men an interest in
Christ such that it longs to know Him in His own nature.
It is a less simple question whether in Hebrews the
name " Son " is given to the pre-existent One or exclu
sively to the historic Jesus. Our decision will rest on
materials . supplied by the first chapter. The writer's
mind clearly starts from the Sonship revealed by exalta
tion following upon the career of earth ; this is steadily
before his mind at every point. But are there indications
that he thought also of the pre-incarnate life as a life of
Sonship? "The name," says Professor A. B. Davidson,
" is not directly given to Him in His pre-existing state,
but the inference that it was applicable is inevitable. It
was the same Son in whom God spake to us, through
whom He made the worlds (l2); and there is no hint
that the name Son became the possession of a Being
already existing on His entering into the flesh." x And
1 Hebrews, 74.

HIS PRE-EXISTENOE 83
from a somewhat different point of view, Professor Bruce
pleads that the writer's interest in magnifying the sacrifice
of Christ required the Sonship to be of older date than
the life on earth.1 We may note for ourselves, in addition,
that origination from God and precise likeness to God —
both constituents of Sonship— are in l3 plainly said to
have characterised the pre-historic One. In favour of
this view, though it has great names against it, is the
fact, noted by Eiehm, that the Subject of the three stadia
of. action — creation before all time, atonement on earth,
and the heavenly ministry — is set forth as personally
identical throughout. The same difficulty meets the ex
positor in what are virtual parallels, Col l15 and Jn l13.
However this may be, it is safe to say that Hebrews
can be quoted for the pre-existence of Christ, and that
this pre-existence is specifically conceived as personal.
As Weiss puts it,2 all theories to the effect that what is
meant is no more than an impersonal principle go to
wreck on l1-^. Christ's eternal being is repeatedly made
a foil to the sorrow, tears, shame, and death endured by
Him in the flesh ; His earthly life is an episode, though
not an episode merely, in a history without beginning and
without end. It was the reproach of Christ which Moses
bore ; it was by Christ Himself, as Lord, that of old the
foundations of the world were laid. Very few words in all
are spent on His pre-temporal life, yet it fills a larger place
than in any other New Testament Epistle. But the writer
has no speculative key to incarnation as an experience. He
says not one word as to the method of it, and although
he points out how the Son came into our very midst by
taking 'flesh and blood, there is no passage to be compared
with Ph 25"11. What is underlined is the fact that He
came into humanity, not out of it ; His coming was a
supernatural event. At the same time, doeetism is ex
cluded firmly. Christ's very purpose in taking flesh was
that He might suffer. Not only so, but His experience
has contributed to His present character. As the fruit
1 Op. cit. 441. 2 New Testament Theology, ii. 189, note.

84 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of His passion He is now a merciful and faithful High
Priest in whom the frail and sinful are sure of sympathy
purchased at a great price. Just because the once suffer
ing Jesus is also the Exalted Head of the Christian society,
the idea of imitation is raised tc the supreme level of
religious faith. He is the Forerunner who has passed
through the heavens as our Priest; He is the beginner
and finisher of faith, whose course of brave endurance we
must consider, when tempted to faint or grow weary. He
can help us in our suffering, inasmuch as He has Himself
been a sufferer, but now lives in glory and universal power.
The writer's exposition of Christ's redemptive work is
in keeping with the centrality of his thought of Sonship. It
is as Son that Christ discharges priestly functions, sacri
ficing Himself in death, and, after death and resurrection,
entering through His own blood as priest within the veil.
In the character of Son, also, He offered Himself to God
" through eternal Spirit " (914, cf. 716). This striking phrase
almost amounts to a definition of His nature; it denotes
that the Spirit which dwelt in Him and made Him what
He was, proved to be inextinguishable by death, and thus
enabled Him to carry on for ever a priestly work in the
higher sanctuary. The importance of this heavenly func
tion for the writer's mind is cardinal. ' But it too is
based on Sonship. It is as Son that Christ intercedes-
(414 726 924); as Son He bears the once-made sacrifice
before God on our behalf as He enters the holy place ; as
Son He sits down on the right hand of God (l4), heir of
all things, and destined to appear a second time to them
that wait for Him (928). Thus the eternity and perfection
'of the new covenant are once for all guaranteed by the
fact that Christ is Son of God.
Nevertheless, the antinomy we have found in St. Paul
returns also in the Christology of Hebrews. On the
one hand, the Godhead of Christ is explicitly asserted.
The Son acts as Creator, and the relations of created
things to God are mediated by Him. No proof is given
of this, which is in itself significant. But on the other

THE SUBORDINATION OF CHRIST 85
hand, the Godhead so enunciated is compatible with real
subordination. Everywhere the Son is viewed as
dependent on the Father — for appointment as heir of
all things (l2), for calling as High Priest (o6), for
resurrection (1320), for exaltation (l13). In l6 He is
described without qualification as "the first-born." Not
Christ, but God, is the final Judge of men. The Son's
place is not on, but on the right hand of, the throne of
God. The two views are there ; and they must simply
be acknowledged. It is idle to refer one of them to
Christ's deity, the other to His manhood. As Baur has
remarked,1 if the words " This day have I begotten Thee "
(l6) seem to define Christ as posited by God's will, and
therefore in a sense temporal and accidental, the metaphors
of l3 as plainly teach that the relationship is one of
essential nature. This may of course be criticised un
favourably as an unmediated conjunction of metaphysic
and history in which justice is done neither to the logical
character of speculation nor to the demands of exact
historical inquiry. As a matter of fact, the duality is
simply indissociable from the Christian view of Jesus.
Faith is conscious of the personal presence of God in Him ;
it is therefore inevitable that He should be regarded alike
in a Divine or eternal aspect — implying somehow a real
pre-existence — and in an aspect for which He fulfils His
mission under the conditions of time. It may turn out that
the antinomy is insoluble by thought ; but the writers of
the New Testament at least obey a true instinct in
affirming both estimates even if the grounds of their
organic unity cannot be made apparent.
No man thinks or writes in a vacuum, and there can
be no question that Hebrews reveals the influence of
Alexandria, that crucible of all creeds. Some of the
writer's phrases have a history behind them. There is a
significant resemblance between his description of the
Son and epithets applied by Philo and the Book of
Wisdom to the Logos or Wisdom personified.2 Philo
1 Neutest. Theol. 237. 2 Cf. Holtzmann, NT Theologie, ii. 294 f.

86 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
had spoken of the Logos as the mediator between God
and man, as the first-born creature, as the oldest Son of
God, as the organ or instrument of creation and providence.
But while we recognise the Alexandrian vocabulary, it is
quite mistaken to infer from this that the underlying
system of ideas is in each case the same. Philo in com
parison with Hebrews is " as water unto wine." In Philo
the Logos floats vaguely in a medium which is neither
personal nor impersonal, as the unity of subordinate logoi
that pervade the world ; the soul which has been caught up
in ecstasy and initiated in mystery may dispense altogether
with the Logos ; God is impassably severed from the world
by a gulf the Logos only can bridge ; and at no point is
the Logos identified with the Messiah. But in Hebrews the
Messianic Son-— nowhere designated as Logos — descends
into history as a Eedeemer,, and through a career of
temptation, death, and victory becomes the great High
Priest of men, by whom alone we come to God. It is
clear that a wholly new religious interest is predominant.
The author of Hebrews has carried over to Jesus predicates
and epithets drawn from the cultured phraseology of his
time which appear to him pre-eminently suited to declare
His greatness. With a sovereign freedom he argues that
what philosophy has aspired to is given in Christ. We
must not make him responsible for more than this verbal
debt. It is indeed difficult to conceive how an apostolic
writer is to satisfy a certain type of criticism. Let him
create a new world of ideas, and he is in danger of being
pronounced unintelligible ; let him use the categories of
his day, even though baptized in the name of Christ, and
he is scouted as a plagiarist who has nothing of his own
to say. The Christ of Hebrews does replace the Philonic
Logos, in which philosophy had, as it were, been dreaming
of a Saviour ; but to state the one in terms of the other
is impossible. The Christologies of St. Paul and of Hebrews are
similar in many important features. Both teach that
Christ did not begin to be at His earthly incarnation, but

ST. PAUL AND HEBREWS 87
was Mediator of creation from the first ; and in each case
the argument moves in a regressive direction, from His
exalted glory to His pristine estate. Both teach that He
has reached a glory far above men and angels by way of
the cross ; it was at the resurrection that for the first
time — in some sense as reward — He attained to a mani
fested greatness which was His always by right. Both
teach His true Godhead yet real subordination. At the
same time, vital differences prove that as constructions
they are wholly independent. The idea of High Priest has
no place in St. Paul, and much is said in Hebrews about
our Lord's heavenly ministry to which in St. Paul there
answers only the thought of intercession. Hebrews also
brings out in a new way — here more or less anticipating
the Fourth Gospel — the glory of Jesus' life on earth, with
its riches of acquired sympathy. If in St. Paul imitation
of the earthly Jesus is swallowed up in the thought of
union with Christ (cf., however, 1 Co 1031fl-), in Hebrews
the Leader of all the faithful is our pattern in temptation,
who endured before us the gainsaying of the wicked, and
suffered, as we also must suffer, without the gate. In
the later book the mystical side of Paulinism is absent,
even from 314 and 64, and though the writer looks forward
to the Parousia, there is no suggestion, as in 1 Co 1545~47,
of a future when Christ will abdicate, and His Messianic
reign merge in the absolute dispensation of the Father.

CHAPTER V.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE APOCALYPSE.
The view of Christ which inspires the Apocalypse of John
— the Domitianic date seems proved — offers a peculiarly
interesting study in contrasts. On the one hand, whatever
be its sources, the book is now rightly regarded as the
product of an intensely Jewish form of Christianity. To
the writer Jesus is the true Messiah. He is the Lion
of the tribe of Judah (55), the bright, morning Star, the
Eoot and Offspring of David (2216), whose destiny it is to
rule the nations with a rod of iron (527 etc.) — all manifestly
Old Testament predicates. On the other hand, so exalted
is another vein in his conception, that Bousset speaks of
it as apparently the most advanced Christology in the
New Testament. Nor ought we too hastily to assume
that this is due to Pauline influence. It may represent
a late independent branch of primitive faith.
Here we are concerned less with the origins of the
writer's symbolism, than with the immense significance
he has forced it to carry. " His vision of Jesus," Dr.
Moffatt has said, " came to him through an atmosphere
of truculent and fantastic Messianism, which was scarcely
lucid at all points, and which tended to refract if not to
blur the newer light." The inconsistencies and inequalities
of his usage " are mainly due to the fact that the writer's
Literature — Bousset, Die Offenbarung JohannW, 1906 ; Moffatt,
"Revelation," in the Expositor's Greek Testament, 1910 ; Porter, Messages of
the Apocalyptical Writers, 1905 ; Briggs, Messiah of the Apostles ; Peake,
in Mansfield College Essays, 1909 ; Schmiedel, Johannine Writings,
1908 ; Titius, Die neutestamentliche Lehre von der Seligkeit, Abtheil. IV.
1900.

J j

MESSIANISM 89
Christian consciousness repeatedly tends to break through
forms too narrow for its fulness. Probably the materials
at the author's disposal would have been better arranged
had this been anything less than the presentation of a
living Bedeemer in heaven as the Messiah of God's people
upon earth. The mere fact that the Messiah had lived,
involved a readjustment of Messianic categories ; the
further fact that he had suffered and risen meant that
many had to be reshaped." x It is the heavenly life and
activity of Christ that occupy the foreground, although the
days of His flesh are not wholly forgotten. The name
"Jesus" occurs five times, twice in the now familiar
phrase, "Lord Jesus." Primitive thought is revealed in
the Judaistic appellations of the Messiah, as also in the
Danielic reminiscence, "one like unto a son of man" (I414).
Eschatological forms are frequent. The Kingdom will be
established by the advent of Jesus, not by the develop
ment of society. The past is His ; but above all He is
herald of the future, ushering in the day of final triumph
when those who have kept His testimony shall be made
priests of God and His Christ, and reign with Him a
thousand years. His vestments in l13 are priestly. But
the seer's favourite title for Jesus is " the Lamb." It
occurs twenty-nine times as a significant and touching
index of His redeeming work and of the awed yet tender
adoration evoked by it, for the blood of the slain Li in
which purges sin, guarantees to all the faithful a like
victory through suffering and death.
Yet all memories of the past are virtually absorbed
in the vision of Jesus' heavenly glory. He who was dead
now lives to bless and rule. And it is not going too far
to say that the song uttered in His praise passes upward
from point to point, till, in all essential ways, He is
frankly identified with Godhead and fills a Divine place.
His power is far superior to the angels. Omnipotence,
omniscience, and eternity are ascribed to Him. He is
the " Living One " whose conquest of the tomb gave Him
1 Expositor's Greek Testament, v. 297.

90 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the keys of death and Hades (l18); like Jehovah (Ps 79)
He searches the reins and the hearts with eyes like a
flame of fire ; the seven spirits of God are His ; He has
power to unlock the secrets of human destiny (ch. 5) ; and,
in the Christophany with which the book opens, such is
the godlike and overwhelming radiance of His person that
the seer falls at His feet as dead. He is source and end
of all existing things, assuming thrice with solemnity the
specifically Divine name, "the First and the Last," and
the impression of absolute eternal power is deepened by
the additional circumstance that the words, " I am Alpha
and Omega, the beginning and end," spoken by God
Himself in 216, are elsewhere uttered by Jesus (2213) in
an emphasised form. This makes it virtually certain
that He is ranked with God, not with finitude, in such
phrases as " the beginning (or principle) of the creation
of God " (314), and that He is conceived as filling this
place eternally, not merely after His exaltation.
Within this Divine sphere, His relation to God is
that of Sonship. In the letter to the Church of Thyatira
He designates Himself "Son of God," and His words
make reference more than once to "My Father" (227 35).
Once only He is described as "the Word of God" (1913),
a token that we are somewhere within the range of
Johannine and Alexandrine ideas. Even if the phrase is
not an interpolation, however, the nature of the context
scarcely invites an immediate or unconditional identifica
tion with the Logos as conceived in the Prologue to the
Fourth Gospel.
Throughout the book the praise of this Divine person
ality is echoed passionately. In 1910 the seer is bidden
worship God only, but the Apocalypse as a whole heaps
proof on proof that already the adoration of Jesus is
a distinctive feature of Christian religion, this earthly
praxis being no more than a reflex of the homage paid
on high. " Unto Him that loveth us, and washed us from
our sins by His blood ... to Him be the glory and the
dominion for ever and ever " (l5- 6). This is closely parallel

THE ADORATION OF JESUS 91
to the doxology in 7llfl-, which is addressed to God.
Along with this may be combined two salient passages,
513 and 710, in which God and Christ are held forth as
the objects of a single intense movement of adoration:
" Unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the
Lamb, be the blessing," is the worship offered in 513 by
the totality of animated creation ; " Salvation unto our
God which sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb," is
in 710 the song of the great multitude of the redeemed,
which no man could number. In both instances God the
Creator and Jesus the Eedeemer are exhibited in the same
indissociable unity, the same oneness with difference. And
with this representation the mystical expressions har
monise which occur in the beautiful picture of the heavenly
Jerusalem (2122-23), regarding which it is said, in fulfil
ment of the Old Testament ideal, that "the Lord God
Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof," and again
that " the glory of God did lighten it, and the lamp thereof
is the Lamb." This last verse is obviously parallel to and
a reminiscence of Is 6 019 : " The Lord shall be unto thee
an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory"; where a
recent commentator points out the noteworthiness of the
fact that in the closing phrase " the Lamb " occupies the
place of " thy God " in the prophecy.1 We have only to
read the seven epistles to the Churches consecutively to
realise with a vividness scarcely felt in any other part
of the New Testament how central, incomparable, and
all-determining is the place of Jesus in the life and faith
of first-century believers, and how impossible any com
parison is between His function as the medium and as
it were the very atmosphere of redemption and that of
any other, whether prophet, saint, or martyr. Christ does
not live, as we do, by the grace of God, but we live by
the grace of God and Christ. A monotheist Jew, of the
first Christian generation, finds himself not only free,
but actually bound, to identify Christ in His attributes
with God, and can use with adoring freedom such
1 Professor C. A. Scott, Commentary (Century Bible), 294.

92 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
unparalleled phrases as " the throne of God and of the
Lamb." 1
As in the rest of the New Testament, the tran
scendence of Jesus — His place within the Divine sphere —
is still combined with a view of His person as subordinate
to God. However misleading it may be to say, as Wernle
does, that in the Apocalypse Jesus is only the highest in
the great company of mediators; however obvious the
author's conviction that in ascribing praise to Jesus he
cannot go too far or far enough, since words must still
fall short ; yet this Person, alone, unapproachable and
supreme, is yet uniformly presented as dependent on God
the Father. In the opening verse, whatever rendering
we choose, it is made clear that the revelation which forms
the subject was given to Jesus Christ by God. And in 321
Christ's risen glory is depicted as in some real sense the
outcome and reward of His earthly fidelity, for He promises
to all who overcome a share in His own acquired royal
power and judicial dignity. Lofty as His position is, He
still reveals Himself as the exemplar of His people. To
object, as some writers do, that it is only because Jesus
is not God that He can be conceived as the pattern of
humanity, and that the naming separately of Jesus and
God virtually disproves the author's belief in His Divine
significance, is to assume the very matter in dispute.
The same may be said of the contention that, since the
gift of exaltation is conferred on Christ, we cannot be
meant to take seriously various other expressions in which
His original divinity appears to be asserted. Weiss has
pointedly replied to this, that so far from one position
neutralising the other, it really furnishes its sufficient
ground. None but He who was Divine by nature could
sit upon the Divine throne.2
1 It is not as if the author had decided this question of Christ-worship
unreflectively. The issue filled his whole mind. His book is a trumpet-
call to Christians to ' worship Jesus and refuse to worship the Roman
Emperor (cf. Moffatt, op. cit. 307-17).
2 NT Theology, ii. 277.

CHRIST SUBORDINATE TO GOD 93
Here, then, as elsewhere in the apostolic writings,
the Christian view of Jesus stands firmly on a founda
tion of experience. It is the impression made by the
historic Eedeemer on hearts surrendered to Him, joined
to the consciousness of the new life in the Spirit which He
conveys to them from His place on high. To this Jesus
belong " the glory and the dominion for ever and ever "
(l6). No one knew better than the author that the
Apocalypse was a book for the people, not for the
theologian,1 and that the literary and mythological details
of his symbolism have no unity but that of the religious
passion which employed them. " The writer's Christology,"
it has been said, " may mingle naively archaic elements
like the lion of the tribe of Judah, or the iron sceptre
which dashes nations in pieces, with speculative ideas like
the first principle of creation or the eternal Divine word —
it matters not. What his work reveals is that Jesus is
practically greater than any or all these ways of represent
ing Him; neither the imagination of the Jew nor the
philosophical faculty of the Greek can embody Him ; in
the faith and life of the seer He has an importance to
which neither is adequate ; the only true name for Him
is one which is above every name." 2
1 Wernle may be right in his suggestion (Anfange, 230) that the book
is of lay origin.
¦ Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 79.

CHAPTEE VI.
THE JOHANNINE CHRISTOLOGY.
The writer of the Fourth Gospel — on the evidence it
is still possible to regard him as John the Apostle1 —
has explained very clearly the purpose of his work. In
words which may have formed the conclusion of the Gospel
as originally composed, he declares plainly : " These are
written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through
His name" (2031). He felt himself to be in line with
primitive Christian belief. The point at which he passed
beyond primitive ideas was not in replacing the Messiah
by the Logos, but in perceiving how much is eventually
implied in Messiahship. Jesus' Messianic function he
construes uniformly in terms of Divine Sonship. Or, to
put it otherwise, he formulates Messiahship in categories
more universal and absolute, working back to those
ultimate presuppositions which were best fitted to impress
the wider contemporary intelligence.
But the specifically Messianic interest is never out of
sight. Thus in chapter 1, Andrew reports to his brother
Literature — Scott, The Fourth Gospel, its Purpose and Theology, 1906 ;
Drummond, The Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 1903 ;
Sanday, Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, 1905 ; Ltitgert, Die johanneische
Christologie, 1899 ; Barth, Das Johannesevangelium und die synoptischen
Evangelien, 1905 ; B. Weiss, Der johanneische Lehrbegriff, 1862 ; Holtzmann,
Hand-Kommentar3, Bd. iv., 1910 ; Titins, Die neutestamentliche Lehre von
der Seligkeit, Abtheil. iii., 1900 ; Schmiedel, Johannine Writings, 1908 ;
Heitmiiller on the Fourth Gospel in Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments2
(ed. J. Weiss), 1907 ; Kirn, article " Logos," in RE. xi.
1 This is not meant to negate the possibility that a later editor or editors
may have arranged the apostolic material, or that certain passages in the
Gospel as we have it are in the wrong order.
84

MESSIANISM 95
Simon that he has found the Christ, and Nathanael hails
Jesus in that character on the ground of His preternatural
knowledge. The woman of Samaria also is convinced,
while a similar process of reasoning goes on in the minds
of the Jerusalem populace, as revealed in their question :
" When the Christ shall come, will He do more signs than
those which this man hath done ? " (731). The works of
Jesus, moreover, are characteristically Messianic. He
comes to raise the dead, to bestow the Spirit in fulfilment
of the ancient promise, to receive the Lordship of all things
(3s5 161B). It lies with Him also to execute judgment ;
though, as has been pointed out, " the judgment is taken
out of the future, and carried back into the actual life of
Christ,"1 an earlier conception of judgment thus being
supplemented by the notion of a present and continued
process. His miracles are placed in the same light, but it
is significant of St. John's profounder and more spiritual
interpretation that outward miracles are regarded (520) as
but the signs of greater works still, wrought by Jesus in
His function of awakening, animating, judging, and illumin
ing the souls of men. He is represented, in short, as
exerting a delegated but competent authority such as only
the Messiah could assume. But the Jewish horizon has
vanished. Whatever Jesus may be as Christ, He is
definitely for the whole world.
The writer intentionally selects the person of Jesus Christ
as the subject-matter of his Gospel. Our Lord's conscious
ness of His relation to God, His transcendent nature, His
willingness to communicate eternal life, and the issues of
the attitude which men take to His person — these form the
real centre of the picture. "The point of view," says
Mathews, " is certainly not that of the Synoptic Gospels,
but it is precisely that of a devoted disciple, who, looking
back upon the career of his Master through the course of
years, would be quick to see how constantly Jesus was in
reality presenting Himself as the subject of definition."2
1 Scott, Fourth Gospel, 214.
s Messianic Hope, 216.

96 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
The relation of Father to Son had already been signalised in
a great Synoptic passage (Mt ll27) in terms which involve
the uniqueness of Jesus' nature, so that in part the change
of emphasis is prepared for. At the same time, the repre
sentation of Christ diverges from that of the older Gospels,
in so far as the Fourth Gospel represents His discourse as
revolving almost exclusively round His own person and the
revelation it contains. He is alike the subject and object
of His message. Thus the Gospel opens with a carefully
constructed Prologue, the purpose of which is to affirm the
eternal Godhead of the personal Word who became flesh
in Jesus Christ ; and (if chapter 21 is by a later hand)
it virtually closes on the same note, in the adoring cry
of Thomas, "My Lord and my God" (2028). In great
measure, however, the distinction between the two readings
is that of fact and theory. The first three Gospels had
pictured Christ in His familiar habit among men, as any
onlooker might observe Him; the fourth undertakes to
penetrate behind this to its deeper ground. If they moved
always within the fact of Jesus' human life, St. John
offers an articulated view of the relationship of Christ to
God, when followed up into its final implications.1 Jesus
is the Christ, in the last and highest sense of that term,
because He is primarily the Eternal Word or Son, come
forth in history as the perfect manifestation of the Father.
The varied elements of the story — the miracles of Jesus,
His sayings, His experiences — are so arranged as to focus
the light directly on this Divine truth. Each incident,
each discourse, reveals a new aspect of Jesus as the Christ
who is also the Incarnate Son, and can be the first only
because He is the second. Constant reference to this
central aim lends the Gospel its singular uniformity of
tone and language.
1 Both readings are inspired by religious conviction. St. John's interest
in the Godhead of Jesus Christ was, as Mr. Purchas has noted, " not philo
sophical ; it was intensely practical. To him Christianity meant the love
of God reaching forth and stooping down to men wandering in darkness "
(Johannine Problems, 101).

THE JOHANNINE DISCOURSES 97
As regards the authenticity of the Johannine dis
courses, a working compromise is being slowly effected
between reasonable men on both sides. A few scholars
would still claim for the evangelist a quite literal
exactitude. At the other extreme, a large body of writers
contend that the teaching of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel
is really an expansion in philosophic terms of an estimate
of Jesus which has virtually no point of contact with
the person known to us from the Synoptics. On this
view, the apostolic authorship is out of the question.
Gradually, however, there is growing up a mediating party,
who are more or less prepared to waive the question of
authorship, but in any case are convinced that the
Johannine witness of Jesus to Himself is at bottom histori
cally trustworthy, while yet His actual words have passed
through the colouring medium of the writer's personal
reflection. His type of exposition, so unlike that of the
Synoptics, is due to his having thoroughly worked over into
his own style his recollections of what Jesus said and did.
But it is incredible that a Christian apostle should have
taken liberties with the self-consciousness of Jesus. We may
say with Haupt that the teaching of Jesus has an authentic
commentary bound up with it, or, in Burton's admirable
phrase, that the Gospel is " a series of historical sermons " ; 1
but in either case there is a vital accuracy. The pregnant
pictorial words of the Synoptics are gone, the original
matter has largely been melted and recast in memory, yet
we feel no final discrepancy between the Master's thought
as we know it elsewhere and the evangelist's report and
exposition. Truth learnt by St. John and the Church
around him, ere the close of the apostolic age, was felt
to have lain from the very outset in Jesus' words, and in
the light of this perception the words themselves assumed
a new aspect. Thus we may explain the comparative
absence of development alike in Jesus' self-revelation and
the apprehension of it by the disciples. Objects really
separate in time merged in each other unawares ; to the
1 Short Introduction to the Gospels, 128.
7

98 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
evangelist looking back, as Dr. Sanday suggests, the
evolutionary process was foreshortened.1
It is an axiom, therefore, that the apostle's view of
Christ had passed through a rich and fruitful process of
transformation.2 We can imagine spiritual forces which
may well have produced the change. Such were his
fellowship with the exalted Lord; the common faith of
the living and suffering Church; the challenge of the
wistful religious longings which pervaded the Graeco-
Boman world ; not least, perhaps, the teaching of St.
Paul, with which he must have been familiar. Unless
experience is something of which God can make no use,
these influences must have operated on St. John's recol
lections of the historic Jesus and have tended to evoke
an ever profounder apprehension of His supreme religious
significance. The Fourth Gospel is then fundamentally
the work of an apostle, who, in the evening of life, and as
a protest against the idealising tendency which sought to
turn Christianity into a group of abstract conceptions,
made known to the Church the intuition he had gained of
the eternal value of the historic Lord — His unique relation
to God as uncreated Son, His relation to men as essential
Life and Truth. Throughout he strives to convey the total
impression of this Christ. The secret of his Gospel lies
in its unique combination of history with clear-sighted faith.
It belongs to a class of writings which may be described as
not merely historical but prophetic, and has the qualities
rather of a portrait than a photograph. As it has been
expressed finely: "The greatness of the Fourth Gospel
consists in this, that it takes us back to the living Person
of Jesus as the ultimate force in Christianity. There was
a danger in the period immediately following the apostolic
age that the religion of Christ would soon cease to bear
any vital relation to its founder — John perceived that a
religion thus severed from Christ Himself would be
emptied of its real content and power. It was the life
1 Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, 157.
2 He is himself conscious of this ; 1426 1526 1613'-.

THE RETURN TO CHRIST 99
which had been the Light of men." * The final import of
the historic Personality had yet to be set forth ; and
St. John, essaying this task, has seized the inmost truth of
Jesus' self-consciousness with a surer grasp even than the
Synoptics. Thus the difference of interpretation is after
all only a matter of degree. There is a close affinity, for
instance, between the Christology of the Fourth Gospel
and that of the Second.2
As a whole the Johannine picture of Christ makes on
the reader's mind an impression of harmonious and sublime
transcendence. Incessu patet deus ; this is indeed the mien
of God manifest in the flesh. At the same time it is
a rather unfortunate mistake to regard the delineation
of Christ as out of touch with the common experience
of men. To say that the Logos-Jesus is incapable of
human weakness, and that the writer has obliterated all
traces of a moral struggle in His life, is totally misleading
in view of the cry for deliverance from the passion in
1227; and in chapter 5, where Jesus is represented as
Judge, it is noticeable that His fulfilment of the office is
made wholly dependent on His obedience to the Father.
" I can of Myself do nothing ; as I hear, I judge " (o30).
The real fact is that manifestations of the humanity of
Jesus are recorded with greater vividness in the Fourth
Gospel than in any of the first three.3 He is shown to us
wearied at Jacob's well, weeping beside the grave of
Lazarus, grateful for the companionship of the Twelve,
anticipating the cross with alternate shrinking and desire,
athirst on Calvary, and bearing, even after the resurrection,
the marks of the spear and the nails. He is bound to His
fellows by ties of blood. He is guest with His family at
1 Scott, op. cit. 291.
2 Cf. J. Weiss, Das alteste Evangelium, 42-47.
3 Cf. Weizsaeker, Jahrbilcher filr deutsche Theologie, 1857, 175 ;
Drummond, Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 422 f.
Professor F. C. Burkitt has said that "in no early Christian document
is the real humanity of Jesus so emphasised as in the Fourth Gospel"
(Gospel History and its Transmission, 233).

100 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
a wedding-party, receives advice as to His conduct, cares
for His mother with His latest breath. He offers prayer.
He is subject, moreover, to the limits of earthly experience ;
for although more than once very remarkable knowledge is
attributed to Him, yet definite details, such as His inquiry
regarding the place of Lazarus' tomb, make it impossible to
say that He is depicted as omniscient.
His oneness of nature with us is specially exhibited in
His uniform dependence on God. He prays to God as His
Father, and gives thanks that His prayer is always heard
(ll41). The will of God is throughout the source and
background of His mission to the world. Consecrated and
sent by the Father (1036), He speaks only those things
which He has seen and heard of Him, or, as it is expressed
in one place, " as the Father hath taught Me " (828). He
is in fact a commissioned deputy to whom both words
and works have been "given." His higher knowledge
is described as being His by communication, and He
confesses that He can do nothing of Himself but that
which He sees the Father do (519). Knowledge and
power equally are mediated through the Spirit. Not only
so ; His relation to God is somehow conditioned by His
moral attitude. " He that sent Me is with Me ; He hath
not left Me alone ; for I do always the things that are
pleasing to Him" (829); and again: "therefore doth the
Father love Me, because I lay down My life" (1017). But
this human dependence, on the other hand, is no mere
commonplace fact which might have simply been taken
for granted: it is of the essence of this unique life; it
flows ultimately from His special and unshared Sonship,
and is the form of that special Sonship under the conditions
of human experience. That He should do Divine works on
earth results from His singular relation to the Father.
The power necessary for His vocation is given from day
to day, but it is only because He is Son that He can
receive it.
While therefore the mutual love and knowledge of
Father and Son are insisted on, the relationship is not

THE HUMANITY OF JESUS 101
such as to involve a simple equality. The Son is dependent
at each point on the Father, but it would be gravely
unfaithful to St. John's interpretation to speak of the
Father as being dependent on the Son. There remains a
true subordination, a human subjection and (as it were)
inferiority, on Jesus' side. What has frequently been
missed, however, is that this subordination is depicted
as expressing itself in modes which are purely ethical.
It is mediated, that is, by authentic human motives,
desires, prayers, acts of submission and compliance, and
nothing could be more inaccurate than to regard it as
necessitated by the inherent properties of a metaphysical
Divine " substance " or as illustrating the rigid, self-acting
categories of an a priori ontology. To assert that " the
moral attributes, trust, pity, forgiveness, infinite sympathy,
are replaced by certain metaphysical attributes, which are
supposed to belong more essentially to the Divine nature,"
is not to interpret what the evangelist has written, but
to impose on him an erroneous modern theory. It is a
reading of the facts wholly out of keeping with the
character of One who, when exhorting the disciples to
keep His commandments, could promise that thereby they
would abide in His love, " even as I have kept My Father's
commandments, and abide in His love " (1510), and who, in
another place, is presented as entreating the Father to glorify
Him with the glory which had been His before the world
was (i.76). Metaphysical attributes, in any sense in which
they are represented as opposed to ethical attributes, are
irrelevant to such a situation. All the predicates affirmed
of Jesus by Himself are of a fundamentally religious type ;
they are meant to state personal relations humanly, so
that human souls may lay hold upon the only true God
in His Son, Jesus Christ (173). The Christ of the Fourth
Gospel, then, is truly man, one with us in all points,
except sin. The secret of His uniqueness lies in an un
paralleled relation to the Father. Men can be children
of God only by the new birth ; Jesus is the Son of God
by eternal nature. This combination of personal unique-

102 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
ness with human dependence is put very strikingly in
528, where each side is brought out alternately : " As the
Father hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the Son
also to have life in Himself." The power to impart life
is a derived power; on the other hand, as imparting it,
Jesus is for men that which none can be save God — the
source of life eternal. In like manner, He does nothing
but what He sees the Father do, yet He does the same
works as the Father.
Like the Synoptic writers, the Fourth evangelist
represents Jesus as seeking by human fellowship to train
the disciples into a spiritual conception of His purpose.
By degrees, under His influence, they became aware that
the gift He. desired to impart was Divine and universal,
namely, the possession of perfect life in union with Himself.
A crucial stage in their progress is dated from St. Peter's
words : " We have believed and know that Thou art the
Holy One of God" (669); and it is a significant minor
detail, testifying to the substantially historical character of
the narrative, that there is no intrusion at this point of
the ideas of the Logos or the eternal Sonship.1 The
disciples are coming to recognise the Messiah, but, as they
rise to a religious point of view, the name is assuming a
new content.
The distinctive name of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel,
however, is " the Son of God," or, more briefly and simply,
as in the Synoptics, " the Son." At least thirty times He
employs the phrase " My Father," on nine occasions when
speaking to God directly ; seventeen times, by the lowest
estimate, He designates Himself " Son " or " Son of God."
In the Johannine writings, and throughout the New Testa
ment as a whole, the primary reference of this name is clearly
enough to the historic Person, known and remembered
within the domain of human fact. So far then it denotes
1 Those who regard the Fourth Gospel as a philosophical romance or a
thesis in theology may still do well to read the essay appended by Renan
to his Vie de Jisus (ed. 13).

THE SON OF GOD 103
our Lord as one who held towards God a unique relation
ship of intimacy and love, manifested in entire obedience
to His will. This aspect of the matter we have had
occasion to study closely, and at present we need not
dwell on it.
But as one who loved ultimate conceptions, St. John
felt the inadequacy of this, and he pressed on to eluci
date its absolute eternal ground. He does so in the
first place by expounding the witness of Christ to the
identity of nature subsisting between Himself and the
Father. That nothing less august than such a unity
is meant may be gathered from the charge made by
the Jews against His claim to special Sonship, namely, that
He made Himself equal with God (518 1033). In 519-29
this identity or parallelism is drawn out in considerable
.detail, only a faint allusion being made to the subordina
tion of the Son ; the Father and Jesus are one in quicken
ing power, in authority to judge, in worthiness to be adored.
It is a remarkable passage, the distinctive note of which
is audible in the words, " that all may honour the Son,
even as they honour the Father." This unique relation
of Son to Father is elsewhere described by the term
" only-begotten " (316), joined to and explained by the
phrase, " who is in the bosom of the Father " (l18). Shades
of meaning but faintly discernible in the Christology of
St. Paul are thus deepened and intensified. Sonship is
defined in its highest terms. The Son is of the same
nature as the Father, Divine powers and qualities devolving
on Him in virtue of His inherent birthright. Yet His
possession of these powers is seen so steadily from the
ideal or timeless point of view that it nowhere cancels
the element of weakness and restriction inseparable from
the personal presence of the Son in human life.
At various points the writer opens up, beyond this
unity of Father and Son, a vista of its eternal character.
He transcends the first three Gospels by insisting on
the fact that the Sonship of Christ is increate and un-
beginning, the presupposition of all time and history.

104 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
In the beginning (l1, cf. Gn l1) He had been the Word
with the Father. Ere coming from heaven He had lived
a life somehow characterised by spiritual relationships
(176); it was not some impersonal moment or tendency
in God which had taken flesh and dwelt among men, but
the Son, eternal object of the Father's love (1734), and
possessed thereby of a perfect knowledge of the Father
which was capable of reproducing itself in His earthly
consciousness. As one whose place is in the Father's
bosom (l18), He presents God in propria persona. He
knows God thus because He has always known Him so.
" I speak the things which I have seen with My Father " ;
" no man hath ascended into heaven, but He that descended
out of heaven." Numerous other salient passages dwell
on this prior life of Sonship. To the Jews' question
where He will go that they cannot come, He answers,
" I am from above " (8s8). In the mysterious declaration,
" Before Abraham was, I am " (868), the tense is apparently
chosen to denote, as far as human speech permits, the
timeless and unbecoming eternity of His inmost being.
And in the upper room, He speaks to the Father of " the
glory which I had with Thee before the world was " (1 76),
and prays that it may be restored to Him. Yet the
main object of these statements is not to make certain
speculative predications, in a so-called metaphysical interest,
but to exhibit Jesus as the final revelation of the Father.
This is the pivotal and organising idea in St. John's
theology. We can see the conviction in his mind that
none can reveal perfectly save He who is that which He
reveals. In His essential love, accordingly, the Father
has poured forth His being in Jesus, that a perishing
world may have life through Him. " Believest thou not,"
Jesus asks, " that I am in the Father and the Father in
Me ? The words that I say unto you I speak not from
Myself: but the Father abiding in Me doeth His^works"
(1410). It has been urged that Jesus' claim to a pre-existent
knowledge of God must reduce His earthly experience

JESUS THE FINAL REVELATION 105
to mere semblance. Could He learn what previously
He had known ? On the other hand, are we prepared
to conceive the life of God and of man as so totally
disparate in ethical and spiritual character that what
pertains by origin to the one may not reproduce or
mediate itself organically in and through the other ?
Are divinity and humanity to be thus defined by mutual
exclusion ? If not, there may be nothing self-contra
dictory in the view that Jesus' knowledge of God was
experimental in kind — mediated, that is, by the un
measured gift to Him of the Spirit, as acting on and
interpreting to His mind the normal development of His
own life — while yet its deepest fount lay in His eternal
being as the Son. To take the parallel case of love,
it is a frequent suggestion in the Fourth Gospel that
Jesus, though loved eternally as Son, keeps Himself
in the love of God by doing His will. "This is an
assertion of the ultimate truth, that the union of Jesus
with God depends on moral 'conditions ; not that through
His conduct He had in the first instance to gain His
Father's love — it was there from the beginning — but that
He can retain it only on the one condition, that He makes
the will of God His own." x In some such way we may
conceive His earthly realisation of the perfect knowledge
of God. Apart from a theory more or less on these lines,
the evangelist must have held that either no continuity
or no difference obtained between the pre-existence of the
Son and His earthly life. Humanitarianism or docetism
would have been forced upon him.
The conclusions at which we arrive regarding the
historic accuracy of the Johannine discourses is of course
to be applied also to Jesus' recorded words about His pre-
temporal being. It would seem that these words were
uttered in exalted hours of feeling, when our Lord's self-
consciousness expanded to a length and depth and height
that passes understanding. As we listen, we hear only
the plunge of the lead into unfathomable waters. It is
1 J. Weiss, Christ: the Beginnings of Dogma, 156.

106 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
possible, and we have to allow for the possibility in
our interpretation, that lapse of time may have altered
light and shade in the apostle's memory. One feels it
scarcely credible that Jesus should have spoken on the
subject so often or so clearly as to be at once intelligible
to the great bulk of His auditors ; for otherwise the
silence of the first three Gospels is enigmatic. On the
other hand, while He may have displayed a marked
reticence on this theme, as on that of His Messiahship, we
have reason to believe that He spoke regarding the
antecedents of His life on earth with such significance
that the brooding evangelist later became conscious of
the claim to pre-existence implied in His words ; a pre-
existence not of an ideal type, but real and personal.
The last stage of Jesus' reported interpretation of Son-
ship is represented by His prediction of the glory to be
resumed by Him after death, and of His abiding spiritual
presence with the disciples (ch.13 ff). Besurrection would
mark His entrance on a larger, unseen life, free from the
limits of time or space, and this involved a change in the
dignity of Jesus' person at least in the sense that it
conferred on Him an omnipresence and universality of
influence He had lacked on earth. We have seen that
Sonship, in initial content, was a relation with God of
unequalled love and intimacy. This is what we already
find in the Synoptics : though even there, as Titius has
remarked, the absolute tone with which the name Son
is used in Mt ll2Bfl- naturally suggests a more tran
scendent background of meaning.1 But now the Fourth
Gospel proclaims that Jesus as the Son is eventually
to share in the omnipotence and absoluteness of God
Himself. Thus in the deliberately chosen language of
133 : " Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things
into His hands, and that He came forth from God, and
goeth unto God," there is no convincing reason for re
stricting " all things " to the sphere of perfect revelation,
so as to exclude omnipotence in the full sense. Nor is it
1 Jesu Lehre vom Reich Gottes, 118.

THE FUTURE GLORY OF THE SON 107
easy to grasp the philosophical position of those who quote
such a verse in confirmation of the view that in the New
Testament Christ is made absolute Lord of the Church
merely, not of the universe. We cannot break up reality
in unrelated parts. The absolute Lordship of the exalted
Christ is the starting-point of all New Testament writers.
Some of them refrain from theologising on the matter,
but to St. John, as he sought an explanation for his own
mind, its reality appeared in complete harmony with
Jesus' intimations of His own pre-existence. Why (he felt)
should not One who had shared the very glory of God
Himself share it once again ? He had mediated in the
creation of all things from the beginning; He had come
to His own, though they received Him not (l11) ; it was
fitting, therefore, that He should be their Lord and
Master after the resurrection. Hence the Divine power
to which Jesus ascends is in no way incommensurate with
His nature, overwhelming (as it were) a finite form with an
infinite content; still less is it the prize of usurpation.
It is the Father's gift, bestowed in consequence of Jesus'
fidelity in the work given Him to do (174,5), and fitly
answering to His essential being.
But the resurrection is past before the truth of Jesus'
greatness has dawned on His followers. The wonderful
scene which culminates in Thomas' cry of adoration
(2023) portrays the experience of one on whom the dis
covery has just broken, and whose eyes are blinded with
excess of light. In the risen Jesus, fresh with victory
from the grave, the apostle discerns the very Lord of
glory ; and perceiving in a flash of joy and peace that all
he had sought for in the Father has been vouchsafed to
men in the Son, he grasps the person of Jesus as possess
ing for faith the value and the reality of God. If his
reported words mean anything, they mean an ascription
to Christ of . Divine prerogatives, they salute Him as
the medium .and vehicle of that life which is found
only in the Eternal. There has been a manifestation
of God in human form. Faith in Jesus Christ, aware

108 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of its own significance, becomes an explicit faith in
His divinity.
Our conclusions up to this point are on the whole
confirmed by St. John's usage of the title " Son of man."
It is a striking minor detail that, as in the Synoptics,
this name is employed solely by Jesus. It occurs some
twelve times. But the accent has shifted slightly from
His vocation to His person ; so that by using the phrase
in harmony with his lofty view of our Lord's nature, the
evangelist strives to bring out the uniqueness of Jesus' person
ality. As in the first three Gospels, we can still trace its
primitive Messianic sense. Thus in 1 234 — a question put
by the multitude — " Christ " and " Son of man " are used
indifferently. In the Synoptics, as we have seen, two
types of passage occur in which Jesus speaks of the " Son of
man " ; they are allusions either (a) to His earthly work,
and especially to His passion, or (5) to the glory of His
Parousia. Taking the inverse order, it appears that although
the name is nowhere in the Fourth Gospel put in relation
to the Second Coming, the majority of passages where
it occurs refer quite specifically to Jesus' exaltation (313
662 etc.) or to His being glorified (1223 1331). It is
implied that transcendent glory awaits the Son of man,
and befits His person ; and this is plainly an expansion
of one side of the Synoptic idea.1 The second type of
Synoptic allusion, dealing with Jesus' work on earth and
with the passion it involves, is also represented in the Fourth
Gospel. It is represented, for example, by sayings which
describe the Son of man as giving meat that endureth to
everlasting life (627), or attach eternal life to eating His
flesh and drinking His blood (663), or declare that He
must be " lifted up " (314).
It will be observed that this Johannine usage
retains that element of paradoxical contrast which we
found to be characteristic and indeed constitutive of the
title in the Synoptics, even though the facts are con-
1 Cf. Ewald, Die Evangelienfrage, 43-47.

THE SON OF MAN 109
templated from a slightly different point of view.
Certain scholars have maintained that the original signi
ficance of the name is well-nigh inverted in the Fourth
Gospel, but a careful scrutiny of the data scarcely bears
this out. What is undeniable, however, is that in St. John
the title " Son of man " seems always to convey the
suggestion faintly that for Jesus it is an amazing thing
that He should be man at all. He was man indeed, like
His brethren ; yet in this humanity there resided a Divine
content which gave Him a place apart. Or, as it may be
put otherwise, the human aspect of His life is not the
primary and original aspect; He came into humanity
from a higher realm. His disciples may eat His flesh
and drink His blood, for He is to pass through death,
dying as only man can die ; yet only one who was more
than man could thus dwell in believers as their inward life.
Similarly, it is the Son of man who is to be lifted up, not
on the cross merely, but by exaltation. On the one hand,
this implies His inherent Divine transcendence, which alone
makes such exaltation conceivable ; on the other, it pre
supposes His real manhood, since exaltation comes by way
of death. Thus so far from the title, as used in the Fourth
Gospel, containing no reference to Jesus' higher claims,
it invariably connotes these loftier antecedents as the foil
or background against which the fact of His true humanity
is placed. We cannot eliminate the duality. As it has
been expressed : " In several passages the contrast is ex
pressly marked between the present revelation of Jesus as
Son of man and the true glory of His Divine nature. . . .
The significance of the name in all these verses lies in
the suggestion that the human nature of Christ was
vfnitecT with a higher nature which was present in it
even now, and would at last become fully manifest."1
This note of contrast never seems to fail. The Son of
man, in all points authentically human, has heaven open
to Him perpetually, and will yet ascend up again where
He was before (662). Hence it is not going too far to
1 Scott, Fourth Gospel, 184 (?).

110 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
say that no appreciable distinction can be drawn in the
Fourth Gospel between what is predicated of the Son of
man and of the Son of God. Both names, originally
Messianic, are raised to the highest power. If the one
denotes the eternal origin of Christ in God, the other
points to His human affiliation but connects it with a
higher being with which it is significantly contrasted.
This suggestion of a Divine transcendence is the distinctive
feature which St. John adds to the Synoptic view.
The Christ-mysticism of the Fourth Gospel has always
been regarded as casting a revealing light upon its final
interpretation of Jesus' person. We can scarcely over
estimate the importance for the evangelist's mind of
this conception of mystic union, by which believers are
made partakers in the higher life streaming to them from
Jesus. The doctrine is central in more than one of the
great discourses. " I am the living bread which came
down out of heaven ; if any man eat of this bread, he
shall live for ever " (651) ; " I am the vine, ye are the
branches ; he that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same
beareth much fruit" (155); "I in them, and Thou in Me,
that they may be perfected into one" (1723). It is worth
noting that this^vital fellowship is nowhere described in
the Fourth Gospel as being mediated by the Spirit, though
in the First Epistle expressions are found which distinctly
point that way (324 413). At the same time we observe
that the idea of life-union with Christ is unmistakably
connected with His exaltation.1 It is not something
possible for men while He still lived on earth ; rather it
forms a substitute, in the future, for His visible presence
in their midst. Hence its prominence in Christ's parting
words. " Because I live," is His promise, " ye shall live
also." The presence of Christ in the believer is a super-
1 Cf. Titius, Die neutest. Lehre von der Seligkeit, iii. 68 f. It does not
follow that the historic Jesus could not have spoken of life-union with His
followers, as of something to be realised in the future. There is a very fair
Synoptic parallel in Mt 18M, the authenticity of which we need not doubt.

THE JOHANNINE MYSTICISM 111
natural indwelling, by which they partake in His spiritual
life. In 1721 and elsewhere this indwelling is explained
or illustrated by the analogy of God's indwelling presence
in Christ ; and as the relation of God to Christ, notwith
standing this mutual interpenetration of life, is wholly
personal in character, the communion of Christ with
men is also personal; it is a relation of spirit to spirit.
And as Christ dwells in the believer, so the believer
dwells in Christ, is incorporated or transplanted into the
sphere of His supernatural life. This also is paralleled
by the abiding of Christ in God. " In that day ye shall
know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in
you"(1420). It has however been contended that in the Fourth
Gospel this living and spiritual conception is infected with
a quite unethical and realistic strain of thought, according
to which Christ conveys to men a higher and all but
physical essence whereby they partake in the life of God.
The union, it is true, is regarded as supernatural; but
this in no way precludes an interpretation on ethical and
psychological lines. For the vehicle of Christ's self-im-
partation is His word ; His word is as it were the medium
or element of the reciprocal possession, as it is put in
157, "if ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you."
And with this it is in harmony that abiding in Christ
is represented as being mediated and sustained, on the
believer's side, by faith (538), obedience (1421-23), and love
(1627). St. John has occasionally been unfavourably com
pared with St. Paul in this matter, and accused of having
introduced at a crucial point factors of thought which
are less than spiritual, and which prepared the way for
later ecclesiastical dogma. It is not necessary to reply
to this by urging that St. Paul is the real offender ; since
for any such counter-charge there is no proper ground.
But at least we may point out that the Johannine view
lays a deeper emphasis even than the Pauline on the psycho
logical mediation of life-union as a present experience,
and that the union itself is everywhere defined as a

112 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
spiritual relationship of person to person. The mutual
immanence, if we may call it so, is the intelligible resultant
of Divine grace and human faith. The roots of this
Johannine conception may be traced partly no doubt to
the doctrine of St. Paul, but in addition the direct influence
of Jesus' teaching is apparent.
From this central and characteristic thought we are
irresistibly led to one view of Christ's person rather than
another. If He is thus one with men, and they with Him,
it is impossible to confine His life within the dimensions
of normal manhood. But the Fourth evangelist does not
leave us to mere inference. Over and over again he
represents union with Christ as being, in itself, vital
union with God. The analogy of Christ's oneness with
the Father is made explicit : " That they may all be one ;
even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they
also may be one in us" (1721). This is a conception of
which still more is heard in the First Epistle of John. In
the Gospel the same practical identity of Christ and God
is signalised in those passages which deal with the mission
and activities of the Spirit. Not merely is Christ present
in the community by the Spirit ; He is Himself the
object of the Spirit's witness. He is indeed the Giver of
the Spirit to His people. But the same predications are
made of God. He too is to send the Spirit and come in
the Spirit along with Christ. Thus from a fresh point of
view the religious equivalence of Christ and God is
revealed as the truth from which radiates the whole
teaching of the Gospel.
The Christology of St. John, then, may be condensed
in the truth that the Father is personally in the Son, the
Son in the Father (1038 1410). The most august and
profound words of our Lord are simple affirmations of
this fact: "I and the Father are one"(1030, cf. 1711);
"He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father" (149,
cf. 1246). These utterances and others like them carry
our minds in the direction of a simple modalism — Jesus

SIMPLE MODALISM 113
Christ is God revealed to faith — but no theory of the
fact, or of its remoter implications, is anywhere sketched
out in the manner of a theological speculation. We are
shown that the word of Jesus is the word of God Himself,
and conveys a Divine life to the soul ; that the Father,
exhibited to faith in a historic career, is now fully known
in His Fatherhood. Faith is certain of this, and affirms
it unconditionally. It is another question how far we can
penetrate to the ontological grounds of this modalism
and give a speculative or independent account of them
which will gain the interest and assent of the philosopher.
Even the Logos-conception, which St. John has employed
— whether as an implied solution of the problem or as a
statement of it in final terms — is incompetent to give us
a complete understanding of all mysteries in this tran
scendent realm. No theory expressible in words, no com
bination of ideas, even those of an apostle, can after all
avail to place us at a point where we see the life of God
head on its inward side. Nevertheless, we know and are
sure that in Jesus' person the God of heaven and earth
has appeared among us ; that the Son reveals the Father
perfectly as being one with Him who is revealed ; and
that our eyes are enlightened by Him in all knowledge
because He dwells within as our inmost life. This is the
keynote of the Johannine interpretation. The faith out
of which it comes, and which it strives to evoke in other
minds, is the great faith that Christ and God are one —
the Son sharing the supernatural life of the Father, the
Father completely manifested in the Son.
This unity has often been described as if in the last
resort it were limited and defective, a unity merely of
will and purpose. And the objection is no doubt well
taken, provided we agree that will is something less and
lower than ultimate reality. If behind all will and
thought there exists in God a mysterious incognizable
substance, not to be described in terms familiar to human
experience, but representing the point through which the
threads of cosmic relations pass, and constituting the
8

114 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
inmost essence of the Divine life, then indeed the oneness
of Christ with God is after all only relative. But the
supposition is mistaken. There is in the universe nothing
more real than will, the living energy of spirit ; nothing
more concrete and actual, whether it be in God or man.
It is the last home and sanctuary of essential being. We
may therefore conclude that the true and inherent Godhead
of Jesus Christ, if human words can affirm it, is affirmed
unequivocally in the Gospel of St. John. He is completely
possessed of those qualities which constitute the proper
life of Deity.
Yet even here we encounter that unfailing counter-
strain of subordination which we have seen to be present
in the New Testament as a whole. It is noteworthy,
indeed, that Jesus affirms His personal dependence on God
precisely in those passages which deal with His uniqueness.
Both ideas are prominent, for instance, in 519-29. So too
in 17 the pre-existent glory, which Jesus entreats may
be restored, is a gift bestowed by the Father. It is
misleading to say that this subordination has reference
solely to the life on earth. It is of course manifest
during the earthly life in a special degree ; Jesus declares
that He can do nothing of Himself,1 that His works, like
His knowledge or His right to judge, have been given
Him of the Father. But we introduce the distinctions of
a later age when we argue that such expressions of de
pendence are only meant to cover Christ's human nature,
or His incarnate life, or what theology designates "the
estate of humiliation." For the subordination is quite
distinctly predicated of the filial life as such ; it character
ises Sonship everywhere, always. Even in regard to His
exalted life Jesus could say, " I will pray the Father for
you" (1626), thus projecting the idea of subordination
to the other side of death; and as a parallel to this,
relating to His pre-existence, we cannot ignore the state
ment (1036) that the Father sanctified Him and sent Him
1 A trait which forbids us to speak of the Johannine Christ as "omni
potent. "

PROLOGUE TO THE GOSPEL 115
into the world. His advent implied, of course, that the
dependent nature of the Son became manifest under the
new conditions which pertain to a true human life ; J but
St. John suggests that it was because His eternal relation
to the Father had been one of filial reliance that He could
thus reveal Him perfectly on earth. It is erroneous,
therefore, to play off assertions of His Godhead and of
His subordination against each other, as if either weakened
the force of its opposite, or reduced it to a merely symbolic
Bense. The evangelist is equally in earnest with both
things. For his mind both sayings are essential to the
complete truth : " I and the Father are one," and " The
Father is greater than I." Sonship is inconceivable without
dependence. In the words of Liitgert : " The superiority of
God to Jesus does not mean that He reserves anything
to Himself ; on the contrary, He wholly conveys Himself
to Jesus, making Him sovereign of the entire world.
What it does mean is that God is everywhere and at each
point the Origin, the Giver, the Foundation ; while Jesus
is the obedient and receptive organ of His will."2
We turn now to the special teaching of the prologue
(l1-18). It was convenient to defer the Christology of
these introductory verses until the general thought of the
Gospel had been examined, for after all the subject of
the Gospel is not the Logos or Word, but the Divine
person Jesus Christ. But with this general exposition
in our minds, it is all but impossible to maintain that
1 It has been maintained that the idea of humiliation is virtually foreign
to the Johannine thought, in which the conception of revelation has taken
the place which the sacrifice of the cross occupied for St. Paul. Piquant
contrasts of this sort have a very real didactic value, but they must not
be overpressed. There is sacrifice for St. John in the incarnation as well as
in the cross (l29), but also in the intervening life. " Though the greatest
stress," Mr. Purchas rightly observes, is "laid throughout the Gospel upon
the Son's transcendent dignity, the aspect under which that dignity is
invariably contemplated is not that of dignity gloriously won, or dignity
brilliantly maintained, but of dignity humbly put aside, and only mani
fested in pre-eminence of self-sacrifice " (Johannine Problems, 104).
2 Diejohann. Christologie, 34.

116 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the prologue serves a speculative and not a practically
religious purpose. The first paragraph, as Harnack puts
it,1 is a mere preface, not a philosophic programme. Its
special ideas are not allowed to intrude upon the record,
nor does Jesus ever name Himself " the Word." 2 The
prologue on the whole makes the impression of having
been written last, in a current vocabulary and mode of
thought fitted to make appeal to a quite specific con
stituency. "The writer desires to avail himself of a
conception more congenial to the thought of his readers
than to his own, in order to set forth in words familiar
to his readers the doctrine he wishes to teach, viz. the
uniqueness, finality, and all-sufficiency of the revelation
of God made in the person of Jesus Christ." 3 It is no
a priori philosopheme, by assimilating which the mind
was to be prepared to understand and estimate the facts
about to be narrated.
To say that St. John derived the Logos-conception
from Philo (who may have had it from the Stoics or even
Heraclitus) is one of those tantalisingly ambiguous pro
nouncements which darken a subject almost as much as
they enlighten.4 We cannot indeed hold that there is no
mutual relation. But the influence of Philo appears to have
acted in a twofold direction. First, by way of antagonism.
"The evangelist uses Philo 's term to deny Philo's thought.
In the Fourth Gospel " Logos " means word, not rational
cosmic order; uttered revealing speech, not immanent
reason ; an agency or force dynamic or personal in nature,
not static or vaguely ideal. There is nothing answering
to this in Philo. It is not merely that in the earlier
writer the Logos is probably impersonal ; it is also carefully
separated from God ; as in various Gnostic schools, it is
inserted between God and the world to prevent their
1 ZTK. ii. 189-231. 2 As He does in the Evang. Infantiae, c. 1.
3 Burton, Short Introduction to the Gospels, 132.
4 Cf. Harnack's trenchant paragraph, Dogmengcsch* i. 109. Can we
assume " that every presentation of the doctrine of the Logos had passed
through the moulding hands of Philo " ?

THE LOGOS-CONCEPTION 117
contact, even though in a philosophical point of view it
may serve as intermediary ; and to crown all, the nature
of the Logos is such as to make wholly inconceivable its
entrance, by incarnation, upon the real processes of history.
But in St. John the Word is personal, is Himself Divine,
mediates in the creation of the world, and enters human
life by becoming flesh in order that as Jesus Christ, the
historic Messiah, He may live and die as man and reveal.
the very heart of God. Thus even were the evangelist's
debt to Philo an ascertained fact, we should still have to
acknowledge that the borrowed notion was submitted to
changes so radical as virtually to transform it into its
opposite. In the second place, Philo's influence, or at least the
influence of a general philosophical atmosphere typified
by Philo, may well have decided which of the terms
furnished by the Old Testament the evangelist should
select for his purpose. Several such terms were open
to him — Wisdom, the Spirit, the Angel of the Lord, the
Word. In any case, too little allowance has been made
for Old Testament associations. The action of the word
of God in Gn 1 may well have supplied the first sugges
tion of the Logos, and at various other points in the
older Scriptures the creation and government of the world,
as well as the progress of revelation, are traced to the
Divine word going forth from God as the active organ
of His will.1
We hold then that what St. John required and sought
for was a term worthy to express the absolute nature
of Christ, in whom the eternal, self-revealing God was
incarnate ; and that this seemed to be furnished by the con
temporary religious thought, in which the Logos-conception
had become familiarly established. He perceived its extra
ordinary value for the expositor. More significantly than
any other word it gave expression to that aspect of Christ's
life and work which he regarded as supreme. In addition
to its place in Old Testament thought, it had received
1 Ps 336 10720 14715, Is 5511, Jer 23s9.

118 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
from Hellenism a certain cosmic width of meaning, and
thus furnished a point of coutact — this every missionary
must appreciate — between Christianity and current modes
of religious speculation. He chose it therefore as peculiarly
fitted to recommend the Light and Life which had appeared
in Jesus-; but in choosing it he took full precautions to
ensure by his exposition that its Christian import should
• not be overshadowed by former associations. The Word
is interpreted by Jesus, not Jesus by the Word. So far
from being captured for speculation, the Logos receives
a connotation which- is fundamentally ethical, personal,
soteriological.1 Its colour and significance are drawn
from what the writer has known of Jesus, Son of God and
Son of man ; it is handled with perfect freedom and
without any suspicion of bondage to a phrase. St. John
was too near Christ to adopt a really Greek view. In the
prologue he but sums up the total impression left upon
him by the personality of the Saviour. If we recall
the allied doctrine of Hebrews, and the teaching of St.
Paul that all things were created by Christ and for Him
(Col l16), it will seem very natural that St. John should
advance to the explicit identification of the historic Jesus
with the creative Word.
A glance at the details of the prologue may illustrate
these results. In v.1 three weighty predications are
made of the Logos: {a) He was from the beginning, or
eternally; (b) He existed in a living personal relation
ship with God; (c) His place was within the Godhead.
It is next affirmed that He was the medium or instrument
of creation. Stress is laid on the truth of His universal
relation to humanity; not only was the life in Him
the light of men (v.4), but it gives light to every man1
coming into the world (v.9). His Divine life had been
immanent in the world from the first, though unrecog
nised ; but now He came in person, and to all who
received Him He gave the right to become children of God.
The commentators point out how v.14 resumes and care-
1 This is well put by Schlatter, Die Lehre der Apostel, 131-32.

THE LOGOS-CONCEPTION 119
fully corresponds to the first verse of the Gospel. The
Word is throughout the subject of discourse, though not
named explicitly in the interval; but now in v.14 the
announcement of the Incarnation is laid point for point
alongside of the initial statement regarding the absolute
eternal nature of the Word. Westcott has drawn out the
exact harmony. " ' He was God ' and ' He became flesh ' :
eternity and time, the Divine and human are reconciled
in Him. ' He was with God ' and ' He tabernacled
among us ' : the Divine existence is brought into a vital
and historical connection with human life. ' He was in
the beginning ' and ' we beheld His glory ' : He who
' was ' beyond time was revealed for a space to the
observation of men." x By the phrase of deep simplicity,
" the Word became flesh," it appears to be taught that He
passed into a new form of existence, a form essentially
qualified by human mortality and dependence. Coming
forth from God, He took individuality as a man, in
unbroken personal continuity with that which He was
before. We may distinguish four stages in the thought thus
briefly summarised. There is (1) the Word in His
primeval everlasting being; (2) the Lord who comes to
His own as Life and Light ; 2 (3) Jesus Christ, upon whom
the writer's mind has been fixed from the very outset,
and who is now further characterised (4) as the only-
begotten Son. Minor details, such as the mention of the
Forerunner (v.6), or the significant phrase, " them that believe
on His name " (v.12), prove the evangelist's mind to be in
vitalising contact with religious experience from first to
last. The entire representation is as it were an avenue
conducting the mind to a redeeming view of Jesus as an
historic person, and the term " Logos," by which the subject
1 Commentary, in loc.
2 Certain scholars hold that in the recently discovered Odes of Solomon
there is revealed a tendency in Jewish thought which has close ainnity with
the Johannine conceptions of life, light, truth, etc. (cf. Rendel Harris, The
Odes and Psalms of Solomon2, p. xiii if.).

120 THE PERSON OF JESOS CHRIST
is introduced, is never more than a subordinate element
in a special vocabulary, which presents the personality of
Christ in a certain aspect and with a special aim.
It is obvious that nothing in the prologue is intended
to shed light upon the mode of the Incarnation, however
distinctly it may assert the fact. Yet when it is read, as
it ought to be, with constant reference to the Gospel it
has introduced, no one can miss the clear indication of
the motive which is conceived of as underlying the advent
of Jesus Christ. It is the Divine desire to impart life to
a perishing and darkened world. No doubt it is charac
teristic of St. John, in contrast to the Pauline view, to
regard the earthly life of Jesus less as a humiliation than
as a revelation of Divine glory, the beams of which
shine forth clearly in His wondrous works. Nevertheless,
he is wholly at one with St. Paul in the conviction that
the redeeming work of Christ centres in the sacrifice of
the cross (l29). Jesus speaks of His death as the hour
of His being glorified (1223,24 1331), and declares that He
came into the world to die (1227). But death for Jesus
is part of His life as Son. And life and death together
make up the perfect revelation. The whole is viewed
in the light of eternal fact, the lines of change or
temporal distinction being obliterated. All that St. Paul
beholds in the exalted Christ is found by St. John, the
personal disciple, in the veiled glory of the earthly Life.
Thus in the transcendent consciousness of eternal life as
an experience generated by the knowledge of the Son,
eschatology passes into the background.
The Christology of the First Epistle of St. John is in
harmony with the teaching of the Gospel. The first three
verses form an implicit commentary on the prologue with
which the Gospel opens, and as such they caution us once
more against a too theoretic interpretation of the Logos-
conception. So complete is the identification of God and
Christ that in a series of passages it is impossible to be certain
of which the writer speaks. This is the case, for instance,

FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN 121
in the great closing verse : " We know that the Son of
God is come, and hath given us an understanding that we
know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true,
even in His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and
eternal life " (520). What is specially distinctive of the
Epistle, however, is the emphatic condemnation of certain
active champions of heresy. In the spirit of docetic idealism
they had begun very early to disunite the saving word of
life from the historic Jesus, and to seek another path to
fellowship with God than the mediation of the incarnate
Christ. It is possible that they were enthusiastic students
of the Alexandrian philosophy animated by the desire to
impose the Philonic Logos-conception upon the Christian
facts, but in the process dissipating their significance and
value. Of these men St. John writes in tones of the
gravest indignation. To deny that Jesus Christ is come
in the flesh (42- 3), or that He underwent actual death
(l7 56), is to abandon the faith for anti-Christian lies. To
refute an error so far-reaching the writer falls back on per
sonal testimony, declaring in the first verse of the Epistle
that he is proclaiming " that which we have heard, that
which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld,
and our hands handled." The presence of Life among
men had been audible, visible, tangible. Christ's advent
in the flesh is that on which hangs everything that can
be called salvation ; victory belongs only to those who
receive Him as the Son of God. "Whosoever denieth
the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that confesseth
the Son hath the Father also " (223).

BOOK II.
HISTORY OF CHRISTOLOGICAL
DOCTRINE.
CHAPTER I.
CHRISTOLOGY IN THE SUB-APOSTOLIC AGE.
§ 1. Introduction. — In the Neutestamentliche Theologie of
Holtzmann we find an interesting passage,1 in which the
writer expresses the conviction that even in St. Paul and
St. John there lie the seeds and origins of the later Christo
logioal development. This at least indicates that our
study of the doctrine in history ought to start from the
teaching, not of Jesus Himself, but of the apostles. It
Literature — On the history of Christologioal doctrine as a whole :
Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte4, 1909 (Eng. tr. 1894) ; Loofs, Leit-
faden zum Studium der Dogmengeschichte*, 1906 ; Seeberg, Lehrbuch der
Dogmengeschichte2, 1908 ff. ; Baur, Die chrislliche Lehre von der Drei-
einigkeit und Menschwerdung, 1841-43 ; Dorner, EntwicHungsgeschichte der
Lehre von der Person Christ?, 1845-53 (Eng. tr. 1861-63) ; Ottley, The
Doctrine of the Incarnation, 1896 ; Bethune-Baker, History of Early
Christian Doctrine, 1903 ; Kriiger, Das Dogma von der Dreieinigkeit
und Gottmenschheit, 1905 ; Bonwetsch, Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte,
1909. On the present chapter : Loofs, article " Christologie, Kirchenlehre,"
in RE.3 iv. (to which I owe much) ; Engelhardt, Das Christenlum Justins,
1878 ;" Lightfoot, St. Clement of Rome, 1890, and St. Ignatius, 1889 ; Zahn,
Ignatius von Antiochien, 1873 ; von der Goltz, Ignatius von Antiochien als
Christ und Theologe, 1894 ; Rainy, The Ancient Catholic Church, 1902 ;
Kriiger, article " Gnosis," in RE.3 vi. ; Swete, The Apostles' Creed, 1894 ;
McGiffert, The Apostles' Creed, 1902 ; Kattenbusch, Das apostolische Symbol,
1894-1900 ; Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1888.
1 i. 418, cf. 353. 122

THE EARLIEST CHRISTOLOGY 123
was from their preaching that the earliest circles of
believers received a conception of the Lord. The common
faith evoked by the evangelism of apostolic men is the
seed-plot of ecclesiastical Christology. To these primitive
Christian societies the Gospel of the Kingdom came
primarily as a Gospel of Christ — i.e. good news about
God resting on and revolving round an historic person.
This person had revealed God's mind toward men ; He
had wrought salvation by His death; as Eisen and
Ascended Lord He was soon to return in glory, and
establish the Kingdom in its fulness. He was the Messiah
promised from of old, but Messiah in a sense the novelty
of which was slowly dawning on the Christian mind.
To speak of an " official " doctrine of Christ in New
Testament times is, however, impossible. His Divine
uniqueness was indeed acknowledged everywhere. From
the first it was felt that He had a universal and eternal
meaning, stretching over history and reaching back to
the inmost sphere of the Diyine. All believers held to
Him an attitude of trust and worship. Much earlier
than the days told of in Pliny's famous letter they sang
hymns to Christ "as though to God." So high a name
was but the expression of their new life in Him. But
we are not in a position to say exactly how the average
believer- thought of this uniqueness. Jesus belonged to,
if He did not fill, the sphere of God — so much was certain ;
but men did not question themselves more particularly
as to the bearing of this on the axiom of the Divine unity.
They were content to have life through His name, and
to leave problems of theory alone. The marks of a
Christian were, thus far, more practical in kind. Probably
the general belief included as its chief items faith in the
one God revealed in Christ, a hope in the life everlasting
guaranteed by the historic Messiah, and the conviction
that after baptism one ought to live in conformity with
the example of Jesus.
Do we know of any primitive circle, evangelised by
apostolic men, which held a purely " humanitarian " view

124 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of Christ? Was there anywhere a group of believers
who considered Him to be only an eminent religious
teacher, like the prophets, though greater ? There appears
to have been one such group. In his Dialogue with
Trypho (cap. 48) Justin writes : " Some there are of your
race, who allow that He is Christ, but declare Him to be
a man of men ; with whom I do not agree." The same
party regarded Him' as the son of Joseph and denied His
pre-existence. But it is noteworthy that even so these
were but a section of Jewish Christianity. They formed
part of the Ebionite sect, and, like all Ebionites, held that
it was by the descent of the Spirit at His baptism that
Jesus was endowed for the vocation of Messiah. Certain
scholars have argued that this represents the genuinely
original Christology, current among the first Christian Jews
of Palestine. But the facts are dead against them. St.
Paul's teaching as to the Person of our Lord never was,
so far as we know, the subject of controversy ; which of
itself proves that the apostles took the higher view of
Jesus' nature. Or, to take another example, the Christo
logioal heresy against which St. Paul warns the Colossians
contained elements, as Lightfoot has shown, of a Gnostic
character. Instances of this kind are sufficient evidence
that various types of Christologioal thought prevailed even
among Jewish Christians at the close of the apostolic age,
and the effort to make them out unanimously humanitarian
is a failure.
Of course, some colour may seem to be given to the
mistake by the fact that all types of tradition in the first
century lay stress on Jesus' true humanity. From the
beginning the Christian mind assumed that Jesus of
Nazareth was man. But Loofs points to two considera
tions tending to show that in primitive Jewish -Christian
circles there were no advocates of mere humanitarianism.
In the first place, to hold, as unquestionably they did
hold, that Jesus at His baptism received the plenitude of
the Spirit, is to affirm a very great, an absolutely super
natural, thing. It is to assert that a certain individual,

THE SUB- APOSTOLIC AGE 125
at a particular point of history, had vouchsafed to Him
the Spirit of the living God in its fulness. Between such
a view and that of St. Paul the gulf is not impassable.
Secondly, this idea of Jesus as a Spirit-filled man is not,
in the strict sense, an expression of their religious estimate
of Jesus ; it is a theory of the subject, though an incipient
one ; it is an attempt to explain the uniqueness which that
estimate ascribes to Him. Our problem therefore is :
What was the prevailing religious estimate of Jesus at
the close of the apostolic age ?
It is scarcely enough to say that He was held to be
the Messiah. That is of course true ; but, on the one
hand, " Christ " had become for Gentile believers little more
than Jesus' surname, while, on the other, for Jewish
Christians, the title bore rather on the future than the
present, and carried men's minds into the world of
eschatology. This being so, we shall find a clearer
instance of the practical religious attitude of the Church
in the custom of prayer to Jesus. That this custom pre
vailed in the sub-apostolic Church is made virtually
certain by the facts to which we can point at either limit
of the period.1 Prayer is addressed to Christ directly in
the New Testament (Ac 759, 1 Co l2, 2 Co 128,Eev 2220);
and according to the principle lex supplicandi, lex credendi
we may regard this as the practical " deifying " of Jesus
which anticipated a theoretical Christology. Again, in
113 we have Pliny's letter to Trajan, formerly referred
to, in which he reports that Christians of his province
were accustomed to gather before sunrise on a fixed day
of the week, and sing alternately " a hymn to Christ as
though to God." In the age of the Apologists the worship
of Jesus was viewed by the heathen as a mark of Christian
faith, and in the immediately following generations the
practice of men like Irenseus and Tertullian does not admit
of question. Facts like these, which Loofs enumerates,
justify his temperately expressed conclusion that we ought
to consider the invocation of Christ " as an inherited
1 Zahn, Skizzen aus dem Leben der alien Kirche', 271 ff.

126 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
custom prevailing in all, or at least all non-Ebionitic,
churches of the post-apostolic age." " This custom," he
adds, " shows more clearly than any incipient Christologioal
speculation, that to the believers of the time from which
we have to set out Christ belonged to the sphere of God.
And this is the root from which sprang the development
of the Christologioal dogma."1
How far this religious estimate of Christ took the
shape of ascribing to Him the predicate 0eo? is uncertain.2
One gathers generally that the divinity of our Lord, for
the most part expressed in practical terms, was a recog
nised fact among Christians in the second century. For
the Christian mind at large He. was both God and man,
though certain Jewish-Christian groups may have scrupled
to use the decided language of their fellows. Many, how
ever, were content to believe in " one God, one Lord,"
without in the least impairing their monotheism, or pushing
reflection beyond the stage of naive faith.
In this transition period of the sub-apostolic age there
were, according to Harnack, two main streams of Christo
logioal reflection. " Jesus," he writes, " was either regarded
as the man whom God has chosen, in whom the Godhead
or the Spirit of God has dwelt, and who, after testing, was
adopted by God and invested with dominion (Adoptian
Christology) ; or He ranked as a heavenly spiritual being
(or the highest after God), who took flesh, and went back
to heaven again after completing His work on earth
(pneumatic Christology)." 3 Hermas, he argues, is a clear
example of the former point of view, which was later
declared heretical; Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp
illustrate the latter. Harnack himself tends more recently
to modify this sharp distinction. Loofs, indeed, had urged
that both Christologies, to the limited extent in which
they are correctly formulated, go back rather to the
1 Op. cit. 22.
2 wals Beov was a common title ; cf. 1 Clem., and Didache, c. 9 and 10.
It at least expressed the belief that His connection with God was of a unique
kind. s See History of Dogma (Eng. tr.), i. 190 ff.

THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS 127
primitive two-sided estimate of Christ Kara crdpica and
icara, irvev/ia. This he traces to Bo l3f-, and considers
to be the most ancient and most widely spread of all
Christologioal formulas. It meant that Christ was con
templated alternately on the side of His natural and His
supernatural being, without any effort to determine to
which the personal subject in Him belonged. There is
much that is attractive and illuminating in this suggestion,
though it will not cover all the facts. But in spite of
the rudimentary character of early Christological ideas,
they rested on quite definite convictions. Gospel traditions
kept men aware that the self-consciousness of the historic
Jesus had been more than human, while His post-resurrec
tion appearances, due to His own direct agency, supplied
a final proof of His supramundane nature. Ebionism had
little influence in the wider life of the Church. No one
of course operated with ideas like the modern "person
ality " ; but it was never doubted that the " Spirit "
present in Jesus was essentially Divine and pre-existent,
nor would the suggestion that Jesus was a man who had
become God have been understood at this time. He was
always viewed as both things — heavenly Divine Spirit,
and true man who had suffered and died. In prayers and
hymns He was worshipped along with God the Father.
§ 2. The Apostolic Fathers. — We shall gain a clearer
view of this common faith by examining data presented
in the writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers, from
the year 90 to 140. Ignatius apart, we find that the
rest exhibit a striking variety of ideas. All start, as the
New Testament does, from the historic Christ, who is
identified with the exalted Lord. He is the perfect
revelation of God, His servant, His beloved ; or again, it
is said that God " chose " Him. It is agreed that He
existed before His birth in a state of glory and power,
and Clement of Borne (about 95) calls Him "the sceptre
of the majesty of God," and declares that His coming to
earth was a willing self-abasement (c. 16). From the

128 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
beginning He was Lord of all things, by Him the world
was created, God took counsel with Him at the creation
of man.1 On the whole His eternal prior existence was
simply assumed, for it was felt that One to whom men
appealed in prayer could not be the creature of time. Such
ideas of pre-existence must not be confused with those
current in Judaism.
One point has caused difficulty. When we read in
2 Clement (c. 9) : " Christ the Lord who saved us, being
first spirit, then became flesh," or in Hermas (S. 5, 6):
" The holy pre-existent Spirit, which created the whole
creation, God made to dwell in flesh that He desired," are
we to say that the pre-existent Christ is being identified
with the Holy Spirit ? Baur, Harnack, Loofs 2 and others
have maintained this, but in his last edition Seeberg puts
forward strong reasons for denying it, and appositely cites
St. Paul's identification of the Lord with the Spirit in
2 Co 317, although his general practice of differentiating
them is quite plain.3 But in any case we are entitled to
affirm that at this stage the dogmatic distinction had not
been worked out. Christ is Spirit, or Holy Spirit, by
His very essence ; as Spirit He is one with God, and of
the same nature. It is even said that His sufferings were
the sufferings of God.4 Not that we are to import a
Nicaean significance in these phrases. Alongside of the
unity of the Son with God goes an emphasis upon His
subordination that would scarcely have been possible two
centuries later. This was due to inherited ideas about
Jesus' Divine mission, His life of obedience and trust, and
His return to the Father. Indeed there are parts of
Hermas where, to secure definiteness of outline, Christ is
represented as an angel or lofty spirit, though passages
may also be quoted of a different tenor.
When Jesus is called Son of God, in literature of this
1 Barnabas, c. 5.
2 Loofs calls this Binitarian Monotheism, and thinks that it commended
itself by falling in conveniently with the Kara. o-ipKa-Karh vvevp.a formula.
3 Lehrbuch d. Dogmengeschichte2, i. 98. * 1 Clem. u. 2.

CHRIST AND THE SPIRIT 129
period, the name " is connected more especially with the
human life by which it was manifested." * Hence we can
not assume, as we might later, that " Son " per se implies a
personal relation of the personal factor in Christ to or in
the Father. But although speculation was not yet busied
with the point, incipient tokens of it are traceable in
Hermas, who certainly names the pre-existent Christ by
the title Son (S. 912). How close the relation between the
Son and the Father was conceived to be, may be seen from
the opening words of 2 Clement : " Brethren, we ought so
to think of Jesus Christ, as of God, as of the Judge of
quick and dead." It was possible, in short, to accentuate
either His Divine unity with, or His personal distinction
from, the Father.
As regards the entrance of Christ into human life, two
streams of reflection are observable. On the one hand,
the pre-existent Son of God, it is taught, joined Himself
to the man Jesus, making him thus God's Servant, and as
Spirit pervading and energising all the workings of the
flesh. The man Jesus is but as it were the form and
vehicle of the (Christ) Spirit — a view, obviously, with a
certain leaning towards dualism. Traces of it may be
found in Hermas and Barnabas. The other line of reflection
conceives Christ to have become man, exchanging one form
of being for another; and this may be illustrated from
2 Clement, and particularly from the letters of Ignatius.
It permitted men to predicate now Divine and now human
properties of the one Christ. Certain advocates of the
former view, it is possible, held that the union between the
Son of God and the man Jesus took place at His baptism —
an idea which had been maintained by groups of Jewish
Christians, and formed part of the philosophical theory
elaborated by Cerinthus in the interests of docetism (Iren.
1. 26). But for this period it would be a mistake to
insist on this distinction.
§ 3. Ignatius. — When we turn to the attractive
1 Swete, The Apostles' Creed, 29.
9

130 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
personality of Ignatius, the martyr bishop of Antioch, it
is to one in whose thoughts and life Jesus Christ formed
the inspiring centre. His letters (written before 117)
reveal an almost apostolic sense of Jesus' person as a
whole, and have left a deep mark on later Christology.
" Nowhere else," Dr. Sanday has ' remarked, " have we the
idea of the fulness of Godhead revealed in Christ grasped
and expressed with so much vigour." 1 His ideas are
Johannine in the maim In perfervid language he sets
forth Christ, again and again, as the Bevealer of God and
the Eternal Head of a race of redeemed men. "Jesus
Christ, our inseparable life, is the mind of the Father,"2
" the unerring mouth in whom the Father hath spoken." 3
He starts from the historic Christ, now exalted and im
passible, and dwells with great emphasis on the reality of
His earthly career, pointing in turn to His birth, baptism,
sufferings, death, descent into Hades, and resurrection.4
" Ignatius," it has been said, " is the great teacher of the
sacramental significance of the incidents of the incarnate
life,"6 and just for this reason his anti-docetism is
pronounced. "He suffered truly," he writes to the
Smyrnseans, "as also He raised Himself truly; not as
certain unbelievers say, that He suffered in semblance,
being themselves mere semblance." 6 One or two passages
are singularly like the second article of the Apostles'
Creed. A strong and keen sense of history comes out.
It was because the disciples " touched " Christ that they
were able to despise death.7 Flesh, in the view of
Ignatius, belongs to Christ's nature permanently, even in
heaven. The whole value of Christianity would perish
with the denial that He came into a genuinely human life.
This is maintained vehemently against all who professed
to give a purer and more spiritual theory. Far from
concealing, Ignatius rather glories in the paradoxes and
1 Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, 244. 2 Eph. 3. 8 Rom. 8.
4 Cf. Trail. 9, where, as Lightfoot says, the word "truly" is repeated
again and again as "a watchword against docetism."
6 Ottley, Doct. of Hie Incarnation, vol. i. 164. 8 2. 7 Smyr. 3.

CHRISTOLOGY IN IGNATIUS 131
antitheses of Christ's being; they are cardinal to the
salvation He brings. " There is one only physician," he
writes in a classic passage, " of flesh and of spirit, generate
and ingenerate, God in man, true life in death, Son of
Mary and Son of God, first passible and then impassible." l
Neither aspect can be dispensed with ; whatever the verbal
tension, the idea must somehow be put in words that God
has appeared in, or as, man ; the Eternal in time. The
union of these two sides, in a vitally indissociable union,
is the hall-mark of Ignatian Christology.
It is also implied that the relation of Jesus Christ to the
Father is of a unique kind. In Him have been manifested
things wrought in the ancient silence of God and perfected
in 'His counsels.2 Christ is a revelation less of the reason
than of the saving will of the Father ; for although
Ignatius employs the term X0709, it is scarcely with a
technical significance. And this revelation was given, not
in His words merely, but in His silent deeds, or, to be more
exact, through His inmost self and personality. From
this point of view a glance is given to His filial subordina
tion : " the Lord did nothing without the Father," '' as
Jesus Christ was to the Father, be obedient to the bishop
and to one another." 3 Elsewhere He is said to have been
an imitator of the Father,4 and there is a reference to His
faith and love.6 But the writer does not insist on this.
The fulness of Christ's relation to God is everywhere
expressed by the term " Son." For Ignatius, no doubt, as
for St. John, the primary reference of this title is to the
historic Lord, now crowned with glory. In virtue of His
immaculate birth Christ is Son of Man and Son of God,
1 Eph. 7. The Apostolic Fathers, as Professor Gwatkin has put it
(Studies in Arianism, 6), " scarcely seem to see the difficulty of reconciling
divinity with suffering — for this rather than the Resurrection was the
stumbling-block of their time. 'If He suffered,' said the Ebionites, 'He
was not Divine.' 'If He was Divine,' answered the Docetists, ' Hi3
sufferings were unreal.' The sub- Apostolic Fathers were content to reply
that He was Divine and that He truly suffered, without attempting to
explain the difficulty."
2 Eph. 19. 3 Mag. 7. 13. 4 Phil. 7. sEph. 20.

132 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
with descent through Mary from David and through the
Holy Spirit from God. But I am not convinced by Zahn's
careful argument that the name " Son " is essentially and
exclusively relative to the miraculous birth in the flesh.1
If we take such phrases as " Jesus Christ, who was with
the Father before the worlds,"2 "Jesus Christ His Son,
who is His word that proceeded from silence," 8 or, still
more relevantly, a description like "Jesus Christ, who.
came forth from One Father and is with One and departed
unto One " ; i if we consider that no other designation is
available for the pre-existent One, since " Logos " is used
quite untechnically, I cannot but feel that — since Father
hood and Sonship are essentially correlative for him as for
the writers of the New Testament — Ignatius also carries
" Son " backward into the eternal sphere. His view will
then be that "the Eternal Son of God became man, when
God created for Him through Mary a human life, namely
the life of the historic Son."6 But however this may be,
it is agreed that Christ is presented as pre-existent on the
Divine or "pneumatic" side of His being. Not indeed
that Ignatius knows anything of the later doctrine of
eternal generation, for- he uses the epithet "ingenerate"
of Christ in His higher being.6 But the Subject of the
historic life had been as God before He "appeared in
the likeness of man."7 We also find in Ignatius the
authentically New Testament idea that it was after the
resurrection that the Saviour's nature was fully manifested :
" our Lord Jesus Christ," he writes, " being in the Father,
is the more plainly visible." 8
In what sense is the predicate "God" applied to
Christ in these letters ? For it is frequently so applied
in moments of deep feeling, even by a writer whose
monotheism is emphatic. There are phrases like " Jesus
Christ, our God," "the blood of God," and "the pas-

1 Ignatius von Antiochien, 469.

2 Mag. 6.

8 Mag. 8.

4 Mag. 7.

5 Seeberg, op. cit. i. 101.

8 Eph. 7.

7 Ibid. 19.

6 Rom. 8.

CHRISTOLOGY IN IGNATIUS 133
sion of my God."1 The entire content of Ignatius'
thought of God is drawn from Christ : he sees the two
merged in one. Moreover, functions and honours of a
specifically Divine character are ascribed to Christ, such as
the knowledge of our secret heart, the power to awaken
penitence, to raise up prophets, to care in love for His
Church. His relation to the Christian is that of in
dwelling : He is " our never-failing life," union with whom,
especially in the Eucharist, is eo ipso union with the Father.
True, Ignatius makes no effort to construct a set theory of
the incarnate person. But it is flying in the face of the
actual data to say that for him " God " in this relation is
" only a pregnant expression of the fact that in Christ God
is grasped and held as eternal salvation,2 if by this is
meant that he speaks of the Lord's deity merely in value-
judgments. The simple fact is that for Ignatius Christ
was identical, personally one, with the highest in the
highest realm he knew. Christ's life was the human life
of God, His coming the renewal of humanity through the
union of God with man. He repeats in other words the
simple religious modalism of St. John, but he does so without
prejudice to more definite formulations of the truth. The
one certain thing is that Christ is truly God and man, no
less one than the other.
Ignatius nobly represents the living Christologioal
faith of which theology is but the systematised exposition,
and the insistent claims of which have ruined many a
theory. In a sense, the thread might well be taken up
to-day where he dropped it ; at all events his pages are
extraordinarily modern, and the passion in his words keeps,
and will always keep, his thought fresh and vital. In
no sense a writer of intellectual power, he cuts his way to
ultimate realities by sheer energy of faith. It is because
Jesus Christ has mediated to him eternal life through
knowledge of the true God that he names Him the Divine
Son. Himself little of a theologian, he exhibits the first
1 Athanasius later rejected such expressions as unscriptural.
2 von der Goltz, Ignatius v. Antiochien als Christ u. Theologe, 25-26.

134 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
stirrings of theological interest in the post-apostolic age;
and already, it is clear, faith and Christ are bound up
together. Belief in God and in Christ are the same thing
in different aspects.
§ 4. The Gnostic Christology. — Ignatius lived and
wrote in full view of Gnostic speculation. More and more
it is being felt that Gnosticism — an atmosphere rather than
a system — is more easily comprehensible in the light of the
general history of religion than as a form of Christianity.
Looming on the horizon by the year 60, it became really
dangerous in the first half of the second century,
striving as it did to capture the Gospel for the philosophy
of the age. The Church was to be turned into a mystery-
society or a speculative school. At the root of all Gnostic
systems — and they are legion 1 — lay the idea of redemption,
and the conviction that it was to be won by a rare kind of
knowledge.2 In a way, Christ was made the centre of
all. Not only so ; at first sight it might appear as if
the Gnostics were engaged in a more serious and impressive
effort to construe the person of the Lord than their
orthodox assailants. But, on the one hand, their Chris
tology was incurably docetic. Partly owing to the
accepted metaphysical opposition of spirit and matter,
partly through a tendency to see in all things earthly
a mystic allegory of great cosmic redeeming processes,
His life in flesh was dissolved in unreal appearance.
Valentinus says that Jesus did not eat or drink like other
men, and that He passed through Mary merely as a
channel. By some His birth was totally denied, and of
course the same principle, when applied to His death on
the cross, robbed it of the value of a real passion. On the
other hand, the distinctive feature in Gnosticism was its
sharp separation between a Christ who is not truly human
1 On the many shades of Gnostic Christology, see a valuable note in
Seeberg, op. cit. i. 238.
2 What Christ does for men is to reveal transcendent secrets, though
there are more mystioab suggestions.

THE GNOSTIC CHRISTOLOGY 135
and a Jesus who is not Divine. " Christ " is an Aeon who,
being " a wonderful concentration of the light and virtue
of the Pleroma," or hierarchical Divine cosmos, has come
down and joined Himself somehow to the Messiah of the
Demiurge, Jesus, that He may infuse a higher mysterious
knowledge into receptive souls, thus rescuing for the
supernal world nobler elements previously immersed in
matter. The union of Christ and Jesus, some held, began
at the baptism in the Jordan, and terminated just before
death, the precise moment of separation being signalised
by the cry: "Father, into Thy hands I commend My
spirit." Basilides taught that Simon of Cyrene was
crucified in Jesus' room. Thus Christ is to be sought
behind, not in, the personality of Jesus.
That Christian ideas enter into this construction is
of course not to be denied. The central significance of
Christ is vigorously affirmed, and, so far as concerns
practical religion, Harnack is probably right in saying
that to the majority of Gnostics Christ was a Spirit,
consubstantial with the Father.1 His person, His teaching,
His career were recognised as an in-breaking of supreme
remedial energies from above. Yet a believing instinct
led the Church past the danger. Apart from the docetic
taint, apart from the indifference to history as also from
the fact that Gnosticism turns on cosmic rather than
ethical ideas, it was not even certain after all whether the
Eedeemer came from the highest God or not. He came
out of the Pleroma, but was not His divinity such as
might be predicated of many Aeons, all less than God and
more than man ? Ambiguity on this point disqualified
Gnosticism as a substitute for a faith that clung to history,
and in that history found very God. At the same time
Gnosticism wakened up the Church to more strenuous
reflection, and drove orthodoxy from a bare assertion of
historic facts, though it cannot be said that the spokes
men of ihe faith altogether succeeded in avoiding or
1 History of Dogma, i. 260. It is worth noting that ouoofoios t<$ rtarpl is
originally a Gnostic phrase.

136 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
surmounting the dualism which heresy had thus so plainly
taught. Echoes of Gnostic Christology came later from Marcion
(died about 165). He maintained that the good God —
in contradistinction from the Demiurge who had made
the world — took pity upon men, and that in the fifteenth
year of the Emperor Tiberius Christ Jesus came down
from heaven as a saving spirit (spiritus salutaris), assumed
a phantasmal body, and, as manifesting the highest God,
began to preach in the synagogue at Capernaum. But
his doctrine has curious inconsistencies. He may have
identified Christ with the good God ; in that direction
lay all his religious interests. Yet at times there is a
clear distinction. And it is remarkable that, with all his
docetism, to which the idea of human birth or growth is
intolerable, he yet attaches a high value to the crucifixion
inflicted on Christ by the Demiurge. Here also the
Church felt that the faith of the Incarnation is evaporated
in unhistoric fancies.
§ 5. The Apostles' Creed. — Moving out into a wider
field, let us now observe the profound influence exerted by
the earliest forms of what is known as the Apostles'
Creed.1 The present Latin text goes back only to the
eighth century, or possibly to the sixth; but its main
contents can be traced much farther, and scholars describe
it as the Gallican recension of the shorter Boman symbol,
that is, the symbol used in the Church of Borne from the
third century onwards, and venerated there as an apostolic
heirloom. There is virtual agreement that the original
Greek text of this Baptismal Creed was in existence before
150 ; how long before is still disputed. Kattenbusch makes
Borne its birthplace about 100, Harnack about 150 ; Zahn
and Loofs, more or less following Caspari, look for its
origin to Asia Minor, and date it somewhere in the period
100-130. We are not concerned here with the details
of the problem ; and interesting as are the variations in
1 Cf. Loofs, Leitfaden*, 87-88.

THE APOSTLES' CREED 137
the earliest Greek and Latin forms, they are of no
religious importance.1 But we should note the triadic
terms in which the Christian faith is henceforward ex
pressed. From this time on the Church professed a
knowledge of God, and taught it to her catechumens,
which grasps Him as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With
out this the Christian faith in God cannot be put in words ;
the God of redeeming power and truth is these three in
unity. The second article of the Apostles' Creed, according
to our most ancient source, Marcellus of Ancyra, is as
follows : —
(Tlio-reva) et? deov iravroKpaTopa'') ical el<s Xpiarbv
Ivaovv, tov vwv avrov tov fiovoyevrj, tov Kvpiov r)/j,a>v, tov
yevvrjOevra iic •jrvevfiaros dyiov teal Mapias Tr)<; irapdevov,
tov eirl TIovTtov IIiXaTov aravpmOevTa teal ra^ivra ical
TJ} Tpny r)p.epq uvaaravra etc t&v veicpwv, avafiavra els
tov? ovpavovi ical Ka6rjp,evov iv Se^ta tov Trarp6<s, odev
epfterat tcpivew Z&vra*; ical ve/cpov*;.2
This is obviously a commixture of supernatural and historic
facts, with virtually no commentary or interpretation.
And history is insisted on because the Church stood con
fronted with a reasoned docetism, and found its most
powerful weapon of defence in a simple recital of the
facts of Christ's career. The truth is, we owe the article
just quoted, not to any desire to exhibit Jesus Christ as
a marvellous Divine being, but to an instinct for the
Bedeemer's true humanity. Hence the enumeration of
the main points of His life, from a real birth — human
though miraculous — through passion, death, burial, and
1 This is true even of the question whether " only " (p.ovoyevrj, unicum)
or " our Lord " stood in the original texts of the first clause of the second
article. Such details may be studied in Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbole u.
Glaubensregeln der alten Kirche3, 22 ff.
2 Hahn, § 17. The conjectural reconstruction of the Old Roman Symbol
(R), given by Professor McGiffert (Apostles' Creed, 100), differs from the
text given above only in minor details, which do not seriously modify the
sense.

138 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
resurrection, to His present session in glory and future
coming as Judge of the world.
It is illegitimate, however, to suggest that all this
human simplicity covers and necessitates no higher impli
cations. Is the term "(only-begotten) Son," for example,
applied to Christ merely in an immanent sense, in a
heightened mode of the epithet as used in the Old
Testament ? Or does it carry a transcendent signification,
indicative of a Sonship which lies beyond the bounds of
time ? The latter view is distinctly the more probable.
That the name " Son " has its point of departure in the
earthly life of Christ is no reason for limiting it to that
life. We have seen ground for believing that the wider
usage is illustrated in the New Testament ; and as regards
the Apostles' Creed, there can be no doubt that previous
and contemporary writers name God " Father " not
relatively to the created world merely, but with special
reference to Jesus Christ. In Hermas, in the Epistle
to Diognetus, in Barnabas, in Ignatius, God is essentially
Father. Moreover, belief in the pre-existence of the
Divine in Christ, if not universal by the middle of the
second century, was very widespread. Finally, there
is the verbal arrangement of the Creed itself. The
first two articles answer to each other. " Can it be
believed," asks Dr. Swete, " that Patrem in the first clause
of the Creed has no prospective reference to Filium in
the second?"1 On the initial mention of the Father
follows that of His " Son " ; and He, after being designated
by His historic name, is first put in relation to God by
the adjective "only-begotten," and next in relation to
Christians by the title "Lord." Only as supramundane
in being could He be worshipped absolutely as Lord of
men, and by parity of reasoning only in virtue of a pre-
mundane and pre-historic relationship could He be
absolutely "Son" of God. After this solemn appella
tion, the article proceeds to affirm His entrance into
human life, and to detail the items of His life-story.
1 The Apostles' Creed, 23.

THE APOSTLES' CREED 139
Son of God from before all time, He became man through
the action of the Holy Ghost upon the Virgin Mary.
Not even here, as some have thought, is Christ desig
nated " Son " exclusively in consequence of the Spirit's
operation. What resulted from the co-operation of the
Holy Spirit and the Virgin was the man Jesus, in whom
the pre-existent " Son " became flesh.1
We need not here review the specific points which the
article cites from the life-experience of Christ. The anti-
docetic trend of the whole is manifest. Thus it is the
reality of our Lord's birth, even more than its unique
character, upon which emphasis is laid. The curiously
definite statement that the crucifixion occurred under
Pontius Pilate goes back, probably, to the early creed of
some local church ; 2 but its inclusion proves that the
primary interest of the authors of the Creed was in facts.
Whether the prominent reference to the Ascension is or
is not a departure from the oldest teaching (and here
Harnack scarcely appears to have proved his case), is a
question of no great importance. In any case the tran
scendent place occupied by Christ is sufficiently indicated
by the assertions that He is now at the right hand of
God, and will come thence in judgment.
1 Cf. Seeberg, op. tit. i. 180. a Cf. 1 Ti 61S.

CHAPTER II.
BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTOLOGICAL DOGMA.
§ 1. The Apologists. — The Greek Apologists of the second
century (the most important names are Aristides, Justin
Martyr, Theophilus, and Athenagoras) offer a striking
contrast to the mental attitude revealed in the Apostles'
Creed. Instead of a plain recital of facts, they proposed,
as Christian philosophers, to give a rendering of the ideas
of the Gospel in the scientific or speculative language of
the day. In Christ they possessed what philosophy is
ever seeking, and the higher knowledge given by the new
faith they now strove to make explicit in a defensive
statement of Christianity. And one idea or formula which
they used to set forth the dignity of Christ's Person
affected later theology to its depths. / This was the
philosophical conception of the Logos, a speculative deposit
of varied systems. ") The Apologists carried over this
elastic idea with them from older studies, and in their
writings we see the attempt being made to combine it
with the conviction, native to the believing mind, that
Christ is #eos, as well as the consciousness that in point
of fact they found themselves instinctively paying Him
Divine honour.
For the mind of that age, be it remembered, the Logos
summed up all the Divine forces energising in the worlds
of nature and spirit. It was "a formula capable of
Literature— Engelhardt, Das Christentum Justins, 1878; Holland,
article " Justinus," in Diet, of Chr. Biog. ; Flemming, Zwr Beurteilung des
Christentums Justins, 1893 ; Kunze, Die Gotteslehre des Irenaeus, 1891 ;
Harnack, article "Monarchianismus," in RE. xiii. ; Zahn, Marcellus von
Ancyra, 1867 ; Stier, Die Gottes- und Logoslehre Tertullians, 1899 ; Fair
bairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 1893. 140

THE APOLOGISTS 141
expressing the transcendent and unchangeable nature of
God on the one hand, and on the other His fulness of
creative and spiritual powers."1 The current conception
of God being utterly abstract and transcendent, a mediator
was required to bring Him in contact with the world,
and this function only the Logos could fulfil. To the
Apologists, then, He is in His distinct or personal being a
product of the Father's will (epjov irpmroTOKov tov •jraTposi),
though eternally immanent as a principle in God, who has
never been aA.070?. In due time He came forth in order
to create all things, "begotten from the Father, by His
power and will, but not by abscission, as if the essence of
the Father were divided."2 Numerically distinct from
the Father,3 He is yet one with Him in will. In virtue
of His origin He is subordinate to the highest God, but
He may be called a second God, and ought to be worshipped.
Finite in His own being, since there was a time when He
began to be, He forms the natural organ of revelation to
the finite. Lastly, He has appeared in Christ, not in part
merely but completely. In Christ the new law of freedom
has been set forth in its entirety, but the Logos had
previously been operative in the prophets of the Old
Testament and even in heathen sages. He alone is
properly to be called Son.4
Except Justin, none of the Apologists bestows any
particular attention upon the doctrine of Incarnation.
The older idea that the union of Divine and human in
Christ took place at the Baptism is not found in his pages ;
instead, he speaks of Jesus the Christ, " being of old the
Logos . . . now by the will of God having become man
for the human race " ; B and in one passage goes so far into
detail as to affirm that " Christ, the whole Logos, who
appeared for our sakes, became alike body and reason and
souh"a This emphasis upon the presence of the whole
1 Harnack, History of Dogma, ii. 207.
2 Justin Martyr, Dialog, e. Try ph. c. 128.
* api8p.tp trepbv ti. 4 Apol. ii. 6.
• Ibid. i. 63 ; cf. 23. 6 Ibid. ii. 10.

142 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Logos in the Saviour is characteristic of Justin, and forma
the implicit ground upon which he goes in declaring roundly
that Christ is " God and man." It is a plausible view
which finds in him the first faint beginnings of the
" two-natures " doctrine, so influential in later centuries ;
at all events in his contemporary Melito of Sardes there
is a clear allusion to the " two substances " in Christ.
According to Justin, the Logos (who even as pre-incarnate is
designated Christ) came down from heaven as a Spirit x and
made Himself one with the flesh conceived of Mary. He
asserts, indeed, that the Spirit and power of God mentioned
by St. Luke is just the Logos Himself, so that Jesus'
humanity may be described as the creation or product
of the indwelling Logos. Yet Jesus grew up like other
men, using the proper means of growth, and assigning to
each stage of the development that which befitted it. The
risen and exalted Lord will hereafter judge the world;
meanwhile His reign from heaven gives victory to His
people over demons and all evil powers.
There are indications in Justin that unorthodox views
regarding Christ's higher being were not always felt to
involve the forfeiture of the Christian name. And this
is intelligible when we recollect that for him Christ's
Saviourhood mainly consisted in His having taught mono
theism and a new morality. "Becoming man according
to His will, He instructed us in these things for the con
version and restoration of the human race." 2
All this has value rather as testifying to the profound
impression made by Christ on a mind determined to be
philosophic than as a reasoned Christological scheme. In
particular, the introduction of the Logos- conception was
a dubious expedient, and before long it was to prove
itself a weapon which men grasped only by the blade.
It is little wonder, indeed, that an idea with so imposing
a history should thus have been captured for Christian
1 Terms are not infrequently employed which seem to identify the Logos
and the Spirit.
2 Apol. i. 23.

THE LOGOS -CONCEPTION 143
service. In terms St. John had seemed to authorise its
Christian usage ; by its suggestion at once of plurality and
unity it served to convey the truth that Christ is God, while
yet God is one ; and its emphasis on • the pre-existence of
Christ gave credibility to faith's conviction that all things
good, fair, and true flow, and have ever flowed, from Him.
But in this world fallible men seldom act rightly without
mixing their right with wrong. It was so now. In
St. John the term Logos is obviously defined by relation
to the more fundamental " Son " ; it is secondary and
interpretative, more particularly for a specific audience,
while " Son " is primary, because rooted in the fruitful
depths of history. In the Apologists this relation is turned
the other way. Here " Logos " comes on the scene with
a settled independent meaning of its own ; it stands for
the vast diffused world-reason ; its antecedents are meta
physical, not historical ; and from the outset it is capable
of being analysed and explicated quite apart from the
Jesus of the Gospels. In this case cosmology, not
soteriology, gives tone to the discussion ; Christ is before
all things the Logos, rather than the Son, of God. Thus
the mind of the Church, in its Christological reflection,
was encouraged to move by dt priori lines of deduction
from the pre-existent Divine Beason downwards to the
world, rather than upwards, by intuition, from the experi
ence of souls redeemed through union with a historic
person. If Justin could describe the Logos as " a certain
rational power," then the personal colour which the believing
consciousness insists upon in all categories that concern
Jesus Christ vanishes, and the door is opened wide to
ideas so mechanical and unethical as to be incongruous
with New Testament conceptions of the being and life of
God. Further, if the Logos be defined as caused by God,
it becomes plain that the subordination which, in one
sense, is an authentically New Testament idea, is on the
point of passing into essential dualism and inferiority.
So that in certain ways Justin may be said to have
anticipated Arius, as moving too much on the same cosmo-

144 THE PERSON OF JESOS CHRIST
logical plane. And when Athanasius came to the discussion
a century later, he was forced to put the Logos Christology
aside. On the other hand, it was particularly easy to
explain it in a Sabellian sense.1 Thus a review of the
work of the Apologists more than half inclines one to
acquiesce in Loofs' verdict : " Their doctrine of the Logos
is not a 'higher' Christology than the common one; it
falls short of the genuinely Christian estimate of Christ.
It is not God that manifests Himself in Christ, but the
Logos, a depotentiated God, a God who as God is sub
ordinate to God Most High." 2
But while Justin's formulas thus led him to contrast
fatally the Father and the Logos, the conception he
was endeavouring to express was in no sense disloyal to
Christ. More than once he protests against being accused
of worshipping a mere man. Christ, the Logos, is the
true Son of God, and has His place essentially in the
sphere of the Creator.
§ 2. Irenceus. — Ireneeus, a native of Asia Minor, and
bishop of Lyons at his death in or near 200, wrote a great
work, Adversus Hwreses, about the year 185. The influence
upon his mind of the Asia Minor tradition is shown in
a ruling tendency to keep to the via media of normal
Christian thinking, and eschew bold speculations on the
inner life of Godhead. Gnostic or Apologist views of the
emanation of the Word, expressed in terms of a material
hue, were especially distasteful to him. For no one
1 On the two wrong roads down which men might be led by the Logos
Christology, see a luminous note in Rainy's Ancient Catholic Church, 205.
Elsewhere he says (203) of the term "Logos" : "For the domestic interests
of the faith, the use of this word is not indispensable. The Church has
framed all her great creeds without employing it." " If Christianity had
depended on the Logos," writes Mr. Glover (Conflict of Religions, 303-4),
1 ' it Would have followed the Logos to the limbo whither went Aeon and
Ap rrhoia and Spermaticos Logos. But that the" Logos has not perished is
due to the one fact that it has been borne through the ages on the shoulders
of Jesus." 2 Leitfaden l, 129. Dr. Sanday (Christologies Ancient and Modern, 14-21)
puts the other side persuasively.

IRENSEUS 145
understands how the Son is brought forth by the Father ;
His birth, by the nature of the case, is ineffable
(generatio inenarrabilis).1 Gnosticism, in opposition to
which Irenseus puts forth all his strength, has made it
necessary to reassert the unity and simplicity of God,
but though God be inscrutable (here Irenseus agrees with
his adversaries), it is His will to reveal Himself savingly
to men. As Logos, indeed, He has always been manifested
in the world, first through the prophets, finally in Christ
His Son. " Through the Word Himself, who had become
visible and palpable, was the Father shown forth ; all saw
the Father in the Son : for the Father is the invisible of the
Son, but the Son the visible of the Father." 2 Alongside of
the modalism of such expressions are found some faint
suggestions of a Kenotic view : " Well spake he," we
read, " who said that the unmeasurable Father was Himself
subjected to measure in the Son; for the Son is the
measure of the Father, since He also comprehends Him." s
And again : " For this cause the incomprehensible and
boundless and invisible One made Himself seen and
apprehended and comprehended by those who believe, that
He might vivify such as receive and behold Him by faith." 4
There is a revelational identity of Christ and God.
Irenseus starts from the historic Jesus, the God-man,
not from the cosmic Logos, and his central problem is :
Why did Christ descend ? 5 In any case, Christ is the
Logos in human guise, with an eternal personal pre-exist
ence lying behind His earthly career. But it is fruitless
toil to build up theories of His origin from or in God,
whether as a preparatory approach to creation or other
wise. To him as to Ignatius the pre-historic One is un-
begotten (ayevvwTos), and in one place he visits with
grave censure those " who transfer the generation of a
word uttered by men to the eternal Word of God,
assigning to Him a beginning of emergence and a genesis." 6
1 adv. Haer. ii. 28. 6. 2 iv. 6. 6.
8 iv. 4. 2. 4 iv. 20. 5.
•ii. 14. 7. «itl8. 8.
IO

146 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
With equal energy he protests against the Gnostic differ
entiation of the Logos and the man Jesus. The Bedeemer's
person is rather the abiding unity of God with man. The
Divine in Christ he names " Son," apparently, when it
is desired to bring out His relation to the Father, but
'' Logos," quite in the manner of the Fourth Gospel, when
He is contemplated as the great revelation, the Word or
Voice of God, making Him apprehensible.
For Irenseus the work of Christ and His person are
one organically, and we gain light upon each from the
study of both together. Humanity, we are told, lies in
sin and death. In Christ this fallen race is saved, not
by mere teaching or enlightenment, but in the deeper
fashion of what a modern would call personal identifica
tion.1 In His infinite love He was made as we are in
order that He might make us to be as He is. Our
fleshly and corruptible nature is, as it were, fused or
inoculated with Deity, and so made immortal. What we
lost in the first Adam, we recovered in Christ the second
Adam ; 2 for as we become partakers of the Divine nature,
union with incorruption confers on us salvation from
corruptibility. In other words, Christ saves by gathering
the entire race into Himself and suffusing it with His
Spirit. Physical terms are used freely, but it would be
a mistake to imagine that Irenseus takes redemption to
be a purely unethical or material process. On the contrary,
for all the weight laid upon the advent of Christ, as in
itself redemptorial, it is explained clearly that the In
carnate One had still a work to do, which invested His
life on earth with real soteriological meaning. He passed
through every age of human life ; 3 perfect as He was, He
became an infant like the rest of mankind, He faced
temptation, He bowed Himself to the last suffering of
death. Nor is Irenseus without a real interest in our
1 On the central idea of recapitulatio (avaKeqiaXaiuais), cf. Seeberg, op. cit.
i. 325 ff., Bethune- Baker, Early Hvtory of Christian Doctrine, 333 ff., and
Ottley, Doct. of the Incarnation, i. 219-21.
2 iii. 18. 1. » iif 22. 4.

DYNAMIC MONARCHIANISM 147
Lord's moral growth. Doubtless a note of dualism is
audible in his statement that the Logos remained quiescent,
in order that Christ might be capable of being tempted.1
Still, incarnation is taken to imply a human soul as well
as a body ; Christ was no mere human frame inhabited
by a higher Divine presence. And on the whole we may
say that for Irenseus, as for St. John, the same subject
is both Logos and man. " He insists," says Mr. Bethune-
Baker, " that it is one and the same person — Jesus Christ
— the Logos — the Son of God^who created the world,
was born as man, and suffered and ascended to heaven,
still man as well as God." 2 He is the meeting-place of
Creator and creature : commixtio et communio dei et hominis
secundum placitum patris facta est.a Irenseus is certainly
more successful than Justin in getting the idea expressed
that in Christ very God Himself has come to us, for with
a modahsm slightly more conscious and theoretical than
that of Ignatius, he tends to construe the Logos not as
somehow a portion of the Godhead, much less a second
inferior God, but as God Himself breaking forth in
revelation. The main conceptions in this impressive scheme go
back, through Ignatius, to the Fourth Gospel. Neither the
deity nor the personality of the Son could be dispensed
with. But this position naturally raised more questions
than it solved. Might this idea of a God-man not imperil
the unity of God, not perhaps in a way resembling Gnosti
cism, but after the debasing fashion of pagan polytheisms ?
Must not the God who appeared on earth be reckoned a
secondary God, somehow numerically different from the
Lord of all things ? These were salient points of doubt
and controversy to which the Monarchians were to call
attention. § 3. Monarchianism. — Can belief in a real incarnation
be reconciled with the fundamental Christian certainty
that God is one ? This, at bottom, was the question
1 iii. 19. 3. 2 Op. cit. 131. s iv. 20. 4.

148 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
agitated by two modes of thought which began to make
themselves felt near the close of the second century, and
which resemble the older Ebionism and Docetism on a
higher plane. The first of these tendencies endangered
Christ's divinity, the second His distinction from the
Father ; and the conflict lasted rather more than a century.
Both go under the name Monarchianism, though of very
different types. The name was drawn from their insist
ence on the unity of principle in God (fiovap^ta), and it
was a cardinal point with them to deny all personal
distinctions in the Divine Being. From Tertullian we
can see that they were able to make a very strong appeal
to simple-hearted members of the Church.
(1) Dynamic Monarchianism.1 — This, the more rational
ist of the two views, made its first appearance in the
West. Somewhere between 189 and 199 a certain
leather>merchant from Byzantium, by name Theodotus,2
taught Dynamism at Borne, and was excommunicated by
the bishop Victor. On the ground that God was strictly
unipersonal, he held Jesus to be a man abnormal only in
being born of a virgin, though distinguished from others
by exceptional holiness and fidelity. At baptism He was
filled with a Divine influence or power (Bvvafim, hence
the name Dynamic), and exalted after the resurrection as
" Divine." He revealed God the Father, and may there
fore be styled His Son and worshipped. But this creed
of the Theodoti, Artemon, and their sympathisers is not
what we to-day should call humanitarianism. If not a
personal and pre-existent Logos, Jesus was yet a man to
whom deity was gradually communicated. Seeberg helps
us by the remark that what the Church condemned was
not their assertions but their denials. These were felt
to be perilously retrograde. " Who," says a Church writer
of the time, " who does not know the works of Irenseus,
1 Harnack's proposal to call this group "Adoptian" is perhaps rather
ill-advised. See RE. iv. 38.
2 He is to be distinguished from Theodotus "the banker," another
member of the group.

MODALISTIC MONARCHIANISM 149
Melito, and the rest, in which they proclaim Christ as
God and man ? " Of course it is possible to say that this
party had some externalities of the Synoptic tradition
on its side. The idea, for example, that Jesus at His
baptism was endowed with superhuman power has points
of real contact with primitive belief. But even on their
own showing the Lord was in no sense an ordinary man,
and some of Theodotus' followers contended that Jesus
became God after the resurrection. The majority, how
ever, denied this, and promulgated views which, had they
prevailed, would have been fatal to the continued existence
of the Christian society. Dynamic Monarchianism, we
can see, has certain points of resemblance to modern
liberal theories, and is on the whole a tolerably clear
example of how often they are not the best theologians
who profess to dispense with theology.
(2) Others, however, felt that a more Christian way
might be found to preserve the Divine unity, and one which
involved neither a ditheistic' Logos doctrine nor a view of
Christ that reduced Him to the plane of bare humanity.
This was the party of modalistic Monarchians,1 or, as they
were sometimes named, not altogether unnaturally, Patri-
passians. Numerous in Egypt, for almost a generation
they held the field in Borne. They knew that Christ
was God, but they were equally sure that God is one.
No subordinationist theory would suffice. Hence, in the
full belief that they had Scripture on their side, they
represented Christ as being just the Father Himself,
an appearance or modification of the one God. None
other than He was born, suffered, and died. Noetus and
Praxeas, both from Asia Minor, where a naive form of
modalism was very old, Epigonus, Cleomenes, and (in a
sense) Callistus, bishop of Borne, are the most prominent
names. Tertullian wrote against Praxeas, Hippolytus
against Noetus and the Boman bishop. The movement
1 For a subtle estimate of the tendencies which might lead men from one
form of Monarchianism to the other, see Rainy, Anc. Cath. Church,
215-16.

150 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
was at its height in the second and third decades of the
second century.
The theory, then, was as follows : Christ is the one God,
only in a specialised mode or aspect making revelation
possible. Johannine sayings like " I and the Father are
one," or " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,"
are meant literally, and imply a unity of person as well as
of essence. Support may also have been found in principles
of the Stoic philosophy for holding that Father and Son are
but two names for one reality. According to Hippolytus,
it was the teaching of Noetus that " in so far as the Father
is not made, we rightly call Him Father. But in so far
as He was pleased to subject Himself to birth, He is as
engendered become His own Son, not the Son of another."1
As invisible, ingenerate, impassible, He is Father ; as
visible, generate and mortal, He is Son. And this one
God was nailed on the cross, rendered up His spirit to
Himself, died, yet did not die, and on the third day
raised Himself from the grave. In Noetus' own words :
'' If now I confess Christ as God, He clearly is the Father
if He is God at all. Now Christ, who Himself is God,
has suffered; hence the Father has suffered, for He was
the Father." This is the theory in brief. To the
objector who quoted the prologue to the Fourth Gospel,
it was answered that when St. John appears to speak of
Christ as pre-existently separate from the Father, he is
really using the language of allegory. Praxeas, a " con
fessor " of Asia Minor, is specially explicit. Post tempus,
he is represented as saying, pater natus et pater passus,
ipse deus, dominus omnipotens Jesus Christus praedicatur.2
This drew from Tertullian the biting phrase that one of
the two jobs Praxeas had done for the devil at Borne
was to crucify the Father.8 Elsewhere he remarks that
the God of Praxeas' creed is a " turncoat " (versipellisY
Sometimes an effort was made to avoid the conclusion
that the Father suffered by distinguishing in the Lord's
1 Rep. ix. 10. 2 Tert. adv. Prax. 2.
3 Ibid. 1. * Ibid. 2.

SABELLIUS 151
person between the flesh, which is Son, and the spirit,
which is Father : filium carnem esse, id est hominem, id est
Jesum,patrem autem spiritum,id est deum,id est Christum;1
,filius patitur, pater vero compatitur? But this clearly
gives up the point of Modalism.
There are heresies and heresies ; some erring in the
statement of the faith, others denying it outright. And
it is impossible not to feel that Monarchianism of
the modalistic type is of the more venial kind. It
attracted many earnest and devout men. Noetus' ex
clamation, as reported by Hippolytus — "How can I do
harm by glorifying Christ ? " 3 — is significant. Patri- '
passianism indeed, though it resulted from the application
of an imperfect scheme of conceptions to the older and
purely religious modalism of Ignatius and Irenseus, was
from one point of view no more than a vigorous affirmation
of the basal certainty that in Jesus Christ we find God
Himself personally present for our salvation. However
mistakenly, it aimed at serving the interests of faith.
For many who resented the subtleties of theological
debate, it must have offered itself as an effective working
theory. But the equilibrium of the doctrine was peculi
arly unstable. In Praxeas' hands it came very near to
Docetism. He recognised no human soul in Jesus, and
the flesh which with him did duty for complete human
nature can hardly have been more than a bare selfless
vesture of the indwelling God. Already there are faint
anticipations of Apollinaris.4
The classic representative of this species of Modalism
has been found by later times in Sabellius, a native of
Egypt who lived in Bome about 220. But in reality
Sabellius was only unusually frank. A comparison with
Noetus shows that scarcely anything was new in his
teaching save the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the
1 Tert. adv. Prax. 27. ! Ibid. 29.
0 rl odv kclkov Trotw, 5o£d£"wv rbv Xpiarbp ;
4 On the Monarchian movement as a whole, see an informing article by
Professor Warfield in the Princeton Theological Review for Oct. 1905.

152 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
modalistic scheme. For him also the Divine in Christ
has no personal subsistence, but is a mere passing phase
of the one deity, who is denoted by the name vioirdrmp.
Three phenomenal aspects — Father, Son, and Spirit — are
referred to a transcendent Godhead which remains immut
able behind them all. In the prosdpon of the Father,
God acted as Creator and Lawgiver; in the prosdpon
of the Son as Eedeemer, from the birth at Bethlehem
on to the ascension; thenceforward as the Holy Spirit.
Epiphanius relates that Sabellius used to compare the
Father to the orb of the sun as we see it, the Son to its
light, and the Spirit to its heat; while Athanasius adds
that he described the Father as being expanded into the
Son and the Spirit.1 These three Divine phases, then,
correspond to three periods of revelation — the Old Testa
ment, the New Testament, and the subsequent history
of the Church ; the entire development making up the
unified history of God's self-manifestation. But what is
of first-rate importance in the system is Sabellius' explicit
declaration that these revelational aspects of God are
successive and temporary. For him God is not Father,
Son, and Spirit simultaneously ; only as one aspect ceases
to be does another rise into existence. This is a far-
reaching divergence from the Church's doctrine of the
Divine "economy," to which otherwise it approximates.
From certain indications Sabellius appears to have
modified the rigour of his logic so far as to hold that
after all the Father predominates throughout the entire
process of revelation ; in the Son and Spirit He is still
somehow operative, as the Godhead par excellence, reveal
ing itself in temporary forms. But on one point he
stood firm — neither Son nor Spirit has personal sub
sistence. The point of view was admirably simple in its logic.
Sabellianism is only Modalism quite conscious of itself,
and formulated in such a manner as to bring out glaringly
some of the defects of the Logos doctrine held by Origen
1 Or. c. Arianos, iv. 25.

SABELLIANISM 153
and Tertullian. And it is not difficult to assign one
reason for its oft-repeated failure to win the Church's
confidence. This is its definite negation of the existence
of the Divine Christ after His ascension. In His earthly
life He was God ; at its close He was again absorbed, like a
sunbeam retracted once more to its native source in the sun.
This was more than a dubious Trinitarian theory ; it was
an attempt upon the immediate certainties of the Christian
mind, and would in itself have been enough to discredit
explicit Sabellianism with believers. And in point of
history, many theories which critics have described as
Sabellian really lack the distinctive feature of authentic
Sabellianism ; they ignore the successiveness of the phases,
and what is in consequence the merely temporary being
of the Divine Christ.
The extremer views of Sabellius, however, must not
be charged upon the Modalists generally. Indeed, there
is ground for holding that, as compared with the Logos
Christology, they had a truly concrete view of the historic
Christ, and stood for a conception that did more justice
to religious faith. Eeflective modalism was initially only
a one-sided statement of the unity of nature subsisting
between the Son and the Father. As against this, Ter
tullian had an easy task in proving that the New Testa
ment implies the distinct personality of the Son. And
Athanasius and Hilary press home the objection that
writers like Praxeas dissolve the whole redemptive economy.
" In his view," writes Athanasius, " the Father becomes
the Son, and with the absorption of the Son the Father
also is no more — which means a Christianity without
Father and Fatherhood, hence also without Divine Sonship.
On the other hand, the Son remains a mere name, and
disappears along with the Spirit once His mission is
accomplished."1 It was felt that Sabellius had fallen
back into the hard monotheistic abstractions of Judaism.
Basil, indeed, makes this charge directly. At a Synod
in the year 261, Sabellianism was condemned.
1 Cf. Thomasius-Bonwetsch, Dogmengeschichte, i. 189 f.

154 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
§ 4. Tertullian. — In Tertullian, the passionate and
inexhaustibly energetic Western, whose literary activity
may be placed between 195 and 220, we encounter
a form of Christology whose main features took shape
in the heat of the Monarchian controversy. A Stoic
by philosophic training, Tertullian was converted and
ordained at Bome. His theory of the Logos, at which
we must first glance, is in great measure an inherit
ance from the Apologists, but expanded and deepened.
First existent in God, as it were anticipatively or in
potentiality, the Logos arose out of God as Son by genera
tion before all worlds, being thus projected, or invested
with independent being, with a view to the creation of the
universe. Thus He had a beginning : fuit tempus, cum,
filius non fuit.1 Pr 822 fills a large place in these specu
lations. The process of the Son's coming to be is actually
described as one of emanation, and the old figure of the
sun and its beam reappears in illustration.2 Father and
Son constitute the one Divine substance, the one as it were
overlapping and embracing the other : pater tota substantia,
filius derivatio et portio totius 3 — a famous sentence. They
are differentiated as persons, not by division or separation,
but rather in virtue of an economic distinction. The
lines of subordinationism are strongly marked.4 In the
Father resides the plenitude of deity, in the Son so
much only as is consistent with His derived position
(pro modulo derivationis).5 Things which may not be
ascribed to the one are predicable of the other. This
subordination holds even of the pre-existent Logos. On
such terms, since a sharp distinction is made between
the Divine existence now and before the generation of
1 adv. Herm. 8. a Cf. the threefold simile in Apol. 21.
8 adv. Prax. 9.
1 Mr. Bethune-Baker surely oversteps the mark in saying that "there
is no suggestion or thought of subordination, in any other sense than in
regard to origin, and even that is merged in the unity of substance" (op.
cit. 142). This is to forget Tertullian's dependence on a traditional Logos
doctrine. e adv. Prax. 14.

TERTULLIAN 155
the Logos, the Trinitarian life is drawn into the processes
of time and history. It is a form of subordinationism,
so far, which, owing to the cosmological entanglements
of the Logos doctrine, and the persistence of the quasi-
philosophic assumption that God's essence lies in mystery
and abstract isolation, and cannot therefore be communi
cated, goes near to wreck the validity for faith of the
work of the historic Christ. At the same time even
Tertullian's most emphatic statements of subordination are
intelligible enough as expressing a criticism of the Mon-
archian theory. There can be no question as to his
religious estimate of Christ. He was true God, only
in a real and independent personality, which, although
never characterised as " created," yet issued from the God
head at a distinct point in the past, and in due time will
finally be abdicated, that God may be all in all.
Tertullian, who expressed Christian ideas in the
natural language of a Boman, is the first to speak
of the Godhead as una substantia, tres personae. Loofs
rightly refuses to see in these terms a deposit of the great
divine's training as a jurist. Substantia was a familiar
word in philosophy, and persona, though it originally
signified in law a "party" or "individual" with legal
rights, had passed into common speech. Much more
baffling than Tertullian's use of legally flavoured terms
is a marked predilection for mechanical and even crudely
physical images.
The pre-existent Logos or Son, then, assumed flesh
for our salvation, this being the last stage in the coming
of the Logos to full personal existence. He was born of
a virgin, for as Son of God He had no need of human
fatherhood. The incarnation, prompted by God's redeem
ing love, was an act of His unconditioned power and
freedom, since unlike creatures He can take a new form
while yet remaining what He is. Thus Tertullian does
not scruple to say that God was born and was crucified.
The resultant person, we are told, was compound of
two substances (this rather than " natures " is his term),

156 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
— spirit and flesh, Divine and human respectively. In
one place, indeed, the soul of Christ and His flesh are
represented as two substances making up His humanity,
the Divine Logos thus being a third.1 But his more
usual practice is to speak of two substances as united in
one person. He holds with decision that incarnation is
not a metamorphosis into, but an assumption of, flesh ; and
there is nothing against which he contends more vigorously
(so far anticipating the Monophysite controversy) than the
view which blends spirit and flesh together in a new hybrid
mixture. " If the Logos became flesh," he says, " by a
transfiguration and change of substance, it at once follows
that Jesus must be substance composed of two substances,
like electrum compounded of gold and silver. At this
rate Jesus cannot be God, for He has ceased to be the
Word ; nor can He be Man incarnate, for He is not properly
flesh." 2 This may be regarded as Tertullian's genuine
conviction, though phrases occur now and then, like homo
Deo mixtus,3 or filius Dei miscens in semetipso hominem ei
Deum? which look the other way. He insists frequently
on the permanence in Christ's one person of both sub
stances ; not only so, each substance acts independently
and by itself, according to its own character. Salva est
utriusque proprietas substantias.5 The substances of flesh
and spirit are conjoined, not confused. Videmus duplicem
statum, non confusum, sed conjunctum, in una persona, deum
et hominen Jesum.6 It is worth noting that for Tertullian
Christ is certainly an individual man, not mere impersonal
humanity.7 The paradoxical character of the Christian doctrine,
when squarely faced, so far from being toned down, is
proclaimed in exulting antitheses. Natus est Dei filius;
non pudet, quia pudendum est. Et mortuus est Dei filius;
prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus resurrexit ;
1 de cam. Christi, 13. z adv. Prax. 27.
8 de earn. Christi, 15. 4 adv. Marc. ii. 27.
6 adv. Prax. 27. 6 Ibid.
' The orthodox view a century or two later was different.

TERTULLIAN 157
certum est, quia impossibile.1 Yet, having once chosen his
formulas, Tertullian could scarcely avoid a certain dualism,
which not seldom threatened to dissolve the union of God
and man in Christ. The God in Jesus, he argues, needed
no baptism; nor may God suffer or die, any more than
dishonour done to a stream can touch the parent fountain.
Hence the cry of desolation on the Cross " was uttered in
order to prove the impassibility of God, who forsook His
Son while giving the man in Him up to death."2 To
balance this, stress is laid upon the eternal nature of
the union, and it is declared that even in His glory Jesus
wears both the form and substance of human flesh and
blood. The thought is in a sense an inheritance from
Ignatius,3 though it has a new definiteness.
Harnack has called Tertullian the father of the
orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ. That he
should be so, in spite of the hampering inadequacies of
the Logos Christology bequeathed to him by the Apologists,
with its suggestions of a reduced deity mediating a
transcendent Absolute, is the best evidence of his amazing
power. In fact, the issue of his work was to put in
terms of the Logos conception a religious and doctrinal
view of Christ so rich and full as ultimately to break
through its own limitations. It is too much to say, with
Dorner, that Tertullian marks the transition from the
Logos Christology to a Christology interpreted by Divine
Sonship (this applies rather to Athanasius); yet it is
true that he prepared the way for the beneficent change.
His great phrase, nihil tarn dignum Deo quam hominum
salusf involving an ethical rather than a purely onto-
logical idea of God, might, had it been followed put, have
supplied a worthy background even for his boldest
Christological assertions, in which he sought to laud and
magnify the grace of the Eedeemer.
The Christology of Tertullian was disseminated in the
West chiefly through the de Trinitate of Novatian, a
1 de earn. Christi, 5. 2 adv. Prax. 30.
* Cf. Smyr. 3. 1. 4 adv. Marc. ii. 27.

158 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
book which Harnack describes as a dogmatic vade mecum
for the Latin Churches. A vehement adversary of both
types of Monarchianism, he taught, particularly as
against Sabellius, at once the real Deity of Christ and
the personal distinction of Father and Son. Christ is
true man and true God. Yet so far is Novatian from
commingling both, that he posits two Sons in , the the-
anthropic Person — one filius natura, the other filius ex
adoptione. The manhood could be put on and off like
a garment. He re-echoes the subordinationist strain of
his master, prophesying the future cessation of the Son's
independent being, even though, strange to say, he appears
to hold the existence of the Son to have been eternal in
the past. The vis divinitatis, "having been sent forth,
and also given and directed to the Son, circles back to
the Father in virtue of the communion of substance." *
1 de Trin. 31.

CHAPTER III.
THE ASCENDANCY OF THE LOGOS DOCTRINE.
§ 1. The Alexandrian Theologians : (a) Clement. — As we
turn to the Christologioal work of the great Alexandrian
Fathers, it is needful to realise the conditions of thought
and feeling in view of which they wrought out their
systems. On the threshold of the third century began a
striking revival of the religion of Mithras, a primseval
god of the Aryans, which affected virtually the entire
Boman world. Thenceforward for more than a hundred
years Mithraism and Christianity struggled for mastery,
each professing to satisfy man's craving for blessedness
and eternal life. Christianity won because it is a faith
grounded in history. The authentic and concrete revela
tion in the historic person of Jesus proved stronger than
all the mysteries. Meanwhile the religion of educated
men was growing eclectic and syncretist. A sort of
monotheistic worship of the sun ; the adoration of great
men of the past, as Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana —
these may illustrate the prevailing tendencies ; and it is
a fair question whether the biographies of these men did
not owe something to the wish to present a heathen Christ
superior to our Lord.
Nor must we overlook the philosophic movements
Literatim — Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 1886 ; Bon-
wetsch, article "Clemens von Alexandrien," in RE. iv. ; Preuschen, article
" Origenes," RE. xiv. ; Westcott, Religious Thought in the West, 1891 ;
Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1890 ; Redepenning, Origenes, 1841-46 ; Gwatkin,
The Knowledge of God2, 1908 ; Bonwetsch, Die Theologie des Methodius,
1903 ; Routh, Reliquiae sacrae2, 1848 ; Pfleiderer, Gifford Lectures, 1895 ;
Allen, The Continuity of Christian Thought, 1885 ; Liddon, Bampton
Lectures, 1866. 169

160 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of the time. Two of the biographers of Pythagoras
were Porphyry and Iamblichus, distinguished leaders of
the Neo-Platonic school, which had been founded by
Ammonius Saccas, a teacher of Platonic philosophy at
Alexandria. The system of which he was the expositor
received its most perfect . expression at the hands of his
pupil Plotinus, whose life extended from 205 to 270.
It may be described as a kind of dynamic pantheism.
There are three great cosmic principles.1 Primal being
resides in the One, the Infinite, the Good, which is beyond
and above all attributes, whether of thought, will, or
energy, and yet is the uncaused and moveless source of
all existent things. Next comes the Nous, its exact
emitted image and the archetype of lower being, embracing
in itself likewise the supersensible world (ic6o-fio<s votitos;).
And lastly the Nous giv^s forth, as its product and copy,
the Soul or Psyche, related to the Nous in turn as
the Nous is to the One. Placed between the Nous and
the world of phenomena, it shares in some degree the
character of both. Material nature is meant to be subject
to Psyche. But in actual existence this intended harmony
of subordination is displaced by strife, the result being
that the entire phenomenal system is shot through
with illusion and vanity. Something in the very essence
of matter condemns it to be a principle of darkness.
Hence to be born into corporeality signifies that the soul
has fallen into the toils of sensuality, though redemption
is not impossible. Each soul must leave the material
behind and rise to the region of Divine knowledge, and
even in the present life we may approximate to this,
above all through the medium of passive intuition. In
perfect receptivity and repose the soul is able to touch
and grasp God directly, losing itself in the Divine with a
silent rapture or ecstasy of unutterable feeling. Porphyry
relates that to his own knowledge Plotinus tasted this
supreme bliss on four distinct occasions.
1 To each of these potencies the name biroo-rao-is is given, indicating that
they represent the Divine in specific forms or modes of existence.

NEO-PLATONISM 161
It is customary for historians to deny that Neo-
Platonism is dualistic, and to contrast it in this respect
with Gnosticism, against which Plotinus wrote vehemently.
Yet the idea of matter which Neo-Platonists assumed,
as of something indefinite, formless, evil, came very near
to pure dualism. We learn that Plotinus was ashamed
of his body.
A system of this kind, obviously, would act as a foil
to Christianity, rather than as its intellectual model. The
influence of Neo-Platonism on Church thinkers has been
much exaggerated. Doubtless, like the writers of the
New Testament, the Fathers may not have disdained to
borrow from their rivals this or that technical expression,
without prejudice to its new Christian meaning, or to
learn something of the art of formal ratiocination. But
men like Tertullian and Origen were after all seeking to
theologise upon a faith anchored to historical realities ;
the Neo-Platonists, on the other hand, were bent on a
metaphysical cosmology. Their trinity and the Trinity
of Church writers have scarcely anything in common but
the number three. Furthermore, their idea of matter
barred out incarnation from the first as inconceivable. To
Porphyry, Christ was a pious sage who may well have
risen to immortality after death, but one whose place is
distinctly beneath Pythagoras. His followers, it was
argued, had mixed His doctrine with falsehood, and
abandoned His toleration of other faiths.
It is in a world filled, or being filled, with religious
and philosophical influences of this description that we
must picture Clement of Alexandria, and especially Origen,
at work. The Gospel had to be stated defensively in an
extremely difficult situation. The task of the Apologists
must be resumed, and the adversary beaten with his
own weapons. And Christ had to be set forth, not as
the Saviour of the world merely, but as One in whom
lay hid the treasures of wisdom and knowledge1; for men
felt there was a specifically Christian gnosis, and neither
the name nor the idea could be dispensed with.

162 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Clement is said, with much probability, to have been
a native of Athens. A pupil of Pantaenus, one of the
best teachers in the institution known as the Catechetical
School of Alexandria, he was himself a member of the
staff more or less from 190 to 216. The faith of
Irenseus and Tertullian he too shared with conviction;
evidently, however, he regarded himself as free to construe .
its elements with a certain speculative liberality. He
describes himself as a scholar of Tatian, and there are
frequent traces of the influence of Justin. With all his
admiration for Greek philosophy and intense sympathy
with its noble and inspiring characteristics, he never
wavers in the conviction that Christ has brought to men
the best and highest revelation of God.
This revelation, naturally enough, Clement interprets
by means of the Logos doctrine, with the result, at all
events partially, of depersonalising the historic Saviour.
The timeless content for which He stood, rather than
Jesus Christ in His concrete actuality, holds the central
place. Through the Eternal Logos is revealed God most
high, who is seated far above all distinction ; and from
the Logos comes "all that there is upon earth of beauty,
truth, goodness, all that distinguishes the civilised man
from the savage, the savage from the beasts." x He is
freely named Son, and in that character separated by an
absolute gulf from things created. Precisely how Clement
means us to conceive the relation of the Logos to the
Father it is difficult to say.2 He uses contradictory modes
of expression, according as the Logos is viewed from the
side of humanity or of God Himself.3 From below He
appears as the fulness of the Godhead concentred in an
independent life ; from above He is the highest next to
the Almighty, the minister of God, mediating all created
life, and at a certain distance from the Father as the
1 Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 72.
2 It is at all events an essential relation. " If God is a Father, He is
at the same time Father of a Son " (Strom, v. 1. 1).
8 Cf. Redepenning, Origenes, 110-14.

THE LOGOS IN CLEMENT 163
absolute monad. But in a writer who asserts both the
full equality of Father and Son, and the Son's subordina
tion, we are bound, I think, to hold that the idea of
subordination is secondary. It is a result of the effort
to posit distinctions in the Godhead.
It has been maintained that Clement makes an im
portant difference between the Logos as in God, and the
Logos-Son, to whom it has been given to become incarnate.
But the theory, tempting as it is, appears to depend on
a single passage of doubtful interpretation.1 The Word,
we are told, came into the world, fashioning His own
humanity ; and " this Logos, the Christ, the cause both
of our being at first (for He was in God) and of our well-
being, this very Logos has now appeared to men, He alone
being both, at once God and man."2 The continuous
identity of the Subject is put quite clearly ; the Logos " put
on a man," and was " God in the form of man, stainless,
the servant of His Father's will." 3 A tendency to think of
our Lord's humanity as but a garment brings Clement
repeatedly to the verge of docetism. Christ's body was
superior to physical needs ; " He ate, not for the sake of
His bodily frame, which was held together by a holy
energy, but lest His companions should think about Him
otherwise."4 He knew no pain, or grief, or emotion,
and had no need to learn. Theories which start, not
from the historical Christ, but from the pre-existent Word,
and proceed by way of deduction, will always be in grave
hazard on the side of docetism, and Clement is no ex
ception. But when it is contended by some writers that
for him " the Lord's descent into flesh " was no real in
carnation, but only an extreme case of Divine inspiration
or possession, we must demur. Not only is Christ's full
Godhead vital for Clement, as furnishing a guarantee that
the revelation He brought was perfect, but there are
1 The question is argued by Mr. Bethune-Baker, op. tit. 134 f.
2 Protr. 1. s Ibid. 2.
4 Strom, vi. 9 ; i.e. to refute docetism by anticipation. Cf. Glover, The
Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, 299.

164 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
too many passages whose meaning is quite explicit.
Thus, for example, He speaks of Christ as " a God in
human form,"1 and elsewhere says that "assuming the
character of man, and having been fashioned in flesh, He
enacted the drama of human salvation." 2 But he cannot
be quoted as teaching the Two Natures doctrine; for
the unity of, Christ is assumed by him rather than de
monstrated; and indeed he scarcely inquires at all
regarding the exact relations which obtain between the
Divine content of Christ's person and its phenomenal
human form.
§ 2. (b) Origen. — Origen (185-254), a pupil of
Clement, and his successor in the mastership of the
Catechetical School of Alexandria, is the supremely great
name among the divines of the Christian East. An
Egyptian by race, he was the child of Christian parents.
His width of interest, his learning, his fabulous industry,
not least his devoutness and fine simplicity of nature, make
him a noble and memorable figure. As an exegete, in
spite of a tendency to allegorise, his services to theology
were vast. His troubled yet unceasingly studious life
cannot be recounted here ; but the secret of his wonderful
influence is revealed in the farewell eulogy pronounced
upon him by his pupil, Gregory Thaumaturgus, bishop of
Neo-Csesarea. Later ages, even those which disowned his
heresies most bitterly, paid tribute to his power. "It'
was Origen," says Harnack, " who created the dogmatic of
the Church, and did more than any other man to win the
Old World to the Christian religion." He was leader in
the campaign of Christian theology against the varied
forces of pagan thought, and the thirst for knowledge felt
by the loftier spirits within the Church found its satis
faction mainly in his innumerable works. To his tireless
intellect, theology was very life and happiness. Though
conscious of a staunch fidelity to the historic faith, he
felt it essential that the contents of the creed should at
1 Paed. i. 99. 2 Protr. x. 110.

THE LOGOS IN ORIGEN .' 165
the same time be sublimated by the methods of reverent
speculation, provided only that the limits of ecclesiastical
and apostolic tradition were recognised. Within these
limits free discussion must have its way.1
We turn first to his doctrine of the Logos. God the
Father — this is, as so often, the point of departure — is
immutable and absolute Being, self-conscious Mind throned
sibove all mind and all substance. As being perfectly good,:
He must communicate Himself, and it is in the Logos
that He is first made apprehensible. This Logos, or Sofu
(the two names are freely interchanged), being the most!
eminent of the Divine powers or ideas, embraces within.
Himself the whole contents of the intelligible world; and
for us, indeed, it is a higher thing to view Him in this:
light than to dwell only upon the Christ incarnate and
crucified. Very emphatically Origen insists that the Word
is personal, as well as eternally and intrinsically Divine.;
Both aspects are vital. " For him and the men of his
time," says Dr. Bigg, " the great object was to establish
the true Personality of Christ, to show that though God
He yet was not the Father." 2
As Son, then, the Logos proceeds from the Father;
not, however, by way of partition, but as the will does
from spirit, Or, as he elsewhere expresses it. in a great
phrase which has lodged itself in the Church's mind, by an
eternal generation. The exact words are : est namque ita
aeterna ac . sempitema geheratio, sicut splendor generatur ex
luce.3 '¦, The nature of this generation is ineffable ; we only
know that "it denotes no finite act either temporal or
pre-tefnporal, but an eternal or intemporal process or
relation." Hence to say that a time was when the Son
was not,- is an error (ovk Io-tw ore ovk r/v).4. As an
independent subsistence, then, the Son is numerically
distinct from the Father, but withal they are in substance
absolutely one. In essential content the Son is 6/jtoov<rio<;
with th6*Father, as vapour is with water or children with
1 Cf. the opening words of the de Prmpipiis. 2 Op. cit. p. 166.
8 de Princip. i. 2. 4. / * Cf. ibid. i. 2. 9;

166 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
their parents. They are two viroo-Td&ets, not one, as
the Monarchians said. It is quite in harmony with this
homousia that Origen should elsewhere describe the Son as
" begotten of the Father's will," for in the spiritual realm
no contrast exists between will and substance.1
Our first impression is that by this decisive assertion
of the homousia the co-equality of the Son with the Father
has been secured. But it is not so. Origen shares, in a real
measure, the subordinationism of the Apologists. Begarding
the Son as " the most ancient of all the works " of God,2
he does not hesitate to speak of Him as a KTto-p,a.a The
Son is the second God, but not immutably or intrinsically
good, as the Father is. The Father's will is wiser than
the Son's ; at creation the Son was the Father's servant,
executing His commands. Most remarkable of all, while
practising prayer to Christ as Divine, and indeed insisting
on it as a duty, Origen proclaims that there is a still
higher object of invocation. "In the supreme moment
of adoration, when the soul strains upward to lay itself
as a sacrifice before the highest object of thought, we
must not stop short of Him who is above all." 4 Here,
accordingly, there is a wavering use of terms. If the
result is contradictory, it is surely due to a difficulty from
which the Christian theologian cannot escape ; for the Son
may be viewed from above or from below. Seen from
above, He appears as the first, step towards man, and, in
addition, the content of the word " Son " must, for us, be
drawn from our knowledge of the Incarnate Life; seen
from below, He is the object of religious faith, and ipso
facto on one plane of being with God. In Origen's case
the difficulty was intensified by his desire to construct
a theory including both Christ and the universe. Christ
the Son is not merely Saviour ; He is the World-Beason,
pervading and moulding all things. Hence He stands
1 Loofs, Dogmengeschichte, 194. 2 c. Cels. v. 37.
s On such expressions the Arians fastened, though with only superficial
plausibility. * Bigg, op. tit. 186.

SUBORDINATION OF THE SON 167
midway between the Uncreated and His creation, between
the One and the Many, partaking in the nature of both.
Allusions to the Spirit are even more subordinationist
in tone. In spite of his assertion that the Logos incarnate is
not of first-rate importance for "gnostics," or Christians
of the intellectual rank, Origen's sketch of Christologioal
doctrine1 was such as to exert later a profound influence.
Faced with the difficulty of conceiving how the creative
and all-permeating Logos could gather Himself into an
earthly life, his solution was to make the human soul of
Jesus a mediating bond uniting the infinite Logos to finite
flesh (substantiate animae inter Deum et carnem medians).2
Like all souls, the soul of Jesus was pre-existent. But
alone of all it had kept its purity, and thus, quite apart
from the Incarnation in time, had become one spirit
indissociably with the Logos ; the two being fused in a
union that " may be compared to a mass of iron glowing
for ever with a white heat." In their unity they passed
into an incontaniinate human body, born of a virgin.
Thus was constituted the God-Man (OedvOpomos) ; and
since the Eternal Son is the chief partner in the resultant
complex being, it is fitting that the Incarnate person as a
whole should likewise be designated " Son," and that the Son
of God should be said to have suffered death. But though
Jesus was, in Origen's view, a real man, the normality of
His body is not quite beyond suspicion. True, it is no
phantasmal appearance ; there is no docetism in the strict
sense ; but neither is it composed of coarse matter : rather
it is of ethereal purity and celestially fair, with a glorious
brightness that shone forth even upon earth, and was
manifested completely after death. Moreover, the union
of the Divine and human in the one Christ is represented
as permitting an equally real separation. The taunt of
Celsus about a crucified God is pointless ; for of God it is
impossible to predicate such things, and the man Jesus
1 Cf. Harnack, whose pages on this subject are particularly brilliant.
a de Princip. ii. 6. 3.

168 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
alone suffered and died. "The Word, still remaining
essentially the Word, suffers none of those things which
are endured by the body or soul; but, condescending
occasionally to one who is unable to gaze upon the
splendours and brightness of deity, He becomes as it
were flesh."1 In the light of His cosmic functions the
Logos cannot be thought of as confined to the human life
of Jesus ; even while appearing thus in a form suited
to our capacities, He yet manifested Himself everywhere
as before. Christ, then, is a single complex being ; and in strong
contrast to the aspect of his teaching just noted, Origen
insists that between the two phases or elements of His
constituted life there obtained not a communion merely,
but a gradual merging and commingling, with the result
that the humanity of Jesus is itself deified (deificavit quern
susceperat humanam naturam).2 In terms of a later age, we
may speak of a communicatio idiomatum. So far did this
go that in the end, after the resurrection, the body was
completely absorbed in the Divine spirit. The ascended
Lord has ceased to be man.3 But from another point of
view Origen felt himself justified in declaring that Jesus*
humanity still persists, though His body has been trans
muted into a higher form. For His soul still preserves its
being, merged in the Logos by an inner mystical union1
wrought by its perfection of holy love. As God-Man, we
are told, Christ offered the sacrifice which atones for sin,
and paid the ransom by which the devil's power has been
shattered. This, it is true, is always balanced by the
assurance that His crucifixion is of value only for those
who cannot rise to the apprehension of ideal truth. " To
know Christ crucified is the knowledge of babes." But td»
such as need Him not, or need Him no longer, in the
capacity of Physician and Eedeemer, Christ is Divine
Teacher and Leader, who opens the door of the Holy-
Place of sacred mysteries. Of love to this Christ/ Origen
speaks with the most intense feeling.
1 c. Cels. iv. 15. " in Matt. Serm. 33. 3 m Luc. horn. 29.

JESUS' HUMAN SOUL 169
There is - no trace in Origen of sympathy with
Monarchian ideas, against which he directs various
passages of strong polemic. But he uses freely all
other views about our Lord's Person which were current
in the Church, dovetailing them into each other with
amazing skill, and adapting to his purpose not a few
conceptions which later times banned as heretical. His
main conception, according to which the personal Logos
united Himself to the personal soul (and so to the body)
of Jesus, differs noticeably from the tendency of earlier
writers, like Irenseus, to say rather that the Logos became
mam This insistence on the personal being of Christ qua
man is a conspicuous merit in his system. Even Clement
had spoken of the direct union of the Logos with a
human body, and later thinkers were apt to surrender
the position Origen had gained by his clear perception
of Jesus' soul as truly human. Yet in Origen's hands the
result was an obvious dualism. If in Christ we have
a human subject which, as a free moral personality,
cleaves inseparably to the Logos, and is ultimately lost
in Him, the total outcome, as Harnack puts it, is not
so much a doctrine of two natures (though the phrase
" two natures " does occur) as rather that of tWo subjects
which gradually become amalgamated with each other.1
The human personality of the Saviour finally disappears,
leaving only its Divine content. Still, we cannot forget
that the unity which Origen strove to bring out between
God and man in Christ was a unity so ethically mediated
that it could also be designated "essential" or "sub
stantial." He felt how great was the condescension of the
Eternal Son in being born, and by conceiving His advent
as a real self-exinanition he makes room for a truly human
development. " Ignorance and learning," he writes, " per
tain not to the Eternal Wisdom in itself, but as it is in
flesh; for Christ had to learn to stammer and speak like
a child with, infants." This condescension of God to
human life is met and ratified by a capacity on the part
1 History of Dogma, ii. 373.

170 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of humanity to receive the essential life of God ; and
it is probably in the main as a real effort to illustrate
this position that the thought of Origen marks an epoch
in Christology. § 3. The Correspondence of the Dionysii. — If Tertullian
dominated the West, in the East the influence of Origen
was supreme. But trouble was sure to result from
the inconsistency of his views — his assertion of the
homousia, for example, coupled with a distinct sub
ordination of the Logos. How easily he could be mis
interpreted we see in the brief significant controversy
of Dionysius of Alexandria with Dionysius of Bome,
about the year 260. The former had received his
training in the school of Origen, and, in fulminating
against the Sabellians of Egypt, had been unfortunate
enough to exaggerate the subordinationism of his master.
Accentuating the distinction of Father and Son, he
declared that the Son is the Father's creature, and was
not before He came to be. He has a different oiaia
from the Father, as the vine has from the vintager or
a ship from its builder. This was of course utterly
to misconceive Origen, who had taught clearly enough
that as begotten by the Father the Son is absolutely
I separate from all creatures. Complaint was promptly
made by the orthodox to Dionysius of Eome ; the eternity
of the Son had been denied, and suspicion cast upon
His unity of essence with the Father. Thus they pled
the doctrine of Origen against his erring follower.
The bishop of Eome dealt with the matter on the
lines of Tertullian and Novatian. He urged that in zeal
for the three distinctions in the Godhead the unity must
not be overlooked. Tritheism is the deadliest of foes.
Hence, appealing to the Baptismal Creed, he was content
to say that faith accepts the being of one God, the
Almighty Father, of Christ Jesus His Son, and of the
Holy Spirit. In particular, the Logos must have been
ever in the Father, for He is no product of time, not

THE DIONYSII 17 1
having been made, but begotten in a Divine and ineffable
manner. The Boman bishop appears even to have laid
stress upon the term o/ioovaios, and Seeberg points out
that this is the first occasion upon which the historic
adjective figures as a definitely orthodox expression.1
The tone of his answer to the Eastern complaint is
judicial, not speculative, as was natural in a man not
attempting originality, but seeking a wise and tested via
media. Dionysius of Alexandria, protesting meanwhile
that some of his expressions had been misconstrued,
showed himself very ready to make amends. It was true,
he said, that no time had ever been when God had not
been Father ; the Son, as the radiance of Eternal Light,
was Himself eternal. To say, however, that he rejected
the homousia was false, though he had felt a delicacy in
using a term not to be found in Scripture. Thus the
correspondence ended, with apparent agreement on all
hands as to the unity of essence. What is mainly of
interest to the modern student is to observe how one
part of Origen's system has already begun to be set in
opposition to another, and also to note how practically-
minded Bome, clinging to the Creed, and deprecating
additions to it, stands in uneasy contrast to the Eastern
love of speculation.
§ 4. Paul of Samosata. — A few years after the death
of Origen, theological attention was drawn sharply to the
opinions of Paul of Samosata, the ablest expositor in the
ancient Church of Dynamic Monarchianism. Paul was
bishop of Antioch from 260 to 269. With considerable
knowledge of the world he combined striking gifts of
exposition, and could hold unfriendly synods at bay by
the sheer skill of his dialectic. Starting with a purely Old
Testament idea of God, he taught that in the man Jesus
there dwelt the Divine Sophia or Logos. But the Logos
is no personal subsistence (avvrroaTaTos) ; it is simply the
Spirit of God, and exists in the Deity as a man's reason
1 Op. tit. i. 468.

172 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
does in himself, and this essential impersonality renders
it unthinkable that it should manifest itself personally
in a human life. It is present in Christ, therefore,
only as a power or influence, like the indwelling of
wisdom in the prophets. What is unique in Jesus is the
inhabitation of the Logos sensu eminenti; the man is as
a temple for the higher presence. Thus the historic Jesus
while superior to other men in all things, is strictly
" from beneath " (Xpio-To<; KaTwdev) ; Mary bore a man our
equal, who is the only personal subject in the case, and
whose existence began at the nativity. But the Logos
from above inspired Him, and wrought in Him as a quality,
though not in essential or personal form (ovk ovo-uoSSk
aXkd KaTa. irotoTnTo). Apparently Paul made a good
deal of the Baptism, as marking the point at which the
Logos was communicated. Thus endowed, Jesus kept Him
self by obedience in the love of God. Between God and
Jesus, as two distinct persons, there subsisted a relation
ship of perfect unity in disposition, based on perfect love,
a bond which is best described as ethical, not natural, since
it is constituted by mutual knowledge and communion
between a Father only in heaven and a Son only on earth.
Finally, in virtue of His transcendent merit, Jesus attained
to such a permanent union with God as qualifies Him to
be Saviour, and confers upon Him the name that is above
every name.1 Subsequently to death and resurrection
He was invested with Divine power, and may fitly be
designated "God (born) of the Virgin." As Harnack
expresses it, " He became God through Divine grace and
His constant manifestation of goodness."2
Clearly enough this scheme has some connection with
Origen, though whether of misinterpretation or revolt is not
so easy to say. Origen too had said much of the ethical
development of the man Jesus, and of His possession of
the Logos. Yet the difference is obvious that to Origen
the Logos existed hypostatically before all time, while for
1 Paul was fond of arguing from Ph 26"11.
2 History of Dogma, iii. 43.

PAUL OF SAMOSATA 173
Paul the hypostatic factor is purely human. Curiously,
although Seeberg calls him the first Unitarian, and
declares that he is the only thinker among dynamic
Monarchians whom the name really fits, Paul nevertheless
persisted, with whatever inconsistency, in speaking of the
Godhead of Christ, and this after he had stopped the
singing of hymns in public worship which affirmed Christ's
essential divinity.
Harnack praises Paul warmly, almost as if he were
an early Bitschlian of the left wing. Thus, for example :
" Paul's expositions of nature and will in the Persons, of
the essence and power of love, of the Divinity of Christ,
as only perceptible in the work of His ministry, because
exclusively constituted by unity of will with God, are
almost unparalleled in the whole dogmatic literature of
the Oriental Churches in the first three centuries." x He
also commends him for having fixed upon Jesus' will, not
His nature, as the element of Divine uniqueness, and in
general for his refusal to plunge into speculation. The
authenticity of the fragments on which Harnack bases
part of this eulogy has been questioned ; but in any case
we may well permit the Samosatene to remind us that
a mere opposition between will and nature is unsound.
Nature certainly may mean " substance," and on that
understanding it is obviously a category unequal to the
task of interpreting supremely personal and spiritual
realities, so that Paul's protest will seem in place as a
warning that " nature " can only be usefully employed to
mean the whole personal being, whether of God or man, as
a living unity of knowing, feeling, and will. Beyond this
terminological concession, however, we cannot go. If we
have to choose between a Saviour who was God by original
and inherent life, and one who, as now suggested, became 2
God, we shall scarcely hesitate. The conception of a
Godhead which came to be, although not unknown in
1 History of Dogma, iii. 44.
2 tiarepov airbv p.era ri\v iyavSpdirijo'iy ix jrpoKOTijs TeffeoiroirjaBat.,
Athanasius, de Cogn. 26. 45.

174 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
nineteenth-century thought, is sheer mythology. It is
simply a mistaken expression of the perfectly legitimate
demand that the human aspect of Christ must not be
sacrificed or suppressed.
It is interesting to observe that the Council which
condemned Paul, in 268 or 269, explicitly censured the
term ofioovaiof. This was done, according to Athanasius,
because Paul had contended that if Christ is ofioouaiof
with the Father, their two identical ovo-Lat, must be
derived from a still higher ova-la, as the ultimate source
or fount of Deity, which would imply that in reality
three ovo-lat exist. But Hilary's account is much more
probable. The word was rejected, he says, because Paul
had used it to cover his doctrine of the impersonality
of the Logos. For as yet ovala and inroo-Tao-is were
synonyms ; and the assertion of one essence was taken
to imply one personality. Henceforth no Christology
could hope for a hearing which did not make room for
the hypostatic pre existence of Christ, and affirm His
divinity as eternal in the past no less than in the
future.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
§ 1. The Heresy of Arius. — Before the commencement
of the Arian strife, the Church appeared to have reached
three fixed truths respecting the Lord's person, as the
fruit of previous controversies. These points were (a)
the Son's unity of essence with the Father ; (b) His
eternal generation ; (c) His personal distinction from the
Father. Suddenly, however, new conflicts broke out round
the first and second of these, and raged for near a
century. Arius, through whose intervention the question became
acute, was a presbyter of Alexandria, of whose birth and
early life we know nothing. One of the churches of the
city was under his care, and he appears to have discharged
his responsibilities with exemplary diligence and piety.
Of ascetic aspect and winning manners (so it is said),
his faults were vanity and ambition. Nevertheless, albeit
the most detested heretic in history, it seems likely
enough that when in advanced years he began to urge
his peculiar theories, it was without any clear conscious
ness that he was deserting from the traditional view of
the Church.Previous to his residence in Alexandria, Arius sat at
Litekatttke — Gwatkin, Studies cf Arianism, 1882 ; Newman, The
Arians of the Fourth Century3, 1854 ; Loofs, articles " Arianismus," RE.
ii., " Christologie," RE. iv., and " Kenosis," RE. x. ; Schultz, Die Lehre
von der Goitheit Christi, 1881 ; Gore, Dissertations, 1895 ; Voigt, Die
Lehre des Athanasius, 1881 ; Rainy,' The Ancient Catholic Church, 1902 ;
Zahn, Marcellus von Ancyra, 1867 ; Curtis, History of Creeds and
Confessions of Faith, 1911 ; Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1901.
176

176 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the feet of Lucian of Antioch, a contemporary and
follower of Paul of Samosata, who had fallen out of
Church fellowship, but presided over a famous exegetical
school. Lucian had made certain modifications in Paul's
Christology, which Arius took over from his teacher.
They involved an approximation to the left wing of
the Origenistic school, a representative of which we have
already encountered in Dionysius of Alexandria. For
the most part Arius only repeated the views of Lucian.
The occasion of the decisive outbreak, according to the
historian Socrates (i. 5), was a doctrinal address given
to his presbyters by Alexander, bishop of Alexandria,
probably in the year 318. Thus the controversy was
Eastern in origin. In the West, owing to the influence
of writers like Tertullian, the mind of the Church had
been satisfied with formulas which combined the deity of
Christ with the oneness of the Godhead. So Dionysius
of Bome had insisted on the homousia, going back to
the una substantia of Tertullian. Prior to the con
troversy, therefore, the West had virtually pronounced
judgment. Arius sets out from a baldly transcendent monotheism.1
God is abstractly perfect and infinite, one and unbegotten,
which means that the idea of a Divine emanation or
TrpofioXrj cannot be entertained ; " the unity of God," in
short, "excludes not only distinctions inside the Divine
nature, but also contact with the world."2 Hence the
Son, although pre-existent, is not unbegotten; for any
thing else would make the Father composite and divisible,
and the second " unbegotten " were Brother of the
first. Accordingly the Son had a beginning. Before all
time He came into existence, out of nothing, by God's
will, His primary function being that of mediator of
creation. So that He is a creature, even if the first of
creatures, as is proved by Pr 822ff-. Before His generation
1 So much is God a mystery that Arius says He is inscrutable tQ His
own Son.
2 Gwatkin, The Arian Controversy, 6.

CHRISTOLOGY OF ARIUS 177
or production He was not. " God was not Father eternally ;
on the contrary, there was a time when God was alone, and
was not as yet Father, though later He became Father.
The Son did not exist eternally ; for, all things having come
to be out of that which was not . . . the Logos of God
also Himself originated out of things that were not (e^ ovk
ovt(ov), there was once when He was not, and He was not
prior to His becoming (fjv ttotc ore ovk fjv, Kal ovk r)v
trplv yivrjTat)." 1 This means, of course, that there is no
identity of essence between the Father and the Son (£ei/o?
tov vlov KaT ovaiav o traTrjp'). There is indeed a Logos
immanent in God, but it is not the Son ; and the Son,
like all other creaturely beings, participates in this
inherent Logos, and is Himself named Logos only by way
of grace. Arius was willing to call Christ " God " on
occasion, and in fact went so far as to employ the
orthodox - sounding phrase, " fully God, only - begotten,
immutable."2 But this was an evasion, as he virtually
concedes in the more popular Thalia : 3 " Even if He be
styled God, yet is He not true God, but only by the
participation of grace, even as all others." At this point
a startling corollary comes into view. If the Logos is
not unbegotten, neither is He immutable. " The Logos
Himself is changeable (TpeirTo?) ; it is by His own choice
that He remains good, so long as He will ; but when He
wishes, even He can change, just as we can." God,
knowing in advance that He would be perfect, gave Him
anticipatively the glory won by His human virtue. Such
things had been said before, by Paul of Samosata,
regarding the historic Christ; but it is jioteworthy that
Arius, following Lucian, affirmed them/ definitely of the
pre-temporal Logos, possibly influenced^ by his belief that
Christ had no human soul, its place being taken directly
by the Logos. I
Schultz has pronounced the Arian theory of the Lord's
1 Thai, in Athan. Or. c. Ar. i. 5.
2 In his Epistle to Eusebius of Nicomedia.
8 A collection of songs " for sailors and millers and wayfarers."
12

178 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
person to be " inwardly the least stable and dogmatically
the most worthless of all the Christologies to be met
with in history."1 Few will question the justice of
this verdict. For Arianism introduced a mythological
element into Christianity, strangely reminiscent of the
heroes and demigods of pagan legend. Proofs, no doubt,
might have been quoted as to this or that point from
older writers, for both the Apologists and Tertullian had
taught that the Son had a beginning in time; but there
is a difference between the casual phrases of pioneer
exploration and the clear-cut terminology, of deliberate
system. The completeness with which Arius missed his
mark is one of the ironies of history. Starting with a
desire to clear the worship of Christ from a charge of
polytheism, he led the way straight back to heathen
idolatry. After proclaiming that Christ's humanity is
fundamental, he ended by denying Him a human soul.
Above all, he made it fatally certain that on his terms
our Lord is no true mediator, no daysman " who can lay a
hand upon us both." God stands' outside the world, and
the chasm cannot be bridged. The Church refused, on
purely religious grounds, to be put off with a Saviour
who turned out on examination to be only an inferior
cosmological principle. And from the first it was an
ominous characteristic of Arianism that it strove to render
the Gospel into the terms of common sense, and took
pride in having so banished all mystery that the problems
of Christology are child's play to any fairly intelligent
outsider. Our business is with the progress of doctrine, not the
struggles of parties, and we cannot follow the windings
of the sixty years of controversy. Yet it should be said
that Arius pled his case before the world with singular
political dexterity. His influence was not confined to
Alexandria. Bishops and virgins of Egypt favoured him,
and he had champions among the episcopate of Palestine
and Syria. Shallow and thoughtful men alike were
1 Goitheit Christi, 65.

THE NICENE CREED 179
attracted by his views, at least to begin with ; but
most of all he was assisted by the prevailing fear of
Sabellianism. It was only after an immense expendi
ture of intellectual and ethical resources that the Church
as a whole was brought to see how the specious simplicity
of his theories was totally subversive of the fundamental
realities of the Christian faith.
§ 2. The Nicene Creed. — The first to stamp the
doctrine of Arius with churchly disapproval was his
bishop, Alexander. Probably in 321, he passed sentence
of excommunication on the leader and a few of his chief
followers. Alexander's own statements on Christology are
opaque, and not devoid of superficial contradictions, but
his drift is quite clearly to maintain the essential unity
of Father and Son, and the inherent divinity of the
Eedeemer Christ. To Arius he replied that if Christ is
the effulgence of the Father's glory, to deny His eternity
is to deny that in God there is light eternal. God, as
such, is Father, and this He cannot be without a Son.
On the other hand, Alexander holds that the Son is
generate of the Father, though in no material sense or by
way of actual division. At the same time, as an Origenist
of the right wing he can speak of the Logos as " a mediat
ing only-begotten nature," 1 set between the unoriginate
Father and created things, and his distaste for Sabellian
ism manifests itself in the phrase that the two natures in
the Divine substance were not one, but like in all points.
It is even explained that the Father, who alone is un
begotten, is anterior to, as well as greater than, Christ ;
on which Harnack well remarks that evidently " the real
point in dispute [with Arius] was not as to subordination
and co-ordination, but as to unity of substance and
difference of substance." 2 But an irreconcilable hostility
to Arius' doctrine is expressed in his insistent claim that
the resemblance of the Son to the Father is an essential
1 /ie<riTei5ou<ra <pvcris fiovoyerfis.
'History of Dogma, vol. iv. 23.

180 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
one. If the Arians suspected Alexander of Sabellianism,
his phrases were more to blame than his ideas.
By this time Constantine had become aware of the
dispute. Perceiving how detrimental bitter controversy
must be to the unity of his empire, he resolved to bring
it to an end, and summoned all Christian bishops to
assemble at Nicsea in Bithynia (325). It was the first
ecumenical Council, and something like 300 bishops
attended, mostly from the East. Two presbyters came
from Bome, and Hosius of Cordova was the Spanish
deputy. In the Council itself we can distinguish three
parties, shading off into each other — the Arians, led by
Eusebius of Nicomedia, and comparatively few in number;
a still smaller group who sided with Alexander by convic
tion ; and between these, the great majority of the bishops,
either too indifferent to theology to appreciate the issue,
or disposed by conservatism to rest content with Origen
as usually interpreted. Of this middle party the spokes
man was Eusebius of Csesarea, by far the most learned
member of the Council.
First of all the Arians presented a creed shaped
to their mind, only to see it torn fiercely in fragments.
On this Eusebius of Csesarea brought forward the
baptismal creed of his own church, " a short and simple
document, admirably recommended to conservative feeling
by its scriptural language and prudent evasions of the
question before the Council."1 It was Origenist in
general type, speaking of Christ as the Logos of God,
" the first-born of all creation, begotten of the Father
before all ages," and, in short, had the good and bad
features of a compromise. The bulk of those present
would have accepted it without discussion ; but men like
Athanasius and Marcellus of Ancyra, who realised the
danger, were resolved not to be put off with ambiguities.
They felt that phrases like "first-born of all creation"
gave a loop-hole to Arianism, and that the mere statement
that the Son " was made flesh " affirmed nothing vital as to
1 Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, 39.

THE NICENE CREED 181
His possession of a true human soul. Possibly in the
end it was Hosius of Cordova who urged the Emperor
to include the pregnant words 6p,oov<no<; to> iraTpi, as
a bulwark against equivocation. Hosius, as a Western,
may have overlooked the difficulties in the phrase of
which the Easterns were conscious, and which had led
them, fifty years before, to reject it in their con
demnation of Paul of Samosata. Further, opoovaiof
agrees with the Western tradition as stated by Tertullian.
Once the Emperor had indicated his approval, nothing
remained for the majority but to submit ; and ultimately
the creed of Eusebius was remodelled in a spirit of stern
and resolute opposition to all Arianising views. The text,
as passed with virtual unanimity, is as follows : —
Utcnevofiev eh eva Oebv iraTepa iravTOKpaTopa,
irdvTcov opaToiv Te Kal dopaTOiv. Kal els eva Kvpiov
'Iwaovv XptcrTOV tov vlbv tov Qeov, yevvvdivTa Sk tov
TraTpos fiovoyevfj, TOvreaTiv e«: t?j? ovcrtas tov iraTpos,
debv eK deov, oSco? sk $<uto9, Qeov aXnOtvbv e/c 0eov akijOtvov,
yevvwOevTa, oil irovr\QevTa, ofioovatov tG> iraTpi, Bi ov to, irdvTa
eyeveTO, tu Te iv tw ovpava Kal to, iv ttj yfj • tov Si fjixas
tov? dvdpdnrovs Kal Bia tt/v r)p,eTepav acoTnplav KaTeXdovTa
Kal aapKCoffevra, ivavOpoiirrjcravTa, iradovTa, Kal dvaaTavTa
rfj Tplrrj f)p,epq, dve\66vTa eh ovpavovs, Kal ip%op,evov
Kpivat £o~)VTa<; Kal veKpovs. Kal eh to ayiov irvevpa.
Toils Be XeyovTas ' r)v 7TOT6 6Ve ovk r\v, Kal irplv
yevvr)6r)vat ovk rjv, Kal oti if; ovk ovtwv iyeveTO, r) e'f erepas
inroaTdcreci)<; r) overlap (pdaKOVTas etvat, rj ktigtov r/ TperrTov
fj dWotcoTov tov vlbv tov deov, dvadep,aTi£ei ij Ka6o\iKr)
iKKkrjaia.1 1 " We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things
both visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God,
begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, of the substance of the
Fattier, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not
made, of one substance with the Father (homoousion) ; through whom
all things were made, both things in heaven and things on earth ; who
for us men and for our salvation came down and was made flesh, was made
man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens,
and cometh to judge quick and dead. And in the Holy Spirit. But those

182 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
The main desire of those who framed this creed was
obviously, as has been remarked, to exclude Arianism.
At all costs it must be affirmed that the Son is not a
creature, and that He is of one essence with the Father.
This explains the alterations introduced into the Eusebian
Creed, of which a brief account may be given. To begin
with, Christ is designated, not as Logos, but as Son ; and
the two phrases, " the first-born of all creation " and " be
gotten of the Father before all ages," are dropped. Arians
could have accepted both. Next, there are additions
pointing in the same direction : (1) '' only-begotten '' has
attached to it the explanatory clause, " that is, from the
essence of the Father"; (2) two phrases are inserted,
" begotten, not made," and the famous " of one essence
with the Father " ; (3) the creed ends with unmistakable
anathemas. According to these decisions, the Divine Son-
ship of Christ is set forth as no accident of time, but an
eternal, and, as it were, organic relation within the Godhead.
The distinction between Father and Son and their unity
are equally stated and balanced over-against each other
by the two phrases " from the essence " (distinction) and
" of one essence " (unity). Finally, by adding " was made
man " to " was made flesh," the Arian tenet that Christ had a
real body, but no human soul, was definitively barred out ;
the Council, with remarkable self-restraint, laying down no
other finding as to the constitution of the theanthropic
person. Two curious facts are worth mention, as indicat
ing that the Council had no leaning to Origen, and was
more concerned to insist on the unity of Father and Son
than the distinction. In the first place, there is no
reference to " eternal generation " ; in the second, the
anathemas employ inroaTacrv? and ovaia as synonyms.
The latter usage almost entitles a thinker like Marcellus
who say that 'there was once when He was not,' and 'before being be
gotten He was not,' and ' He came to be of things that were not,' or contend
that the Son of God is of a different substance or essence, or created, or
(morally) alterable or mutable — these doth the Catholic Church anathematize,"
For the Greek text, see Hahn, § 142.

ATHANASIUS 183
of Ancyra to read 6p,oovo-tos in a Sabellian sense. The
Sabellian associations of the word, at all events, are the
most natural explanation of Athanasius' long reluctance
to adopt it.
In the end only a few refused to sign ; some perhaps,
like Eusebius of Nicomedia, subscribing their names with
secret reservations ; others feeling, in their own bitter
phrase, that " the soul is none the worse for a little ink."
In point of fact, the views of Athanasius had been forced
on half-convinced men, and reaction came inevitably, with
the result that the Council of Nicsea opened a new stage
in the controversy it, was designed to close. This brings
its to the man who now fought for truth in the front rank,
and through whose instrumentality the Church was enabled
to keep the faith.
§ 3. Athanasius.-^- Athanasius (c. 297-373) comes
into view at the. Council of Nicsea, to which he accom
panied his bishop, Alexander. Probably a native of
Alexandria, and doubtless trained in the grammar, logic,
and rhetoric of the time, he appears early to have won the
regard of the bishop, who employed him as his secretary.
By the opening of the Arian controversy he was deacon,
and in 326 succeeded Alexander in the bishop's chair.
Although technically ineligible, he is considered on good
grounds to have played a leading part in the Nicene
debates. Though not erudite like Origen, he exhibits a
clear and disciplined intelligence, as well as a searching
religious power, and a courageous loftiness of spiritual
temper, which make his vast influence no mystery. States
man, saint, thinker, he gave his life as a long sacrifice for
truth, with hardly one lapse from consistent greatness.
His fundamental ideas may be gathered from his tract,
On the Incarnation of the Word of God, written before Arius
had broached the new theory. Its leading thought is that
God Himself has entered human history. Through the fall
sin had invaded earth, bringing upon guilty man the fate of
corruption and mortality. A higher power must interpose,

184 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
since repentance on man's part would have been insufficient
remedy ; and hence in His infinite love God did the wonder
of wonders. " The immortal Word took human flesh, and
gave His mortal body for us all." 1 He wrought deliverance
by receiving the principle of death into Himself, so per
mitting it to wreak all its might and terror on His nature,
and annulling its power for all who are one with life
in Him. By resurrection He vanquished the powers of
corruption for ever, in a triumph which is the surety of
our glorious return to God. To use the very words
of Athanasius, "He was made man that we might be
made God." 2
His piercing criticisms of the Arian doctrine are only
an application of these principles, from which he never
swerved.3 Arius, he said, taught pure polytheism ; for if
the Father is not Father everlastingly, and if in time a Son
emerges, as the finite progeny of Godhead, and afterwards
a Spirit lower still, who can answer for it that this is the
end ? Only if the Son is identical in nature and essence
with the Father is it possible to speak of the Divine unity,
and that this is the Son's true place is settled by the fact
that Christians pray to Him. Again, the theory of Arius
takes all certainty out of salvation. For how can it be
certain if the Logos is morally alterable ; how in that case
can we see the unchanging Father in the Son, or regard the
Son as the Father's image ? In short, given the Arian view
of Christ, it is idle to talk of our attaining to real union
with God, or the forgiveness of sins, or immortality. If the
Son has a created nature, His becoming man leaves us still
at a distance from God, for no one who is a creature like
ourselves could raise us to oneness with the Creator. He
could never give us what He had not for Himself. A God
head not original, but derived, could not be passed on to
1 Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 10.
2 On the rendering "God," rather than "gods,'' see Robertson's note,
p. 54 of his translation of Athanasius (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
vol. iv.).
8 Cf. Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte (lte Aufl.), 162 f.

HIS CRITICISM OF ARIUS 185
others. Accordingly, " He had not promotion from His
descent, but rather Himself promoted the things which
needed promotion ; and if He descended to effect their
promotion, therefore He did not receive in reward the name
of the Son and God, but rather He Himself has made us
sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming Himself
man. Therefore He was not man, and then became God,
but He was God, and then became man, and that to deify
us." 1 This is an idea which perpetually recurs ; to partake
of the Son is to partake of God Himself.2 And once more,
the idea of a cosmological mediator is superfluous. God is
not too proud to touch the world, and needs no intermediary
to bring Him in contact with finitude. Such a notion is
immeasurably more unworthy of Him without whom not
even a sparrow falls to the ground, than a clear assertion of
His creative activity. Indeed, with a surprising divergence
into pure logic, Athanasius in one passage 3 urges that if
God needs a mediator to create, and the Logos is a creature,
yet another mediator must have been required to create Him,
and so on to infinity. Arius therefore satisfies reason as
little as he does religion.
Thus, if Arius held Christ as part of the created world,
Athanasius contended still more resolutely that His place
is within the sphere of essential Godhead. Carefully
maintaining that Divine unity to which Sabellius had borne
confused witness, he set forth the being of the Son as
Divine in the absolute and eternal sense. " Whatever that
manner of existence is which differences God from all
creatures, that is to be ascribed to the Son as well as to
the Father." 4 His is no mediating nature, as Origen had
taught, between the increate and the created ; " the Son is
different in kind and different in essence from things
originate, and on the contrary is proper to the Father's
essence and one in nature with it." 6 At the same time
His independent personal being is secured. What binds
1 Or. c. Ar. i. 38-39 (Robertson's translation).
2 Ibid. 16. 3 Ibid. ii. 26. 4 Rainy, op. tit. 335.
• Or. c. Ar. i. 58 ; cf. 13.

186 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Father and Son together is unity of essence (evcnns t%
ovalas); the Word is generate from the essence of the Father.
Still, at first Athanasius shows a certain avoidance of the word
o/ioovaios, which occurs but once in the Orationes contra
Arianos. He speaks indeed of the Son as " having with His
Father the oneness of Godhead indivisible," x and refers to
" the identity of the one Godhead " 2 which Son and Father
share. He can even express his meaning adequately by the
term " like," in a variety of combinations; as " like in essence"
or " like in all things." And, in agreement with the Nicene
Creed, he employs inroaTacns and ovala as synonyms.
But it has been pointed out that a change took place during
his second exile, part of which was spent in Bome (339-
346). For whatever reason, Athanasius went back to
Alexandria a more convinced advocate of the term opoovaios,
which the Nicene Council, he remarks, had inserted to check
the Eusebians, " by way of signifying that the Son was from
the Father, and not merely like, but the same in likeness." 3
It is characteristic of him that in such a case he would
not decline the newer phrase.4
The Son, then, comes forth from the Father by
birth or generation ; and by generation Athanasius means
simply the Son's complete participation in the whole
essence of the Father. The idea of an efflux or emanation
is inapplicable : " God, being without parts, is Father of
the Son without partition or passion ; for there is neither
effluence of the Immaterial, nor influx from without, as
1 Or. c. Ar. iv. 41. 2 Ibid. iii. 4. s de Deer. 20.
4 When Athanasius says (de Deer. 27) that "the Word is not of another
essence or subsistence (4i Mpas oi<rtas fj inrocrri.o-e(as), but proper to the
Father's," he is obviously hampered by having so far no settled term for the
distinctions in the Godhead. "Hypostasis" and "ousia" are used inter
changeably. The West had personae for the three aspects of Deity, but the
Greek equivalent (irpdo-iawa) was suspect owing to its Sabellian associations,
This lack of terminological unanimity and clearness was extremely awkward ;
and at times we can see that Easterns and Westerns who felt themselves at
variance were really in agreement, but got to cross-purposes through the
ambiguity of terms, and especially owing to the fact that the technical word3
in Greek and Latin did not correspond. Something was done to clear up the
confusion by the Council of Alexandria in 362,

LOGOS REPLACED BY SON 187
among men ; but, being uncompounded in nature, He is
Father of one Only Son." Again and again it is insisted
that this generation is not of the Father's will (e'/e fiovXrjo-eo*;)
but of His nature, for the Son is not to be reduced to the
offspring of arbitrary volition. Athanasius' favourite symbol
of the relationship is the familiar one of radiance in its
unity with the parent light.1 So the Godhead, which exists
in the Father, belongs to the Son also in the totality of its
essence ; " the same things are said of the Son which are
said of the Father, except His being said to be Father." 2
Finally, the generation is an eternal one, for " as the Father
is always good by nature, so He is always generative by
nature." 3
An argument of this kind, based not so much on logic
as on permanent religious considerations, really meant that
the philosophical doctrine of the Logos, as interpretative of
the Lord's person, had been replaced by the conception
of the Divine Sonship. Experience had proved that the
term Logos too easily lent itself to cosmological theories
with no bearing on salvation, and tended to denote a
mediating Being, essentially distinct from God. In such
ideas Athanasius could have no interest. The Saviour
must be God, if a world perishing in death was to be
renewed in Divine immortality. Being very God, how
ever, and having put on human flesh, the Son became liable
to suffering ; nay more, He submitted to be put to death
in the body, that by His risen power He might quicken
all men. In Him, as the Second Adam, we have gained
what was lost through the first, for whatever happened to
Christ's flesh happened to us also mystically. Loofs has
justly remarked that this doctrine of redemption, which
goes back through Asia Minor tradition to the Fourth
Gospel, is the most important element in the Athanasian
theology. Not only was central significance given thereby
to the historic Christ, but the religious interests at stake
in the Arian controversy were placed in their true light,
and the ultimate triumph of the Nicene doctrine assured.4
1 Cf. Or. c. Ar. iii. 4. 2 Ibid. 8 Ibid. iii. 67. 4 RE. ii. 18-19.

188 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Looking back, we can perceive that a strongly mono
theistic tendency gave tone to Athanasius' mind, and
lent irresistible force to his conflict with the followers of
Arius. His unfaltering conviction that the Son has His
being within the one Godhead was also in line with
immemorial Christian instincts, and was expressed, besides,
with such resolute and persistent energy that after his
time neither Sabellianism nor a doctrine of subordination
affecting the intrinsic nature of the Son could make
headway. But withal Athanasius never wavered in the
belief that the Father is the source and fountain of deity.
These two aspects of theory, the one identifying the Son
with the Father's essence, the other representing the Son
as somehow caused by, or derived from, the Father as
the Divine Monad, are both present in his writings,
and neither can be ignored in an estimate of the whole.
Animadversions, no doubt, may be made upon this or that
defect in his teaching. We should put differently his
point that God is Father " by nature, and not of will," for
to the modern mind will is the very core and essence of
personality. And the Lord's humanity is referred to
with ominous frequency in terms which might seem to
make it consist only of the flesh. Nor will Athanasius'
exegesis always bear inspection, though he has an instinct
for the really important passages of the New Testament.
His power lay in his possession of the truth, and in his
worthy representation of a great cause. His phraseology
is by no means sacrosanct, and we should often apply a
different mode of argument ; but with the New Testament
in our hands it is impossible not to acquiesce in his main
conclusion. Even the word " consubstantial " (ojjloovo-io*;),
so fiercely assailed both then and now, is but the assertion
of the real deity of Christ in terms of the philosophy by
which it had been denied.1
xCf. Illingworth, Reason and Revelation, 123. "The place of
Athanasius as a great religious leader has been obscured by his position as
a tlieologian ; but when we turn to his writings, where do we find less of
what is commonly called dogmatic theology ? There is argument, reason-

MARCELLUS OF ANCYRA 189
§ 4. Marcellus of Ancyra. — At Nicsea, we have seen
victory being snatched by a resolute minority in face
of an immensely larger but divided party. The great
mediating group — often called Eusebians, or later Semi-
Arians, though this term really belongs to the later
party of Homceans — quickly recovered themselves, and a
reaction ensued. The belief of the churches was against
Arius, yet not definitely for Nicsea. This at all events
holds true of the East, where conservative feeling inclined
strongly to the indefinite Christological formulas of an
older time. Two objections were made. In the first
place, bpoovcnos was a new word, and it was an unheard-
of thing thus to put an unscriptural expression (and one
previously condemned) into a creed — not the creed of a
particular bishop, but a symbol or definition constructed
by a general Council, and meant for the whole Church.
To this Athanasius rejoins that " if the expressions are
not in so many words in the Scriptures, yet they contain
the sense of the Scriptures." 1 Secondly, the Nicene
doctrine was denounced as Sabellian. Some colour, it
may be admitted, was given to this accusation by the
teaching of Marcellus of Ancyra, than whom the Nicene
Creed had no more ardent champion. His is a curiously
modern type of theory in certain aspects, and will repay
a brief examination.2
ing, searching for proofs and their statement ; hut all that belongs to the
outworks of his teaching. The central citadel is a spiritual intuition — I
know that my Saviour is the God Who made heaven and earth. He took
his stand firmly and unflinchingly on that personal experience, and all else
mattered little compared with the fundamental spiritual fact. It was not
his arguments, but his unflinching faith, that convinced his generation"
(Lindsay, History of the Reformation, vol. i. 433). Athanasius felt less
interest in the problem of the theanthropic Person, and can hardly be said
to recognise the distinction of person and nature. Cf. Scheel, 102.
1 de Deer. 21.
2 A clear, if rather unsympathetic, account of the Christology of
Marcellus is given by Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, 75-82. See also
Moberly's valuable note, Atonement and Personality, 208-15 ; and Sanday,
in HDB. iv. 579. ~ A modern writer who resembles Marcellus is the cele
brated Moses Stuart of Andover; see some interesting pages in Foster's
History of the New England Theology, chap. x.

190 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
His main interest in the unity of God was
exhibited in an energetic antipathy to the ditheism
he felt to be encouraged by, if not immediately derived
from, the teaching of Origen. But he was not con
sciously a Sabellian. Instead, he went back, as he not
quite unnaturally believed, to the authentic doctrine of the
New Testament. Holding with the Arians that genera
tion carried with it the inferiority of the Son, as neither
co-eternal nor co-equal with the Father, he rejected the
term " Son " as a designation of the pre-existent One.
" Logos " is the proper term ; the Son, on the other
hand, said Marcellus, was generate at His birth "four
hundred years ago," at which point of time the Logos
— i.e. the eternally inherent power of God, which emerged
before time to create the world — came forth into personal
subsistence. The original emergence of the Logos being
" an active extension of the Godhead," 1 the relative dis
tinction implied in it was augmented by the incarna
tion; the incarnate Logos, as he puts it, is "separated
from the Father by the weakness of flesh," yet without
change in His previous relation. In fine, " the Word
as such is pure spirit, and only became the Son of God
by becoming the Son of Man."2 In the same way, the
Spirit exists only since Christ breathed it on His disciples.
" We see the Monad being expanded into a Triad." 3 At
the Parousia, Christ will appear in flesh once more ; there
after the relation of Sonship will terminate, "the Logos
being merged in God as He was before the existence of
the world." What will then become of His body,
unworthy of God in any case, it is impossible to say.
If not Sabellian, the theory was at least Sabellian-
ising. That its author was acknowledged by the great
bulk of the Homousians proves how sincerely they held
the Divine unity, and took the threefold historic revela
tion as the point of departure. Marcellus met them here.
The Christ of the Gospels is kuto. irvevfia the eternal
1 TrKariveadai ivt-pyelq.. 2 Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 54.
* i) fiivas (palverai. Trkarvvofiivn eJs rpidda.

THE CAPPADOCIAN DIVINES 191
Logos, and, until His final abdication, partner in the
throne of God. But the scheme was at once rejected as
involving a merely transitory incarnation ; and unquestion
ably, so far as language goes, the Son of God is in
Marcellus' view a mere phenomenon of time. He came
into collision with Christian feeling even more violently*
by the suggestion that the Lord's humanity itself is but
a temporary vesture, a servant's form to be laid aside
when the servant's work is done. But in justice we
should remember that his refusal of the name " Son " to
the pre-incarnate Christ appears not to have been quite
definitive after all. He fought passionately for the Nicene
Creed, in which the pre-existent One is Son, not Logos ;
and when in 371 his followers presented a creed to
Athanasius, it was found to contain a distinct acknowledg
ment of the eternal Sonship, with anathemas upon those
who held the contrary. At all events, Athanasius never
disowned him publicly, though he tacitly refutes him in
the Fourth Discourse against the Arians. Not till 380
was Marcellus condemned in the West. " Of whose
kingdom there shall be no end," in the so-called Nicseno-
Constantinopolitan Creed, is aimed at him.
§ 5. Movements of Semiarianism ; the Cappadocian
Divines. — Under Constantine, who died in 337, and especi
ally in the reign of his successor Constantius, the mediating
party were high favourites at court. In 351 his brother's
death left Constantius sole Emperor. At once his will
became law in religion. Many of the noblest Westerns, in
cluding Hilary of Poictiers and Hosius of Cordova, endured
exile for the sake of the Nicene faith. In 356, Athanasius
fled to the desert for the third time, not to return for six
years, and the triumph of Arianism seemed complete.
Under the leadership of iEtius of Antioch and Eunomius
of Cyzicus, men came forward to revive the teaching of
Arius in its most objectionable form. Only logic is
wanted, and logic tells us that if God is unbegotten and
His essence simple, there is no mystery in His being; on

192 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the other hand, and with equal obviousness, if the Son is
unbegotten He cannot be God as the Father is ; nay, in
strictness, He cannot be like the Father at all, for He is
a mere creature. Euzoius only put this Anhomcean
position bluntly when at Antioch in 361 he carried
the position that the Son is kuto, irdvTa dvop,oios tw
iraTpi The next step was explicitly to condemn the
Nicene Creed ; and this was duly done in the Sirmian
manifesto (357), an overtly Arian document in which it
was declared that the words essence, of the same essence,
or of like essence, ought not to be used, because they do
not occur in the Holy Scriptures, and because the matter
passes human comprehension.1 Even the veteran Hosius
was compelled to sign, though he would not condemn
Athanasius. This seemed to make an end of the Nicene
doctrine for good. But the policy of huddling up diffi
culties in silence rarely prospers, nor was the situation
cleared by the sedulous evasiveness of the definition
promoted by the new Homcean party soon after at the
conference in Sirmium (359): "We say that the Son is
like the Father in all things, as the Holy Scriptures say
and teach."2 In the capacious ambiguity of a phrase
like this, even the punctuation of which was uncertain,
all sorts of opinion were at home. Meanwhile, these
minimising tendencies made little or no headway in the
West. Throughout the East also they were opposed strongly.
In 358, Basil presided over a council at Ancyra, which
affirmed very emphatically the Son's similarity of essence,
and formed the turning-point of the contest by giving
rise to the Homceousian party. Bejecting the Nicene
" consubstantial " as Sabellian, they declined the Anhomcean
position still more vehemently.3 Gradually they began
slowly to approximate to the Nicene theology, feeling
that with it lay the future of religion. Athanasius
returned once more to Alexandria, and held out a coif-
ciliatory hand. He recognised (de Synodis) that the
1 See Hahn, § 161. 2 Ibid. § 163. 3 Ibid. § 162.

THE YOUNGER NICENE PARTY 193
Homoeousian formula "of like essence" was distinctly
meant both to affirm Christ's true Sonship and to deny
His creaturehood ; and though preferring his own terms,
he was willing to discuss the matter. Two points are
worth noting. When Basil and his friends urged that
6p,oovaio<i should be replaced by optoios /ear ovalav, they
meant no casual resemblance, but rather specific identity ;
Christ is essentially like God as a human son is like his
father. And again, it was among these Homoeousian
writers first that ova'ut, and viroaTaats began to be distin
guished clearly ; the one being used to designate the Divine
essence (Lat. substantia), the other to denote a personal
distinction within the Godhead (Lat. persona). They felt
that if this useful differentiation of the general from the
individual were adopted, all danger of taking the Nicene
formula in a Sabellian sense would be gone. The under
standing on these points attained between Athanasius
and the Homceousians at the Council of Alexandria in
362, ensured the ultimate fall of Arianism, and issued in
the formation of the younger Nicene party. The same
Council repudiated the view that the Holy Spirit is "a
creature," or distinct from the essence of the Son, a tenet
which had been maintained by a group led by Mace-
donius of Constantinople.
This younger Nicene party was headed by three
remarkable men, Basil of Csesarea (died 379), his^ friend
Gregory of Nazianzus (died 389), and his brother
Gregory of Nyssa (died after 394). They were enthusi
astic students of Origen — in spite of the growing tendency
to rank him as heretical — who revered Athanasius as the
father of orthodoxy. By interpreting his theology in
an Origenistic sense, they lent to it a colour consider
ably different from the original. But their influence on
the doctrine of the Trinity was profound. Assuming the
three hypostases in the Godhead, they strove to bring
out the unity of the one Divine essence, and to fix their
results the significance of the principal terms was defined
with a new sharpness. "'Ovala now received a signifi-
!3

194 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
cance midway between the abstract 'essence* and the
concrete ' individual,' yet so that it inclined very strongly
to the former ; virbaTaa-is was placed in meaning midway
between person and quality (accident or ' mode '), yet so
that the personal idea was the stronger." 1 Starting as
they did from the threeness in the Divine, with the unity
as a mysterious problem, it was particularly difficult for
the Cappadocians to avoid the semblance of tritheism,
and this was an accusation long current in the West.
In Christology, their work largely resulted in a revival
of the idea of the Logos, as mediator of creation. And
yet they ring out clearly the believing certainty that only
through God Himself is fellowship with God accessible to
mam This determines their view of the Lord's person.
But they lay the emphasis otherwise than Athanasius.
Basil, for example, argues that the revelation of the Image
of God in flesh gives us that knowledge of God which
makes us like Him, and that only He who is the essential
Good can perfect us in goodness. Gregory of Nazianzus
contends that none can deify our spirits save He who is
Spirit, essentially, and that only the death of the Son of
God can atone for the sins of the whole world. Gregory
of Nyssa looks back more eagerly to the historic Christ,
pointedly naming Him, however, " the only-begotten God,"
wholly identical in essence with the Father.
In 381 the Emperor Theodosius convoked a general
Council at Constantinople, and there, in addition to the
condemnation of the Sabellians and the various types, -of
Arian, the Nicene Creed in its original form was ratified.
No new creed was set forth. For centuries tradition held
that the creed now commonly known as the Nicene2
(technically the Nicseno - Constantinopolitan) had been
promulgated at this Council, which is certainly an error.
It came into existence earlier, and has close resemblances
to a creed which, as Epiphanius relates, was used by
the Church of Salamis in Cyprus. Others connect it with
1 Harnack, Grundriss, 182 ; cf. Loofs, in RE. iv. 46.
2 Hahn, § 144.

COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE 195
the baptismal creed of the Church of Jerusalem. In the
acts of. the Council of Chalcedon it is ascribed to the
150 bishops who met at Constantinople, and put on a
par with the original Nicene Creed, which thenceforward
it virtually displaced. Its phrasing and order are distinctly
inferior to those of its predecessor. " The elaborate frame
work of Nicsea is completely shattered, and even the
keystone clause ' of the essence of the Father ' is left
out."1 The Arian conflict was now over, and the East could
lay aside its fear of Sabellianising definitions.
1 Gwatkin, Arian Controversy, 160.

CHAPTER V.
CONTROVERSIES AS TO THE FULL HUMANITY
OF CHRIST.
§ 1. Apollinarianism. — It was now an axiom that the
Divine manifested in Jesus Christ was one in essence
with supreme Godhead. His real humanity also had
been assumed from the first, and explicitly defended in
opposition to Gnostic docetism. But men had scarcely
reflected on the question how two natures could unite
in one personality, or how room could be made, in a life
thus dual or composite, for human nature as a whole.
Tertullian had spoken of " .two substances in one person " ;
but this was a Western formula. The instinctive feeling
of the Church was of course that in order to save man
Christ must Himself be man. But if God and man are
actually disparate and incommensurable, how shall this
deep craving of the believing consciousness be satisfied ?
The problem could not be resolved by the merely figurative
declaration that the humanity of Jesus is in the Logos as
glowing iron in fire.
We have seen that in the Nicene Creed " made flesh "
was explained by the added phrase " made man," in order
Literature — Voisin, L'Apollinarisme, 1901 ; Lietzmann, Apollmaris
von Laodicea und seine Schule, 1904 ; Holl, Amphiloehius von Ikonium in
seinem Verhaltnis zu den grossen Kappadoziern, 1904 ; Swete, article
"Theodorus," in Diet. Chr. Biog. ; Harnack, article " Antiochienische
Schule," RE. i. ; Bright, History of the Church 313-415 ; Loofs, articles
on "Nestorius," RE. xiii., and "Eutyches," RE. v.; Rainy, Ancient
Catholic Church, 1902 ; Kriiger, article " Cyrill von Alexandrien," RE. iv. ;
Loofs, Leontius von Byzantium, 1887 ; Kriiger, Monophysitische Streitig-
keiten, 1884 ; Curtis, History of Greeds, 1911 ; Hefele,
geschichte, iii. 196

APOLLINARIS 197
to exclude the Arian tenet that Christ had a human
body but no human soul. Eudoxius of Constantinople
had put the Arian view unambiguously in the creed known
by his name : " He took no human soul, but became flesh.
. . . Two natures there were not, but instead of the soul
was God in flesh, the whole one composite nature." 1 Not
even Athanasius had grappled with the interior problems
of the theanthropic Life. He was accustomed to speak of
the Logos as having assumed a human body, or simply flesh ;
and while the Saviour was for him — at least in his earlier
phase— an individual man, he frequently operates with
the conception " flesh " as denoting an impersonal vesture
or instrument, to which it was natural to refer the
phenomena of suffering, progress, and exaltation. But he
never worked out a clear view. An extraordinary variety
of opinion prevailed as to the relation of Christ's manhood
to ours. Harnack points out that docetism, of a finer or
coarser shade, was almost universal. Few ascribed to
Christ a genuinely human soul, and by many His flesh
was conceived as heavenly in character, as a transmuted
form of the Logos, or simply as a garment. "No one in
the East really thought of two natures. One eternal
Divine-human nature, one Divine-human nature that has
come to be, a Divine nature temporarily changed into the
human, a Divine nature inhabiting the human or clad in
a veil of humanity — these were the dominating ideas."2
If the Church was to pronounce on the connection between
the Divine and human in Christ, she had first to clear
up her mind as to the significance of His humanity.
Apollinaris of Laodicea (died about 390) was the first
to raise the question in an acute form. A theologian
of the first rank, he set the problems at which after-
centuries laboured. His dominating aim was to secure
the complete unity of Christ's person without sacrificing
His real deity, or representing Him, with Paul of
Samosata or Photinus, as a mere avOpwrros evdeos. But
he considered the Arians were right in objecting to
1 Hahn, § 191, 2 Grundriss, 191.

198 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the current doctrine that it predicated of Christ two
personalities ; to quote his words, " if perfect God were
joined to perfect man, they would be two — one, Son
of God by nature, one by adoption" (deros).1 A man-
God is really as unthinkable as a centaur. We must
apply the fundamental axiom of logic that two perfect
entities cannot become one. Besides, how can we ascribe
freedom of will to the man Jesus, without such risks
as faith dare not accept ? Where complete manhood is,
there is sin. For these reasons Apollinaris was obliged
to deny the entirety of Christ's human nature. At
first he held that the Logos had taken merely a human
body ; later, in a defensive statement of his position, he
developed the view — resting on a trichotomic pyschology
(cf. 1 Th 53) — that the body and soul in Christ were
human, whereas the place of the human spirit was taken
by the Logos. Thus he attained his supreme object ; the
human spirit, source and seat of mutability, is replaced
by the immutable Divine Word. The danger is removed,
not by curtailing the Divine nature, which would be
heresy, but by leaving out that element in man's being
which means a perilous fallibility. As a further ad
vantage, the fatal deficiencies of Arianism are vetoed,
for the Logos contemplated in this scheme is no mere
creature, but eternally and inherently one with God.
These difficulties surmounted, Apollinaris was able to
describe the Logos and the abridged human nature as
having been fused in " a single nature," " a single essence."
Instead of two natures, which imply two self-conscious
and self-determining subjects, what exists is an essential
union of God and man. There is but one incarnate nature
of God the Word (p,iav <f>vaiv tov deov \6yov o-eo-apK<op£vr)v).2
Apollinaris took this so literally as to affirm an actual
deification of the flesh of Christ, thus furnishing a reasoned
basis for the physical doctrine of redemption current in
the Greek theology. "His flesh," we read, "makes us
alive through the Deity now become one essence with it, for
1 Fragm. 81. 2 Ad lotion. 1. Hahn, § 195.

ONE INCARNATE NATURE 199
the flesh is Divine, having been joined to God." J On his
special presuppositions, however, the outcome of Apollinaris'
argument could scarcely fail to be docetic; and we are
not surprised that at last he should venture upon the
statement that Christ's flesh is not consubstantial with
ours, since it is the very flesh of God. It is even in
a sense pre-existent. It may be that in speaking of
the pre-temporal reality of Christ's flesh Apollinaris
meant to indicate the belief that the Logos, as such, is
archetypal man, "not foreign to that human spirit which
is in His likeness, but rather the true perfection of His
image." But in that case his expressions have an un
fortunate obscurity.
Scholars are on the whole agreed in acknowledging
the singular intellectual brilliance and power of Apollinaris'
work. Indeed, his theory of the person of Christ has with
some reason been declared by certain modern writers to
be the most consistent and successful application known
to us of the psychological presuppositions and speculative
categories of his time. It is a question whether even
Athanasius had greater gifts for pure theology. The fact
is all the more remarkable — may we not say, the more pro
videntially significant ? — that, notwithstanding the marked
strain of docetism in previous Christologies, the Church
at this point definitely refused to follow a daring thinker
who seemed only to regularise and make logical her own
docetic tendencies. Her reasons for this refusal are con
vincing. In the first place, it was felt that Apollinaris
taught no real incarnation after all. In becoming man,
the Son of God took possession only bf a partial or
mutilated humanity. Not only so ; that very constituent
of human nature was left out which is intrinsically akin
to God and capable of vital relations to Him, and God is
conceived as "uniting Himself only with that in man
which he shares with the beasts that perish." 2 Doubtless
by maintaining that the Logos can thus replace the principle
of intelligence and moral action in man, Apollinaris so far
1 Fragm. 116. a Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, ii. 156.

200 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
brings out the close relationship of the Divine and the
human, for only related things can be substituted for each
other; but this furnishes no compensation for so grave
an omission. Again, sin is primarily an affair of man's
spiritual being ; it is the spirit that is corrupted, misguided,
estranged from God : hence the salvation we require must
be applied to and take possession of that focal point of
human life, and this, according to the theory of Apollinaris,
is precisely what cannot be. As Gregory of Nazianzus
put it tersely : " that which is unassumed is unhealed "
(to yap dirpoa-Xrj-n-Tov, dOepdirevTov). The very part of
man in which sin resides gains nothing from the redemptive
powers of Christ, and consequently falls short of eternal life.
And yet again, owing very much to his use of categories
which are more physical or metaphysical than ethical,
Apollinaris tends to define God and man as absolute
contraries which cannot on any terms be truly one.
God is immutable, man is mutable ; God is essentially
self -moving, man is wholly passive; from which it
obviously follows that a living unity of the two is in
conceivable. We have to choose between a human and a
Divine spirit in Christ. The sublime thought that Christ
is perfect in His humanity just because of the personal
indwelling of God, and thereby becomes the Head of a
new redeemed race, has completely fallen out of sight.
Nevertheless, in spite of these grave defects, which prepared
the way for Monophysitism, Apollinaris quickened the
mind of the Church and forced an interest in vital
questions. In particular, he made it necessary for those
who rejected his conclusions to admit into their view of
Christ a real belief in His spiritual experience as man,
lived out " not under unnatural or supernaturally guarded
conditions, but under strictly human conditions of growth,
trial, dependence, and freedom."1 It was a lesson the
Church took centuries to learn.
The task of combating the Apollinarian positions fell
chiefly to the two Gregories, who were themselves perhaps
1 Dykes, in Expos. Times for Nov. 1905, 56.

REFUTATION OF APOLLINARIS 201
too near the heresy to strike at it with effect. Gregory
of Nazianzus rightly finds that the death of Christ is an
atonement only as it is the death of One who is true man
as well as God, and we have already seen how unerringly he
laid his finger on the central weakness of the novel theory.
For both thinkers, however, the subject or Ego in Christ
was the Logos, His human nature being no more than
the sphere in which deification should take place. Gregory
of Nyssa compares the relation of the Divine and human
to that between a drop of vinegar and the sea in which
it is swallowed up,1 and affirms that even Christ's body
in which He suffered became identical, because commingled,
with the Divine nature that assumed it.2 Man's weakness
and mutability disappear in the life of God. Along with
this, it is true, went a strong assertion of the two natures.
It was the manhood that wept at the grave of Lazarus,
the Godhead that raised him up. But these two natures
mutually interpenetrate, and Gregory of Nyssa threw
out the valuable idea that in Christ's person we see
a growing unity, in which the humanity comes fully to
partake of the qualities of Godhead only after the passion
and the resurrection.3 Thus he was able to make room
for the human life of Jesus.
In 381, at the Council of Constantinople, Apollin-
arianism was explicitly condemned ; but neither in the
Church nor outside was a period then put to its influence.
§ 2. The School of Antioch : Nestorius. — If the criticism
of the Cappadocian thinkers occasionally lacked force, it
was not so with the theologians of Antioch. Diodorus,
founder of the exegetical school of Antioch, had had
as his most famous pupil Theodore of Mopsuestia (died
429). Theodore came to the problems of Christology
with a mind preoccupied with thoughts of the immuta
bility of God, the freedom of the will, and the reality of
Jesus' human life. We must gain a point of view from
1 Cf. Driiseke, op. tit. 175. . 2 contra Eunomium, c. 3.
8 Cf. Bonwetsch, Grundriss d. DG. (1909), 89.

202 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
which His ethical career is seen as exemplary for ours.
Hence no more can be affirmed than a relative moral
union of Godhead and manhood; the Saviour's person
consists of two independent natures, each complete within
itself, but united in one personality by means of an
ethical bond (avvdcpeta). God is present in Jesus as He
was in saints or prophets, only in complete fulness, not
substantially but by way of grace or favour (kut evSoKiav,
not Kar ovaiav), and in a union which is perfected at
the ascension. There is a oneness accordingly for the
spectator, a oneness of name, worship, honour; but the
unity so affirmed is imported into the object by the mind,
not resident in its actual constitution. The passion, for
instance, does not touch the Godhead. Theodore could
even speak of two " hypostases," or persons, united as it
were by a moral league.
This mode of interpretation, beyond all doubt, held
within it elements of value. To it the Church owed a
vivid realisation of the earthly career of Jesus, with
all its richness of ethical experience, and that human
individuality of life which means so much for us to-day.
"Probably," as Dykes has put it, "Theodore's best
contribution to the subject lay in his insistence that
the development of our Lord in knowledge and virtue
could be no QeaTpov, but a genuine human progress
culminating in genuine human virtue; and that this
human life and character, with its free self-determination
and moral victories, was essential to His work of redemp
tion."1 And yet there was not a little in the rational
supernaturalism of Antioch to awaken the misgivings
of faith. While Theodore himself fulminated against
Paul of Samosata as an angelus diaboli, many others
believed that lines of connection could easily be traced
from Samosata to Antioch, and that the advantages of
consistency and clearness were entirely on the side
of the older writer. Theodore and his group, it goes
without saying, were convinced adherents of Nicsea, and
1 Op. tit. 55.

THE SCHOOL OF ANTIOCH 203
in all sincerity acknowledged the presence of the Eternal
Word in Christ. But in point of fact it was difficult for
them to call Jesus more than a supremely inspired man.
He is man side by side with God, man in alliance with
God, not God in and through and as man. There is
concord of will and purpose, not the oneness of a single
personal life. Now, only those could be content with this,
whose conception of salvation had declined from the New
Testament level. It was not merely that the Antiochenes
repudiated the physical doctrine of redemption, for so far
they were on right lines ; it was rather that they scarcely
felt the necessity for pardon and regeneration. Christ •
to them is the Leader and Perfecter of faith rather
than a Bedeemer who quickens and restores the soul by
inward grace. The same tendency to emphasise the
ethical more than the religious aspects of the Gospel is
shown by the fact that the qualities of manhood they
fixed upon for Christ, and vindicated as essential, were
abstract moral freedom and the capacity to suffer.
But here, as in the Arian controversy, it was found
that views which might be held quietly in schools of
doctrine woke the sounds of strife when proclaimed
in the Church at large. A liturgical phrase began
the war. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople in
428, had received his theological education at Antioch.
Offended by the application of the epithet OeoTOKos to
the Virgin Mary, he vehemently took sides with a
presbyter who had assailed the word as inaccurate and
extravagant. It was a popular term, and even Theodore
had used it. But Nestorius pronounced it heathenish.
"Mary," he writes, "did not bear the Godhead; she
bore a man who was the organ of Godhead." Not
OeoTOKos but Xpio-totokos is the right name. As Mr.
Bethune-Baker has expressed it : " What he feels must
be guarded against at all costs is, on the one hand, the
idea that the Godhead itself was born of a woman, wrapped
in swaddling-clothes, suffered and died ; and, on the other
hand, the idea that the manhood of the incarnate Word
4

204 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
was not real manhood like our own." 1 To understand
the fierce resistance he met with, we must consider that
the word now assailed had come to be a testimony
against the Unitarian theories of the day. It goes back
at least to Athanasius and probably to Origen. And
that Nestorius' dislike of it was not unreasoning, or the
product of mere negation, is clear from the fact that he
later conceded the word, provided only it was not held to
make the Virgin a goddess.
But in general he remained true to the Christological
traditions of Antioch. God the Word is sharply dis-
¦ tinguished from the man Jesus. The Holy Spirit did
not create the Word, but formed a temple for Him from
the Virgin, which He should inhabit. "For His sake
who wears I worship Him that is worn ; for the sake of
the hidden One I adore Him that appears. From Him
who appears God is inseparable : for this reason I do not
separate the honour of Him who is inseparate. I sever
the natures, but I combine the worship."2 The man
Jesus was not deified, but He was taken into a unique
personal conjunction with the Logos, and after the resur
rection lifted up to a share in His universal power.
Loofs has pointed out3 that it was easier for Nestorius
' Mr. Bethune-Baker has published a brief work in which he endeavours
to clear Nestorius' reputation for orthodoxy (Nestorius and his Teaching,
Cambridge, 1908). He comes to the conclusion that Nestorius was in
reality no "Nestorian," since "he did not hold the belief commonly
attributed to him that in Jesus Christ two persons, the person of a God
and the person of a man, were mechanically joined together, one being
Son by nature and the other Son by association, so that really there were
two Sons and two Christs. He is as explicit as possible on this point"
(82). And again: "He did not think of two distinct persons joined
together, but of a single Person who combined in Himself the two distinct
things (substances), Godhead and manhood, with their characteristics
(natures) complete and intact though united in Him" (87); "he had had
all through the weary years of the struggle ' one only end in view — that
no one should call the Word of God a creature, or the manhood which
was assumed incomplete'" (197). It is indeed a question whether
dualism can be charged upon Nestorius in any sense that would not also
hold against the Creed of Chalcedon.
2 Serm. 9 (Loofs, Nestoriana, 262). * Leitfaden, 290.

CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA 205
than for Theodore to emphasise the unity of Christ's
personality, because, like Marcellus of Ancyra, he regards
the terms " Son," " Lord," and even " only-begotten " as
terms proper to be used of the Incarnate, rather than
"God the Word" or "Man." For they express the
duality of nature in Him, the created nature and the
increate. It is the historic Christ, single though duplex
in nature, that forms his real point of departure.
§ 3. Cyril of Alexandria. — Nestorius had the misfortune
to be opposed by one of the most powerful and most un
sympathetic figures in Church history. Cyril (376—444)
had been bishop of Alexandria since 412. A master of
diplomatic intrigue, unscrupulous in his methods, ambitious,
proud, and violent, he was nevertheless a really great
divine, and to this day has a place of special honour
among the teachers of the Greek Church.
The Christology of Cyril in its essential features is
a continuation of the theory held by Athanasius and
Gregory of Nazianzus. Like them, he chiefly aimed at
supplying a theoretical basis for the physical theory of
redemption, according to which humanity is imbued or
saturated with deity through the incarnation ; and the
militant opposition which this involved to the theologians
of Antioch, who denied the real union of the natures
in Christ, Was the predominant influence in his doctrinal
activities. Starting from the eternal being of the Logos,
as a hypostatic distinction in the Trinity, he teaches that
He not only assumed but became flesh, and formed the
personal subject in the God-man.1 Christ, be it noted,
was not an individual man. On the contrary, the Word,
1 Ottley well remarks that Cyril gives no consistent answer to the
question what is meant by the "unity" of the Diviue person. At one
time it appears as an original unity, being constituted by the one unchange
able Logos "who remains even after the Incarnation what He was before
it." " Sometimes, on the other hand, Cyril speaks of the person of Christ as
if it were a resultant unity," issuing from the amalgamation of the two
natures. But the former point of view is more typical. (Doctrine of the
Incarnation, vol. ii. 82.)

206 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
having passed into human nature, as constituted by rational
soul and body — which now are His soul and body indis-
sociably — yet remains the one indivisible subject He was \
prior to incarnation. The two natures are in no way con
fused or mingled — " the flesh is flesh and not deity, even if ,
it has become flesh of God " — but their union has produced
a permanent essential state or fact ; it is a evmais Kar
ovaiav Kal KaQ virbaTaaiv, a evmais <pvaiKr}. Manhood
has been taken up intact into the unity of the Divine
essence. But we may speak of a certain interchange of
the properties, in this sense that the person being one,
all qualities of either nature can be predicated of the one
Christ. Thus, for example, the Logos is visible and tangible,
and the suffering is the suffering of God. The natures are
distinct, yet when we see them most truly we see them in
a mysteriously intimate cohesion, all that properly inheres
in the one passing over to, and becoming the possession of,
the other. There are no doubt occasional infidelities to
this point of view, as when Cyril declares the Logos to be
as little affected by suffering as fire in glowing steel by
the smith's hammer-strokes, and replaces the recorded
limitations of our Lord's knowledge by what is really a
prudential affectation of ignorance.
A favourite mode of expression with Cyril is the
phrase that Christ is " one out of two natures " (e* Sw
<j}va-ea>v eh). In other words, before the incarnation two
natures existed, thereafter only the one Divine-human
nature of the Lord. Indeed, we encounter once again
the older Apollinarian formula, " one incarnate nature of
God the Word," which Cyril mistakenly believed to be
Athanasian. The phrase is an epitome of his polemic
against Nestorius. The Logos had not united with Him
self the person of man; He had become flesh, and the
Virgin had borne the incarnate Word " according to the
flesh." As soul and body are one in us, so Godhead and
manhood were made the one Christ. Hence the Nestorian
assertion of a mere "conjunction" or "contact" is to be
utterly rejected ; nothing but a hypostatic union will serve.

CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA 207
" If the Word did not suffer for us humanly, He did not
accomplish our redemption Divinely ; if He who suffered
for us was mere man and but the organ of deity, we are
not in fact redeemed." 1 One detail of historical import
ance should be noted. Since the person in the God-man
is but the prolongation of the one life of the Eternal
Word — not the effect of incarnation — it follows in Cyril's
view that Christ's human nature is impersonal (dvvrro-
araTOs). This much resembles the theory of Apollinaris,
but Cyril escapes the danger, at least verbally, by his
emphatic insistence on the completeness of the human
nature assumed by the Logos. At the same time, while he
does not enter explicitly on the question — even he can
still use cpvo-is and viroaTao-ts as synonyms — Cyril really
heads the list of writers who have held that the human
nature of Christ possesses no independent personality of
its own, and is personal only in the Logos.2 In itself it
is reduced to unconscious and impersonal elements. The
step, in a multitude of ways, was a singularly unfortunate
one. It broke decisively, as we have seen, with earlier
and better patristic views. And it added enormously
to the difficulty of recognising in the Christ of Church
dogma the historic Saviour who had long been enshrined
in the inmost heart of faith, for no real meaning could
be attached to a human "nature" which is not simply
one aspect of the concrete life of a human person.
Nevertheless, it is a merit in Cyril not easily to be
overestimated, that he strove with such persistence to bring
out the living and organic unity of Christ's person. And
here he was guided by a genuinely religious interest.
" This school of Greek theology was right," it has been
said, " in the stress it laid on the closest possible union
of God with Man in order that the dynamic power of the
1 Quoted by Bonwetsch, Grundriss, 90.
2 His account of Christ's human knowledge is unconcealed docetism.
There was really no ignorance, and could be none, in a nature physically
united to the Logos. When Christ said that He was ignorant of the day
of judgment, "He usefully pretended not to know."

208 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Christ-life might operate upon the race whose new Head
He is come to be." 1 That is at all events a thoroughly
sympathetic verdict on its deepest motive, and it explains
much even in Cyril's view of the communicatio idiomatum,
or interchange of qualities between the natures, which
was later to become fertile in so many unedifying
artificialities. Harnack says roundly that Cyril's theory is pure but
unintentional Monophysitism. Loofs, with more prudence,
remarks that the question whether the Christology is to
be called Monophysite is after all a matter of words.
" There were many Monophysites who thought just as he
did. But if we reserve the name for the view that
Christ's humanity was raised above humanity even before
the resurrection, and that the fiia <f>va<,s of Christ was,
so to speak, the result — by mixture or addition — of the
evcoais, Cyril must be acquitted of the charge." 2
From his point of view Cyril naturally attacked
Nestorius with vehemence, and they hurled anathemas at
each other. Cyril exerted all his powers to bring out
the irreligious consequences of Nestorianism. How could
the sufferings of a man save us ; and in the Eucharist was
it no more than human flesh that we received ? Bather
at every point manhood is blended with Godhead. By
thus insisting on " one incarnate nature " Cyril was un
questionably faithful to the instinct of Greek Christianity.
Ere long he succeeded in gaining the adhesion of Celestine
of Bome (430). The West, alike by tradition and
temperament, occupied a middle position between Antioch
and Alexandria, but, having been long accustomed to
phrases like deus natus, deus crucifixus est, it now leant to
Cyril's emphasis on the unity of the Bedeemer's person.
Nothing would serve but the meeting of another
Council. It was held at Ephesus in 431, and takes rank
as the third Ecumenical Council of the Church. Suffice
it to say that the Cyrillians first deposed Nestorius, before
the arrival of his friends, to which they replied by deposing
1 Dykes, ut supra, 57. a Leitfaden, 293 f.

THE EUTVCHIAN CONTROVERSY 209
Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus. The Emperor confirmed
both sentences, but that on Cyril was soon reversed. By
433 court influence had driven both parties into outward
harmony, and Cyril accepted a creed drawn up in great
part by Theodoret of Cyrus — whose Nestorian sympathies
were strong — while Nestorius was dropped by his old
supporters. The terms of this creed paved the way for
Chalcedon, but its excessively ambiguous tenor has led
Harnack to speak of it as " the saddest and most momentous
event in the history of dogma since the condemation of
Paul of Samosata." x It declared that Christ was " con-
substantial with us in His humanity, for there has been
a union of two natures ; wherefore we confess one Christ,
one Son, one Lord." 2 Nothing was decided as to whether
two natures existed in Christ after the incarnation. But
Loofs says truly that the arrangement in no way mitigated
the differences between Cyril and Nestorius on the question
whether Christ was, or was not, an individual man. For
Cyril, it was not the person of a man that the Logos had
assumed, but man, i.e. the qualities and attributes of
human nature. This shadowy abstractness of conception
was only too certain to lead men away from the historic
life portrayed in the New Testament.
Henceforth the strength of the Nestorians lay in
Persia. The pious barbarism of the monks flung them
ever more violently on the side of Cyril.
§ 4. The Eutychian Controversy; Chalcedon. — Cyril's
death in 444 seemed to bring peace, when suddenly the
flames of war shot up again. They were kindled by
Eutyches, archimandrite of Constantinople, a keen but
limited and ill-balanced nature, whose piety gave him
influence, and who had been one of Cyril's most ardent
followers. At a council in his own city he was accused of
heresy by Eusebius of Dorylseum. He had certainly used
imprudent phrases. " My God," he said, " is not of like
essence with us " ; the body of God could not be a man's
1 History of Dogma, iv. 197. 2 Hahn, § 170.
14

210 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
body, but only like it ; and so forth. Opponents of the
Cyrillian theology at once exclaimed that Eutyches was
only blurting out what Cyril had held secretly. In 448
a synod held at Constantinople, under the presidency
of his bishop, Flavian, condemned the old man on the
charge of denying the consubstantiality of Christ's human
nature with ours. In the circumstances, Eutyches drew
back upon the Christologioal positions of his old
leader, and expressed his own view thus : " I confess
our Lord to have become out of two natures before
the union. But I confess one nature after the union."
But he refused to concede the orthodox belief that two
natures existed in Christ after the incarnation had taken
place. He found a powerful advocate in Dioscurus of
Alexandria, an ambitious and coarse-grained ecclesiastic who
felt that the championship of Eutyches might help him to
a kind of papacy in the East. On the other hand, he was
opposed not merely by Flavian but by Leo of Bome, who
had chosen his side with some hesitation. At this point
the Emperor, with whom Flavian was no favourite, com
manded him to hand in a confession of faith justifying his
evil . opinion of Eutyches. The document he prepared is
of great interest, as an anticipation of the Formula of
Chalcedon.1 It proved that men were beginning to make
distinctions between " nature " and " hypostasis," on the
basis of which a reconciliation might be hoped for between
Alexandria and Antioch.
Dioscurus, however, was not to be restrained, and,
having persuaded Theodosius to summon a new council
at Ephesus (449, known later as the Bobber Synod), he
presided over it, and forced through both a rehabilitation
of Eutyches and a condemnation and deposition of the
Antiochene leaders. The Eoman deputies were refused
a hearing. Under cover of an appeal to a resolution of
the Council of Ephesus in 431, forbidding the addition
of a new creed to that of Nicsea, the Union Symbol of 433
was summarily put aside. Anathemas were pronounced
1 Hahn, § 223.

LEO S DOGMATIC EPISTLE 211
against all who should teach that in Christ there were two
natures subsequently to the incarnation. And it is a very
arguable position that Dioscurus faithfully represented the
view really held by the majority in the East.
.It was to this Council that Leo of Eome sent his
famous Dogmatic Epistle, which, though left unread, grew
every month in importance. It revived Christological
formulas which Tertullian and Augustine had made familiar.
" Two substances or natures in the one Christ " is the
keynote. The substances in the Incarnate remain what
they were, but are combined in the unity of the person.
Each nature preserves intact its own characteristics, the
lowliness and infirmity of man being assumed by the Divine
majesty and eternity. Not only so, but in the Divine-
human life of the one person each nature performs its
own proper function in alliance with the other, a basis
being thus found for Biblical expressions which imply a
communicatio idiomatum, or interchange of qualities; as
when it is said that the Son of Man came down from
heaven or that the Son of God was crucified and buried.
Leo is also emphatic as to the integrity of our Lord's
manhood, and makes severe animadversions on the crimi
nality of Eutyches in denying it and so casting the shadow
of unreality on the passion which had been endured for
our salvation.1 The Epistle is written with great practical wisdom and
insight, the positive and negative results of previous
discussions being lucidly set forth and sagaciously balanced
over against each other. Fine shades of theological dis
tinction are avoided, and no effort is made to follow the
1 The following are the most significant phrases : Salva proprietate
utriusque naturae et substantiae et in unam coeunte personam suscepta est
a majestate humilitas, a virtute infirmitas . . . impassibilis deus non
dedignatus est homo esse passibilis et immortalis mortis legibus subjacere ;
. . . qui enim verus est deus, idem verus est homo . . . agit utraque forma
cum alterius communione, quod proprium est . . . propter hanc unitatem
personae in utraque natura intelligendam et filius hominis legitur de-
scendisse de ccelo . . . et rursus filius dei crucifixus dicitur ac sepultus.
Cf. Loofs, Leitfaden, 299.

212 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Greek divines in subtle or elaborate speculative theories.
On the whole, Leo comes a good deal nearer to the view
of Antioch than of Alexandria. Still it is impossible to
claim him for either. There is no direct refutation of
Nestorius, only of Eutyches.
Theodosius died in July 450, and in 451 his successor
Marcian convened the synod Leo had asked for, not,
however, at Bome, but at Chalcedon. It was the fourth
Ecumenical Council of the Church. About six hundred
bishops came, and from the first the guidance of events lay
in the hands of the Western deputies. Leo's Epistle was
recognised as the norm of orthodoxy; Dioscurus deposed;
Nestorianism and Eutychianism condemned. Shouts were
heard from the assembly : " We all believe as Leo does."
The inviolability of the creeds of Nicsea and Ephesus was
reaffirmed, and thereafter the Council set forth the
following definition: —
'ETTOfievot toLwv tois dyiots traTpdo-tv eva Kal tov avTOV
ofj,d\oyeiv vwv tov Kvptov r)/j.a>v Ivaovv XpiaTov avfjufywvwi
diravTes iK8t8do-Kop,ev, Tekeiov tov uvtov iv deoTnTi Kal
TeXeiov tov ainbv iv avOpoiiroTrjTi, 6ebv dXndSys Kal
avBpooTTOv dXnOws tov avTOV, hK "^v-^rjs "koytKrjs Kal
croofiaTOS, op,oovaiov to3 iraTpl kuto, tt)v deoTifTa Kal
Ofxoovcrbov tov avTov r\p2v kuto, ttjv dvOponroTrjTa . . . ev
Bvo (pvaeaiv davyxyTOis, drpeTTTois, dBiaipeTOds, d-^oiplaTW;
yvoypi^ofjtevov ' oi)Bap,ov ttjs twv cpvcreosv 8ia<popas dvr)pr\p,evr\<i
Bid ttjv evatcnv, aco^op,ev7js Be fiaXKov rrjs IBlottjtos
eKarepas (pvcrecos Kal eh ev irpoo-OiTrov Kal p,lav virocrTacnv
crvvTpe^pvaTjs.1 1 "Therefore following the holy fathers we all with one consent teach
men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same
perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and the
same truly man, of a rational soul and body, co-essential with the Father
according to the Godhead, and co-essential with us according to the manhood
... to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without
mutation, without division, without separation ; the distinction of natures
being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of
each nature being preserved and concurring in one person and one
hypostasis." For the text, see Hahn, § 146.

THE CHALCEDONIAN CREED 213
In the main this was a document approximating
closely to the theology of Cyril ; but the phrase " in two
natures " proves that at a critical point Western influences
had triumphed, for as it now stood the clause satisfied only
the Antiochenes and a few friends of the Union Symbol of
433. Still, both Cyril and Leo had been acknowledged
as authoritative. Obviously the framers of the definition
wished not so much to formulate a theory of Christ's
person as to bar out extreme statements on either side.
Hence the famous four adverbs, fixing the two natures rela
tively to one another, are all negative. At the same time
the unity of the person is positively emphasised, as may
have been done already in the Athanasian Creed (which
is perhaps earlier) : unus Christus, non confusione sub-
stantiarum, sed unitate personae.1 In the last resort a
clearly felt soteriological interest is behind the careful
phrases, and enables us to interpret the whole as a
combination of the vital elements which faith has always
insisted on combining in its view of Christ the Saviour.
Thus the reality and integrity of each nature, of Godhead
and of manhood, is upheld ; the incarnation has not issued
in a being that is somehow neither Divine nor human, or
either exclusively. On the other hand, the theanthropic
Life is a personal unity, not severed into two independent,
subjects, but hypostatically one. Thus the decisions of
Chalcedon may reasonably be viewed as a great utterance)
of faith, aware of the wrong turnings which theory may I
take so easily. They have been well compared to buoys
anchored along a difficult estuary, on the right and left,
to guide the ship of truth. With the religion of the
Creed, accordingly, we have no quarrel.
But with its theology it is otherwise. As Dorner has
remarked, it is mere short-sightedness to imagine that
the Christology of that age, which could operate with
ideas of God and man only in the form in which they were
then current, took shape in determinations which need no
amendment, and admit of none. As a theory or doctrine,
1 Cf. Bonwetsch, Grundriss, 93.

214 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
therefore, the formula of Chalcedon is susceptible of
criticism. Thus it may be pointed out that Christologioal
relations which, in essence, are ethical and personal, have
been too much expressed in terms imbued with a
certain mechanical and even material flavour. This is
particularly true of the term "nature" ((pvo-is), which
is not an ethical word at all. Now non-ethical realities
admit of no true unity ; hence we are not surprised to
find that Godhead and manhood are contemplated here
as being in essence so disparate, so utterly unrelated
and heterogeneous, that a miracle of sheer omnipotence
is needed to unite them. Love, it is true, is behind
the incarnation, and gives it its significance, but the
methods by which this love accomplishes its purpose are
not sufficiently conceived as spiritual, with the result
that from the first Christ's true humanity is overshadowed,
if not indeed seriously curtailed. So that objections
may be raised to the resultant doctrine from two quite
opposite points of view. In the first place, it awakens
suspicion by its dualism, by its blank unrelieved insist
ence upon the eternal parallelism of two "natures" set
in a relation to each other which after all is ethically
unmediated — scarcely less so than in the theory of
Nestorius. God and man are yoked together, not exhibited
in the singleness of personal life. That this was the
preponderating tendency of Chalcedonian Christology is
proved by the Dyophysite and Dyothelite findings of
the next three hundred years, and against this tendency
Monophysitism offered a valuable protest, so far, by con
tending that all that is Divine in Christ is human,
and all that is human, Divine. Nothing else represents
the unity of impression made by the historic Jesus.
Secondly, the unity which Chalcedon nevertheless affirms
is a purely marvellous one — a mere wonder, a thing in
expressible in genuinely spiritual terms, the humanity so
reduced to a mere selfless " organ " of the Divine Word
that it becomes impossible to think this Christ as the Head
of a new redeemed race of men and Himself the Pattern

MONOPHYSITISM 215
Man. From this point of view the strictures of Principal
Dykes are hardly too severe. "A Being," he writes,
" who combines in an inscrutable fashion Divine with
human properties, and of whom consequently contradictory
assertions can be made, whose single Person is Divine,
while His dual natures hold an undefined relation to one
another: this is not a scheme to satisfy either head or
heart. It is but the bare skeleton of a dogma, in which
one cannot readily recognise either the Jesus of the Gospels
or the Christ of the Church's worship." 1
Thus the Council did not so much reconcile or
synthesise the opposing theories put before it, as conceal
their opposition under extremely careful phrases. But
when the Creed had to be interpreted, would it be
read in the light of Cyril's teaching, or Theodoret's, or
Leo's ? 2 All three were grammatically possible ; which
should rank as correct was to be the problem of the next
century, § 5. The Monophysite and Monothelite Controversies. — In
point of fact the Chalcedonian decisions had at first a
nearly fatal influence on the Eastern Church. Instead of
peace the Council brought a sword, for Dyophysites and
Monophysites counted each other the worst of heretics.
There were risings in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. The
monks refused to take their theology from Bome. We
cannot pursue the details of this miserable conflict, but we
note one or two landmarks which obtrude themselves on a
rapid survey. Kriiger has adverted to a curious parallel
between the course of Arianism and Monophysitism, utterly
unlike as the two movements were in religious motive. If
Lucian was father of the one heresy, Apollinaris was father
of the other. If the Arians appealed to Origen, the
Monophysites appealed to Cyril. And as it required a
race of thinkers trained by Origen to secure the triumph
1 Expository Times, October 1905, 10. On the whole subject, cf. Dorner,
Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi, ii. 144-49.
2 Loofs, Leilfaden, 301.

216 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of Nicsea, so too it was only by the efforts of men who
had gone back to the Christology of Cyril that permanent
recognition was gained for Chalcedon, in so far as it was
gained at all.1
The watchword of the Monophysite party was the
Cyrillian formula, p,ia tpvcris tov Xoyov 6eov creo-apKCOfievr).
Starting from the concrete unity of the Divine-human
Christ, within which two natures can be discriminated
only in theory, they contended like the Nestorians that
" nature " and " person " are equivalent, or at all events
coincident ideas. And since the general (Godhead, man
hood) exists only in the form of concrete personality,
never merely in the abstract, it follows that to say " two
natures " is tantamount to saying " two persons," that is, to
pure Nestorianism. What has offended the Church in
Monophysitism has not been so much these presuppositions,
— in which from one point of view there is nothing
objectionable — as rather the docetism which Monophysites
from Cyril to Julian never succeeded in shaking off. The
following points are important : 2 —
(a) In the Monophysite Christology two diverging
tendencies appeared. These are represented by the
Severians and the Julianists, so named from their leaders,
Severus of Antioch and Julius of Halicarnassus. It was
the aim of the Severians to distinguish Godhead and man
hood ideally within the one Christ. So they accentuated
the unmingledness of the natures, together with the
creaturely and mortal character of our Lord's humanity,
and even drew attention to limitations in the knowledge
of Jesus. At the same time they repudiated the Chal-
cedonian ev Bvo (pvo-eaiv, and especially Leo's insistence on
the (so to speak) private and independent activity of each
nature, an interpretation which they judged to be no better
than Nestorianism. Their real interest lay in affirming
a single Divine-human subject, a (pvats koI xmoaTaats
OeavBptKr). On the other hand, the Julianists, while
1 Das Dogma von der Dreieinigkeit, 230.
8 Cf. Harnack, Grundriss, § 43.

MONOPHYSITISM 217
denying that the manhood of Christ was totally absorbed
in the Godhead, still maintained that His human nature
was not as that of other men. Transmuted by its
contact with deity, it was incorruptible, glorified, and even
uncreate, not merely after the resurrection, but from the
very moment of assumption. Hence the passibility of
Christ is no mere natural attribute of His being man ; it
rests at every point on His free will.
(b) In order to maintain the unity of the Empire,
repeated attempts of a political kind were made to sup
press the Chalcedonian Creed. Thus Basiliscus the Usurper
cancelled it by his Encyclicon in 476, and in 482 the
conciliatory Zeno attempted in his famous Henoticon to
evade its terms, declaring that while the Son of God was
co-essential with the Father in deity and co-essential with
us in manhood, yet He was one, not two, the miracles
and the sufferings being pre,dicable of the same subject.
This was a direct blow at the authority of Leo, and a
thirty-five years' schism with Bome was the result. But in
519 the Henoticon was once more cast aside, and the Creed
of Chalcedon, which had come meanwhile to be invested
with the sanctity of tradition, was restored. The so-called
Theopaschite controversy, which sprang up over the phrase
6 o-Tavpadeh oV fjixas, inserted by Peter the Fuller in the
Trishagion, showed how unwilling the West even now
was to interpret Chalcedon in a Cyrillian sense, whereas
the East would hear of no other. It was the strong
hand of Justinian (527-565) that lifted the definition of
451 into permanent supremacy. To please the Mono
physites, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret were
condemned. (c) In the sixth century the defenders of Chalce
donian orthodoxy are obviously men of marked intellectual
power. Aristotelian metaphysic supplied good weapons.
The most conspicuous name is that of Leontius of Byzan
tium (c. 485-543), forerunner of John of Damascus;
a lover of severe philosophic categories whose influence
on the Christological evolution is of real historic im-

218 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
portance. Betaining the distinction between "nature"
and "person," he took the Formula of Chalcedon on
the whole in a Cyrillian sense. The human nature of
Christ is not strictly impersonal, nor on the other hand
does it possess, as the Antiochenes held, an independent
personality or centre of the conscious moral life ; it is
ivvrroo-TaTos, i.e. it has personality only in and through
the Logos. By the aid of this finer species of Apollin-
arianism, Leontius was able to maintain both that an
exchange of qualities obtained between the two natures
and that each nature has its own " energy," as Leo had
affirmed in his Epistle. Harnack well names Leontius
" the father of the new Christological orthodoxy, as the
Cappadocians had been fathers of the new Trinitarian
orthodoxy." : He is the first scholastic. His conception
of the " enhypostasia " or impersonality of Christ's man
hood was new only in formula ; but as a formula it was
new, and in theological history the power of formulas has
been immense.
(d) At last, in 553, when the fifth Ecumenical
Council met in Constantinople, victory rested with the
orthodoxy which read Chalcedon in the sense of Cyril.
The decisions now formulated were meant to make an
Antiochene interpretation of the Creed for ever impossible.
Christ is one ; and of this one Christ both miracles and
sufferings must be predicated. The two natures are dis
tinguishable only in theory. The Logos was also man, but
in the historic Christ there existed no human personality.
" Here in Constantinople the Christology of the Ancient
Church reached its conclusion."2 But the triumph of
Cyril, though it satisfied the instincts of Eastern faith,
failed to reconcile the Monophysites. Their Churches
remain to this day.
The two parties, as Dorner observes, were not in
the last resort so far apart as they supposed. "The
Monophysites only represent the effort to attain a more
inward unity of the natures than the Chalcedonians, but
1 Grundriss, 207. 2 Loofs, RE. iv. 52.

THE MONOTHELITES 219
can do as little as their opponents to prove the inner
cohesive affinity of the Divine and the human. The
Chalcedonians, on the other hand, represent the effort to
secure a true and relatively independent humanity, without
confusion or conversion; but fundamentally — although
declining to admit it — they really fail to transcend the
Monophysite view that the human becomes hypostatic
only in the Divine." x
It remains to treat shortly of the Monothelite con
troversy, the ethical sequel of that which we have
just surveyed, and due to political attempts at union.
Thus far nothing had been determined as to volition
in Christ, and the terms of Chalcedon could be read
either way. Harnack says that in point of fact nobody
had spoken of two wills in Christ prior to the sixth
century, not even the Antiochenes.2 The question
now became a burning one. Sergius, patriarch of Con
stantinople, advised the reigning Emperor Heraclius to
issue the formula (about 630) that the one Christ had
wrought all things by a single Divine-human energy (p,la
deavBptKy evepyela). This was meant as a sop to the
Monophysites, and met with considerable success in Egypt.
But opposition came from Sophronius, afterwards bishop
of Jerusalem. The consequence was a second royal edict
(the "EK0eais TrlaTeox; of 638), inspired by Sergius and
Honorius of Bome, and affirming the existence of a single
will in Christ. The minor question of one or two " energies "
was brushed aside as unscriptural. On this the West
blazed up in revolt, and even in the East divines like
Maximus Confessor flung themselves ardently into the
defence of a position which they held to be only a
corollary of the two natures affirmed at Chalcedon. Two
natures implied two faculties of volition. Fearing a
revolution, the Emperor Constans II. issued -in 648 the
notorious rescript entitled Towos tt)s ntiaTem, prohibiting
all discussion of the subject. But its influence proved
small, and feeling was intensified by cruel measures taken
1 Eniwicklungsgeschichte, ii. 189. 2 Grundriss, 209.

220 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
against Martin of Bome. The Emperor was murdered
in 668, and after some years his successor Constantine
Pogonatus saw his way to combine with the Pope in
taking a more conciliatory position. In 680 the sixth
Ecumenical Council gathered at Constantinople ; and
there, on the basis of a communication from Agathon of
Bome obviously modelled on Leo's Epistle, the Dyothelite
position was explicitly affirmed. The exact terms by
which the relation of the natures had been defined at
Chalcedon are now carried over to the relation of the
wills. In Christ, it is declared, are two natural wills
and two natural energies (modes of activity), the human
will not being opposed to the Divine, but rather obedient
and subordinate to its omnipotence. Thus the dualism
is asserted in its sharpest form, as implying two
parallel series of volitions and activities, while yet it is
added, with seeming inconsistency, that the almighty
will of the Logos so conditions the will distinctive of
the humanity as wholly to absorb its independence and
self - motion. Maximus had tried to bridge the gulf
between the two wills by suggesting that the pure
human soul is in itself godlike, akin to the Logos ethically
and in essence ; but his suggestions came to nothing.
In the East the Monophysite habit of thought persisted;
for even if the Western interpretation of Chalcedon had
triumphed formally, yet the ideas of Apollinaris and
Cyril retained vitality, and held a place firmly in the
now official conception of the impersonality of Christ's
manhood. So much for the outward features of the conflict;
let us glance at the theological motives operating
beneath the surface. Both sides of course started from
the accepted doctrine of two natures in one person.
But within .this complex whole the Monothelites began
from the unity of the person, the Dyothelites from the
duality of the natures. If one party referred the will to
the personal Ego in Christ, the other held with equal
conviction that it forms part of each "nature." The

MONOTHELITES AND DYOTHELITES 221
Monothelites feared Nestorianism — the combination of a
fallible with an infallible will — and preferred to think of
Christ's humanity as being related to the Logos as the
body is to the soul. For them the unity of will had a vast
religious significance. " We conclude," writes Theodore
of Pharan, their leading representative, " that all that which
we hear from Christ and believe is the work of God . . .
from beginning to end the whole incarnation is one truly
high and Divine activity." 1 At this point, however, our
sympathy is. checked by Theodore's inveterate tendency to
docetism, manifested, for example, in the statement that
our Lord's sense-experience at each moment was evoked by
no natural necessity but by His Divine volition. It was
this docetism which lent power to the Dyothelite counter
argument. Over and over again it is insisted that a
nature without a will is nothing; that if Christ was man,
He must have been man willing and active. One composite
will is inconceivable. Only through His human will could
Jesus finish the work given Him to do. Faith, love, hope
and all the virtues are only possible for one in whom they
are the outcome of real spontaneity ; unless He were
endowed with a human faculty of volition, and were thus
humanly free, Christ could not be our pattern. Here also
a true religious interest is at work.
Each party, it is manifest, had taken possession of
one aspect of the truth. As the question was then
stated, each had much to say for itself, and had no need
to fear the other's refutation. The philosophic reader
will be apt to say that no advance was possible till the
relation of the will to the personality, the centre of
conscious moral experience, had been thought out more
clearly, and the idea of personality itself submitted to a
more exact analysis. On the other hand, the basis of
doctrine in past facts had been virtually abandoned, and
it was necessary to recover vital touch with the historic
Jesus. " What this Christology handed over to the
Church was not a finished result but a problem — that
1 Baur, Dreieinigkeit, ii. 109.

222 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
God Himself should have lived and walked here, a man
like to us." 1
Finally, a brief reference is due to John of Damascus
(died probably before 754), to whom the theology of the
Greek Church owes its definitive systematic form. He
taught that the two natures in Christ interpenetrate each
other like fire and iron (Trepi^wpno-ts), with an ensuing
exchange of qualities. He laid stress, moreover, on |he
" Enhypostasia " of the manhood,2 thus perpetuating^ in
spite of the Dyophysite and Dyothelite creeds, a view
that has many points of affinity with Apollinaris. The
Logos is placed as head on the mere trunk of humanity.
But in neither respect was he original. What he offers
us is rather a scholastic elaboration of results attained
by the Cappadocians and by Leontius of Byzantium.
Development had stopped with the Council of. 553, and
John was merely " the registrar of Greek orthodoxy."
And thus by degrees the Church's memories of the
human life of Jesus faded into oblivion. Men lost the
sense of history. Nothing had happened at the incar
nation save that Godhead assumed a new relationship,
took a new organ, began to work at a new place. Nor
was the situation bettered by the bravely persistent
instinct of revolt against dualism, for this only meant
that one aspect of the double Life is swallowed up indis-
tinguishably in the other. Christ's deity is seen as
" loosely attached to His human nature, yet overbearing it,
and reducing to little better than a phantasm the moral
victories and pathetic conflicts of His earthly career." 3
1 Seeberg, Lehrbuch d. DG. (1895), i. 231.
2 Since the Logos forms the personality in Christ, He prayed not for
Himself but as an example to us.
8 Dykes, ut supra, 59.

CHAPTER VI.
LATER CHRISTOLOGY IN THE WEST.
Augustine and the Middle Ages. — Henceforward we shall
be engaged solely with Western thought, for in the
East theology had sunk into petrified inaction. Even
of the Latin Church it may be said that it was more
occupied with the means of salvation than with the
person of the Saviour.1 The creed functioned as a
legal mystery, which no one outside the great Church
could understand. Speculation, accordingly, was kept
within narrow bounds. From the eighth century to the
sixteenth not a single contribution of real importance
was made. As in earlier times, Western divines proved
skilful rather to register and formulate the ecumenical
decisions than to serve as pathfinders in new fields
of truth. One exception may be named in Hilary of
Poictiers (d. 367), who developed an impressionist view
which has been interpreted as akin to modern Kenotic
theories, but its influence on the course of thought is
negligible. Even Augustine (354-430) is scarcely to be desig
nated an original or creative mind in the realm of
Christology; he impresses rather by the amazing verbal
Literature — Scheel, Die Anschauung Augustins iiber Christi Person
und Werk, 1901 ; Gottschick, article "Augustins Anschauungen von der
Erlbserwirkungen Christi," ZTK. 1901; Mbller, article "Adoptianismus,"
RE. i. j Ritschl, History of the Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation,
1872 ; Schultz, Die Lehre von der Goitheit Christi, 1881 ; Foley, Anselm's
Theory of the Atonement, 1909 ; Neander, Church History ; Seeberg, Die
Theologie des Joh. Duns Scolus, 1900.
1 Senile, History of the Dogma of the Deity of Jesus Christ, 158.

224 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
and dialectical ability with which he reproduced the
accepted doctrines of the Church.1 Biblical and orthodox
ideas gradually mastered him, but he never quite flung
off the early influences of Neo-Platonism, and these in
clined him, at each stage of his development, to define
the Son as identical with the Neo-Platonic vovs or
Wisdom ; yet without any of the subordinationism to
which a similar path had conducted Origen. In his
mature period, however, he insists that the man Jesus
had been conjoined with God the Logos in such a unity,
" that it is the same Son of God who is Son of Man, the
same Son of Man who is Son of God." 2 The conception
by which he resolves all difficulties is the distinction —
in reality very old — between the forma Dei and the
forma servi; a distinction not to be hastily equated
with that between the two natures. In terms, of course,
this contrast of " forms " is taken from Ph 2 ; but while
St. Paul describes our Lord as having abandoned the one
mode of being for the other, Augustine regards them
as co- existent (non formam Dei amittens, sed formam
servi accipiens). It is curiously hard to say whether
Augustine's sympathies were more with the East or
West. On the one hand, his tendency is to conceive
Godhead and manhood as self-evidently exclusive of
each other, thus keeping the two natures apart, and
in this view, which on the whole predominates, he
follows Ambrose. This made it possible to regard the
humanity of Christ as constituting an independent moral
subject, genuinely human in its growth and progress,
and Augustine did not even shrink from declaring that
Christ's humanity — like the elect everywhere — was the
object of Divine predestination. His Mediatorship rests
on His participation in manhood (mediator non quia
deus sed quia homo). It is perhaps a one-sided esti
mate of this element which leads Harnack to remark that
1 On the whole subject, cf. Scheel's full and able monograph, Die
Anschauung Augustins iiber Christi Person und Werk (Tubingen, 1901).
2 Enchir. c. 40.

AUGUSTINE 225
Augustine's profoundest interest "centred in the human
soul of Jesus."1 On the other hand, his more explicit
statements are in line with Athanasius, and share in the
Cyrillian docetism. In the God-man the personal factor
is supplied by God the Word ; the assumed human nature
is deified, while the Word remains metaphysically un
changeable, and nothing like a commixtio is really possible;
But for the ends of popular exposition, he is accustomed
to say that Jesus Christ is man and God in one person,
as each of us is flesh and spirit. Obviously this analogy,
if pressed, would have led straight back to Apoll in arian
ism, of which Augustine was a lifelong and passionate
opponent. But the phrase is none the less a symptom.
It fits in with the increasing Western tendency to speak
of Christ's " flesh " or " body," rather than of Christ the
man. Most of these ideas received symbolic expression
later in the so-called Athanasian Creed, which first comes
into view near the end of the seventh century.
In Spain the older Augustinian tradition lived on for
centuries, in contrast to the semi-Monophysite reading of
Chalcedon, which had become orthodox by the lapse of
time. Westerns used and loved the phrase Christus deus
et homo ; and it hardly seemed inconsistent with this that
in the eighth century Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of
Urgel should have begun to teach that the human nature
combined with the deity of the Eedeemer was not at
once taken up into the essential unity of the Divine
person, and consequently had no direct share in the
Divine Sonship, but was only Son of God adoptively.
Thus a line in the Spanish liturgy speaks of the pas do
filii adoptivi. Hence, too, the name Adoptianism. In the
fight with Arianism it had been customary to maintain
that Christ was Son natura, non adoptione ; and the new
view, ill-informed as its phrases were, was meant as a
corrective of orthodox extravagances which might over
shadow the real humanity. Elipandus may well have felt
the old influence of Antioch. But Charlemagne inter-
1 Hist, of Dogma, v. 128.
*5

226 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
posed, and Adoptianism was condemned at the Synod
of Begensburg in 792 and twice later, Alcuin being its
keenest foe. It was urged that, like the Nestorians, the
Adoptianists held a double personality in Christ; but it
is worth noting that in refuting their errors Alcuin went
so far as to say, in adsumptione carnis a deo persona
peril hominis, non natura. This persona perit hominis
left even the orthodoxy of Cyril behind, and meant that
the strict two-nature doctrine was consistent with, not
to say demanded, a wholly impersonal conception of
what manhood in Christ is. The formula of Chalcedon
was in fact ill adapted to express the Western idea of
redemption, and Adoptianism proved it. One who in
His true humanity should be the normal subject of
moral life, and should atone by a real passion for sin,
as Head of the Church and Brother of the redeemed —
this, and nothing less, was felt to be indispensable if
guilt were to be abolished and holiness made a possibility.
Adoptianism was easy to refute, but it betokened grave
defects in the received doctrine.
The dogma of transubstantiation, now rising into view,
was a new and powerful influence tending to annihilate
the true humanity of Christ. One can discern a certain
parallelism between the view that the human factor in
our Lord had as such no personality, but was personal
only in and, as it were, under the Logos, and the later
controversy as to whether in the Eucharist the substance
of bread and wine continues to exist, or is so merged in
the higher essence that only its phenomenal accidents
remain. In both cases the simple perceptions of faith
were turned upside down by theory.
The dialectic activities of the Middle Age added little
to the Church doctrine of our Lord's person.1 In pro
portion as the historic Life grew, dim and the exalted
Saviour receded in the distance, the interval was filled
with other mediators, highest of all being the Virgin Mary.
The anhypostasia was steadily maintained. But Scheel
1 See an important note by Loofs, Leitfaden, 531-32.

MEDIEVAL CHRISTOLOGY 227
observes with great point that " outside the topic of the
person of Christ, where the impersonality of His human
nature is asserted, Catholic dogmatic has in the doctrine
of His work emphasised the humanity so strongly that
its impersonality seems to be forgotten." 1 Practical piety
kept a firm grasp on the full manhood of Jesus, as is
proved by the immense literature on the Imitation of
Christ, yet without affecting Christology proper. Above
all, the great mediseval theories of Atonement, to be intelli
gible, required a genuine humanity, animated and energ
by the personal life of a Brother. Anselm's wordsj^
the "merit" of Christ have no meaning, if Christ firfe
man had no personality. In essence this is true also of
Abelard and St. Bernard. The later scholastics, without
exception, build the argument on Augustine's great maxim :
in quantum homo, in tarttum mediator; so especially
Peter the Lombard. The deity of Christ came into view
rather as the infinite co-efficient raising human action
and passion to an infinite value. Yet these teachers, in
the Christological section of their work, set forth a view
which was simply docetic. Indeed, the Lombard did not
scruple to say that in respect of His humanity Christ
was nothing at all (Christus secundum hominem non est
persona, nee aliquid), but at this Nihilianism the Church
took fright, and he was censured in 1170. Here can
be traced the malign influence of the pseudo-Dionysius,
that unknown Christian theosophist of (probably) the
sixth century, whose Neo-Platonic and more than half-
docetic conceptions did so much to colour mediseval
religious thought, and to infect it with a mysticism which
had nothing Christian about it save the name.
No writer of this time approaches Bernard of Clairvaux
in the intensity with which he realised the manhood of
Jesus. Besides the mysterious and half -unknown Christ
of the sacrament, he grasps and clings to the Man whose
mind and deeds and passion are the medium of Divine
life to the world. In the historic Christ God is personally
1 Op. tit. 274.

228 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
present to redeem. Cum nomino Jesum, he says in a
beautiful phrase, horninem mihi propono mitem et humilem
corde . . . eundemque ipsum deum omnipotentem.1
Like other thinkers of the period, Thomas Aquinas
(d. 1274) and Duns Scotus (d. 1308) also did homage
t#,an iclea of God well-nigh excessive in its remote tran-
,%endehce. In Christology it was felt that at all hazards
jiBpeonfusion of deity with finite forms of life must be
'avoided. ^Hence Aquinas teaches that the Logos takes
arsbnal — though somehow individual — human nature
jfeUnity with itself; the counterstroke immediately
wing, however, to the effect that after all the
union is real not in the Divine nature, but in the human
nature only. Or, to put it otherwise, the natures are not
so much united, as brought into a common relation to
the Logos. At bottom, the theory is Monophysite. It
means that the incarnation is to be constructed merely
in a relative sense; for, while God is present in the
manhood of Jesus, it is only in such a fashion that He
might equally be present in more than one man, and
other instances of God-manhood are quite thinkable as
well as the historic Saviour. Nowhere else is the error
so apparent of regarding Christology as an abstract
problem in the combination of Infinite and finite, with
the inevitable result that on each side of the equation
impersonal categories are inserted, and the discussion
has practically no relevance to the Jesus of the
Gospels. How true this is we see from Thomas' declara
tion that from the conception of the Virgin onwards
the person of the God-man is absolutely complete and
perfected; in Christ, accordingly, there exists neither
faith nor hope, since both are excluded by His perfect
vision of God. The forms of human knowledge and
volition remain, but all is really determined by the will
of the Word. Even so the unity for the sake of which
the humanity has been curtailed is not achieved. For
Thomas concedes in the last resort that Christ's human
1 in Cant. 15. 6 ; quoted by Loofs.

THOMAS AQUINAS AND DUNS SCOTUS 229
mind, as being created, is, unlike His deity, incapable of
grasping the Divine essence. His soul knows all that is
or will be ; not, however, that which is possible. So, too,
with the omnipotence which, as Son of God, He possessed
wholly, but as Son of Man only in part, and as far as the
measures of humanity permit. But Aquinas has much to
say that is noble regarding the man Christ Jesus as the
recipient of grace.
Perhaps the most disconcerting notion in this theory
as a whole is an allusion to the possible plurality, of
incarnations, for a shadow is thus cast upon the essential
uniqueness of Christ as Saviour. It is an idea with which
the believing mind can make no terms. The period was
one that hardly felt a distinctive interest in Christology.
Men were content to prove the logical connections of
the traditional scheme. They had learnt nothing, and also
forgotten nothing.
Duns Scotus, a generation later, was scarcely more suc
cessful in lifting the debate to a truly moral plane. And
yet, though Thomism conquered, he does exhibit a deeper
appreciation of Jesus' human experience, and faintly in
dicates the limitations of His knowledge as man. Even
so much as this, however, was gained only at the cost of
distinguishing very sharply between the two natures, for
Duns wholly agreed with Thomas in affirming that neither
suffering nor merit could be predicated of the Divine
essence. The union of the natures is at best a relation
of dependence whereby the humanity is subsumed under
the divinity ; a relation comparable to that between
substance and accident, and imposing on the Godhead no
limit of any kind. Jesus has no human personality or
independent being. His humanity exists in the Logos
only "as my foot exists in me. The man alone became, not
ihe'.. Logos in any sense, for deity cannot become that
which is not eternal. Still, the instinct for a true man
hood Was ineradicable, since only through the merit of
Jesus is the world redeemed.

CHAPTER VII.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION
CHURCHES.
§ 1. Luther. — It is not too much to say that with the
Preformation, and especially with Luther, there came into
the world a deeper understanding of the person of
Christ than had prevailed since the apostolic age.
" The attitude towards Jesus which Luther consciously
held," says Herrmann, "marks a step forward in the
development of the Christian religion." 1 This was due
to religious interest being now simply concentrated on
Christ, and no longer dispersed vainly over a multitude
of mediators and spiritual exercises. What emerges in
consequence is a distinctive type of Christian piety. The
Gospel is in the historic Saviour, and it is all there.
Theology and Christology are no longer independent
aspects of doctrine ; they coincide. The Beformers, writes
Dr. Lindsay, " knew no other God than the God who
had manifested Himself in the historical Christ, and made
us see in the miracle of faith that He is our salvation." 2
Luther's system of belief, if system it may be
called, rests on and revolves round the person of Jesus
Christ. To him faith in God and faith in Christ are
Literature — Bruce, Humiliation of Christ 2, 1881 ; Th. Harnack,
Luthers Theologie, 1862-86 ; Kbstlin, Luthers Theologie2, 1901 ; von Kiigelgen,
Luthers Auffassung der GoUheit Christi2, 1901 ; Lindsay, History of the
Reformation, 1906 ; Herrmann, Communion with God, 1906 ; Hastings,
Diet, of Christ and the Gospels, 1908 ; Bensow, Die Lehre von der Kenose,
1903 ; Haering, Der christliche Glaube (Dogmatik), 1906 j Schaff, History of
the Creeds of Christendom, 1877.
1 Communion with God (2nd Eng. edition), 148,
2 Hastings, DCG. ii. 862.

MARTIN LUTHER 231
one and the same thing. " I have no God," he exclaims,
"whether in heaven or in earth, and I know of none,
outside the flesh that lies in the bosom of the Virgin
Mary. For elsewhere God is utterly incomprehensible,
but comprehensible in the flesh of Christ alone." And
again: "Wilt thou go surely and meet and grasp God
rightly, so finding grace and help in Him, be not persuaded
to seek Him elsewhere than in the Lord Christ. Let thine
art and study begin with Christ, and there let it stay and
cling." Hence the problems of the Trinity and the two
natures ceased to be mere enigmas of speculative dialectic,
providing the theologia glories, as Luther called it, with
a field for keen intellectual play ; at every point they
remained in living touch with religion. Christ is for
sinners the one mark on which saving trust must fix ;
elsewhere God is known only as an angry and devour
ing fire, whereas in Christ He is a very ocean of love
unspeakable. It was among the rare excellences of Luther's
Christology that he fastened an indissoluble bond, as
St. Paul had done, between the person of the Eedeemer
and His redeeming work. Any view of Christ, therefore,
which may be developed in abstraction from what He
actually did for men, in His life, death, and resurrection,
is but a formal and delusive play of words. To start
not from metaphysical presuppositions as to what God
head and manhood are, and the possibility of uniting
them, but from Jesus' cross and victory and the working
of His Spirit in the heart — this is the only true way.
These two, the person and the office, are an organic unity,
neither being intelligible apart from the other. Both
are asserted when faith says " our Lord." As the work
is eternal, so must the person be. On the other hand,
none but such a person could have accomplished a work
so great. Therefore even in contemplating the passion we
ought " mostly to consider the person, and study well quis,
qualis, et quantus Christ is."
From all this Luther derives an intuitive certainty

232 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
that to understand Christ we must begin with the
knowledge of His human life. To him the manhood
of Christ signified more than to any post-apostolic
teacher. The foundations of faith are to be laid in
the recorded facts of our Lord's career as man, and
anything else would be to start building from the roof.
" The Scriptures," he says, " begin very gently, and
lead us on to Christ as to a man, and then to one
who is Lord over all creatures, and after that to one who
is God. So do I enter delightfully, and learn to know
God. But the philosophers and doctors have insisted
on beginning from above ; and so they have become fools.
We must begin from below, and after that come upwards.".1
Otherwise we miss Him who is the ladder that guides
us upward to the Father, the lowly glass in which we
see God. Luther is quite conscious of a difference in
accent separating him here from the scholastics and even
from many of the Fathers ; it is indeed his complaint
against the Boman Church, that she never dreamt we
ought to learn to recognise God in Christ.2 Too often the
Fathers fled from the manhood of Christ to the Godhead,
pleading that the flesh profiteth nothing. Whereas the
fact is that except as man Christ could never have
redeemed us by His cross and triumph. Sinners are
guilty; hence none but the proper and true God could
"purge sin, destroy death, remove the curse," and only
in flesh could even God Himself do it. Thus it is
impossible to draw Christ too deeply down into nature
and the flesh. We cannot make Him too human. The
mere juxtaposition of Godhead and manhood, as Luther
never tires of repeating, is of no avail; we must have
the Son of God fused and inwoven with humanity, and
one person therewith. If Christ were not God, there
were no God at all, but in Him God has entered into a
bond with sinners closer even than a brother.
Very plain words, accordingly, are used regarding
the reality of Jesus' earthly life as one of limitation,
1 Werke (Erl. ed.), xii. 412. 2 Herrmann, op. tit. 157.

LUTHER ON CHRIST AS MAN 233
growth, and trial. The apocryphal stories of His youth
are "mere folly." "He ate, drank, slept, and waked;
was weary, sad, joyous ; wept, laughed ; was hungry,
thirsty, cold ; sweated, talked, worked, prayed." In the
days of earth He was no almighty man. So far from
remaining in a different order of being, " there was no
difference between Him and other men save that He
was God and without sin." Luther wavers slightly on
the question as to the necessity of a virgin birth for
sinlessness, but regarding the fact alike of sinlessness and
of birth from a Virgin he has no doubts at all. Always
the motive of this unprecedented insistence on our Lord's
humanity is religious and practical. We are undone if
we cannot say, " This Man is God."
But if Christ was true man, faith is equally
assured that He was not mere man. It is the very
corner-stone of Luther's theology that none other than
God could avail to atone for human sin. Athanasius
himself could not speak more plainly than he as to the
absolute centrality of the Godhead of Christ. " If Deity
be wanting in Christ," he writes, " there is no help or
deliverance for us against God's anger and judgments " ;
and again, " if it could not be held that God died for us,
but only a man, then we are lost." Without this God
who died and rose again, we dare not draw near in worship.
The mystics come far short in representing Him as only
an example, for that turns Him in reality into " an angry
judge and a horrible tyrant." But the principle that
the person is as the work guides us aright, for " since
no one can give eternal life but God alone, it follows
inevitably that Christ must be truly and naturally God."
Strong words come to Luther's pen as he thinks of the
Zwinglian conception of Alloiosis, according to which it
is only by a figure of speech we can assert an interchange
of qualities between the natures — manhood and Godhead
thus being ultimately kept apart. This, says Luther, is
sheerly false, "for if I believe that the human nature
alone suffered for me, then is Christ worse than no Saviour

234 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
to me." The objection that Godhead cannot suffer he
grants as an abstract proposition, but one overruled by
the actualities of the Scripture record. To repeat it yet
once more, he knows no God except the child on Mary's
bosom and the Man upon the cross. In Dr. Lindsay's
admirable phrase, " Christ fills the whole sphere of
God." i
These two sides, the deity and the humanity, were
held or rather fused together by Luther with a kind of
passion. " Since Cyril," writes Harnack, " no teacher
has arisen in the Church, to whom the mystery of the
unity of the two natures in Christ was so deep a consola
tion." 2 Christ as daysman, as Mediator, must by the very
constituents of His person have standing-ground on both
sides, so binding God and man in unity. We are
saved through soul-union with Christ, a union so personal
and vital that our sins become His and His perfect
righteousness ours ; and this mystic unity is itself possible
only because in Christ God is one with manhood. The
doctrine grows sharper in the sacramental controversy,
but Luther had grasped its import long before. To quote
the luminous words of Principal Dykes : " The tradi
tional Christology of the schools, which so coldly held
asunder the finite and infinite natures, seeing in the
incarnation no more than a mere clothing of unchangeable
Deity with a garment of mortal flesh to be its medium
of self-manifestation, could no longer satisfy. Bather
Luther saw in the incarnation (1) the attainment by God
of what He has always longed for in His love, namely,
humanity as His own form of existence, and (2) the
reception by Man of what he was made for, namely,
Divinity as the very contents of his spiritual life; a
union, in brief, real and vital, by which two disparate,
yet allied or kindred, natures coalesce for good and all
into one single indivisible personality." 3
The basal article of faith once settled, Luther was pre-
1 Hastings, DCG. ii. 862. 2 Dogmengeschichte (lte Aufl.), iii. 695.
8 Expository Times for Dec. 1905, 105.

CHRIST AND GOD ALL ONE 235
pared to give and take with respect to inherited technical
phrases, provided only facts were secure. He could even
say, in a well-known passage, that his soul hated the word
" homoousion," and that he preferred not to employ it.1
Modern critical theologians, however, are scarcely accurate
in regarding Luther as a forerunner of their own view
that the Gospel is quite independent of Christology. It
is indeed the fact that acceptance of .the deity of Christ
had ceased, for Luther, to be a doctrinal preliminary of
saving faith ; but this is so because Christ, so far from
counting for less in personal religion, now counts for in
finitely more, and stands in the very centre of the religious
experience itself. Belief in His Godhead, in other words,
is no mere theoretic approach or avenue to faith ; it was
a living constituent in faith, to be afterwards analysed
out and made explicit by the theologian. Here in Christ,
Luther cries, I have the Father's heart and will, coming
forth in love for my salvation ; and the heresy of heresies
is that which separates the mind and disposition of God
from that of Jesus. We must not make "a Christ apart
by Himself and a God apart by Himself," but reckon the
two all one. Now it was this great evangelical intuition
that God and Christ confront us as a single Divine re
deeming cause that moved Luther to argue with such
intensity that the two natures are so united that they
cannot really be looked at apart. There had been a time,
he admits, when he thought he did well to distinguish
them ; and if the efforts failed by which he later strove
to rectify this error, we can see that it was because the
condition of human thought in his time supplied no cate
gories but such as were intrinsically uneqraal to the task.
For Luther, as for Augustine and Athanasius, " Jesus is a '
Man in whom God dwells, and who is God " ; 2 but this'
is a faith which it is impossible to express worthily by
saying that in Him a Divine nature and a human nature
are conjoined, or that a Divine substance underlies the
1 Cf. Th. Harnack, Luthers Theologie, ii. 186.
2 Lindsay, ut supra, 860.

236 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
human life of Jesus. The experience of the man who
finds in Christ the saving presence of very God is, as
Herrmann protests, " not so much expressed as concealed
by the formula that combines a Divine nature with the
human nature of Jesus."1 This, after all, does no more
than reproduce the content of one of the Beformer's most
characteristic passages : " Christ is not called Christ be
cause He has two natures. What is that to me ? That
He is by nature God and man is for Himself. But what
gives me comfort and blessing is that He so applies His
office and pours forth His love and becomes my Saviour
and Eedeemer." 2
Thus new thoughts of. Christ are struggling in Luther
with old forms. In terms, to take one instance, he sub
scribed to the old dogma of the impersonality of Christ's
human nature, but in point of fact he felt no genuine
interest in the idea, arid it had only the faintest influence
on his argument. What he gives to the world, as Loofs
has excellently remarked, is not new dogmatic ideas but
new religious intuitions. By a vitalising innovation he
drew the mind of a whole age back to the historic Christ,
declaring with tremendous power that faith possesses its
proper object solely in the person of the crucified and
exalted Lord. So passionately did he preach the unity
of Christ and God, that a parallel has naturally been
pointed out between his naive modalism and that which
we have discovered in primitive writers like Ignatius.
And Herrmann has done a service by bringing out the
fact, so significant when closely scrutinised, that for Luther
the right confession of Christ's deity is possible only for
a redeemed man.. As he puts it, quite in Luther's spirit,
" when Christ redeems us from ourselves, then we see God
working upon us in Christ's person."3 It is true, of
course, that Luther often fell beneath the level of these
glorious thoughts. The exigencies of controversy at times
seduced him into old mistaken paths. The two -nature
1 Communion, etc., 151. a See Erlangen edition, xii. 244.
8 ut supra, 167.

AFTER THE REFORMATION 237
doctrine hampered the free expression of his mind. Yet
in nothing was his greatness as a Eeformer more clearly
manifested than in his rediscovery of the historic
Saviour, who redeems sinful men by drawing them into
union with His own wondrous person as disclosed in the
New Testament. This apostolic Gospel was not new
in religion, but for long it had been banished from
theology. In this man it rose from the dead once more,
and by claiming to revolutionise men's conception of our
Lord's saving work, claimed also to reconstruct their ideas
of His person. And to this hour the Church is occupied
with the problem essentially as it was stated by Martin
Luther. § 2. The Lutheran and Reformed Christologies. — The
Eeformers, alike in Germany and Switzerland, had made
it plain that they took over without reserve the orthodox
Christology of the ancient Church, as set forth in the
three so-called Ecumenical Creeds. Melanchthon indeed
declared, in a famous sentence, Hoc est Christum cognoscere,
beneficia eius cognoscere non . . . eius naturas, modos incar-
nationis intueri ; x but the pregnant suggestion was not yet
developed, and the Protestant scholasticism which rose to
its height in the seventeenth century was led into other
paths, in the first instance by the pressure of sacramental
controversy. A dreary formalism took possession of the
official views of Christ. Dialectical refinements, with
minute distinctions intended to veil minute concessions,
or to avoid the more glaring self-contradictions of too
omniscient and undaunted hypotheses, revived the in
tellectual methods of the Middle Ages, and went far to
stifle the fresh and life-giving intuitions of the Eeforma-
tion. The main interest of this uninspiring age, so far
as our subject is concerned, lies in the revival of that
old dispute as to the relation of Godhead and manhood
in Christ, which had prevailed between Alexandria
and Antioch. Now it came up freshly, in a modi-
1 Loci of 1521, Introduction.

238 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
fied form, as between the Lutheran and the Beformed
Churches, having been stimulated into detailed expression
rather than initiated by a divergence of view regarding
the Lord's Supper. Consubstantiation and the ubiquity
of the Body and Blood of Christ went hand in hand, and
shaped the Lutheran reading of the two-nature doctrine.
At one in the conviction that the eternal and pre-existent
Son had become man by assuming human nature in its
entirety, the two Churches differed in their interpretation
of the composite unity thus created.
The official Lutheran Christology at the close of the
sixteenth century is to be found in the Formula of Con
cord of 1577 (Art. 8), behind which lie domestic contro
versies of scarcely more than pathological interest. It
must be said that the theory of Christ's person here set
forth attaches itself, often, to Luther's least happy sug
gestions, and even petrifies as dogmas what were, for his
own mind, only so many vivid metaphors. A compro
mise had to be found between the views of Brenz and
Chemnitz.1 According to Brenz, the unity of the Divine-
human person is such that from the moment of the
incarnation Christ's manhood shares in the glory and
power of His deity. He did not renounce the use of
this power and glory even in the days of His flesh, though
for the most part He exercised it only in a hidden manner,
and Brenz feels himself justified in saying that the living
Christ in His majesty governed heaven and earth while
He yet lay dead in the sepulchre. On these terms our
Lord's humanity is ubiquitous in the fullest sense.
Chemnitz, on the other hand, pleads for what is designated
the multivoliprassentia, i.e. the power of being present at
will simultaneously in many places. This power, he holds,
resides in Christ's manhood in virtue of its having been
absolutely suffused by the Divine nature, which ever
after works in, with, and through the other. At the
same time, though on earth Christ in His humanity
1 Brenz was at the head of the Swabian school, while Chemnitz led the
Lower Saxons.

BRENZ AND CHEMNITZ 239
possessed all the fulness of the Godhead, He chose not
to use or manifest it, but suspended its exercise tem
porarily. The Formula of Concord, on the whole, leans
to the side of Chemnitz. There is a real communication
of qualities from one nature to the other, the deity par
ticipating in the passion of the humanity, the humanity
in the majesty of the Divine. Yet it is insisted that no
transformation of the qualities of one nature into those
of the other is to be supposed ; what took place was not
an essential transfusion, but a permanent communication ;
and withal there is an explicit statement to the effect that
no addition to or diminution of the attributes of the
Divine nature resulted from the incarnation of the Word.1
Turning to the contrasted Christologies held by
the Lutheran and the Eeformed Churches, let us note
that the Lutherans, in the endeavour to give fuller
expression to the religious content of faith, were mainly
eager to bring out the unity of the Divine-human
life. Hence they went back to Luther's underlying
axiom, "that human nature has been created for par
ticipation in the life of God, and is destined to reach it
to a degree of which we can form no conception save
from the exemplary instance of Jesus Christ, our Head." 2
Finitum est capax infiniti. Insisting that the inseparability
of the two natures must be taken seriously, they worked
1 That the matter was after all left ambiguous is proved by the seventeenth-
century controversy between the Tubingen theologians and those of Giessen
(1616-27). They long debated the question : Did the God - man, in
the days of His flesh, actually renounce the use of Divine powers,
in respect of His humanity (both sides agreed that these powers were
in His possession), or did He merely employ them secretly ? The first
view is that of Giessen. Tubingen took the second, holding that in
secret the child Jesus ruled the universe qua man, and that He later ex
hibited at times both omnipotence and omniscience. Gradually the opinion
of Giessen prevailed, though illogically enough on the strictly Lutheran
premises ; and in Quenstedt, at whose hands the doctrine received final
shape, the presence in the manhood of Christ of strictly Divine powers had
become a mere potentiality. Cf. Haering, Der christliche Glaube, 434 ;
Schmid, Doctrinal Theology of the Lutheran Church (Eng. tr. by Hay and
Jacobs), 396 ff. ; and see Index of Bruce, Humiliation of Christ,
2 Dykes, ut supra, 104.

240 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
out a theory in rather unprofitable detail. First of all
comes the unitio, or incarnation, the actual combination,
that is to say, of deity and humanity in one person;
and this is strictly an act. The permanent result, on
the other hand, is a state, the perpetual conjunction with
mutual possession of the two natures now subsisting in
the one person of the Son; this state being technically
known as the unio personalis. It is not that a part of
the Logos is united to a part of the flesh. Eather the
whole Logos and the whole flesh form one indissoluble
Life, the hypostasis of the manhood, which in itself is
impersonal, being constituted or replaced by the pre-
existent Divine personality; So closely joined and, as it
were, coextensive, are the natures, that the Logos has no
existence outside the flesh, nor the flesh outside the
Logos (Logos totus in came). In short, it is no mere verbal
or ideal or relative union, but one which is wholly reciprocal
and personal. Finally, from the personal union, and the
resulting communion or mutual permeation of natures,
there flows the communicatio idiomatum, a peculiar and
original tenet for which appeal was made to Col 29.
In two ways, it is true, the ancient Church had taught
a mutual transference of qualities in the Saviour's person.
First, qualities of either nature may be ascribed to the
Divine-human person, as when it is said, " Christ is of the
seed of David," or "The Son of Man is from heaven"
(genus idiomaticum) ; secondly, redemptive qualities or
actions of the theanthropic person as a whole may be
ascribed to one or other of the natures, as in the pro
positions, " The Son of God was manifested to destroy the
works of the devil," or, "The blood of Jesus cleanses
from sin " (genus apotelesmalicum). But the Lutherans went
further, and became responsible for what was really a
theological innovation, by definitely teaching that Divine'
attributes may be predicated of the human nature,
since there is a real transference of properties from the
one side to the other ; they exchange something of their sub
stance as if by a process of endosmosis (genus majestaticum). ,

THE LUTHERAN CONSTRUCTION 241
Even in His human nature Christ is almighty and omni
present, and a basis is thus found in strictly Christologioal
doctrine for the tenet of the sacramental ubiquity, or
multipresence, of the Saviour's body. The fourth possible
class of propositions, asserting the conveyance of human
properties to deity, was summarily put aside, no one
being found to question the immutability of Godhead.1
A little reflection is enough, I think, to prove that
this dogmatic Lutheran Christology has swung round
eventually in a direction exactly opposite to that in which
primarily it had sought to move. For the inspiring
motive of the whole had been a passionate desire to
vindicate for faith the possession of a Divine Christ, whom
we can grasp and hold. It was for the sake of this that
Luther put forward the stupendous conception of a humanity
which is omniscient and almighty. Now in all probability
Luther's mind, in affirming that the manhood received
and used the properties of Godhead, was chiefly occupied
with the exalted Lord in His risen majesty ; yet
further reflection was sure to suggest that if this inter
communication of qualities was a fact, and an essential
outcome of the personal union of the natures, it was
impossible that it should date merely from the ascension.
Bather it must belong to the earthly Jesus from the first
moment of incarnation. And at once this evoked two
objections. First, it might be said, the Gospels present
us with no such Figure — a man who yet is omniscient
or omnipresent : on the contrary, He exhibits the natural
and accustomed limitations of humanity. To meet this
difficulty, the older Lutheran divines took a somewhat
novel line as to the " states " of Christ and the Kenosis
which Scripture declares Him to have undergone. They
drew a sharp distinction between incarnation and humilia
tion. The subject of humiliation or self-emptying is not
the Logos, for in becoming man the Logos surrendered
1 It is at this point that modern Kenotic theories have interposed,
asking whether that which is commonly said to be inconceivable is so
in fact. 16

242 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
nothing of His Divine majesty. The subject of humiliation
is the God-man in respect of His human nature ; and for
Him humiliation consisted solely in this, that while retain
ing possession of the Divine qualities conveyed to His
humanity by its union with the Logos, He yet made
no habitual use of them. He usually dispensed with them,
and only at times did His real powers flash through the
veil. But this naturally provokes a second criticism.
Apart from the fact that the scheme still impairs the
full manhood of the historic Christ, is there not, one feels,
something curiously mechanical in a conception of deity
and humanity, and their mutual relations, which first
combines them absolutely in order to secure a personal
unity of life, and then cancels the reality of the combina
tion lest its effect should be to submerge the lesser of
the two united factors ? Thus Lutheran dogma spoke of
the infant Jesus ruling the universe, but only secretly;
and both the leading statement, and still more if possible
the added qualification, leave an impression of being
completely alien to the thought of the New Testament.
Further, it is doubtful whether the goal aimed at, even as
regards the Atonement, could really be attained this way.
It was axiomatic indeed that the blood of Christ has
infinite expiatory value, as being the life-blood of the God-
man; but if Christ in order to be capable of death must
disengage His humanity yet once more from the Divine
properties conferred on it by incarnation, loosening anew
the formed union, could it be said that His blood any
longer possessed that infinite worth which derives from
personal oneness with the Divine ? For now it is not
fthe God-man who dies, but a humanity disengaged from
'the higher unity.1
If the Lutherans prolonged the line of Alexandrian
reflection, the Beformed Christology, on the other hand,
maintained the traditions of Antioch, holding the formulas
of Chalcedon as sacrosanct. The Lutheran maxim they
1 Cf. Haering, ut supra, 434.

THE REFORMED THEORY 243
met with a direct negative : finitum non est capax infiniti.
In consequence they held the Divine and human natures
rigidly, not to say coldly, in separation. It is true that
in Christ the Infinite nature and the finite co-exist in a
personal union mediated by the Holy Spirit, for the
person of the former, i.e. the eternal Logos, has assumed
the latter, and henceforward is the God-man Jesus Christ.
But the special teaching of the Lutherans as to the
communication of qualities they rejected, as leading to
the deification of the Lord's manhood. Each nature retains
the attributes properly belonging to it ; the hypostatic
unity, therefore, is of an indirect kind, being placed wholly
in the person, which singly rules over and combines two
entities in themselves separate. Of this oneness the best
illustration or analogy is given in the mystic union of
Christ with the believing soul. In harmony with this, the
Beformed divines put forward a different interpretation
of the Kenosis. The subject of humiliation in Ph 2,
they rightly held, is not the incarnate God-man, but the
pre-incarnate Son ; and for the apostle's mind humiliation
is simply the incarnation. Closer inspection, no doubt,
reveals the fact that after all the Logos is ' considered
not to have divested Himself of His Divine glory, but
only to have conjoined the human nature in personal
union with Himself. Nevertheless, the Beformed writers
insisted with tenacity that this manhood was veritably
human, of one essence with our own ; and in great
measure the strength and religious value of their con
struction lay in this persistent effort to do justice to
Jesus' experience of growth and trial, as recorded with
concrete detail in the Gospels. Sinless and infallible,.
He yet grew in knowledge, holiness, and power. Not!
even in the exalted state does His human nature eeasej
to be separated from the Divine by an impassable gulf.'
Perhaps it was by a certain instinct of compensation
that this insistence upon the sublime and absolute tran
scendence of the Divine Logos, even in relation to His
own manhood, came to have alongside of it so marked

244 . THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
an emphasis on the ethical reality of Jesus' human life.
Be that as it may, while the Lutherans had taught that
the whole Logos was present in Jesus, the sharp distinction
of Infinite and finite in the Beformed scheme made this
impossible. It was decided, therefore, that the Logos,
truly present in Jesus' manhood, is none the less existent
outside it — totus extra carnem as well as totus in carne—
governing the world simultaneously from a different centre
of life and consciousness, so to speak, from that at which
He dwelt incarnate in Jesus.1 It is not surprising that
opponents should at once have rejoined that on these
terms the incarnation was made of none effect, since the
relation of the Logos to Jesus now resembled that which
He bears to other men alike in degree and in kind.
If the Lutherans had made the reality of Christ's
human nature dubious, equally natural was the charge
that Beformed writers destroyed the unity of the person.
It was argued that for them the two natures present in
the theanthropic life are glued together " like two boards,"
with no living interpenetration. They had accused the
Lutherans of being Monophysites or Docetics, and now
they had to hear themselves styled Nestorians and
Ebionites. The relative justice of these unhappy recrimi
nations we cannot stay to canvass, but at least we ought
not to miss . the great religious motives operating in the
expressed convictions of both sides. If the Lutherans
had made a nobly conceived effort to formulate the
truth that -Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, the concrete
presence of God in perfect manhood, the Calvinists in
1 This is what is meant by illud "extra" Calvinisticum, of which
Lutheran divines speak with an approach to horror. Calvin formulates it
with his usual clearness: "Although the boundless essence of the Word
was united with human nature into one person, we have no idea of any
enclosing. The Son of God descended miraculously from heaven, yet
without abandoning heaven ; was pleased to be conceived miraculously in
the Virgin's womb, to live on the earth, and hang upon the cross, and yet
always filled the world as from the beginning " (Institutes, bk. ii. chap. 13,
ad fin.). This view can unquestionably appeal to the general trend of
ancient and mediajval Christology, but it may well be doubted whether it
does justice to the religious interests bound up witli the idea of incarnatioa

SOCINIANISM 245
turn proclaimed no less truly the reality of Jesus' human
life, as a religious and ethical experience, striving to
regard the Incarnate One " as He regarded Himself —
as the Son of Man, the Man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief."1
These two Christologies offered an easy mark to the
polemic of the Socinians. The leader of these theo
logical insurgents, Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), had
proclaimed that if religious doctrines are to be believed,
they must be amenable to the strict rules of logic ; and
accordingly he had denied the doctrine of the Trinity,
of the pre-existence of Christ, and of His two natures.
Jesus is a mere man, but He was sent into the world by
a benignant God, and only through Him can salvation be
secured. Yet to this mere man wonderful things have
happened, and it is hardly an exaggeration to. say that
Socinus could have accepted every article in the Apostles'
Creed. For Jesus is distinguished from all other men
by His birth of a virgin, by His sinlessness, and by a
special baptism of the Holy Spirit, endowing Him with
miraculous power; not only so, but as a reward for the
perfect obedience of His earthly life He has been raised
to heaven and constituted God's, viceroy over the whole
universe.2 In this capacity, we are expressly told, He ought
to be worshipped, for, though not in Himself possessed of
the Divine right to worship, special permission has been
accorded to believers by God sanctioning His adoration ;
and Socinus went so far as to hold that the exalted Jesus
might properly be called God. Nevertheless to these
far-reaching Christian affirmations there were appended
the most singular negations. God, in the last resort, is
1 Bruce, ut supra, 132. On the whole subject of the Lutheran and
Reformed Christologies, see his fine chapter.
2 "Even the critical spirits of the Reformation period, the Socinian
Unitarians, made no real headway till they had elevated the creaturely Jesus,
by resurrection, to a heavenly world-papacy " (Kahler, Angewandte Dogmen,
132). They are the clearest instance in history of the theory which
ascribes to Christ a gewordene GoUheit, a Godhead which once was not
but now is.

246 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
not present personally in Jesus, and His position as
glorified and in a sense Divine Lord can be justified only
by a species of what we must call deification. One feels
that neither orthodox nor heretics were so placed as to
comprehend each other, and that already the conditions
of the problem were passing into a new phase, of which
it may be the final issues have not yet emerged. " This
Socinian doctrine," Professor Dick Fleming has said, " rests
on the same presuppositions as the orthodoxy of the day,
namely, that the supreme and essential characters of deity
are omnipotence, omniscience, unchangeableness ; but by
applying this conception logically to the person of Christ,
Socinians emptied their Christology of all religious value.
For union with God is the need of the human heart ; and
the doctrine of the God-man, contradictory as it was, held
a truth for which Socinianism found no expression." 1
We turn now to the modern phase of the Christologioal
question, as reconstituted by two centuries of untiring
historical research. New questions begin to be asked,
and new combinations set on foot.
1 Hastings, DCG. ii. 867 ; cf. Bovon, Dogmatigue Chr&ienne, ii. 151.

CHAPTER VIII.
CHRISTOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
§ 1. Theocentric and Anthropocentric Conceptions. — Two
hundred years ago a striking change of attitude took
place in serious students of the person of Jesus Christ.
Till then the point of departure had prevailingly
been theocentric, as it may be called : that is, men
engaged in Christologioal construction set out from the
Eternal Word or Son, the Second Person of the Trinity,
and at times it almost seems as if we were being
summoned to watch the incarnation taking place through
the eyes of God Himself. Somewhere near the begin
ning of the eighteenth century, pioneer minds began to
feel that this cannot be the right path for human intelli
gence. We must start from a point closer to ourselves.
So the great modern movement of research, of which the
outcome has virtually been a rediscovery of the historic
Jesus, who is now better known than at any period since
the apostolic age, represents an ever-growing volume of
devout study of the Life pictured in the Gospels, inspired
Literature — Faut, Die Christologie seit Schleiermacher, 1907 ; Giinther,
Die Lehre von der Person Christi im XlXten Jahrhundert, 1911 ; Weinel,
Jesus im XlXten Jahrhundert, 1903 ; Bleek, Die Grundlagen der Christ
ologie Schleiermachers, 1898 ; F. H. R. Frank, Geschichte mid Kritik der
neueren Theologie*, 1908 ; Frommel, Etudes de Theologie Moderne, 1909 ;
Pfleiderer, Development of Theology in Germany and in Great Britain in the
Nineteenth Century, 1890; G. Frank, Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie,
Bd. iv., 1905; Herrmann, " Christliche - protestantische Dogmatik," in
Hinneberg's Kultur der Gegenwart, I. iv. 2, 1909 ; Fairbairn, Christ in
Modern Theology, 1893; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ2, 1881 ; Bensow,
Die Lehre von der Kenose, 1903; Orr, Christian View of God and the World,
1893 ; Tulloch, Movements of Religious Thought, 1885 ; Ecke, Die theolo-
gische Schule A. Ritschls, 1897; Garvie, The Ritsehlian Theology, 1899.
247

248 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
by the conviction that, whatever more, it is at all events
genuinely and completely human. The point of view,
in other words, gradually became anthropocentric. These
adjectives need imply no serious difference of opinion as
to ultimate conclusions ; " anthropocentric " must not be
confused with "humanitarian." It is less a question of
antagonism than of order. For both sides Christ is God
manifest in the flesh ; indeed, as a recent writer has
remarked, modern preoccupation with the historic Christ
"has had the effect of making the old problem of His
Person stand out with a quite fresh sharpness of outline."
For it is precisely the unique human characteristics, the
transcendent traits and personal pretensions plainly ex
hibited in the record that send us back, for reasonable
explanation, far and beyond the possibilities of normal man
hood. If previously the movement of Christian thought
had been from above downwards, its direction was now
imperceptibly reversed, and, as was natural in an inductive
age, came to be upwards from below. And the problem
confronting the modern mind may, therefore, be said to
be: Given the fact that Jesus is thus true man, proposing
indeed unheard-of claims, equally separate from sinners
and distinct from saints, yet nowhere transgressing the
limits of perfect manhood as it moves within unique and
inimitable conditions, what is the relation between this
Life, in which God is personally present, and the inner
being of the Godhead ? And further, what is the relation,
in the person of Christ Himself, between the Divine
content of His being, and the specific form it assumed in
Him of a perfectly revealing human consciousness ? x
Bound this question, then, the Christological work of
the moderns has in the main revolved, although its orbit
has occasionally swung out very far from the centre.
During the nineteenth century a varied but rewarding
debate went on. Not since the age of the Cappadocians
has the person of our Lord so held the focus of Christian
thought as in the nineteenth century.
1 Cf. Haering, Dogmatik, 428.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY RATIONALISM 249
The background of the modern movement is furnished
by the uninspired. Eationalism of the Aufkldrung. Eohr,
a characteristic exponent of its temper, declares that
Christology has no place in the system of Christian
doctrine, since we are concerned not with a religion for
which Jesus is object bf faith, but only with that which
Jesus taught. Hence the Aufkldrung dispensed with
Christology because first it had virtually dispensed with
faith in Christ as Saviour. Jesus is indeed the Teacher
of a perfect morality, and the pattern of character for all
time ; but there is nothing supernatural about Him. To
call Him in any metaphysical sense God's Son is irrational,
for His personality was the product of natural gifts directed
by an energetic wilL Even Kant failed to transcend these
meagre conclusions. To him Christ was but the abstract
idea of ethical perfection, of moral unity with God ; and
what saves is faith in this ideal, not in Jesus as a person.
Church doctrine, he said, has committed the error
of applying to Jesus epithets and conceptions which
rightly belong to the ethical ideal, of which He is but
the symbol. Thus, for example, it is true that the idea
of perfect humanity has hovered before the mind of God
from the beginning, and, as an effluence from His being,
may even be designated His Son ; but to speak of the
pre-existence of Christ is mythology. The connection of
faith with historical events is purely fortuitous, and the
phrase " historical revelation " can only be interpreted as
meaning that throughout the course of ages the eternal
truths of Beason have been rising into the clear light
of knowledge. This is tantamount to the assertion that
Christ has no permanent place in the religion known
by His name. The principle of Christianity and the
person of Christ were distinguished sharply — a familiar
phenomenon in the ensuing century, and even now not
quite obsolete, though it is easy to see that it implies
the disappearance of the Gospel of the New Testament.
It implies that Jesus is not, in any legitimate sense, the
object of saving trust. His significance for religion is only

250 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
casual, chronological, indirect. Our business is solely
with the rational faith of which Jesus was the most
eminent preacher and pioneer ; and all truth about God,
virtue, and immortality proclaimed by Him may be ap
propriated, and will save us, quite apart from a personal
relation of dependence on Christ Himself. We have the
seed, and can ourselves grow the flowers. We shall see
that in the speculative movement which sprang from
Kant the same principle is regarded as axiomatic; as
when Fichte, for example, contends that unity with God is
the great matter, but the path to it wholly immaterial.
If Christ were to return to earth He would set little
store by our recognition of His place as Eedeemer, pro
vided only Christianity itself were dominating the minds
of men. Much of the interest of this period lies in its close
affinity with a widely spread tendency of the present
day. Eecently a prominent writer of the advanced wing
declared, with grave emphasis, that if historical in
vestigation were to decide that Jesus had never lived,
he should not as a religious man feel himself seriously
impoverished or disconcerted. We have the ideas of the
Gospel, and may neglect its facts. But if our personal
relation to Christ, as believers, is put in abeyance as
an illegitimate and unscientific prejudice, then, be it in
the eighteenth century or to-day, purely historic investi
gation will yield a conception of His nature which living
faith never can accept. " It is no mere accident,"
Eitschl once observed, "that the subversion of Jesus'
religious importance has been attempted under the guise
of writing His life." 1
§ 2. Sehleiermacher. — It was in view of the situation
just described that Friedrich Sehleiermacher addressed
himself to the problem of Christology. His qualifications
for the task were unrivalled. Apart from a sub-soil of
warm Moravian piety, and of reverent love for Jesus, his
1 Justification and Reconciliation (Eng. tr.), 3.

SCHLEIERMACHER 251
mind had been enriched by fruitful conceptions of the
profound significance of religion in human life. He saw
that religion is a thing sui generis, not to be swamped
by morality or confused heedlessly with mere knowledge.
He saw, too, what the older Eationalism had failed to
see, that Christianity is anchored to facts of the past,
and that here lies its secret. Never was man more alive
to the value of the Christian fellowship for living and
authentic Christian faith. He it was, as an American
theologian has finely said, "who led the German Chris
tianity, in its returning course, to our Lord." The
absoluteness of the Christian religion is the key to his
view of its Founder.
Here we shall confine attention to the Christology
of Schleiermacher's great dogmatic work, Der christliche
Glaube (1821-22; second edition, greatly altered, 1831),
neglecting his cursory treatment of the topic in his
Beden, issued more than twenty years earlier. There,
while acknowledging our vast debt to Jesus, he had
declined to recognise Him as the only Mediator. His
view of Christianity as the fleeting expression of an eternal
ideal debarred him from assigning a central and permanent
importance to the historic Lord. And Christology is
obviously out of the question for one to whom Jesus
is but primus inter pares. At this point Sehleiermacher
temporarily approaches the position of his later antagonist,
Hegel. Far otherwise is the tone of his epoch - making
treatise on dogmatic. For here Christianity is defined at
the very outset as a teleological monotheism, the unique
characteristic of which is this, that in it everything is
directly related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus.
No longer is He a Mediator, adapted to the form which
the religious sentiment assumes in Christianity ; He is the
Mediator, final, supreme, transcendent. Salvation is in-
dissociable from His person. " There is no other mode,"
he writes, "in which one can come to have part in the
Christian fellowship than through faith in Jesus as the

252 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Eedeemer." And progress will consist, not in separating
from Him, but in ever assimilating His work more
completely. This position is defended by an argument whieh,
at least in intention, is purely experimental. Here as
always, he reminds us, the point of departure is the
Christian mind, and our problem takes this form : Who
and what must Christ have been, to explain the state
of a redeemed soul? What are the dimensions of His
being, if He is the sufficient reason of the salvation we
now enjoy ? It is undeniable that there is given to us, as
Christians, a continuous invigoration of the sense of God
which is accompanied by a rising consciousness of bliss
and of victory over the world. This experience of re
demption, which cannot have been generated accidentally,
and which is found only within the Christian Church,
must have a cause capable of producing it. Thus, going
back by inference from the specifically Christian con
sciousness to Him who evoked it, from effect to cause,
we are able to determine the quality of Jesus' person.1
He is the living and self- communicative Saviour, the
inexhaustible fount and creative Type of new life and
freedom conveyed to all who trust Him. From Him
flows a stream of vital and vitalising power.
On the basis of these experiential facts a worthy
doctrinal superstructure may be raised. If Christ re
deems man, it must be in virtue of redemptive forces
resident in His nature ; if, within the Christian Church, our
religious sense is progressively triumphing over our lower
impulses, it is because that triumph was realised in Jesus
absolutely. His consciousness of God was such that it is
properly described as a unique presence of God in Him,
an original entrance of the Divine into human life. In
this modified sense, Sehleiermacher accepts the ecclesias-
1 Theologians, of course, use this argument by instinct, but. no one else
has employed it with Schleiermacher's clearness and tenacity. Whether it
ought to rank as primary is another question. J. H. Skrine gives an
attractive modern statement of the principle, Creed and the Creeds, 167 ff.

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 253
tical doctrine of incarnation. And in that doctrine
he selects for peculiarly warm and intense devotion the
sinlessness of Jesus. Jesus was perfectly and absolutely
holy. "Not holy, however, with a holiness merely
acquired (which would have made Him but a model, and a
model incapable of effecting man's redemption), but with
a holiness acquired — or rather conserved — on the basis
of inherent holiness (only this last gives Him the
creative power of a type). This absolute and primary
perfection of Jesus is simply the complete and perpetual
triumph in Him of the God-consciousness over the sense-
consciousness. Thus it excludes alike every moral fault
and every religious error,. and constitutes His divinity."1
As the Archetypal Man (Urbild) He is a perfect union
of the historical individual and the ideal personality,
crowning the creation of our race, Himself creating a new
race, determined in personal life, as He was, by God.
Type and history coincide in Jesus ; all that is historic
is typical, and all that is typical has become historic.
Sehleiermacher is also convinced that the advent
of this unique and archetypal Figure cannot be ex
plained, on the principle of uniformity, by His human
milieu. Eather it is due to a creative Divine act ; it is
a stream rising from the deepest fount of all spiritual
life — a second Divine creation, as it may be called,
which completes the first, though transcending it, because
it forms part of the . same original Divine idea. Thus
the appearance of Christ in our world is positively
miraculous (eine wunderbare Erscheinung). Although the
Virgin Birth is rejected, a supernatural conception is
strongly affirmed in the spiritual sense that the powers
of the race were unequal to the task of producing
this unparalleled Life. On the other hand, it has been
maintained that for Sehleiermacher the being of our
Lord is supernatural only in a relative sense, inasmuch
as the resident powers of human nature, the receptivity
of man for God - consciousness in perfect measure, is
1 Gaston Frommel, Etudes de Theologie Modems, 172 f.

254 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
regarded as the second and equally important factor
in His origin.1 This, however, is an objection which
it is scarcely possible to sustain except on grounds
which would involve a denial of the ethical affinities of
God and man. There is more justice in the criticism
which points to the grave diminution of the contents of New
Testament faith in Schleiermacher's categorical assertion
that the resurrection and ascension, as well as the pre
diction of Christ's return to judgment, form no real part
of the doctrine of His person (§ 99).
Apart from the supernatural character thus generally
predicated of Jesus' origin, His nature was precisely similar
to ours, and underwent a precisely similar development.
A light is cast on Schleiermacher's deeply Christian
conception of the Saviour by his mystical view of His
redeeming work, on which we may not dwell. Its cardinal
idea is that of vital union with Christ. It is by taking
us up into the energies of His God-consciousness and
the fellowship of His perfect blessedness that He reconciles
and saves.
The influence of this great thinker in leading
Christologians to start from a present experience of
the new life as immediately dependent on Jesus was
closely akin to that of the Beformers, and its depth
and value can scarcely be overestimated. If, as so
often happens, he himself gained less than might have
been hoped from the new point of view, and failed to
satisfy some deep Christian instincts, this was owing
to defects inherent in his theoretic notion of what
salvation is. Its relation to the world too much pre
dominates. Bedeemed men are men liberated from the
oppression of finite causes, and dependent solely on the
Absolute Causality, rather than forgiven sinners, living
in fellowship with God the Father. The idea of religion
present in the Reden still persists. Thus, while Schleier^
macher asserts — no one more emphatically — the central
1 Of. Mulert, Schleiermaehers geschichtsphilosqphische Ansichten, 66 ff.,
84 ff.

DEFECTS OF SCHLEIERMACHER 255
and redeeming place of Christ, it is doubtful whether his
speculative presuppositions permit him to hold such a
person as either real or possible. As long as religion
is defined in impersonal terms — as long as it is not seen
to be communion with a personal God — it has not been
made clear that its perfected stage can arrive only through
a personal Mediator. A principle may suffice. More
over, though he preferred to wreck his system as a monistic
structure rather than tamper with Christ's absolute im
munity from sin (for a miracle is a miracle though its
sphere be the soul), he yet has left a certain shadow upon
the genuine humanity of the Sinless One. Can we say that
a Christ from whose inner life even the minimum of moral
conflict is excluded x is our Companion in temptation, our
Brother and Captain in victory ; is not what appears in
Him, as it has been put, " merely the natural predomin
ance of a higher principle "I2 This also flows from the
romantic pantheism which haunted Sehleiermacher from
first to last, and leads him to represent Jesus' consciousness
of God more, on the whole, as the natural play of tempera
ment than as perfect reciprocal fellowship with His Father.
Finally, it is difficult to concede that Sehleiermacher has
been able to preserve the religious truth of incarnation.
Christ's humanity, in his view, is no doubt God-possessed ;
still, a God-possessed humanity is one thing, and may
have degrees ; God manifest in the flesh is quite another.3
And it makes a difference to theology when it falters in
repeating the words of St. Paul : " Ye know the grace of
our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for
your sakes He became poor." The religious importance
of Christ's eternal being has too much been ignored.
On the other hand, the invaluable service of Sehleier
macher to the Christologioal thinking of three generations
1 Sendschreiben (ed. Mulert), 22.
2 Haering, ut supra, 437.
'Christ is exhibited as the objective ground of faith, but in the last
resort He is shown to us still more clearly as the first believer. Later
liberalism has attached itself to this element in the whole, Cf. Loofs, RE.
iv. 56.

256 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
may be summed up in the statement, first, that he pro
claimed the advent of Christ as a supernatural inter
position, redeeming and Divine ; secondly, he once more
placed the figure of Jesus at the centre of His own religion.
To men bred in the Eationalism of the eighteenth century
this came as a revelation, as life from the dead. It opened
to them a new world. Christ the focus of Christianity
— the watchword was never forgotten. And Schleier
macher's were the lips from which it pealed forth with
the persuasive charm imparted to it by a great personality.
In the words with which Dr. Fairbairn closes a finely
judicious estimate : " In his religious system Jesus held
the same place as God held in the practical system of
Kant ; in the one case God was a necessity to the con
science, in the other Jesus was a necessity to the con
sciousness ; but while the former had all the severity of
an inflexible moral law, the latter had all the beauty and
all the grace of the Eedeemer and Saviour of mankind."
§ 3. Hegel and his School. — In point of speculation
Hegel and Sehleiermacher are contrasted and antipathetic
types ; yet it would be easy to prove a close relation
between their conceptions of the essence of religion. Both
in fact represent a view of life and the world inherited
from Goethe. Whereas for the exposition of this
romanticism, as it may be styled, Sehleiermacher chose
terms of feeling, Hegel construed it in the severer
categories of pure thought. Taking up in a higher
sense the tradition of eighteenth-century Eationalism,
according to which Christianity is doctrine, he welcomed
the Christologioal dogma as embodying the true philosophy
under the forms of imaginative intuition, and setting forth
the ontological unity of God and man, which philosophy
defines by ideas, in the music and poetry of the heart.
Man, he held, is finite spirit, and ultimately identical as
such with Infinite Spirit ; not only so, but, according to
the fairest exegesis of Hegel's words, it is in the finite
spirit that the Absolute, or God, first attains to self-

CHRISTOLOGY IN HEGEL 257
consciousness. History is God's self-realisation in and
through the processes of human experience; in yet more
general terms, reality is definable as the evolution of
Absolute Eeason mediated by nature and history. There
is no more lofty truth than that God and man, so far
from being disparate in essence, are a rational and intrinsic
unity. Eeligion, inferior to philosophy as an exponent
of this unity, still does its best to get it expressed, and
in pictorial fashion the thing is accomplished in the
ecclesiastical dogma of the God-man.
On these terms Hegel showed himself more than
ready to maintain friendly relations with the Church's
creed. He saw his way to put such a meaning upon
doctrines like our Lord's deity or atonement as would
admit them to an important and even an essential place
in his highly speculative construction. Of course there
was a price to pay. The significance of the historic Jesus
has been misconceived, and readjustment is essential.
What the Church predicates of Him is, properly, a symbol ;
but a symbol of a vast metaphysical idea. It is through
its aid that faith in the God-manhood has arisen, #and
the world been educated to perceive the truth of racial or
universal incarnation, according to which the life of man
is God's life in the form of time, and the Divine and
human natures, being related as universal and particular,
realise themselves only in organic unity with each
other. The death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus
are grand pictures of ontological ideas; they speak to
us of the fact that man, viewed merely in his alienat
ing finitude, is the prey of negation and dissolution,
whereas if envisaged in his proper unity with the Infinite
he takes high rank in the total process of the world.
" This essential unity must be presented to the conscious
ness or interpreted to the experience of man by a manifest
fact or sensuous reality in order that he may through
knowledge attain to union. . In other words, in order to
save man from his state of division and estrangement,
God must ' in an objective manner ' enter this empirical
i7

258 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
or sensuous present as man's equal or fellow, and so cause
it to appear — and appearance is always for another, and
the other is here the Church or the society of faith — that
the Divine and the human natures are not in themselves
different, but really alike, akin, able to be in the unity
of a person."1 At times, indeed, it seems as if Hegel's
attitude to the Church doctrine were genuinely positive ;
yet the progress of the discussion unfailingly brings out
the fact that he was much less interested in Jesus than
in what was believed about Him. And these beliefs
are but man's stammering utterance of metaphysical
theorems. Human history is the process of God's
becoming, the self-unfolding of Eeason under conditions
of space and time; and in this sense, but no other, the
Word became flesh and dwelt among us. " The history of
Christ is the visible reconciliation between man and the
jeternal. With the death of Christ this union, ceasing to
be a fact, becomes a vital idea — the Spirit of God which
dwells in the Christian community."2 It is from this
side that Hegel contemplates the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Son of God is the finite world of nature and man,
which is estranged from its Father, and must be again
resumed into essential harmony.
It would be unfair to say that in this scheme Jesus is
deprived of all importance, for He is held to have been
the first to realise the great speculative principle for which
the Christian religion stands. If not Himself the God-
man, He first perceived that God and man are one. Thus
far Hegel transcended the unhistorical naivete" of the
eighteenth century. But it is clear that, apart from this
casual chronological relationship, Christian doctrine, in its
revised and sublimated form, has no longer any particular
connection with the historic Christ. Christianity receives
absolute rank, but at the cost of its tie with history.
For only the world-process as a whole, and no single
point or person in it, can be the true manifestation
1 Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 220.
8 W. Wallace, Encyclopaedia Brilannica, art. " Hegel."

CHRISTOLOGY IN HEGEL 259
of the Absolute. Hence, to quote Hegel's unequivocal
language, " Christology affirms simply that God comes to
be Spirit (Geist wird), and this can take place only in
finite spirit, in man ; in whom there arises the conscious
ness of the Absolute, and who then is likewise the
Absolute's consciousness of itself." Thus, when Hegel has
waved his wand, and uttered his dialectical and all-decisive
formula, a change comes over the spirit of the believer's
dream ; everything appears to be as Christian as before,
yet instinctively we are aware that nothing specifically
Christian is left. Doctrines which as translated into the
language of the notion show as high philosophical truths,
and have the air of exhibiting the Christian as an imper
fectly self-conscious Hegelian, turn out to have no relation,
other than one which is accidental, to facts of the past.
All we need say is that to believe this does not matter
is a departure from Christian ground. When once the
Gospel has been severed from a historic person, and
identified with a complex of metaphysical ideas, what it
ought to be called is scarcely worth discussion ; that it '
is no longer Christianity is clear.
At the same time, a philosophical achievement of- such
real magnitude as Hegelianism could not but leave a
deep permanent mark on theology. Certain minds, it is
true, became so intoxicated by the new system as to
find it scarcely credible that the world could ever get
beyond it. Men like Daub, Marheineke, Goeschel and
Eosenkranz handed on the Hegelian tradition with ardour,
the result in some cases being — not unnaturally, if we
recollect what in one sense was the strongly conservative
bent of Hegel's mind — to bring to the surface once more
the pure intellectualistic orthodoxy of a former age.
Even those who maintained a critical attitude, however,
made sincere though timorous efforts to demonstrate the
necessity for the supreme idea of God-manhood having
actualised itself in a single personal life. It was urged
that Incarnation must take the form of incarnation in one
person, if it was to be more than an abstract conception.

260 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
" The idea that in humanity we see Christ," said Bosen-
kranz, " receives its full truth only through the mediation
of God's absolute incarnation in the person of Jesus." But
Marheineke revived the master's tendency to substitute
" humanity " for Christ in all propositions asserted by
the Church of her Lord. " In the Ascension," he writes,
" we are taught that religion, originating as it does in God,
has no abiding place here on earth, but necessarily and
eternally returns again whence it took its rise." Evidently
this is a mode of thought already trembling on the verge
of a Eationalism hardly distinguishable from that older
type on which Hegel had earlier poured his indignant scorn.
Sooner or later, then, some one was bound to speak out,
and expose the hollow and precarious alliance which had
been proclaimed between the Christian faith and dialectic
pantheism. The word which broke the spell came from
Strauss. According to Strauss the received Gospel history is
in the main a collection of myths gradually accumulated
in the early Christian society, a wreath set on the
Master's brow by reverent and loving fancy. Little of a
historical kind is ascertainable about Jesus Himself, and
that little is in any case totally incapable of sustaining
the weight of Christological dogma. In point of fact, not
scientific thought but religious imagination is responsible
for the identifying of a Divine humanity with the person
of Jesus ; for while Jesus was unquestionably the pioneer
who first grasped the thought that deity and humanity
are in essence one, yet the Christ of faith (by which is
meant not the historic actuality of incarnation but the
abstract notion) is in no sense coincident with any specific
individual. In words that soon became famous, Strauss
declared that " the Idea loves not to pour all its fulness
into one example, in jealousy towards all the rest. Only
the race answers to the Idea." x What was meant for
mankind must not be narrowed into a monopoly.
In spite of these brave words, Strauss felt himself
1 Leben Jesu (1835), § 147. This formula has made a profound impression.

STRAUSS' LEBEN JESU 261
compelled by the critics of his Leben Jesu to make large
concessions in regard to the creative power of the historic
person whom we name Jesus Christ. If he had tended
previously to contemplate Him as no more than the
vehicle of an idea, something of Jesus' actual greatness
now seemed to break on him, at least temporarily ; and
he commits himself to the statement that in religion
Christ is not merely unsurpassed but unsurpassable, so
that we have no option but to regard Him as in fact
the founder of the Christian religion. Great personalities
stand at the source of all new religious epochs ; can
Christianity be an exception ? These admissions may
strike us, perhaps, as grudging and unimportant; but, as
Faut remarks, " what is interesting in this confession is,
first, the argument from effect to cause, which had been
decisive for Schleiermacher's Christology, and next the
acknowledgment that a person, not an idea, must have
been the source of Christianity." But even this admission
was wrung from Strauss at the sword's point ; and he
followed it up with explanations which clearly proved, if
proof were needed, that he was still as far as ever from
the Christian attitude to Jesus.
Though we can no longer believe in Jesus, he
continues, it is vitally important that we should retain
the Christological dogma, provided only we explain
to ourselves carefully what it means. Worthless for
history, it has all the greater value for speculation. Thus
many items in the gospel narrative — the supernatural
birth of Jesus, His miracles, His resurrection and ascension
.—remain as eternally valid truths. They remain, in other
words, as timeless symbols of a metaphysical idea. " Con
ceived as in an individual, a God-man, the attributes and
functions which Church doctrine ascribes to Christ are
mutually contradictory; in the idea of the race they
harmonise." "Humanity is the union of two natures,
the incarnate God, the Infinite Spirit reducing itself to
finite measures, and the finite Spirit recalling its infinity.
Humanity is the child of the visible mother and the

262 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
invisible Spirit; it is the Sinless One, inasmuch as its
evolution-story is without spot or blemish, and the
impurity that always clings merely to the individual is
sublated in the race and its career. Humanity is the
Dying One who rises again and ascends to heaven, inas
much as it draws an ever-higher life from the negation of
its natural existence." x Christianity, in brief, is the final
refutation of all dualism, the perfect expression of pure
monistic immanence. Moving always within the ideal
world, it is superior to history.
The only thing to be done with most of this is to
deny it firmly. It ought to be clear by this time that
the proposed identification of the Christian faith with the
ontological theory that God and man are one — God the
essence of man, man the actuality of God — is an utterly
hopeless enterprise, which the scientific historian cannot
take seriously. For it conflicts with the elementary fact
that the Church existed, and knew itself to be redeemed
by Jesus, long before the Christologioal dogma thus
metaphysically canonised by Strauss had come to be.
Faith was the parent of dogma, not its child. The truth
is that the very idea of religion as consisting in personal
fellowship with God had faded from Strauss' mind, and
with its disappearance went also in large measure the
power to sympathise with, or appreciate, essential Christian
piety as it existed from the first.
We turn now to the systematic theologian in whom
we see Hegelianism at its best, Biedermann of Zurich.
Actuated by a sincere and positive interest in Chris
tianity, he desired to construct a theological system
which faith might safely accept ; but he meant to do so
exclusively with materials drawn from, or at least coloured
by, the monistic philosophy he had learnt from Hegel.
Eeligion as such he conceived, in opposition to Strauss,
as an objectively real interrelation of God and man,
the Infinite Spirit and the finite ; a view, he considered,
equally antagonistic to dualism and pantheism. And while
1 Glaubenslehre2., ii. 740.- , ...

BIEDERMANN 263
faith has its own real place, and is not to be unworthily
defined as inferior to pure thought even from the point
of view of religion itself, the task of theology is to raise
it to the plane of completely self-conscious knowledge,
so reducing its naiver utterances to philosophic and
permanently valuable terms. We may be briefer in our
account of Biedermann, because, with that monotony of
phrase which afflicts so much Hegelian writing, he is
perpetually recurring to one or two speculative axioms,
which have already eome before us. The keynote of
his Christology is the explicit distinction between the
principle of redemption and the person of the Eedeemer.
Strauss, he holds, was justified in his complaint that the
Church wrongly predicates of Jesus what in point of fact
is true only of Divine-humanity. But a dogma which, as
interpreted of Jesus, is logically self -destructive, is never
theless grandly true of the ontological unity of God and
man. God and man are distinct in nature, but they are
one in existence ; one, as the Chalcedonian Creed puts
it, without confusion, without mutation, without division,
without severance. To speculative thought, accordingly,
the incarnation is no single event, capable of being assigned
to a specific time ; it is an eternal fact, an unbeginning
and unending factor in the life of God. Similarly, the
atonement is no temporarily performed act, but God's
timeless process of self-reconciliation, while the resurrec
tion and ascension represent the eternal regress of Absolute
Spirit to itself by way of finite being. In short, the
Christ-principle, as it may be called, is but the religious
expression of the fact that Infinite and finite Spirit,
although distinct in essence, exist in a vital metaphysical
Teciprocity. With this alone dogmatic is concerned. On
the other hand, dogmatic proper has nothing to do with
the Christ-person, the historic Jesus. As the Founder of
the Christian religion He belongs to the sphere of history ;
He is subject, not object, of the Christian faith.1
1 The position taken by Dr. Edward Caird, in his Evolution of Religion,
is very much that of Biedermann. Thus he writes : "By Him (Jesus) as

264 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
None the less, Biedermann makes a persistent and in
some ways a deeply impressive effort to combine principle
and person in a more living unity. If not identical
with the principle of redemption, Jesus was yet the first
to become conscious of it, and to make it known. Hence
the relation between principle and person, though at
first defined loosely enough, is not after all outward and
accidental ; it is inward and abiding, for without the
mediation of Christ the - principle could not have realised
itself in fact. Biedermann never succeeded in overcoming
this inconsistency between his initial separation of prim
ciple and person in abslracto, and his later admission that
in concrete fact they are indissolubly bound up together.
He was also hampered by an imperfect conception of the
personality of God, and of the resulting nature of religion,
for in his pages the Divine sonship which it was Christ's
function to reveal hovers ambiguously between the idea of
personal and ethical communion with the Father and a
purely ontological relation of finite to Infinite Spirit.
In general it may be concluded that Hegelianism
tended to commit a grave offence against history by
construing Christianity as a system of ideas which is
intelligible and effective apart from Jesus Christ. Strauss
took this position frankly, but its influence is seen even
in the more moderate theories of Biedermann. On the
other hand, Hegel rendered the Church an easily forgotten
service by stimulating an intenser reflection upon
Christological problems in their universal aspect.
§ 4. The Kenotic Theories. — In the first quarter of last
century, a union of the Lutheran and Beformed Churches
in Germany was projected in connection with which arose
a novel and remarkable type of Christological doctrine..
by no other individual before, the pure idea of a Divine humanity was
apprehended and made into the great principle of life ; and consequently,
in so far as that idea can be regarded as realised in an individual, — and it
was a necessity of feeling and imagination that it should be regarded as
so realised, — in no other could it find so pure an embodiment" (quoted
by Dr. Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, 305).

KENOTIC THEORIES 265
From the well-known passage in Philippians, which figured
prominently in the discussion, these theories came to be
styled Kenotic,1 and their differential feature, as it has
been put, is that they seek " to do justice to the truth
that the Incarnation of the Son involved a real self-
limitation of His Divine mode of existence." I think the
origin of the name has occasionally been forgotten by those
who profess to explain the motives by which the authors
of these views were actuated. • The suggestion has fre
quently been made that the object of the Kenotic theories
was to signalise the reality and integrity of our Lord's
manhood, and obviously this is one of the fundamental
principles of theif method. Like other moderns, they had
been taught by recent study of the Gospels that Jesus,
whatever more, was truly our fellow-man. But, over and
beyond this, they were also bent on bringing out the
wondrous nature and subduing magnitude of the Divine
sacrifice ; and in- this connection they wished to throw
into strong relief the exceeding greatness of the step down
wards taken by the Son of God when for our sakes,
though rich, He became, poor. It was as if they said, not
merely, This is what in love He came to be ; but, Even
this which He became is unintelligible except by contrast
with what He had been. He did not remain all that He
was in the pre-existent glory, but stooped down, by a
real surrender and self-impoverishment, and took a lower
place. In the light of that renunciation we gain a new
glimpse of the lengths to which Divine love will go for
man's redemption. This I believe to be the profoundest
motive operating in the Kenotic theories — this sense of
sacrifice on the part of a pre-existent One; and it is a
1 Dr. Forrest has justly pointed out that the word Kenotic must not be
taken as implying that "the truth in this matter rests on a particular
exegesis of this single passage in Philippians (26'11)." Its basis in the New
Testament is in reality far wider. . "The Pauline expressions as to the self-
emptying or self-impoverishment (2 Co 89) of the Son only emphasise
what the narratives of Christ's life suggest, and their elimination would leave
the problem as presented in the Gospels precisely where it was " (Authority
of Christ, 98).

266 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
conception notoriously absent from the Christological
arguments of not a few who have criticised these theories
with great severity.
The Kenotic theologians, one and all, proceed upon
orthodox assumptions as to the Triaity and the two
natures present in the one person of our Lord. Their
object is to show how the Second Person of the Trinity
could so enter into human life as that there resulted the
genuinely human experience which is described by the
evangelists. To this problem they are unanimous in
replying — -of course with individual variations — that the
eternal Logos by a wonderful suspension or restriction
of His Divine activities reduced Himself'within the limits
and conditions of manhood. Somehow He laid aside His
Divine mode of existence in order to become man.
Thomasius of Erlangen, the greatest name of this school,
followed the earlier hints of Sartorius in rejecting the
traditions of Lutheran exegesis as to the Philippian
passage in so far as he maintained that the self-emptying
there affirmed has relation, not to the incarnate, but to the
pre-existent Christ. The Logos, he writes, renounced the
fulness of His Divine being in all those relations in which
He reveals Himself ad extra, lowered Himself to become
the substratum of a real human personality, exchanged
His Divine consciousness for one that was human, or
rather Divine-human ; and thus became capable of forming
the centre of a single personal Life. Further, we may
construe this Life as undergoing a veritably human
development, inasmuch as the Logos had voluntarily
contracted His life to the form and dimensions of human
existence, submitting to the laws of human growth and
preserving His absolute powers only in the measure in
which they were essential to His redeeming work; and
at the close of His earthly career He resumed once more
the glory He had laid aside. Thomasius was at one with
previous Lutheran Christology in holding that there is
no presence or activity of the incarnate Son outside of
His human nature ; and he argues that by the addition of

THOMASIUS 267
the genus tapeinoticum — according to which the attributes
of the humanity were transferred to, and imposed limits
upon, the divinity — completeness was for the first time
given to the older theory of the communicatio idiomatum,1
He replied to the objection that his view conflicts with
the doctrine of the Divine immutability 2 by insisting on an
important distinction between the essential or immanent
attributes of Godhead, which cannot be held in suspense,
namely, truth, holiness, and love, and attributes — such as
omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience — which are re
lative to the world and so far external. These last,
lacking in the historic Christ, do not in strictness belong
to the essence of God, but are evoked by His relation
to the world ; holiness, love, and truth, on the other
hand, constitute the very being of deity, and it is pre
cisely they which are incarnate in our Lord. This may
be taken as the classic form of the Kenotic theory,3
but it appears in a still more thoroughgoing shape in
Gess, who extends the kenosis to immanent attributes
also. The self-depotentiation of the Logos is absolute :
" He reduces Himself to the germ of a human soul." He
suffered the extinction of His eternal self-consciousness,
to regain it after many months as a human, variable
consciousness, subject to the processes of gradual develop
ment, and sometimes — as in childhood, sleep, and death —
involving no self-consciousness at all. Step by step
Christ came to know who He really was. Nay, Gess
does not shrink from adding that the incarnation affected
the internal relations of the Trinity, for during the
1 Cf. Loofs' article ' Kenosis,' RE. x. 246 ff.
2 Dorner especially took this point.
8 It was expounded by Thomasius first in his Beitrage zur kirchlichen
Christologie (1845), but the fullest and most attractive statement is his
Christi Person und Werk (1853-61), particularly the second volume. His
main principles were accepted by Lutherans like Kahnis, Luthardt, and
Delitzsch, and by Reformed divines like Ebrard and Godet, while in this
country they have won a modified approval from writers like Fairbairn, Gore,
and Forrest. The most valuable English account and criticism of the chief
writers and their views will be found in Bruce's Humiliation of ChriU,
Lecture iv.

268 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
period covered by the earthly life we must conceive the
eternal generation of the Son by the Father, and the
cosmic functions of the Son to have undergone a temporary
interruption. Godet, in his commentary on the Fourth
Gospel, takes much the same line. In respect of the
incarnate life he draws a sharp distinction between Christ's
filial consciousness, which re-awoke at His baptism, and the
filial state — i.e. the Divine "form of God," the mode of
existence answering to His true being — which He only
regained at the ascension. And the problem of the cosmic
functions of the Son, ex hypothesi suspended for a time,
he solves by the statement that " when the Logos descends
into the world, there to become one of the beings of the
universe, the Father can enter into direct relation to the
world, and Himself exercise the functions of Creator and
Preserver, which He commonly exercises through the
mediation of the Word."1
The theory of Gess in a special measure drew forth
vehement and often scornful condemnation. . This con
ception of a human soul-germ which gradually evolves
into identity with the Logos, of the second Person of the
Trinity first denuded of all the properties of Godhead,
save its bare essence, but ultimately restored to the plenary
possession of all His attributes, was contemptuously de
scribed as pure mythology, which it required " a kenosis
of the understanding" to believe.2 To the objection of
orthodox critics, however, that what we reach in Jesus
on Kenotic principles is a merely human conscious life, the
answer may reasonably be given, that on any terms the
experience of Jesus transcends that of other men in so far
as He is aware that once He was more than man and will
some day return to His former high estate. " It is the
paradox of His unique consciousness that He who exists
as man knows Himself to be God, and remembers the time
when He exercised the attributes of power and knowledge
which for the time being He has laid aside."
While admitting that on the whole ecclesiastical
1 See his Commentary on St. John, i. 358 ff., 394 ff. 2 Biedermann.

CRITICS OF KENOTICISM 269
decisions in the early centuries were against him,
Thomasius nevertheless maintained that in such writers
as Ignatius, Tertullian, Origen, and Hilary he found so
many points of real contact with his own theory that
Kenoticism might in a sense be described as the long-
delayed fulfilment of ancient tendencies. In an import
ant article Loofs has scrutinised the justice of this claim.1
It must be conceded that he destroys the case for regard
ing the Kenotic theory as the logical climax or consistent
outcome of past Christological development. No one
would dream of saying that the Fathers had even begun
to look in the direction of a Kenotic theory. At the
same time I am not convinced that writers like Ignatius,
Irenseus, and Hilary did not give intermittent expres
sion to great religious intuitions which, if consistently
developed, would have led them more or less in the
direction of the modern view, though in point of fact they
at once neutralised the force of these expressions by
counter-statements of a more traditional cast. Whenever
they shake off the haunting docetism that pervades so
much of their reflection on the historic Christ, and take
the idea of incarnation seriously, it is to this side that
their best thoughts incline. But in truth it is of com
paratively slight importance whether the Kenotic writers
at first exaggerated their claim to historic orthodoxy, pro
vided they can appeal to the recorded facts and believing
witness of the New Testament, not, of course, for the
details of a theory, but for the great religious idea they
have striven to set forth. It is only in the eyes of those
who deem patristic Christology wholly superior to revision
or amendment that the alleged defective orthodoxy of
Thomasius and his adherents will seem a grave offence.
At a later stage of this work I shall attempt to deal
1 RE. x. 246 ff. The subject is discussed also by Harnack, Dogmen
geschichte4, i. 215 ; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, ii. 160-76, and
Dogmengeschichte2 (ed. Bonwetsoh), i. 374-75; Bethune- Baker, History of
Doctrine, 297 ff. On the Kenotic elements in Luther, see Th. Harnack,
Luthers Theologie, ii. 204 ff.

270 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
more at length with the general import and religious
value of what may be called " the Kenotic principle " ;
there is space here only to notice one or two of the more
usual criticisms. The most frequent and at first sight
the most damaging objection to the Kenotic doctrine is
that it contravenes the fundamental axiom of the Divine
immutability. The doctrine of the Divine immutability,
however, when used in a, priori fashion, is apt to prove
a weapon we grasp by the blade. If we hold with
conviction that Jesus is one in whom God Himself enters
humanity, then He does so either with all His attributes
unmodified, or in such wise as to manifest only those
qualities which are compatible with a real human life;
and which of these alternatives we shall adopt is of
course settled for us by the actual facts contained in the
historic record. To say that we cannot think away a
single Divine attribute without destroying God is not only
a statement so abstract as to be inapplicable, at least
directly, to the concrete problem before us ; it is a
principle which only needs to be rigorously enforced
to discredit every view of incarnation. But if we find
reasons in the Gospel narrative for hailing Christ as the
incarnate Son of God — reasons which have nothing to do
with any supposed possession on His part of all the
Divine prerogatives in their fulness — -we must repel the
objection that He cannot be God because He is neither
omniscient nor omnipresent.
It is a more recondite form of the same criticism to
urge that a temporary cessation alike of the cosmic
functions of the Son and of His participation in the
eternal life of the Godhead, as implied in the theory of
Gess or Godet, is inherently unthinkable. I have no
wish to minimise the seriousness of this; but there are
two considerations which, I think, may reasonably be held
to mitigate the difficulty. In the first place, the
Trinitarian assumptions which lie behind the objection
are too often of a kind that go perilously near the verge
of tritheism, in so far as it is presupposed that the

DIVINE IMMUTABILITY 271
Divine relation to the universe can only be sustained by
the Son in His distinct being, and is threatened with
collapse by His withdrawal. A more Christian view of
the unity of Godhead largely modifies the gravity of the
problem. Secondly, those who hold that the self-
limitation of the Son in becoming man was real are in
no way bound to provide a solution of remoter questions.
We are free to believe, on the evidence of history,.
that the life of the incarnate Son was in harmony with
the conditions of a genuine manhood, without being com
pelled to go on to speculate on subjects as to which
the New Testament furnishes no data. There is in
theology such a thing as a wise agnosticism against
which the traditional Christology, just at this point,
has grievously offended. And if Kenotic writers have
employed language which appears to threaten the unity
of God, and brings confusion into our conceptions of
the interior life of deity, the defect is due very much
to their sharing the erroneous metaphysical assumptions
of their orthodox opponents.
The service which the Kenotic Christology renders
has been well summarised by Dr. Forrest. "(1) It
represents an advance on the Chalcedon symbol, in that
it gives a truer impression of the New Testament facts
and teaching as to the Divine sacrifice involved in the
Incarnation, and thus emphasises the very quality that
endues the Incarnation with its power of moral appeal.
(2) By insisting that the Divine elements in Christ's
character are not metaphysical, but ethical and spiritual,
it reminds us that the deepest qualities in God and man
are akin, and that humanity is grounded in and reproduces
the eternal sonship in God."1 Like all other theories,
Kenoticism must be allowed the full benefit of the
cardinal distinction in logic between a principle and
the details of its application. It will not do to reject
as mythology8 an idea which, in its inmost meaning,
1 Christ of History, 203.
! Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 409-11.

272 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
is inseparable from the New Testament conception of our
Lord — the idea, namely, that in whatever fashion God in
Christ brought His Divine being down to the measures
of our life, and became poor for our sake.
§ 5. Christology of ihe Mediating School: Dorner. —
Beside the speculative and confessional theologies which
flourished in the nineteenth century stands another
group, various in character and composition, and for
that reason difficult to describe by any less vague epithet
than " mediating." The members of this group strove to
mediate, first, between the Lutheran and the Eeformed
confessions, in the interests of union ; and secondly,
between Church doctrine and philosophy. Bothe, Ullmann,
Julius Miiller, and Dorner are some of the most dis
tinguished names. We select Dorner as the best known
and probably the most influential thinker of the party,
and present those features of his Christological work which
are on the whole most interesting and distinctive.1
A fundamental presupposition of Dorner's theory
is the principle — equally religious and speculative —
that God and man are not mere opposites, but are
spiritually of kin. Man has in him that which is
infinite, at least in the form of receptivity for the
Divine ; and it is this receptiveness of humanity for God,
when raised to its highest, absolute power, which provides
a real basis for the existence of Jesus as " the adequate
personal organ of Deity." We may even say that since
it is God's nature to communicate Himself to man,
and man is closely allied to God, the idea of the God-
man, in whom both are perfectly united, is demanded
antecedently by reason. Not only so ; the organism of
humanity craves a Head, a central representative In
dividual, infinitely susceptible of God ; so that from
yet another point of view we are guided to the thought-
that religion requires for its consummation and absolute
expression not the idea of incarnation merely, but
1 On what follows, see Kirn's article " Dorner,'' RE. iv. 802 ff.

DORNER 273
the fact. This transcendental necessity, as it may be
called, which is rendered still more poignantly urgent
by the fact of sin, is finally confirmed and sealed to us
in the actualities of history. The real Jesus more than
fulfils the postulates of pure thought. Nor is it sufficient
to explain His central place in humanity by the dynamic
immanence of God in Him. Nothing less than a personal
self-communication on the part of God is adequate to the
human need, for only He can perfectly reveal God who
is what He reveals.
Dorner's supreme interest in the unity of the thean-
thropic Person leads him to argue that the true path to
the elucidation of this unity is to start not from either of
the natures separately but from their union as a given fact,
as a spiritual life-process the outcome of which, owing to
the inherent organic affinity of both, is the creation of a
specifically Divine-human consciousness. The Logos, ante-
mundane principle in God of revelation and self-bestowal,
joins Himself to human nature, not, however, in its
empirical quality of sinfulness and defilement, but as a
new humanity, destined to be the Head of a race of re
deemed men. It is at this point that we come upon the
differential feature of Dorner's theory. The unity of the
Divine-human life is not to be conceived as complete from
the beginning. "Since Christ exhibited true humanity
in an actual human life, a truly human growth pertains
to Him. Since, on the other hand, God can only be
perfectly manifest in Christ when the whole fulness of
the Divine Logos has also become the proper fulness of
this man in knowledge and volition, and therefore has
become Divine-human, with the growth of the human side
there is also necessarily given in Him a growth of the
God-humanity ; and the incarnation is not to be thought
as at once completed, but as continuous, nay augmentative,
seeing that God as Logos ever apprehends and appropriates
such new aspects as are generated by the true human
development, just as, conversely, the growing actual re-
ceptiveness of the humanity combines consciously and
18

274 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
voluntarily with ever new aspects of the Logos." The
anticipated objection that this view yields no more than
a human Ego in ever-deepening personal fellowship with
God is met by the statement that " the Logos is from the
beginning united with Jesus in the deepest bases of beingt
and the life of Jesus was Divine-human at every point,
inasmuch as a receptiveness never existed for the Deity
without its fulfilment." x
This general conception is already present in Dorner's
great work on the historical development of Christology ; 2
but in the later System of Christian Doctrine his statement
of the Trinitarian presuppositions is modified at an im
portant point. He insists that if we are to escape the
perils of tritheism in our construction of the Trinity, and
of Nestorianism, or the assumption of two separate person
alities, in Christology, a distinction must be drawn between
hypostasis and personality. The Logos, he declares, "is
of Himself neither a person in the same sense as the
absolute Divine personality, nor as an individual man." 3
And what He does is not so much to constitute the
personality of the incarnate One as rather to supply the
basis of it, in His character as the eternal principle
within the Godhead of freedom, movement, and revelation.
I should single out two points in regard to which the
foregoing theory has proved suggestive. First, it lays a
needed emphasis upon the affinity of the Divine and
human natures, which earlier thought had too much
tended to define as consisting in attributes so unlike as to
be wholly disparate and incompatible. There was a real
need that theology should recur to the instinctive assur
ance of the New Testament writers that between God and
man there is no real incongruity, but rather an essential
kinship. Secondly, the conception of an incarnation which
is gradual, not mechanically and unethically complete from
the beginning, is one which merits the closest scrutiny, and
in a later part of this work we shall have occasion to
' System of Christian Doctrine, vol. iii. 328 (Eng. tr. slightly modified).
8 First edition, 1839 ; second, 1845. » Op. tit. vol. iii. 293.

BRITAIN AND AMERICA 275
return to it. Frequently in past systems the person of
Christ has been displayed in a light which suggests that
its initial completeness is a matter of principle, but the
conviction that the coalescence of the Divine and human
life in our Lord was somehow a growing and advancing
fact is one from which it is difficult to escape if we
look closely at the historic data. Of course it is another
question whether Dorner's theory, based as it is on certain
metaphysical assumptions in regard to the " natures," can
be defended against the criticism urged amongst others by
Kirn, that the immanence of the Logos, which according
to one part of the argument is the basis of the entire
Divine-human process, is, according to another part, no
more than its climax and consummation.
§ 6. Christology in Britain and America. — Apart from
the Unitarian positions defended with so much dignity
and impressiveness through a long series of years by the
late Dr. Martineau, we do not find in the theology of
the English-speaking races much that need be chronicled,
whether in the way of external criticism or interior
expansion of traditional Church doctrine. A series of
brief allusions must suffice. Coleridge poured a stream
of fresh life into English divinity, but he had relatively
little to say regarding the theory of our Lord's person.
On the whole he inclined to a Platonising view of the
inherited dogma, loving to speak of Christ as the Logos,
or Eedemptive Eeason, whom he describes as " the
living and self -subsisting Word, the very truth of all
true being, and the very being of all enduring truth ;
the reality, which is the substance and unity of all
reality." 1 The Broad Church school, which served itself
heir to many of Coleridge's best ideas, was too closely
occupied with the Christianising of social life to have
leisure for sustained doctrinal reflection on our sub
ject. Erskine of Linlathen scarcely touched Christology.
McLeod Campbell did much by his noble book on the
1 Notes on the Book of Common Prayer (published 1838-39).

276 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
atonement to promote more spiritual conceptions of our
Lord's inner life, and to exhibit the vital unity of incar
nation and atonement for sin.1 Maurice, like Coleridge,
showed a Platonic tendency to speak of principles or ideas
rather than of persons ; and it would probably be a fair
criticism on certain expressions in his works to say that
they have the effect of depersonalising Christ, and of
representing Him almost as a vague spiritual atmosphere
or element, rather than as an historic Figure with specific
qualities revealed by His career on earth. Thus it is a
favourite line of reasoning with Maurice that every man,
simply as man, is joined to an Almighty Lord of life, One
nearer to him than his own flesh. "The truth," he
declares, " is that every man is in Christ . . . except he
were joined to Christ he could not think, breathe, live
a single hour." Christ the essential and all-embracing
ground of human life ; every man in Christ whether con
sciously or not — these may be called the root-principles
of the theology of Maurice, which he vainly contends are
derived from the express teaching of the apostles.
We may recur for one moment to the controversy
evoked between 1828 and 1830 by the Christological tenets
of Edward Irving, whose life was one of the greatest and
saddest of the century. He was charged in ecclesiastical
courts with holding " the sinfulness of Christ's humanity " ;
but the expression is really unjust, and no reader of
the history of the case will deny that more than one
argument on which his ecclesiastical condemnation rested
was gravely docetic in its implications. Irving clung
with his whole soul to Christ's sympathy with the tempted,
His veritable brotherhood with man ; and to secure this
he felt it his duty to affirm that the Son of God in
1 Cf. his words in the Introduction to The Nature of the Atonement :
" My attempt to understand and illustrate the nature of the atonement has
been made in the way of taking the subject to the light of the incarnation.
Assuming the incarnation, I have sought to realise the Divine mind in Christ
as perfect Sonship towards God and perfect Brotherhood towards men, and,
doing so, the incarnation has appeared developing itself naturally and
necessarily as the atonement " (p. xvii, Sixth Edition).

EDWARD IRVING 277
incarnation took upon Him fallen human nature, with the
possibility of sin, though, by the indwelling omnipotence
of the Holy Spirit, sin never for one moment touched Him
actually. In his own words : " The point at issue is
simply this, whether Christ's flesh had the grace of sin
lessness and incorruption from its own nature, or from
the indwelling of the Holy Ghost ; I say the latter."
Elsewhere he inveighs against two main errors : the be
lief that Christ's nature was intrinsically better than ours,
or that it underwent a physical change before its assump
tion into the person of the Son. " It was manhood fallen
which He took up into His Divine person, in order to
prove the grace and the might of Godhead in redeeming
it." So the humanity was without guilt, but with every
thing else that belongs to man, and was "held like a
fortress in immaculate purity by the Godhead within."
" Christ was holy in spite of the law of the flesh working
in Him as in another man ; but never in Him prevailing." 1
And on these premises Irving built up a theory of salva
tion according to which our Lord, thus maintaining His
personal sinlessness, and enduring to the uttermost the
penalty due to His sinful human nature, achieved the
reconciliation of God and man in His own person,
the thing done in one portion being done, virtually, in
the whole.
Of this eccentric though touching view it may be
said, briefly, that the oneness of our Lord with us in the
moral conflict, which was ' for Irving the heart of all
things, is indeed a great fact ; yet a theory of it is not
to be purchased at the price of asserting that His humanity
1 Irving was not quite original in this view. Cf. Ullmann, Die Silnd-
losigkeit Jesu (7te Auflage), 101 ; and Bruce, op. tit. 250, who points out
that the same theory was simultaneously advanced by Gottfried Menken,
of Bremen. A writer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th edition), vol.
xiii. 372, says curiously that Irving was condemned "for publishing
doctrines regarding the humanity of Jesus Christ now generally held by
the broad school of theologians." This statement, if read at all strictly, is
absurd. No modern thinker with whom I am acquainted could be said to
hold Irving's position.

278 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
was corrupt, with a corruptness which only the Holy
Spirit could hold in check. Misled probably by the
patristic habit of using " flesh " as a synonym of " man
hood," Irving confused the idea of " corrupt " with that
of " corruptible " (in the sense of liable to corruption or
decay), and hence from the fact that Christ was liable
to decay and death, as being capable of dying, deduced
the rash conclusion that His humanity was fallen.
Certainly he held strongly that only a fallen nature
could be tempted, and that to deny this is to deny
Christ's manhood. There can be no doubt that Irving
passionately repudiated the idea of Christ having actually
sinned ; but it is after all only a loose idea of sinlessness
which takes it as compatible with the existence in Christ
of a potential fault and strong efficacious germ of evil,
divergent even as undeveloped from the Divine standard
of perfect righteousness ; which is the connotation of
" fallen human nature " and " original sin " in all other
cases. The influence of the eminent American divine, Horace
Bushnell (1802—1876), is in many ways comparable to
that of Eitschl. On the whole he deprecated unprofitable
Curiosity, peering into impracticable questions. " Christ is
not given," he writes, " that we may set ourselves to reason
out His mystery, but simply that God may thus express
His own feeling and draw Himself into union with us,
by an act of accommodation to our sympathies and
capacities." The deity of Christ, he repeats again and
again, is in, not outside or apart from, what He does in
bringing us to God, but we must be content with ignor
ance as to the nature of God's indwelling in Him. Not
in metaphysical but in ethical conceptions can we best
set forth the highest truth about His person.
§ 7. Ritschl and the Ritschlians. — The work begun by
Sehleiermacher was taken up fifty years later by Albrecht
Eitschl (1822-1889), who strove even more persistently
to vindicate for the historic Christ the central place in

ALBRECHT RITSCHL 279
His religion. Eitschl, we can see, had a deeper sense of
history than his predecessor, whose view of redemption,
he considered, represented it too much as acting on men
like a natural influence rather than as mediated by those
ethical and spiritual motives which alone are operative
in Christianity. Also he laid stress on the supreme
blessing of the Gospel as consisting in personal fellowship
with God, which is brought to the individual by the
influences of the Christian society, is based on the
forgiveness of sins, and sent home to heart and conscience
by the sight of God's love revealed in Jesus. If we
know God as Father, it is because we know Him through
the Son. Eitschl would not have claimed to teach any Chris
tology in the older sense of the word. Many traditional
problems, he held, such as that of the two natures
and the Trinitarian relation of the Son to the Father,
have no bearing on experience and lie outside the range
of theology. Like every other doctrine, our view of
Christ must be stated in judgments of value or apprecia
tion (Werthurteile), which affirm His significance for the
soul; or, to put it otherwise, we see the Divine quality
of Christ's person in the Divine character of His work.
The impression He makes is most fitly expressed by
saying that He has for us the religious value of God.
He redeemed men by fulfilling perfectly the vocation given
Him to establish the Kingdom of God, and patiently
enduring all things even to death : and on the basis of
this achievement the society gathered round Him is for
given, has imputed to it the position or relationship towards
God, which Jesus held for Himself inviolably to the end,
and is raised " above the iron law of necessity " into the
freedom and joy of God's family. Since the functions
of Jesus — uniting in Himself, as He does, absolute revela
tion and ideal humanity — are thus Divine, He is Himself
Divine in character. If He inaugurated a new relation
between God and man, realised it in His own life, and now
produces it in all believers, then to call Him Divine is, in

280 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Herrmann's striking phrase, " only to give Him His right
name." But it is useless to try and explain the signifi
cance of Jesus ; instead of being explicable by other
things, He explains everything else. He is known by faith
in a unique and unapproachable relation to His people;
to go behind this, and interpret it by ideas like the
Absolute or the Logos, is to define the clear in terms of
the obscure. No confession of His Godhead has any value
save as generated by experience of His grace.
Every one must feel the truth of much of this.
Christ's person seen in the light of His work is a prin
ciple fixed once for all by Luther and Sehleiermacher.
But one may reasonably doubt whether Eitschl does
actually let this fundamental axiom carry him all the
way. The argument is that Christ is Divine just because
His gifts — pardon, liberty, life — are so ; but does Eitschl
after all push home the inference ? That he assigns to
Christ an absolute uniqueness for religion is unquestion
able; but passages also occur in which he declares
plainly that the Godhead of Christ must be capable
of imitation by His people, and protests that the dogma
of His pre-existence confers on Him a solitary great
ness in which the believer can have no share. There
can be no doubt at all that in defining the content of
Christ's deity he omits altogether the idea both of pre-
existence and of exaltation. We have no concern, he
argues, with the pre-existent One, who exists for God
only; our faith is asked for the historic life that began
at Bethlehem. In the same way nothing can be known
about the exalted Lord save from His recorded history.
It is easy to see that this exclusive insistence on a past
which is growing ever more remote tends to the repre
sentation of Christ, semi-deistically, as absent and far
away, rather than as ever-present in the sovereign power
of His resurrection. And as regards the conception of
pre-existence, Bitschl steadily declined to acknowledge
its religious meaning and importance. No one could
possibly wish to censure a mere refusal to embark on

MODERN RADICALISM 281
empty speculation in this region, or to forsake the indica
tions of concrete believing experience ; but it is another
thing when theology, at the instance of a mistaken
philosophical positivism, grows blind to the infinite self-
surrender of God in becoming man for our redemption.
In the further progress of the Bitschlian movement,
as might be expected, many varieties of opinion came
gradually to light. Thus it was debated whether on the
principles of the master it is permissible to speak of
the Godhead of Christ ; and , sides were taken on the
question, though to some extent parties differed only about
a word. Some discussion has also taken place regard
ing the precise elements in the New Testament picture
of Jesus to which faith is directed. Is the resurrec
tion, for example, part of the ground of faith, a vital
factor in the message that evokes faith ; or is it not
rather the object of a conviction in which faith is already
presupposed ? Along with this there has gone a general
consent that while faith rests upon the historic person
ality of Jesus, as revealed in His actual words and deeds,
this must not be construed into a statutory dependence
on particulars of the Gospel story.
§ 8. The Modern Radical School. — A few concluding
words may be said respecting the positions maintained,
with so much vivacity, by members of the radical party
which has sprung into prominence in the last ten years,
and which, speaking broadly, represents the extreme
left wing of Eitschlianism. They form the so-called
religionsgeschichtliche Schule, and their aim is without fear
or favour to determine the place of Christianity in the
religious history of the world. Of this school Dr. Sanday
has said with justice that "the writers cut themselves
adrift from the universal verdict of the Church and from
traditional Christianity. They make no attack upon the
Creeds, but they deliberately ignore them, and in one or
two places where this important question would naturally
come up, they in set terms deny what the Creeds affirm.

282 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
As a rule, the central doctrine of all is not so much
contested as quietly put aside. The constructive view
of primitive Christianity is built up without it." : The
following is a characteristic statement by Wernle. " We
know," he writes, " that above the general level of man
kind rise the prophets and mediators, men who stand in
an especially close relation to God and have an especial
sense of being called by Him, whose souls are full of the
mysterious and wonderful, who breathe the air of eternity
and behold visions of the world that lies beyond this outer
world of phenomena. Amongst them we see Jesus. That
which distinguishes Him and places Him apart from the
others cannot perhaps be expressed theoretically at all,
but we can express it practically by entering into His
service and by doing God's will as He bids us do it. So
... we testify to men, in Jesus' own way, that He is our
Master and that He has made us at one with God. He
who will may call this a practical Christology. The
dogmatical, certainly, lies behind us." 2 These sincere and
moving words suggest one or two observations.
First, the category under which Jesus is subsumed
is that of hero or religious genius. It is a con
ception introduced into theology by Strauss, and largely
accentuated by Thomas Carlyle ; and by these writers it
is explicitly held to embrace more than Jesus. They
tell us that in the primitive age adoring believers inevit
ably came to deck Jesus with all conceivable names of
honour, and to declare in retrospect that He was God's
unique gift to man, a creative vehicle of revelation, a
point at which heaven touched sinful earth. But this
is poetry, out of which theology has made prose. In
sober truth, Jesus is not the object of faith ; like us,
rather, He has faith, and we come to share it.
Again, these writers are well aware that their views
run directly counter to the apostolic doctrine. Formerly
it was customary for those who rejected the traditional
1 Outlines of the Life of Christ, 263.
s Quoted in the Review of Theology and Philosophy, i. 278.

MODERN RADICALISM 283
Christology to appeal to the New Testament, but this is
now given up. It is perceived that in most important
respects the Church has the New Testament on its side ; not
of course for each detail, or for the intellectual categories
employed in after days, but in essence. Accordingly
men like Wernle and Bousset now repudiate the apostolic
view of Christ quite as sharply as that of the fourth
century. St. Paul, St. John, and the writer to the
Hebrews are equally wrong with Origen and Athanasius —
not so far astray, perhaps, but as really. Christology has
been a blunder from the first. It is worth while to note
the fact that the apostolic convictions about Christ are
admitted to have been the very centre of their message.
Nor is it denied that our religion has never assumed a
form in which it did not rest mainly on a Christological
basis. But the writers I have in mind would say that
all this is owing to an unfortunate misconception, which
would very likely have been avoided if men had left
dogmas alone and kept close to facts. And for the
modern intelligence, it is held, nothing can be made of
the person of our Lord till we distinguish clearly between
the historic Man of Nazareth and the dogmatic Christ
of the apostles. Jesus' place in the doctrinal system is
not at the centre, but among the " means of grace." In a
certain loose sense it may be fitting to say that we find
God " in " Jesus, but the time has gone past for speaking
as if God had received us "for Christ's sake," or for
bowing to the absolute claim : " No man cometh unto the
Father but by Me."
Finally, these writers profess to be able to show how
the primitive but mistaken view of Jesus came to exist.
Virtually every ingredient in the New Testament con
ception of our Lord can be traced to its proximate origin
in the ideas of some other faith. A vague Messianic
ideal was then current in the world ; a kind of re
demption-myth circulated in a thousand pious minds over
the Eoman Empire in myriad forms, and these yearning
dreams of eternal life, in all their pathetic intangibility,

284 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
were in due time deposited on the idealised name of
Jesus.1 It was felt that all things expected of the
coming Saviour had been fulfilled in Him. The ferment
ing thought of the time supplied a fruitful soil for an
imaginative and mythological growth of doctrine, which
can be traced, nearly without remainder, either to oriental i
Gnosticism or to Judaism of the syncretistic type.
This modern form of what may fairly be called
the Higher Unitarianism will occupy us repeatedly in
this book; and at present I will only pause to offer
one criticism. It is that little has yet been done by
writers of this party, save by vague allusions to the
mystery of personality, to shew why Jesus drew to
Himself these wonderful epithets of religious trust and
adoration. Why should this Man be chosen to have
such things said of Him as that in Him all things consist,
that in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,
unless He had indeed made such an impression on the
apostles that no lower terms would serve ? It is surely a
question of sufficient gravity how we are to account for
the worship given to Him, then or now, except on the
supposition that His nature was such as rightly to evoke
and to retain it. To suppose the contrary is at variance
with the one certainty on which faith builds, which all
testimony supports, and which serious Christian reflection
instinctively assumes — the certainty that Jesus drew a
clear distinction between Himself and all the children
of men, and that alike in His own mind and that of the
Church universal He is not one of a class, or even first
among His compeers, but in a solitary and unshared sense
the Lord and Eedeemer of the world.
1 If this be so, how comes it that no trace exists in Judaism of the myth
of a dying and rising Saviour ! Cf. supra, p. 75.

BOOK III.
THE RECONSTRUCTIVE STATEMENT
OF THE DOCTRINE.
PART I.
PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS.
CHAPTER I.
THE INTELLECTUAL NEED FOR A CHRISTOLOGY.
The Christian religion is acknowledged_to consist in or
inv-olve-a~cer-tain spiritual attitude to the- person of Jesus
Christ.  Historically it is in this way that Christianity
has defined itself, both in experience and in theory ; from
the first it has been a spiriivial_moyement in which He
is assigned the central place and becomes the object of
explicit faith. No branch of the Church has enjoyed a
strong or contagious life which has ceased to look to Jesus
with adoring trust and to find in Him the abiding way to
the Father. And the proposal to reconstruct Christianity
by displacing Jesus from this position is one which leaves
the firm ground of fact by surrendering continuity with
the past and adopting the visionary programme of a
Liteeatukb — Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, 1890 ; Kaftan,
Zur Dogmatik, 1904 ; Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, 1907 ;
Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1899 ; Simpson, Fact of Christ,
1900 ; Kahler, Wissensahaft der christlichen Lehre3, 1905 ; Forsyth, Person
and Place of Jesus Christ, 1909 ; Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit3,
1894.

286 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
religious life worthy to retain the rights of the Christian
name while yet renouncing the fundamental Christian
conviction. In a later chapter we shall inquire in more detail
what is meant by the statement that Christ is. in the
proper sense of the word, the object of religious faith. At
present we assume the fact. And from it we derive the
immediate inference that for reasoning men it is impossible
to refrain from a theoretical interpretation of this Person
in whom they believe. If we put faith in Jesus, and
if, as Luther used to say, faith and God belong together,
we must seek an explanation of One who so far at least
occupies a position in the Christian consciousness on that
side of reality which we call Divine ; 1 we must ask whether
He has the reality as well as the religious value of God.
The apostles, who had been prepared for the Gospel by
the profoundest religion of antiquity, felt that the concep
tion of God had been radically modified by their experience
of Jesus; and those who share that experience, in its
regenerating power, must like them be conscious of an
irrepressible impulse to search out and construe to intelli
gence the implicates of Christ's redeeming influence, and
in particular of His personal relationship to the Father.
Not merely, that is, ought Dogmatic to include a Chris
tology as one of its integral constituents, but the task
of Christology is prescribed ab initio by the specifically
Christian experience. Silence on the matter is an avowal
that we feel no need of Christ as mediating our personal
possession of God. Kaftan puts the truth not a whit
too strongly when he asserts that Christology is either
the doctrine of Christ's Godhead, or it is nothing at all.2
The one real question before us is how the man Jesus
is God for the believing mind, but this question we may
not shirk.To this contention that the modern theologian has
no choice but to " christologise " there are, however, two
1 Cf. Denney, Jesus and the Gospel. 2 ZTK. (1904), 181.

JESUS AS RELIGIOUS GENIUS 287
possible objections, both widely current and each
diametrically antagonistic to the other. On the one hand
it is said : Christology rwinnti be essential, since it is in
fact superfluous: on the other hand it is said, with equal
emphasis : Christology: is no Jonger essential^ since the
work was all done long ago.
Christology is held to be jpperiktous by all those
modern writers to whom it comes naturally to describe
Jesus by the category of genius or hero. For this mode
of thought, at bottom a significant reaction against
NaJarralisin, Jesus is the sublimest of great men. He is
the man in whom faith in God, virtue, and immortality
is seen in unsurpassed and victorious power; He is the
most inspired of the prophets of God's love. But in the
last resort He takes His place beside us over-against God,
content to struggle and pray like His human brethren.
W_e_aje summoned, therefore, not to rjut faith inJHim, but
to share the faith He had. It is merely a venial exaggera
tion to call Him the~one~Mediator between God and man.
A new and superior revelation may yet be given.
It is unnecessary to say that on such terms theology
cannot long retain a serious doctrine of Christ's person.
Something might still be said regarding Him, doubtless,
under the rubric of " the means of grace " ; but in no sense
could we be said to believe in God through Him in such
wise that He forms an integral and organic part of that in
which we believe. His relation to the new life of grace
and freedom is at best fortuitous. He was the first
Christian; into that phrase we may put what depths of
meaning we choose, but to transcend it is forbidden. All
Christology based on the hypothesis that He was more
is only dead matter too long harboured within the system
of religious truth.
The question whether this is a position compatible
with Christianity may be amTwered"rni;wo wayHT It may be
answered alike bvre|CTeMgliQlHiIoFy~and'by an^examina-
tion of ideas. As concerns history, it will not be denied
that from its most primitive origins the Church adored

288 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Jesus Christ and set Him in the highest place. For the
apostles Christ filled the whole sphere of God, and the
settlement of fundamental issues between Divine holiness
and human sin rested on what He was and had accom
plished. Not less for us to-day faith in God means
faith in Jesus. In this naive and experimental sense, it
is not too much to say that the Godhead of Jesus is de
fide for the Christian mind. Thus only can the vital
continuity of the Christian religion be preserved. It is
an open question, of course, whether the terms anciently
employed to define Jesus' unique transcendence will not
bear amendment ; but the spiritual attitude they witness to
is the essence of religion as we have learnt it from Christ
Himself. To alter this is to alter the religion ; and why
in that case the old name should be retained is something
of a mystery. Once abandon the New Testament convic
tion of Jesus' relation to men, and theirs to Him, and
while doubtless for a time it may be difficult to restrain
our hearts from going out to Him as of old in adoring
worship, the lapse of time may be trusted to do its fatal
work. We shall cease to trust Him ; for One who is
simply human to the mind cannot remain adorable to the
conscience and the heart.
Turning now to the proposed new category, let us
note how impossible it is to accept hero or genius as a
satisfying designation of Jesus Christ. For one thing, it
has no relation to the singular self-consciousness mirrored
in the Gospels. If language has a meaning, this is a
framework into which Jesus' thought of Himself, as the
unique Son of the Father and therefore the unique
Deliverer of man, simply cannot be compressed. If we
call Him hero, it is only because at the same time He
reveals Himself as infinitely more. And that no man can
be more is an unprovable a priori dogma, resulting from
a violent application of the abstract principle of Uniformity.
Along with this, however, we can see that the ethical
quality or constitution indicated by the two suggested
words is inapposite to the case. The powers of a genius,

JESUS AS RELIGIOUS GENIUS 289
and their active exertion, have reference properly to his
own self-centred will. His supreme aim is to realise
himself, to express his nature perfectly, to develop and
unfold the abnormal powers pent up within him. He
has no sense of an entrusted mission ; men are there for
him to use in the process of his self-manifestation, and
whether the outcome will be to bless or curse them is
a question of relatively slight importance. Jesus, on the
other hand, is the Christ. He is come not to do His own
will but the will of God who sent Him. Not to develop
or glorify His own nature is His first care, but to serve ;
to serve the Father, primarily, but a Father who is best
served by the redemptorial service of man. In other
words, there is nothing in Christ's aim or personality
which is not religious ; genius need not have any religious
quality whatever. A second consideration is that genius
is after all only a question of degree. It transcends the
ordinary bulk of mankind to an extent which can ap
proximately be measured, and there is a class or group of
men to all of whom the title can be applied with tolerably
equal justice. But the Christ is solitary. Hero-worship
therefore — and hero is simply genius in the sphere of will
— must always be separated by an impassable gulf from
the believing worship of Christ. To adore a hero is, in
the subtlest way, to adore humanity and therewith our
selves as part of conceivably heroic mankind; but when
we_ worship Jesus the Christ we implicitly worship Clod
in Him. I do not deny that an attitude towards Jesus
is possible — an attitude of romantic or aesthetic admira
tion in which conscience has no part — which is not felt
as altering or indeed touching our relation to God; but
whatever be the proper name for this attitude of mind,
it has at all events no connection with religion. It
centres after all in the human Ego, not, as religion must,
in God. One point more may be noticed. In the presence of
a genius we are acutely and disablingly conscious of our
distance from him, of his cold and remote transcendence
i9

290 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of other men ; and it is therefore in no way surprising
that with enthusiasm for genius there should often be
combined, in the devotee's mind, a pessimistic contempt
for mankind as a whole. Admiration of the superman
is made a refuge from disgust at the common crowd.
His wealth of being is some meagre consolation for the
universal poverty. But these are feelings which cannot
breathe in Jesus' presence. His sublimity does not put
us far from Him ; instead, it gives us courage to draw
near and receive out of His fulness. He is nearer to us,
more by far our fellow and our kinsman, than the greatest
names in human story ; and in this connection it is note
worthy that His overwhelming influence on the disciples
never had the effect of obscuring their instinctive sense
of His real manhood. But if we are personally conscious
of His subduing power, we know by the same experience
that His gifts are for others also. One who loved us, in
our unworthiness, could not despise any. He could not
regard men as things to be handled, and utilised, and cast
away. He could not transgress the high ethical law which
enjoins that persons must always be treated as ends, never
as merely means.1
Whatever then be the scope or value of the category
"hero," it is useless for the purpose of formulating the
Christian view of Christ. To guide ourselves by it is to
make an initial irretrievable mistake. Now as in the
beginning faith consists in taking to Jesus the attitude
which He Himself invited. Now as in the beginning the
name of God has the final meaning Jesus gave it, and part
of that meaning is Himself. But if Jesus is a hero and
no more, even if the greatest of all heroes, Christology is
but a waste of labour. We need not strive to bring out
the implications of His supreme religious value if that
value is in the end merely relative.
A recent writer has observed that " the idea that for
a new object we might have to create a new concept,
1 Cf. with the foregoing two admirable pages in Schlatter's Das christliche
Dogma, 305-6.

THE CATEGORY OF HERO 291
perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant
to us."1 He is speaking of philosophy, but it is not
in philosophy alone that this form of intellectual inertia
has been exhibited. It has been conspicuously manifest
in the interpretation of Jesus. Entia non sunt multipli-
canda praeter necessitatem is a good rule, but it may
result in spurious simplification, and thus hide from
us the impossibility of getting the facts into the ready-
made frames of our old concepts, or fitting the new
reality with some one of the familiar time-honoured cate
gories. This comes of the wilful assumption that one of
the old concepts, already known, must suit ; that there can
after all be no surprises for the mind. Applied to the
person of Jesus, this illicit axiom has meant that various
writers, forming by actual inspection of the race a notion
of what manhood is and can do, are accustomed to
insist that His experience and action shall in no way
transcend the empirical outline thus drawn. Hero is a
familiar category of greatness ; hero, therefore, He at
most can be. Nothing could be more certain than that
this is the way to miss the truth. Nature, we shall all
concede, can only be understood if we are prepared to
accept her originalities equally with her commonplace;
and in like manner, if we wish to know God's supreme
will for our salvation we must listen in lowliness to the
supreme voice He speaks in ; the voice that finds us
at greater depths of our being than any other. We know
comparatively little as to the_ possibilities of the world,
and an intellectual experience which is sometimes painful
reveals the perpetual necessity of remaking our science
and philosophy to the measure of quite unexpected
realities. The wholly unprecedented fact of Jesus,
therefore, in its Divine and absolute significance, is not
to be rejected off-hand as something which the very
structure of the human mind forbids it to recognise. His
solitary and all -determining character must be looked at
as a quite conceivable reality ; and we must in candour
1 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 51.

292 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
be willing to acknowledge that a new conception, not
hitherto called for, may be required to describe Him.
We must not force Him, so to say, to be the mere hero
or genius He has no interest in being. To-day as of
old He hides Himself from those who would take Him by
violence to make Him king.
This, then, is the first method in which modern
theology has tended to put Christology aside. It places
Jesus wholly on the side of reality we call human,
and then denies consistently enough that Christology is
part of Theology as the doctrine of God. To the faith
inspired by the New Testament, on the other hand, this
is a method excluded by the single consideration that
we cannot state the Christian thought of God except as
we include Christ in our statement. He is an integral
constituent of what, for us, God means. The richness
of significance present in the word Divine as a fruit of
the Christian experience of redemption, is not capable
of being expressed save by reference to the Son as
really as to the Father. This fact renders a Christology
essential. The second point of view from which modern
Christological thinking may be deprecated as superfluous
is that of literal fidelity to the definition of Chalcedon.
That definition may be regarded as at once complete
in theory and legally binding on all later ages. It is
true, no serious mind will affect indifference to the
Fathers' long labour in this domain ; we can never over
estimate the value of their unflinching witness to the
incarnation, or the resoluteness with which, in spite of
great temptations to error, they affirmed in symbolic
documents the perfectness and integrity of our Lord's
manhood. Nicsea is a position gained once for all.
Chalcedon, on the other hand, betrays a certain tendency
not merely to define but to theorise. It embodies, even
if faintly and as it were by allusion, a particular form of
interpretation which it is no real gain but a distinct loss

DEFECTS OF TRADITIONAL DOCTRINE 293
to carry back in our minds to the study of the Gospels.
It is one thing to hold that in returning to the Synoptics
we must bring with us the light of the Epistles, for this
means simply that the testimony of the apostles to Christ
is a prolongation, as well as a consequence, of Christ's
testimony to Himself. It is quite another thing to hold
that in reading, say, St. Mark we ought to keep the
Chalcedon formula in the background of our minds, and
interpret what we read in view of its authoritative terms.
That is to ignore the scientific history of dogma.
At the outset of our independent study, then, it is well
that we should consider certain reasons which preclude a
simple or literal acceptance of tradition. It is not merely
that the influence of the Logos idea upon tradition was
immense, and not at all times salutary. It is not merely
that there are more avenues than one by which the mystery
of our Lord's person can be approached, and that of these
possibilities tradition chose one that offers immense diffi
culties to a history-loving age. These are minor questions.
For modern thought the chief defect in . strictly traditional
Christology has been its insistence, not accidentally but
on principle, upon what for brevity is called the doctrine
of ' the two natures. Let us take this doctrine in a
convenient form supplied by the Westminster Confession :
"Two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead
and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in
one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion."
The sense of the important word " distinct " is to be
gathered from a later dictum in the same chapter :
"Christ, in the work of mediation, acteth according to
both natures, by each nature doing that which is proper
to itself."1 This view of the Divine-human personality,
present even in the invicem of Leo's Epistle, is that in
which tradition came to rest, but which now fails to
Satisfy' the great bulk of evangelical theologians. We
• need not at this point recall the scholastic subtlety and
artifice of the communicatio idiomatum developed with an
'•¦)¦'>:> ¦ • ¦ ¦¦ I'd. viii. 2.

294 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
ever-increasing complexity in post-Beformation days, and
issuing in an abstractness of conception sadly unlike the
mobile realities of Jesus' life. Neither is it simply that
the term " nature " turns out to be insufficiently ethical
for its purpose, and is in some ways peculiarly unfitted
to serve as a designation of Godhead. For here, it is
possible, a compromise may be effected. Discarding its
technical and rigid sense, we may hold that human
"nature" means everything pertaining to man's proper
constitution, the whole sum of his spiritual and bodily
endowments ; while on the other hand Divine " nature "
is equivalent to all that forms part of the true being of
God. If these two be put together, we may then say that
Jesus Christ, the God-man, is Himself a living unity of
both. But apart from this (it may be) not insurmountable
objection, two fatal difficulties remain.
First, the doctrine of the two natures, in its tradi
tional form, imports into the life of Christ an incredible
and thoroughgoing dualism. In place of that perfect
unity which is felt in every impression of Him, the
whole is bisected sharply by the fissure of distinction. No
longer one, He is divided against Himself. It has always
been perceived that a dualism of this kind, if more than
a form of words, annuls the very thought of redemption
by means of God's self-manifestation in flesh. Divine
and human alternately vitiates the truth of incarnation.
The simplicity and coherence of all that Christ was and
did vanishes, for God is not after all living a human life.
On the contrary, He is still holding Himself at a distance
from its experience and conditions. There has been no
saving descent. Christ executed this as God, it is said,
and suffered that as man. It could not be otherwise, since
in the last resort deity is impassible. Now this leaves a
profoundly disappointing impression of unethical mystery
and even, in a sense, duplicity. It means that the
reader of the Gospels has constantly to be on guard
against his own instinctive intuitions. The self-conscious
ness of Jesus, as depicted by the evangelists, we may call

iJ

THE TWO-NATURE DOCTRINE 295
Divine or human as we please ; to express the whole
truth we must call it both at once. But it is a single
consciousness after all ; it moves always as a spiritual
unity ; and separatist or divisive theories do a grave dis
service not merely to dear thinking, but to religious
truth and power. Always the result has been that deity
and humanity in Christ are joined in ways so external
that either may be contemplated and (so to speak)
analysed in abstraction from the other. It is an un
questioned merit in the ecclesiastical Christology that it
brings out emphatically the basal oneness of Christ with
God, insisting further that this oneness is, in ultimate
character, mysterious ; it is a grave fault, on the other
hand, that it should so construe this mystery as to get
wholly out of touch with the actualities of the New
Testament. Briefly, the doctrine of the two natures, if
taken seriously, gives us two abstractions instead of one
reality, two impotent halves in place of one living whole.
It hypostatises falsely two aspects of a single concrete
life — aspects which are so indubitably real that apart
from either the whole fact would be quite other than it
is, yet not in themselves distinctly functioning substanti
alities which may be logically estimated or adjusted to
each other, or combined in unspiritual modes.
In the second place, there is a difficulty concerned
with the person in which the two natures are held to be
"inseparably joined together." Once more we are obliged
to report unfavourably on the term "nature," this time
from a rather different point of view. The ancient
dogma proceeds on the definite assumption that, in both
God and man, there exists a complex whole of attri
butes and qualities, which can be understood and spoken
about as a "nature" enjoying some kind of real being
apart from the unifying or focal Ego ; whereas nothing
is more certain than that it is within personal experience,
and only there, that all the varied factors of our human
life — intellectual, moral, emotional, social — have any
proper existence or reality. To put it frankly, when we

296 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
abstract from personality — the spirit which gathers the
manifold particulars into unity and suffuses each with the
glow and intimacy of specifically conscious life — what we
vaguely call " human nature " is not human nature in
the least. It is at most hypothetical raw material,
which, if taken up into and shot through with self-con
sciousness, becomes an organic factor in a real human
experience, but in separation, as untenanted or by itself,
it is no more human nature than hydrogen by itself
is aquatic nature. We must not be tempted into the
obvious mistake of regarding one element in a living
unity as being the same thing outside the unity as within
it. Now in tradition human nature is thus taken (even
if it be only provisionally) as real apart from personality.
According to the technical phrase, the manhood is anhy-
postatic. What constitutes the person is the Ego of the
pre-existent Logos, who assumes into union with His own
hypostasis that whole complex briefly described as " human
nature," conveying to it the properties of His divinity.
Certain teachers of the Church, who felt keenly the
unreal character of an impersonal humanity, strove to
redress the balance by asserting that our Lord's manhood
is personal separately or in its own right, with the
unavoidable result that two personalities came only too
plainly to be predicated of the one Christ. A twofold
personality, however, is not merely something that we
fail to understand ; it is something we see quite well to
be impossible. In fact, a being in whom now the God
acts, now the man, is equally repellent to faith and
theory. It implies that to reach the Godhead we must
pass out beyond the manhood, and vice versa — the two
being so utterly heterogeneous and disparate that no true
union is conceivable.
This dilemma, then — the Scylla of a duplex person
ality and the Charybdis of an impersonal manhood — has
invariably proved fatal to the doctrine of two natures.
If it takes Jesus' manhood seriously, as the New Testa
ment of course does by instinct, it makes shipwreck on

THE TWO-NATURE DOCTRINE 297
the notion of a double Self. If, on the other hand, it
insists on the unity of the person, the unavoidable result
is to abridge the integrity of the manhood and present a
Figure whom it is difficult to identify with the Jesus
of the Synoptic Gospels. For tradition the unity of
the person is always a problem, and to the last a
mystery; for the New Testament it is the first reality
we touch. For tradition it appears as a hypothetical
conclusion tentatively posited at the close of intricate
processes of reasoning; for the New Testament it is given
in a direct and original impression. For tradition the
question is that of uniting two abstractions which have
been defined in bare contrast to each other ; for a mind
which takes its religion from the New Testament the
problem is to investigate the grounds which have led
Christians in every age to confess this concrete historic
person, Jesus Christ, as God. If objection be made to
this ever-renewed work of re-interpretation, as impeaching
the final truth of Chalcedon, two considerations, I think,
may be urged by way of answer. First, it is impossible
to believe that the human intelligence has made no pro
gress, since the fifth century, in the precision or delicacy
of its instruments, or that this progress is in no way to
the advantage of Christian thought. Secondly, each
modern writer, whatever his orthodoxy, does in fact put
a more or less modern construction upon the categories
of the ancient Church. It must be so, unless he is
content merely to repeat the conciliar phrases. No
history at all can be written, or any exposition of truth
historically received, the writing of which is not linked to
present experience by a secret bond, freshening the point
of view, and thus importing novel and valuable elements
of truth. Only a deeply felt interest in the present gives
power to reanimate the past.
Furthermore, it is necessary to redress the balance
which had been disturbed by the partial absence from
the patristic mind of a steady regard for the manhood
of Jesus. No modern reader can be unconscious of the

298 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
docetic strain present in much early writing. Too often,
perhaps most typically in Cyril, the humanity of Christ
is set forth as little more than semblance; and we have
seen how this bias more and more pressed on mediaeval
thought, and at last virtually obliterated in the mind of
the Church expositor the significance of New Testament
words as to Jesus' liability to temptation, infirmity, and
every wholesome human feeling. Distinct statements
about His growth in wisdom and the like were ignored or
twisted in a false direction. It seemed as though union
with the Logos had denaturalised His experience as man.
How a corrective movement set in with the Eeformation
— a movement anthropocentric in the sense that it took
human facts as point of departure — and how vast gains
accrued thereby to the modern religious estimate of Jesus,
we have endeavoured to explain. The Church received a
new impression of His actual career and of the signifi
cance of His Messianic consciousness. Not only so ; but
it is now impossible for us to adopt — as is done in much
traditional Christology — a minimising tone respecting the
immensity of sacrifice made by God in becoming man,
with a life lived in flesh and defined by the limits of
mundane experience. A partially de-ethicising tendency
of the kind just noted was naturally accompanied by a
less than moral view of sacraments, and of their mode
of action in the soul ; and it is worth noting that when
the Eeformers turned back resolutely to the historic
Christ, as God's only Son and our Eedeemer, they re
vived also the primitive apostolic conception of Baptism
and the Lord's Supper, as conveying to men no magical
grace or semi-physical influence or blessing, but the Lord
Jesus Christ in His whole saving power. At each point
a fresh view of Christ quickened their sense of historic
fact. We conclude, therefore, that faith in Christ is not to
be confused with adhesion to a particular Christological
formula, and that the doctrine of two natures, in the
rigid abstract shape given it by tradition, is detachable

THE PROBLEM OF CHRIST 299
from the believing estimate of our Lord. If this be so,
the effort to reinterpret the premises and implications of
faith in Him is no mere venial exercise of intelligence,
but a duty to the evangelic mission of the Church.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. As
Kahler puts it, " He who finds the essence of the
traditional dogma in its sharp rejection of heresy, or its
scholastic form, commits the blunder of mixing up theology
and faith. On the other hand, he who regards it as but
the historic form apart from which believing witness to
the living God — as distinct from metaphysical traditions
— could not have been saved for later ages, may well
join hands with a fellow-worker who pleads that we need
another and a new dogma." 1
But if a mere verbal acquiescence in tradition is out
of the question, since it lends no aid to the modern
student, a distaste for certain minor particulars of the
ancient dogma is by no means equivalent to a renunciation
of all Christology. We cannot appeal to men not to
think. They do not leave their intelligence behind them
when they become Christians. Hence we may anticipate
that now, as in the early centuries, constructive principles
are being slowly worked out, in the hope that by their
means we may attain to a deeper understanding of Him
in whom God has drawn near to us. In every age minds
which have been quickened and inspired by Christ will
continue to pour forth new thoughts concerning His
person and His work. It will always be felt that
"difficulties which are themselves the creation of the
intellect must be intellectually disposed of." It is not an
objection to this that in due time our interpretations like
wise will become obsolete and insufficient. It must be
considered that for an ever larger proportion of earnest
men there is virtually no middle course between holding
a doctrine on grounds which can be really even if
imperfectly apprehended by the mind, and discarding the
1 Angewandte Dogmen, 137.

300 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
doctrine in question altogether. A Christ whom they
cannot place luminously in relation to life or thought is a
Christ with no reality for them. Moreover, it is vain to
speak as if ours alone were the responsibility of agitating
these great issues. Already various definite modern
theories of Christ have been placed before the world;
some of them, it may well be, are of a kind we have no
option but to reject; and we cannot suppose that it is
possible to deal with them satisfactorily save on principles
which appeal to the Christian mind of our own time —
principles which are consistent with each other and would
find their place in a positive and constructive statement.
The fact that each reasoned view of Christ should call for
criticism and modification at the hands of later ages, so
far from being an embarrassment, is a profound testimony
to the magnitude of the theme. Christological theory is
in truth like the great cathedral. " It is ever beautiful for
worship, great for service, sublime as a retreat from the
tumult of the world, and it is for ever unfinished." The
Christ whom any mind or group of minds can reproduce
is not the infinite Eedeemer of the world.
Further, it will scarcely be denied that the task of
thus interpreting Christ afresh is a vital part of our
religious service. He is to be loved with the heart, but
also with the mind. It is all but impossible for a
thoughtful man to adore Jesus Christ, finding in Him
blessedness and eternal life, and not be conscious of a
powerful desire to reach coherent views of His person.
What we already know of Him has led us to faith and
worship ; may not (he will ask) a deepened knowledge, if
it be attainable, add a yet profounder significance to our
confession of His name ? Is it not unworthy that in an
age when men are prepared to spend time and power
lavishly in the investigation of the properties of matter,
and each new step towards the conquest of nature is
saluted with a proud and eager gratitude, Christian
thinkers should flag in the effort to reach lucidity and
truth of judgment as to the person of our Lord ? Why

SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT REQUIRED 301
should we turn from these problems so easily with the
sad confession : Ignoramus et ignorabimus ? Such words —
though they are often taken so — are no proof of a peculiar
susceptibility to the overwhelming power of Christ — the
mind being as it were dumb before Him ; they suggest,
rather, that the very soul of the Gospel — Immanuel, God
with us — has so far left us unimpressed. Many writers
on doctrine at the present moment are either dubious as to
the value of systematic thought or afraid of their own
minds ; Eitschlianism, with all its service to faith, has a
little disparaged the use of reason in theology ; and of
nothing are we more in need than a wise and instructed
courage. We require the brave heart that will launch out
into the deep. Principles and methods may yet be gained,
based alike in faith and reason, by means of which a real
and positive command of the great verities of Christology
may be secured for the intelligence of our own time. The
question is ripe for re-examination, not merely from the
point of view of the apologist, keen to win the outsider,
and tempted by this very keenness to attenuate the un
speakable gift in his search for the minimum of truth a
normal contemporary can be induced to accept. Still
more urgently it needs to be freshly scrutinised from the
point of view of the Christologian proper, whose part it is
to formulate, if that be possible, all that Christ is to the
fully surrendered mind ; not permitting the poor average
of faith to set itself up as criterion, but asking insist
ently who Christ must be if He is indeed the Mediator,
the Advocate with the Father, the person who has availed
as a propitiation for the sins of the whole world. We
have to catch on our minds, not the lowest form of belief
compatible with a profession of Christianity, but some
thing of the incredible wonder of the Jesus who ransomed
us with His blood. A recent writer on some cardinal
elements of the Gospel has insisted on " the demand they
make for an enlargement of human faculty to take in the
unimagined greatness newly revealed in them by God " ;
and this sense of dilation, of infinity, of inexhaustible and

302 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
unending magnitude, is the element we are most of all
bound to pass into our theoretic statements. It may be
taken as certain that the student of Christology will
undergo in the field of theory the same experience of
perpetually renewed effort to grasp a transcendent object
as he encounters in the realm of devotion. In both
spheres, of doctrine as of faith, it transpires that each
new conception of Christ we form, only to dismantle and
reshape it later on the score of inadequacy, gives place
to one always more broad and deep and high.
One point still remains. Shall we aim at a meta
physical view, or shall we rest in an ethical Christ, asking
no hard questions that may lead out over the seas of
thought ? Are transcendent problems to be discounted
from the beginning as irrelevant or at all events quite
subordinate ? What is our duty — to think things out,
even if this should mean a speculative interpretation of
Jesus, or in reverent agnosticism to deprecate intrusion
into such high matters and stay safely within the frontiers
of a verifiable experience ? Advocates of the less
ambitious plan are now more numerous than ever.
Doubtless, too, so far as it goes, their guiding interest
is a positive one. It insists on redemption as a boon
appreciable mainly through conscience and feeling; it
dwells on the self-consciousness of Jesus as the very mirror
of God's heart ; and these profoundly evangelical positions
merit and will receive wide sympathy. In less commend
able fashion, its tacit plea that faith is a necessity but
Christology a luxury makes appeal to the distaste for
systematic thought so curiously common in our time ; and
the appeal which is primarily meant for all who distrust
speculation may also be welcomed by the indolent. In
certain cases, moreover, an exclusive emphasis on what is
called the moral view of Christ may cover negative con
clusions as to His real transcendence.
In this general contention much, of course, is un
deniable. Dr. Forsyth has shown us that the moralising

THE METAPHYSIC OF THE CONSCIENCE 303
of dogma is an essential of all modern Christian thought.1
The conception of Divine omnipotence, for example, must
be transposed from the key of barely ontological ideas into
that of ethical relations as between persons. The almighti-
ness of God is exerted not in vacuo, but in a moral universe
and under moral conditions ; a fact with an obviously direct
bearing on the question of what God may do for man's
salvation. It is more than possible that by this ethicising
of the Divine attributes we may relieve some of the gravest
problems of the incarnation, particularly those which are
due less to ascertained facts of history than to the physical
and all but mechanical thought-forms employed by the
early Church. Thus far, then, the plea for ethical
categories is abundantly justified. Conceptions which
have lost all relation to the conscience are of no more
use for our purpose. The re-statement of Christology in
fully personal and spiritual terms may be a long and
exacting task ; but it is unavoidable, and if carried forward
on sound lines may well hope for results of a permanently
valid character.
At the same time, it is clear that a metaphysic of the
conscience is none the less metaphysical. Guided as it is,
like all knowledge, by an interest more vital than specu
lative, it is at the same time an interpretation of the real.
The moral certainties of redeemed men bring them in
touch with the last and highest facts in the universe.
There is no incognizable Absolute, no more authentic or
final realm of being, from the apprehension of which they
are in the last resort debarred, nor is faith thus morally
conditioned subject after all to the appellate jurisdiction
of philosophy. By all means let us recognise the truth
that.it is through the medium of conscience that Christ is
known in His ultimate and universal significance and His
relation to God and man ; but let us also recollect that
the Christ thus, ethically known pertains ultimately to
the sphere of reality with which the metaphysician is
concerned, and that there exists no legitimate point of
1 Person' and Place of Jesus Christ, Lects. viii. and IX.

304 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
view in which He appears as a merely relative phenomenon.
Moral perception, in fact, is our best guide to the nature
of true being ; if we distrust the utterances of the moral
faculty, there seems to be no reason why we should ever
trust our minds at all. Between the ethical and the
metaphysical view of Christ, then, there is no final
antagonism. The ethical, when taken as ultimately true,
is the metaphysical ; it is metaphysical in the only sense
relevant to a moral intelligence. The phenomenon of moral
worth is reality appearing to our minds. The reality is
not behind the worth, or within it as a secret core ; it is
the Will, the self-conscious activity, of which the worth
is a living attribute. Hence if we are inspired by
Christian faith to affirm that Jesus Christ is identical
with God in will — a Will manifested in His achieve
ment — we have reached a point beyond which no advance
is possible ; for in ethical terms, the highest terms avail
able, we have affirmed His ontological unity with God in
a sense generically different from that which is predicable
of man as man. Intelligent will is the organic centre
of personality; and the will of Jesus fixes His absolute
status in the world of being. In every conceivable sense
in which this is a true estimate of His person, it also is a
metaphysical estimate.
No escape then is possible, in this field or any other, :
from the obligation to think things out persistently to the ",
end. If we are conscious of the spiritual supremacy of
Christ — His unique position in religious history, His
unique significance for each soul — we have no choice
but to ask what conceptions of His person are guaranteed
by this impression. Once these conceptions have been
gained, they take their place as among the truest and
most adequate- of which the human mind is capable. If
Christian experience counts for anything, then it counts
here. It is in touch with reality; the being which our
mind apprehends in Jesus is real being. A right doctrine
of His person, therefore^ is not dealing with ideas which
are^-TmTy^counf^rs^^useful metaphorical expressions ulti-

FAITH AND REALITY 305
mately unredeemable by fact. It is dealing with ideas
necessitated by Jesus' witness to Himself and the cans. -
firma^bnof^ thajj wit.nfiKH .furnished by the story of the
Church. These true ideas it is unnecessary to clothe
in the formulas of conciliar theology. The language, the
categories, the intellectual forms of earlier days are in
certain respects not such as we can use. None the less
our final thought of the Eedeemer has the same meaning
as of yore. The coinage of far-off ages may doubtless be
defaced and soiled ; the inscriptions set upon it may be
in part undecipherable. Yet the ore from which the
ancient currency was struck is still in our possession ; and
the task of modern Christology, as we believe, is to stamp
the mintage freshly, sending it forth for the service of a
new generation.

20

CHAPTER II.
CHRISTOLOGY AND THE HISTORIC CHRIST.
Among modern theologians there is a general disposition
to agree that if Christology is to be valid for the modern
mind, its point of reference and of departure must be
fixed in the Jesus Christ of history. This was in fact
the new Beformation gospel. In Western Catholicism
the idea had become regnant that Christianity is the
Church, while the Church in turn is Christ, the perpetual
incarnation of God in the world. Official doctrine made
no attempt to control Christology by recorded fact.
Jesus was hidden by a crowd of saints. Conceptions of
God prevailed which had little relation to the Son who
alone makes known the Father. But the Eeformers
insist that God is sphered and embodied for us in Christ ;
that only there is He displayed as Eedeemer ; and that
a preacher's duty is to make men see in Christ "the
work of God and His Fatherly heart towards us," not to
" talk much of God in the heathen manner." Sehleier
macher too rang out this note subsequently to the
Aufkldrung; and Eitschlianism, be its faults what they
may, has rendered an invaluable service by holding the
Church's mind close to the actual person of our Lord.
Its influence has coincided significantly with the ever-
Litbratueb — Forrest, The Christ of History and Experience*, 1903 ;
Herrmann, Communion with God, 1906 ; Kirn, Glaube und Geschichte,
1900 ; Sanday, Christologies Ancient and Modem, 1910 ; Kahler, Der
sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche biblische Christus2, 1896;
Wobbermin, Geschichte und Historie in der Religionswissenschaft, 1911 ;
Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 1895 ; Ritschl, Justification and Reconcilia
tion, 1900 ; Simpson, Fact of Christ, 1900.
306

FAITH AND HISTORY 307
increasing tendency to put aside convention and look at
the reality of things.
It is because it is a religion for the sinful that
Christianity is indissolubly implicated with historic fact,
and specifically with the fact of Christ. It is a religion
of atonement. God has reconciled us to Himself through
His Son, attesting His gracious will by Jesus who lived
and died and rose again. Whatever satisfaction Christi
anity may render to the intellectual or aesthetic needs of
mankind, is due to its having first met and satisfied the
need of salvation. But the need of salvation cannot be
satisfied by a bare idea. Not mere ideas but facts are
indispensably vi.tal ; facts which have existence in the
same field of reality as we ourselves, i.e. the field of
history. Nature may indeed reveal a power indefinitely
great and a wisdom indefinitely wide, but as regards
forgiveness it is silent. That is a transcendent word ;
sun, moon, and stars cannot utter it, nor can earth and
sea. It is in history, and only there, that the infinite
love of the Eternal is put within our reach and we are
made certain of it as a personal and inalienable possession.
Nor is it in the course of the world at large that we
encounter God thus ; for history in general is filled with
dubious voices, with warring currents of tendency which
cross and mingle. God's Fatherhood, in the loftiest and
most subduing sense, is known only in Jesus. He is
indeed present in all events, ruling past and future
ceaselessly ; but yet in one unique tract of reality the
veil upon His working grows diaphanous, and we behold
His very heart. It is as with life-blood circulating
through the whole body, yet here or there so near the
surface that by a touch we feel the pulsing flow. Only
in the fact of Jesus does a basis for religion exist not
made by man, but given by God Himself. Apart from
this Eedeemer, Christianity is not redemption in the least ;
it is but one more impotent abstraction.
Nevertheless to urge this conviction will to-day
almost certainly provoke the retort that to base faith

308 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
on history is the most shortsighted of mistakes. Faith
demands a Christ who has absolute value for our
relation with God, but can anything absolute emerge in
the conditioned series of time-events ? How shall the
absolute appear in time and place ? Has not religion
itself displayed an inveterate tendency to lift what it
reckons holy out of the shifting stream of change into
the region of the eternal, the immutable ?
The objection may be put from two points of view
and buttressed by two kinds of argument. On the
philosophical side, it derives ultimately from the Greek
view of things, "which set out from the study of physical
nature, not of man — who is made for history, and is "a
creature of days and years and also of generations " — and
which tended to disparage the succession of human events
as something proper only to the realm of yeveais, the
sphere of change and incalculable variety, which can
never satisfy the properly metaphysical interest. No one
raised the problem of what progress means, or human
history as a whole. No one inquired whether conceivably
it has been '' assigned to man to have history for the
manner in which he should manifest himself,"1 and
whether accordingly in our search for the meaning of the
world we are bound not to stop short with principles,
truths, laws because what we seek is given only in facts,
events, historical transactions. In modern times, the
same objection has never been expressed more powerfully
than in the famous word of Lessing : " Contingent
historical truths can never afford proof of necessary
truths of reason." No absolute verity can be mediated
through events of time. Between the two lies an ugly
broad ditch. This has been called by far the strongest
blow yet struck at Christianity. Spinoza argued on similar
lines ; and Kant, notwithstanding a willing admission that
the ideal took shape and form in the historic Jesus, does
not hesitate to assert that the question whether Jesus' ful
filment of the ideal was complete is relatively unimportant.
1 See Life of Principal Rainy, by P. Carnegie Simpson, i. 204.

FAITH AND HISTORY 309
Faith and history live in disparate worlds which never
intersect. Fichte crowns the series by the declaration
that it is contrary to the Christian religion to demand
faith in the historic Christ. If a man is in fact united
to God, his duty is not to be perpetually going back upon
the way to such union, but to live in the thing. Any
thing else invades true spirituality. God is revealed in
conscience and in the main march of events ; this is all
we know on earth, all we need to know.
The answer to Lessing plainly is, in the first place,
that history is not contingent. At all events for the
Christian mind, sure of God and of God's government, bare
contingency is meaningless. Curiously enough, it was
Lessing who did more than all his contemporaries to lift
men above the strange and arid prejudice that history is
only a Wirr-warr of beings, happenings, relations, and to
exhibit it as the workshop of life both for nations and
persons. The education of mankind, regarding which he
spoke many deep words, is in fact an education by way of
historical media, moving upward from limited and meagre
origins, yet attaining in due time to a heritage defined
and enriched through the bygone experiences of man.
Again, the Christian message does not in any case consist
in necessary truths of reason. It is not, for instance, a
necessary truth of reason — a truth, that is, which rises
with self-evidencing clearness in the mind of every
normally intelligent adult — that God is so truly love
that He interposed to bless and save mankind. For
certainty here, we must have the record of definite
phenomena accrediting themselves to conscience and heart.
Unless faith, like Antaeus in the legend, stands firm on the
mother-earth of fact, it must come to be spun senti
mentally out of the inner consciousness ; * uncorrected,
uncontrolled, uninspired by great actualities. Again, if it
be said the Gospel as involved in history must consent to
be equally relative with other facts of the time-series —
that it has to choose, in short, between historicity and
finality — the answer is that this is pure assumption, and

310 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
assumption which must be changed if it conflicts with
real phenomena. It may well be even bad metaphysics ;
it is so, if, as not a few philosophers have begun to think,
life is an eternal creation of novelties, a scene not of self-
identical persistent objects with unvarying mutual relations,
but of the incessant uprising of the new and impre-
visible. For in that case the fatal presupposition of
mechanism as an exhaustive conception of the real
vanishes, and the only remaining question is whether
the novelty emergent at a specific point in history was
an absolute and all-sufficient Eedeemer. Once more, it is
obvious that the religious life of man has always moved
upward, not by the influence of abstract conceptions,
however rich or versatile, but by the power of great
personalities. Each vast movement starts with a man.
It rises into strength because an idea and a mind have
become fused in one — the thought embodied in a soul, the
soul dedicated to the thought and acting only in its service.
This is unquestionably how concrete history has proceeded
from phase to phase ; it has moved by incessant new de
partures ; and if the axioms of a mechanical psychology
break down helplessly before a Paul, a Luther, or a
Wesley, acknowledging their inability to deal with the
original and inscrutable factors these names represent, it
is hard to see how they can expect to cope with the
incomparable life of Jesus. Finally, it is found that a
priori notions of historic relativity are extinguished in
Jesus' presence. They are broken by redemption as an
experience as of old Samson broke the restraining withes.
The men who followed Christ in Palestine and learnt to
name Him Lord, those who in every time have felt the
sweep of His power and the renewing impulse of His
Spirit — no one of them all but is aware that in Jesus we
touch the supreme moral reality of the universe.
On the historical side, however, the objection to
binding up faith with history takes the form of asking
whether criticism of the New Testament may not have
destroyed for good and all the possibility of touching the

CHRIST AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH 311
real Jesus. It has been argued that His personal existence
is a myth. Even if the more judicious smile at this,
can we regard the situation as satisfactory which makes
Christianity dependent on imperfectly attested narratives of
the past ? Is not this ultimately to condemn the faith of
simple believers to permanent insecurity as the satellite
of scholarship — a tyranny quite as insupportable as that
of any papacy ? Or, turning the whole matter round,
may not our exact knowledge of Jesus prove, religiously,
our fate ? After all, He belongs to the first century.
Assume for the moment that His disciples were able to
transmit His message without falsification ; must He not
have been, in a real measure, the child, the creation, of
His own time and land ? His teaching follows the
methods practised by His prophetic forerunners, His
beliefs are drawn largely from the Old Testament, and
His conception of the universe was that current in His
day. Can His thought of God have escaped quite
unharmed ?
Our answer to this must begin with the admission
that nothing in the past can be so certain for the historian,
purely as an historian, as that it will bear the weight of
personal religion. Historical research can no more give
us a Saviour Christ than science can give us the living
God. Even if Christ were the Eedeemer of the world, and
knowable as such, it is not in fact by way of scholarly in
vestigation that He could be thus known. There are matters,
in short, which history by itself is incompetent to treat
of ; for, as Professor James once put it, " a rule of thinking
which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging
certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were
really there, would be an irrational rule." 1
That, however, is but a preliminary point. The really
important thing is that no man is a mere historian, even
if he tries to be. For no man is without a conscience —
the sense of unconditional and infallible obligation ; hence
none can be guaranteed against the risk of finding himself
1 The Will to Believe, 28.

312 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
in the presence of One who deals with us in ways which
we know to be God's ways. It may happen to any man,
at any time, given the witness of a living Church, to be
inescapably confronted with a Person who convicts him
of moral ruin yet offers him the saving love of God. And
if this should happen, he will then know, with a certainty
which no history can give or take away, that in this Jesus
he has touched and met with God. The Gospel picture
of Jesus carries with it the demonstration of its own
veracity. It is not so much that we argue consciously that
this Man could not have been described had He not been
real ; rather He makes His own overmastering impression
and subdues us to Himself.1 He is beheld as the last and
highest fact of which moral reason takes cognizance.
It thus appears that the ground and content of Chris
tian faith is eventually superior to the shifting results
of historic criticism. Not only so; the conviction of
Christ's power is ultimately unaffected in its central import
by trie progress of investigation. All investigation derives
its data from the New Testament itself, and has therefore
no option but to assume the truth of certain main elements
in the apostolic representation of Jesus, which yield the
sole criterion of reality. If Jesus is cognizable at all, He
is cognizable in the Gospels and Epistles ; no other source
exists. Besides, it is not putting it too strongly to say that
the Christ depicted in every part of the New Testament
is radically the same Christ. There is a close similarity,
for instance, between the Christology of St. Mark and of
St. John. The Christ of St. Paul, like the Christ of all
the Gospels, is a crucified and risen Lord; throughout,
the attitude of faith to Him is identical. After a book
like Dr. Denney's Jesus and the Gospel, this position may
be taken as established. Scientific inquiry, therefore, may
and does force theology to reform its methods of Scripture
proof; it cannot touch the Saviour held forth, in every
1 Cf. a vigorous sentence from Jonathan Edwards : "The Gospel of the
blessed God does not go abroad a-begging for its evidence so much as some
think ; it has its highest and most proper evidence in itself " ( Works, v. 178).

CHRIST AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH 313
part of the New Testament, to repentant faith. The final
outcome alike of scholarly exegesis and of simple Bible
reading is a more lucid apprehension of Jesus Christ as
in the sovereign power of His resurrection He fills the
primitive believing consciousness. This is not to say that
the whole task of verifying the Christian religion may
safely be thrown upon the experience of the individual
believer, confirmed by past centuries of faith.1 The truth
about Jesus cannot be read off the believing mind
simpliciter. For it is a believing mind only as it has been
quickened by contact with the revealing history. The
regenerate soul is no more real independently of the historic
Christ than a child is real, not to say intelligible, apart
from his parents. The experience of being saved and the
knowledge of what God did to save us gWTbne indivisible
unity, and it does not help intelligence in the least to put
asunder, even provisionally, what in fact is joined together.
That faith should manufacture its own data, or do any
thing but apprehend that by which it is created, is
inconceivable. The position here sketched in outline must not,
however, be hastily identified with a different view super
ficially resembling it. Especially the venerable Kahler
of Halle has set forth impressive arguments to the effect
that in the last resort we must simply be content with
the witness of the apostles to Jesus, and that it is idle to
seek, behind their testimony, a scientifically reconstructed
picture of Jesus as He was. The records, he points out,
do not even establish the order in which the narrated
episodes took place, much less the course of Jesus' spiritual
development. In these circumstances, any one who aims
at a biography of Jesus is compelled to fill up the meagre
outline with private fancies, based on psychological analogies
which really are irrelevant to a sinless life. And since
the evangelists in any case are not chroniclers but preachers,
the effort to disentangle " the historic Jesus " from their
1 As is done in the well-known argument of Dale, The Living Christ and
ihe Four Gospels, Lects. I. and n.

314 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
account must be fruitless, because perverted by illegitimate
dogmatic considerations. It was by the apostles' preaching
of Christ that the Church came into existence ; their
preaching, accordingly, must remain the vital soil of her
life and the final court of appeal by which the truth of
her message is sanctioned.1
In much of this we shall all acquiesce gratefully.
Nevertheless it does not meet the question whether after all
the Gospel can rest for us simply on the faith of other men.
If, as Luther reiterates, faith and God belong together,
we cannot really believe in anything but God as He
makes Himself known to us. Even to a New Testament
evangelist it is possible to say, in the language of the
Samaritans : " Now we believe, not because of thy speaking ;
for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is
indeed the Saviour of the world " (Jn 442). The grounds
of faith accessible to apostles are open to us also. For
one thing, the impression made on them is itself an index
of its cause. Jesus revealed what He was not merely —
indeed not mainly — by what He said, but by the way in
which His personality told on others, fixing itself indelibly
in their minds. This picture of Jesus, moreover, once we
have apprehended it, can be employed to control the
evangelical narratives themselves. The gradual outcome
of reverent familiarity with the Gospel portrait of Jesus is
to put us in possession of a conception of His person, so
luminous, authentic, and self-consistent as to release us
from dependence on peripheral details. The Christ shining
out upon us from the sources is a fact so real and sure
that it tests and attests its own constituent elements.
And the susceptible reader of the Gospels simultaneously
begins to find in the Christ thus known a Eedeemer
who both evokes the longing for God and satisfies the
longing He evokes. Thus the apostles' faith is for us a
mirror reflecting the actual Jesus, and enabling us to know
Him for ourselves.
1 Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische
Christus2 (1896).

THE INNER LIFE OF JESUS 315
The historic Christ, then, is the criterion alike of
faith and of the Christology inspired by faith. But
what is the precise content of this phrase, " the historic
Christ " ? How much does it cover ? No present-day
answer to this question has been more influential than
that of Herrmann. He points out that the saving revela
tion of God cannot be a mere multiplicity of facts, which
could only distract the mind. It must be a unity, collected
round a fixed centre with which faith can have immediate
relations. And this fixed centre is " the inner life of
Jesus." Whatever else may be in doubt, this at all events
is incontestably real. " The one thing which the Gospels
will give us as an overpowering reality is just the inner
life of Jesus Himself. . . . Whenever we come to see
the Person of Jesus, then, under the impress of that
inner life that breaks through all the veils of the story,
we ask no more questions as to the trustworthiness of
the evangelists." This picture of Jesus subdues us; it
is, as he finely adds, a " free revelation of the Living to
the living."1 At this point, however, there emerges a
distinction to which Herrmann clearly attaches great
importance. It is the distinction between the ground of
faith (Glaubensgrund) and convictions generated by faith
(Glaubensgedanken). The ground or basis of faith, we
have seen, is the inner life of Jesus, a moral ultimate
behind which criticism cannot penetrate and in virtue
of which Jesus comes home to us as the personal mani
festation of a redeeming God. Contrasted with this
unanalysable datum, however, are beliefs or thoughts
which do not create faith but are created by it, beliefs
which express truth sooner or later felt by the Christian
to be involved in his fundamental trustful response to
Jesus. Such beliefs are the affirmation of His Divine
origin, His resurrection, His sovereign and universal power.
Is this contrast valid ? In particular, are we justified
in narrowing " the historic Jesus " into what Herrmann
has designated His " inner life " ?
1 Communion with God, 74-75.

316 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
He is undoubtedly so far right that no legitimate
development in our conception of Christ can be a bare
external addition to our incipient believing view. All
true elements of an evangelical Christology must be
implicit from the first; points to which they can be
fastened when unfolded later, and which really demand
the more complete statement, are given, though latently,
in the initial confession, " Jesus is Lord." Belief in the
resurrection is a case in point. To grasp or acknowledge
worthily the risen Lord, a man must have been impressed
with Jesus in a certain way. Our faith in the resurrec
tion, though it finds occasion in the Synoptic narratives,
draws its intensity and passion from our sense of Jesus'
greatness ; we so trust the power and glory of the Christ
depicted in the Gospels, that the apostolic witness to
His triumph wins our free assent. What would be
fantastic if asserted of another, clearly is predicable of
Him. But a principle of this kind, however sound, does
not cover Herrmann's position.1 In point of fact, belief
in the resurrection of our Lord is not on a par with
various doctrinal affirmations of which theology avails
itself for the interpretation of Jesus as Mediator. For
the resurrection is itself part of the revelation to be
interpreted. It is an integral element in the whole
presented datum in which the love of God has become
manifest for our salvation. Our faith stands upon the
entire fact of Christ and His experience, as that through
which God's saving power has been revealed and made
effective. But Jesus' experience did not end in death.
It embraced resurrection also, and this can be ignored
only by a violent effort of abstraction. Bemove the
experience of Easter morning, therefore, and the revelation
of God to which we are called to respond is altered,
because the quality and value of Jesus' whole career is
altered. Something great has been withdrawn from the
Pauline climax : " It is Christ that died, yea rather that
was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand. of
1 Cf. Haring and Reischle, ZTK. (1898), 129-133.

THE HISTORIC CHRIST A RISEN LORD 317
God." Diminish the revelation, and perforce the faith
which reacts on revelation is also diminished. A Christ
whom we know to have been raised out of death, and
to have shown Himself to His disciples as the Living
One, and a Christ of whom we are not quite certain
whether He is risen or not, are obviously so different
that they must evoke a quite different religious interest.
If our view of God, therefore, is to be fully Christian, if
we are to believe in Him as omnipotence no less than love,
we must hold that the resurrection enters vitally into the
creative ground of faith. It is part of the Gospel in
which Jesus is held forth. Or, to put it otherwise, the
" historic Christ '' is not the carpenter of Nazareth merely,
the Hero of humanity, the ancient religious genius ; He is
the Lord who rose again to the glory of the Father.1
To sum up, then, the Christ entitled to be called
historic is the Christ mediated to us by the testimony of
apostles; so mediated, however, that in their witness we
are able to perceive and know Him independently. No
line of demarcation can be drawn prohibiting us, in our
assertions regarding Him, from passing beyond the hour
of His crucifixion. The limits within which Christ is
revealed are not fixed between Bethlehem and Calvary.
He is revealed also in His rising from the dead. Hence
the Fourth Gospel follows a true and irrepressible
believing instinct, when it envisages the whole earthly
ministry of Jesus as already charged with the consummated
significance of His exaltation. For this means simply
that the historic Jesus and He in whom faith sees the
last and all-sufficient manifestation of God are one and
the same. We cannot read the Gospels and not feel that
this Man is destined for resurrection ; and what the
writers of the New Testament have done is not to overlay
the concrete facts of history with confusing and irrelevant
1 Niebergall's declaration on behalf of modern radical theology
is significant. "We need," he says, "something else which will serve
as well as the old doctrine of the exalted Christ " (Hilligenlei, 34). Has
this substitute been found 1

318 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
mythology, but with profound spiritual insight to construe
Jesus' whole career in the light of its stupendous issue.
There has never been a Christianity in the world which
did not worship Christ the Lord as personally identical
with Jesus of Nazareth. A criticism, therefore, which,
after repudiating His exaltation, strives to disinter the
real Jesus from the mounds of untrustworthy legend,
is reduced for lack of matter to constructions of a
subjective and imaginary character. These constructions
proceed on lines which almost by definition make valid
results impossible; for, resting as they do on partially
naturalistic assumptions, they are led to argue, first, that
no transcendent Person such as the Christ of faith could
possibly exist, and secondly, that even if He did, it is
inconceivable that a subsequent age should be credibly
informed of His reality.
But if the earthly Jesus and the exalted Lord are
one, and are both of them aspects of what we ought to
mean by "the historic Christ," in the sense that the
resurrection is part of the historical revelation which
evokes faith, this implies further that the historic Christ
is identical also with the Lord present in experience now
and always. " The resurrection," it has been put, " con
stitutes the great point of transition in the Christian
faith, at which He who appeared as a single figure in
history is recognised as in reality above historical limita
tions, the abiding Lord and life of souls."1 In every
age His influence has continued to reconcile men with
God. And these effects of His person, in touching hearts
and changing lives, must be taken account of in our
estimate of Himself, for the capacity to do these things
in humanity must have originally been resident in His
being. The final proof of the Gospel, indeed, lies in the
living interrelation and correspondence between the New
Testament picture of Christ and our experience of His
redeeming energies. Now as then, He convinces men of
sin yet assures them of forgiveness, judges them in
'Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, 158.

HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE 319
righteousness yet restores their soul ; and this in virtue
of a personality uniquely and inseparably one with God.
If the pictured Christ be the die, the impression within
the Christian consciousness answers to it part for part.
Both reveal the actual Jesus. As He imprinted Himself
on the disciples' mind, He imprints Himself to-day on
ours ; and in both cases harmonious effects flow from a
single real cause. The transcendent Christ, active "all
the days unto the end," guarantees the Jesus of Palestine,
for ever anew He grants to men the very experiences
undergone by the primitive group of believers.
It is therefore a principle of cardinal importance
that Christology, at each point, should be animated and
controlled by what we know of the historic Christ ; but,
like other excellent principles, it must not be applied in
any narrow or legalistic spirit. Without this constant
reference to fact, this instinctive recurrence to the self-
consciousness of Jesus and the impression made by Him
on the first Christians, we launch ourselves upon the
wide uncharted sea of mysticism. But it does not
follow that every doctrinal statement about Jesus must
be sanctioned verbally by a word from His lips or by a
distinct apostolic utterance. What is required rather is
that the New Testament picture as a whole should be
truthfully reflected in our construction as a whole. Let
the portrait of the historic Christ, contained in primitive
testimony, be brought to bear directly upon our mind,
saturating it through and through ; and thereupon let us
proceed to .give free systematised expression to the thoughts
which arise within us. This is, as a fact, what has
happened whenever theologians have spoken worthily of
Jesus Christ, and it is clearly the procedure which har
monises with the native freedom of the Gospel. And if
it be said that this appears to commit the Church to the
vagaries of individual feeling, and the cry be raised for
some inflexible rule by which to measure the correctness
of opinions, it must be replied that no legal guarantee for
unchanging orthodoxy can be given. Nothing in Chris-

320 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
tianity, let us be thankful, can be guaranteed in that way.
But there are better sureties within our reach. We have
the promise of the Spirit, to lead the Church into all
truth ; we have the Word of God, which liveth and abideth
for ever, and to which the Spirit bears witness perpetually
in the hearts of men. These are the real — these, when
we speak strictly, are the only and the sufficient — guaran
tees that the mind of the believer, working freely on its data,
will reach conclusions that are in line with the great faith
of the past. Wherever sincere thinkers are impressed
by Christ as those were impressed who gathered round
Him at the beginning, there the truth will be.

CHAPTER III.
CHRIST'S PERSON IN RELATION TO HIS WORK.
It is a feature of the best modern Christology that the
person of our Lord has come to be exhibited as inter-
pretable only through the medium of His redeeming work.
There is an all but universal feeling that to know what
He has done and does will reveal to us what He is.
Nature is relative to function ; the work, as philosophers
say, is the ratio cognoscendi of the Worker. In a former
chapter Sehleiermacher was found to be the pioneer of this
inductive method, but it goes back really to Luther, whose
words are very strong. " Christ," he says, " is not called
Christ because He has two natures. What does that signify
to me ? He bears this glorious and consoling name because
of the office and the work He has undertaken."1 A
kindred spirit, Athanasius, had used it long before, speak
ing in the de Incarnatione of an inquirer who " sees Christ's
power through His works to be incomparable with that of
men, and comes to know that He alone among men is God
the Word." z The forms in which this principle of regress
from work to person may be applied we shall examine
presently; here it is enough to note how essential and
convincing it is to study the Eedeemer not a priori but
Litbeatueb — Kahler, Das Kreuz, Grund und Mass der Christologie,
1911 ; Gore, Bampton Lectures, 1891 ; Frommel, Etudes morales et re-
ligieuses, 1907 ; Haering, Der christliche Glaube, 1906 ; Wendt, System der
christlichen Lehre, 1907 ; Denney, Death of Christ, 1902 ; Garvie, The
Ritschlian Theology, 1899 ; J. Drummond, Studies im, Christian Doctrine,
1908 ; Walker, The Spirit and the Incarnation*, 1901 ; Cairns, Christianity
and the Modern World, 1906.
1 Werke (Erlangen ed.) xii. 244. s o. 45 (Bindley's trans.).
21

322 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
in the medium of redemption, of which as believers we
have direct or experimental knowledge. To pass on from
first-hand data to more remote inductions and hypotheses,
from fact to explanatory theory, is the method of all sound
investigation. Not that we are limited to this mode of
thought. On the contrary, when we have reached an
hypothesis, we go on to test it in a new way by inquiring
how it serves for the inverse process of deduction. Hence
we shall find that Christ's person casts light on His work
as well as gains light from it.
The mutual bearing of person and work is strikingly
illustrated by the main drift of Christology in its great
historic phases.1 An intimate connection has existed at
each point between conceptions of our Lord's saving
influence and His intrinsic being. Take first the Greek
view of redemption. It was felt in the East that man
needs primarily to be saved from that radical corruption
which may be summarily described as " death." Sin has
enslaved us to decay. Death, then, is the great evil; the
loss of fellowship with God, though deeply realised, is of
second-rank importance at this point. Athanasius' words
about sin are fairly typical : " If indeed it had only been a
trespass, and not a consequent corruption, repentance would
be well enough." 2 But, as he proceeds to argue, cor
ruption necessitated the more thorough cure of incarnation.
This fixed the outline of Christology. Salvation is to be
freed from death and decay ; the Saviour, accordingly, was
conceived as the ineffable and transcendent mystery in
which immortal deity is combined with mortal manhood,
the whole lump of humanity being thus leavened with the
impassible and uncorruptible powers of Godhead and raised
into what appears to have been thought of as a physical or
semi-physical union with the Divine. Man universal is
deified in Christ by the living amalgamation in Him of
human nature and the eternal Logos. Doubtless this
irradiation of humanity is fully manifest only in the
resurrection and ascension of the Incarnate One, but in
1 Cf. Haering, op. cit. 374 f. * de Incarn. 7.

GREEK CONCEPTIONS OF THE SAVIOUR 323
principle it is real from the first moment at which the
Word took flesh. No doubt also the Incarnate is the
object of faith ; yet this faith, in its turn, is likewise con
ceived as a mysterious participation in His secret Divine
nature, conveyed most characteristically in the sacra
ments, which act for the most part in non-moral ways.
Thus the Bedeemership of Christ is expressed in cate
gories which could have only a temporary sway. It is
set forth in terms more than half corporeal; salvation has
at times the look almost of a substance which it is possible
to assimilate physically. Christ Himself is an incompre
hensible mystery in whom the indefinable essence of Deity
is combined with that of manhood, and the mystery so
indicated lies rather below than above what we know as
ethical and personal realities.
Of course this is not the whole truth about the Greek
Christology,1 but it is a real and influential part of the
truth. And it exemplifies the maxim that conceptions of
Christ's work and of Himself vary together. If what He
does upon us is to effect a quasi-physical change in our
essential manhood — primarily in the essence of humanity
as such, a real universal in which we participate — we are
naturally led to define His person in terms of substance,
not spirit. For reasons which are both religious and
psychological or philosophical, this is out of touch with
the modern mind. But we are in accord with these great
thinkers in the fundamental conviction which inspired them.
We also believe that the dynamic power of Christ is
operative in the organic life of mankind, and that He
interposed in loving power to regenerate by Himself
descending into the bosom of humanity as a redemptive
force. Take now the Christology of the West. As St.
Augustine lays bare his soul before God, what we see is
chiefly an impassioned longing for righteousness, for
deliverance from the guilt of sin. To be saved is to be
1 The place of knowledge (i.e. a truly spiritual element) in the Greek
view of salvation must not be overlooked.

324 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
made righteous ; and the mode of salvation consists in the
secret infusion of supernatural grace, bestowing power to
do meritorious works. There is an influx of grace as
charity whereby men are enabled to deserve higher grace.
This determines the thought of Christ. He is not merely
as God-man the ineffable mystery the East had found
Him; in His Divine humanity He makes full satisfac
tion for the infinite sin of man. To the Western mind
religion is in large measure a thing of law, and Christ
a legal person. Having purchased forgiveness by His
passion and obedience, He is perpetually operative within
His Church — defined as the institute of grace — above all
in the mass and the sacrament of penance, which distribute
the energies of His Divine life. As the source of life He
is indeed object of faith, but here also faith has lost its
New Testament significance. It is now become the accept
ance of Church dogma and of religious precepts. Hence
if in Greek thought the person of our Lord had been
interpreted by predominantly physical conceptions, the
Western terms are rather those of jurisprudence; and
when Latin theology took its most characteristic form,
unmodified by the deeper motives of religion, the living
personality of the historic Christ was apt to vanish in the
rigid and mechanical actings of a non-human lay-figure.1
In this case also the conceptions of what Christ has
done and of what He is are correlative. His work is
that of a legal intermediary, and it fixes the constitution
of His person. A dualistic combination of deity and
humanity sufficed. Anselm puts it frankly. "To this
end," he writes, " was efficacious the diversity of natures
and unity of person in Christ, that if human nature were
not able to do what must needs be done for the restoration
of mankind, the Divine nature might do it ; and if it were
1 In one point of view Western writers did much to sustain a sense of
our Lord's true manhood. Their profounder grasp of the atonement implied
an Atoner who, as a real ethical subject, was capable of accepting vast
responsibilities. Thus if in the traditional Christology His manhood
ranked as impersonal, its full personality was virtually assumed in the
doctrine of His saving work.

THE LATINS AND THE REFORMERS 325
hardly suitable to the Divine nature, the human might
effect it." 1
Finally, the Beformers gave back to the Christian
thought of salvation its properly religious tone. If in
the East the categories had been too much formed on
a physical analogy, and in the West on the procedure
of the law-court, for Luther and Calvin redemption once
more became simply personal — a relation, historically
mediated, between God and the soul. God is Holy Love,
and salvation is fellowship with Him. It rests on the
forgiveness of sins, it is appropriated by faith as grateful
self-surrender to an infinite object. And Christ is con
ceived in forms suitable to and worthy of this function.
He is the Bevealer of God ; He is man's Surety and
Eepresentative. In Him the eternal Divine truth and
love touch us; in Him we are led to the Father: and
these two sides of the relationship — God in Him for us,
we in Him for God — at each point condition and harmonise
with one another. Thus the great problem re-appears in
spiral fashion one stage higher — How must we think of
His intrinsic nature in the light of this new conception of
His work ? Who is Christ, if He thus embodies to sinful
men the redeeming grace of the Eternal ? There is one
principle, then, countersigned by history, which is funda
mental to all profitable debate. It is the principle that
our thought of what Christ has achieved will fix and
delimit that which we can know of Himself. As the
redemption is, so by necessity is the Eedeemer.
This general truth has been or may be developed in
various related ways. We may single out these four con
ceptions as offering us the best sort of inductive guidance
when we try to clear up our minds regarding the person
and place of Jesus — (1) ethical supremacy, (2) atonement,
(3) union with Christ, (4) revelation. Contemplating these
central matters we find that Christ's work is such as to
lead our thoughts spontaneously in the direction of a quite
i Our Deus Homo, ii. 18.

326 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
distinct view of His position. His work is but His person
in movement.1 (1) Christ is the supreme moral authority of human
life. He inspires a new ideal of character and conduct,
which it has been found impossible to realise except by
His aid. We are not now concerned with the ways in
which this influence is mediated, but solely with the
fact itself, its harmony with Christ's own mind, and its
implications for Christology.
As regards our Lord's mind, it is obvious that He
asked from men a personal obedience more absolute
than normal man may ask from his fellows. It was an
obedience covering the entire field of human life. The
persuasion of men to trust Him was His one chief
aim. On loyalty to Himself He insisted in a manner
resembling the jealousy of God in the Old Testament.
It is impossible to add anything to the words : " If any
man come to Me, and hate not his own father, and
mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters,
yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple."2
To the ancestral code of Judaism His attitude is one of
sovereign liberty ; by the inherent right of the legislator
He cancels the past and enacts new ordinances for His
kingdom. When announcing these higher laws He makes
no appeal to Divine sanctions. To His own conscious
ness He is the representative of the Father, privy always
to His purpose in all its scope and able to declare His
mind as the Son to whom all things are delivered. His
verdict on great life-issues is uttered in a tone of complete
finality. Whether it be the character of an individual,
or seeming conflicts of duty, or the call for renunciation,
or fitness to receive pardon, the truth lies clear before
Him. He reviews, condemns, forgives, commends, enjoins,
with a decision from which there is no appeal. Never do
we read of His solving an intellectual problem, but at
1 With a true instinct, early religious art invariably represents Jesus
as acting. 2 Lk 1426.

THE MORAL AUTHORITY OF JESUS 327
each step He disposed of questions greater by far. That
He took this place intentionally, with the consciousness of
being called to a unique task and of possessing for it
unique powers, is evidenced by His stupendous claim to be
.the final Judge of the world. This assertion He made
unequivocally, and from the Epistles we can see that it
was never forgotten. In principle it was of course not
new; for by assuming the right to forgive sin Jesus
professed to fix the destinies of men ; yet at least there
was affirmed a new universality and timelessness of moral
jurisdiction. In His own mind, therefore, Jesus' authority
over mankind is not merely absolute in the sense that it is
valid eternally ; it is valid in the sense that it goes down
to the depths of personality and represents the last verdict
of Love and Holiness on all that we have been.
On the other hand, this astounding claim — not usurped
or snatched at, as we have seen, but simply presupposed —
has been acknowledged by all Christian believers. In
every age those who call Jesus Lord have rejoiced that
He should exercise an unshared control over life and
conduct. Whether we can or cannot explain it — and
the thing may be as ultimate as the consciousness of right
and wrong — they are somehow made aware that He is
highest in the moral sphere; that is, not merely that
His precepts are unsurpassed in power and clarity, or that
His own life is their perfect illustration, but that He
confronts us as One who is on the throne of conscience,
who has a right to interfere with us, and through sub
mission to whom alone we obtain victory in the moral
strife. The right of Jesus to rule has been often canvassed ;
its limits have been sought for ; the terms in which it is
to be defined have been keenly scrutinised : but for the
Christian it is still true that the moral supremacy of
Christ, in its majestic gravity, covers the length and
breadth and depth and height of human experience, and
subjection to it is not a question of less or more, but a
question of life and death. "As the result of growing
familiarity with our Lord," it has been said, •' conscience

328 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
becomes surer of Him than of itself ; finds in His will the
same awful obligation that it finds in the law of Duty;
His will, because it is His, whenever we are certam that
we know it, is supreme." 1
Now the fact of Christ's overwhelming authority,
which it thus is freedom to obey, is a fact calling for
interpretation. For it is not only that we cannot conceive
a limit to His authority ; by degrees it becomes clear to us
that there is no limit. We search in vain for an exception
to the rule that His will represents the highest form of
obligation. It is a remark of Mr. A. C. Bradley that " we
cannot apprehend an object as sublime while we apprehend
it as comparably, measurably, or finitely great. Let the
thing be what it may — physical, vital, or spiritual — the
moment we say to ourselves, " It is very great, but I know
how great," or " It is very great, but something else is as
great or greater," at that moment it has ceased to be
sublime."2 This unmeasured greatness, this sublimity,
pertains to Jesus as our Lord. His power to rule passes
understanding. And our feeling of this is strikingly
confirmed by its antagonism to immediate impulse. When
the authority of Jesus first breaks upon a man, he is
conscious of a certain suspense or hesitation; there is
a sense of being checked, or baffled, or even stupefied, or
possibly even repelled or menaced, as though something
were affecting him that he could not receive, or grasp, or
stand up to. But once he has ceased to feel that his
personality is being invaded, there succeeds, at a long or
short interval and with mounting gradations of intensity,
a sense of being borne out of himself and carried away
into the dominion of very Goodness, with an adoring
homage which is more than strongly tinged with awe and
self-abasement. No man has ever complained that Jesus'
will misled him, or deprived him of that which is, in the
absolute sense, good.
Furthermore, it is from Christ that we receive that
'Dale, Christian Doctrine, 110.
* Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 60.

THE MORAL AUTHORITY OF JESUS 329
moral dynamic and inspiration in the absence of whichj
His message would lead us to despair. Along with the
call to obedience goes the power to obey. Life's moral
resources are in Him. This is an experiential truth
against which the protest of this or that man that he
does not have any such experience has no cogency. Men
do pass out of themselves to make the will of Christ
theirs and their will His ; having died with Him they
also live with Him. In Him they share the relationship
of sons of God, and are supported in the struggle with
self and evil by His sympathy and communion. They
share, they really share, His conflict and His triumph.
As I have said, these are plain facts calling for
explanation and synthesis. We are faced by One whose
moral authority is infinite as God's is infinite ; yet it is a
completely human person whom we see. No view of
Christ, it follows, will be adequate which is blind to
this complete manhood as mediating a more than human
transcendence. By this handle, indeed, the modern mind
in most cases first lays hold of the Godhead of Christ.
His assertion — the more deliberate because often it is
unuttered — of His own complete fulfilment of the Father's
will, and of His consequent authority over men, is either
the acme of self-righteousness, or it is the self-revealing
speech of the Son of God. But to say this is to interpret
Jesus' person by His work.
(2) The atoning work performed by Christ is also
a decisive index of His person. Of this principle Dr.
Denney has given a brief elucidation in his Death of Christ1
arguing that the doctrine of atonement is the proper
evangelical foundation of Christology. " To put it in the
shortest form possible," he writes, " Christ is the Person
who can do this work for us. This is the deepest and
most decisive thing we can know about Him, and in
answering the questions which it prompts we are starting
from a basis in experience. There is a sense in which
1 817 ff.

330 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Christ as the Eeconciler confronts us. He is doing the
will of God on our behalf, and we can only look on. It
is the mercy of God in relation to our sins which we see in
Him, and His presence and work on earth are a Divine gift,
a Divine visitation. He is the gift of God to men, not the
offering of men to God, and God gives Himself to us in and
with Him. We owe to Him all that we call Divine life.
On the other hand, this Divine visitation is made, and this
Divine life is imparted, through a life and work which
are truly human. The presence and work of Jesus in the
world, even the work of bearing sin, does not prompt us
to define human and Divine by contrast with each other :
there is no suggestion of incongruity between them.
Nevertheless, they are both there, and the fact that they
are both there justifies us in raising the question as to
Jesus' relation to God on the one hand, and to men on
the other. ... It is the doctrine of the Atonement which
secures for Christ His place in the gospel, and which
makes it inevitable that we should have a Christology or
a doctrine of His Person. . . . The Atonement always
says to us again, Consider how great this Man was ! As
long as it holds its place in the preaching of the gospel,
and asserts itself in the Church, as it does in the New
Testament, as the supreme inspiration to praise, so long
will Christians find in the Person of their Lord a subject
of high and reverent thought."
To this nothing can be added in point of cogency, but
it may reward us to dwell for a moment on certain of its
implications. Thus, the Christian is intuitively aware
that the vicarious love revealed in Jesus' cross is the love
of God.1 It is He that in Christ gives us " rest by His
sorrow and life by His death." It is He that stands
beside us and receives our trespass, in its awful gravity
for His mind and ours, upon Himself. Unless this were
so, unless the passion to which we lift our eyes at Calvary
were a Divine passion, through which we have sight of a
1 Cf. for a speculative but deeply impressive statement of this, Nettleship,
Philosophical Remains, 40-42.

HIS WORK OF ATONEMENT 331
grief that troubles even the Eternal Blessedness, it would
simply mean nothing for religion. It could not affect the
relation of man to God. On the other hand, just because
as we confront Jesus, living and dying, we become conscious
of the Divine sacrifice poured forth in Him, we are
irresistibly impelled to form one view of His person
rather than another. Something of the pathos and
sublimity of that word stirs and subdues the mind : " He
that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for
us all." Narrow and poor as human terms are, we must
needs employ them to formulate the certainty of faith that
in the sufferings of Christ for our sake God suffered ; that
for us the Father hid His face from the Son, withdrew
His hand, permitted the desolation, left Him to His foes.
The impression we receive at the cross is unintelligible
save as in Jesus we behold very God " in loving communion
with our misery."
Again, the condemnation of sin visible in the life and
death of Jesus is a condemnation uttered by God Himself.
Not by a divinely commissioned prophet only, or other
inspired deputy, but by God. We have a living sense
of this as we are face to face with Jesus. There looks
on us from His eyes the holiness with which evil cannot
dwell. Never was sin so exposed, and, by exposure,
reprobated, doomed, and sentenced as by our Lord's
demeanour. In His dealings with the sinful, and with the
consequences of sin, this Man is one with God ; and what
awes the beholder in the cross is not the meeting of sin
and a good man, but the meeting of sin with the Eternal.
If as true man Christ felt the horror and curse of moral
evil, He also in unity with God felt and judged its guilt.
And if, in spite of that judgment and condemnation, He
goes to death for sinners, He thereby exemplifies in a
supreme measure the moral truth that only He can forgive
sin who expiates it. This judgment, then, of which Jesus
is the personal manifestation, is a Divine judgment ; at
the same time, it is pronounced through the medium of
perfect manhood. It comes from the lips of one who

332 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Himself had battled with temptation and had conquered
in the power of God.
Once more, the atonement raises great Christological
questions by forcing us to ask how the obedience of
Jesus avails for us, the guilty. It has always been a
baffling problem : How can the suffering of one person
benefit, or savingly embrace and comprehend, any other?
In the words of Moberly: "How is it conceivable (the
mind asks) that any Bedeemer's work, or endurance, or
goodness, be it what it may, seeing that it is outside the
personalities of men, should touch the point of pressing
necessity ? " 1 To deal with this question fully we should
have to anticipate the argument summarised under (3), but
here it may at least be said that if Jesus Christ were one
more human individual merely, as separate from men as
we are from our fellows, the difficulty just noted would
be insoluble, alike in logic and in morality. But if with
St. Paul and St. John we decline to conceive Christ as
one isolated person, and the Christian as another, then
the representative act of sacrifice on His part is quite
another thing, and the death that He died for all may
have the significance which the death of all would itself
have. Union between Christ and men, that is, just
because it is a union, has two sides. His self-identification
with us implies consequences both for Him and us. As
the representative or central person — none the less truly
individual, as we shall see — He stands in a momentous
kinship to men; and this universality of relation forms
one vital condition of His power to make atonement. It
is surely the false step in many theories of atonement that
they first abstract the Christian from Christ — severing
them as two mutually impervious personalities — and then
find it hard, naturally, to put them back into such a
oneness that what Christ did and is fundamentally
modifies our relation to God. But if by its very nature
all Christian theology is an interpretation of believing
experience from within, this oneness with Christ, of which
1 Atonement and Personality, 74.

HIS WORK OF ATONEMENT 333
we are conscious, is our punctum stans ; and the attempt
to put it even temporarily in abeyance must be ruled out
as illegitimate. We do not have to prove it, or make a
doctrine of atonement apart from it ; we assume it, rather,
and seek to elucidate its deepest implications. And for
our present purpose the relevant inference is that this
absolute capacity whereby Christ gathers men into
Himself and in their name, and for them, makes
response to the Divine righteousness condemning sin, is
something which, if we regard it closely, makes humanitarian
conceptions of His being totally inadequate.
Not only so ; it is precisely as we recognise the true
Godhead of Christ that we are able to repel successfully one
of the gravest moral difficulties which the doctrine of atone
ment has created. This is the difficulty men feel when
they point to the impossible ideas of " an enraged Father, a
victimised Son, the unrighteous punishment of the innocent,
the unrighteous reward of the guilty." As against certain
forms of theory we need not question the justice of the
charge. But it is at least obvious that the mistake of
suggesting a kind of antagonism between the Father and
the Son attaches more naturally to a view of Christ which
denies, than to one which asserts, His deity. If Christ
were but one more good man, there might be reason in
the argument that redeeming love originated in man, not
in God, and that by the urgency and passion of His
sacrifice Christ had induced an otherwise implacable God
to show mercy. But this antagonism we cannot suspect
if we are sure that in Christ God Himself has bowed
down to bless us. If the required atonement has been
provided by God, out of His own life, it is meaningless to
speak any more of His implacability.
(3) Light is cast on our Lord's person, thirdly, by the
Christian experience of vital union with Christ.1 This
unio mystica, I need hardly say, is not meant here as
'On what follows cf. the present writer's article, "The Unio Mystica
as a Theological Conception," Expositor, February 1909.

334 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
implying what older writers were accustomed to describe
as a union of the " substance " of Christ and the
"substance" of believers. Men of to-day rightly reject
any such view. But in agreeing with them, we do well to
remind ourselves that substance was simply the category
by which earlier thinkers strove to affirm the highest
conceivable degree of reality ; it was indeed their loftiest
notion of God Himself. Nothing so exalted or so adequate
could be said of Him as that He is the ultimate or universal
Substance. Hence it is not surprising that they should
have spoken freely of a substantial union with the Lord.
Such a union was for their minds the most real imaginable,
and was regarded as being laden with a secret and ineffable
significance far transcending all conscious ethical relation
ships. We may so far sympathise with this as to hold
that our ethical relations to Christ are in point of fact
more profoundly intimate than any which obtain between
one man and another, and also that they may be suitably
described as "mystic." But we have to put aside the
category " substance " and construe the facts freshly in
terms of personality. On the accepted principle of modern
philosophy that there are degrees of reality, a personal
union ought to be regarded as infinitely more real than a
"substantial" one.
Now in this sense it is not putting it too strongly to
say that union with Christ is a brief name for all that
the apostles mean by salvation. For St. Paul and St.
John oneness with Christ is to be redeemed, and to be
redeemed is oneness with Christ. Illustrations readily
occur. For example, in a phrase, which, if we read
it for the first time, would startle and confound us, St.
Paul writes (1 Co 617): "He who cleaves to the Lord
is one spirit." As it is said elsewhere of man and wife
that they two are one flesh, so, the apostle's words imply
— and they set forth, be it remembered, the classical
Christian experience, not a peripheral eccentricity — a
spiritual unity no less real and close in its far higher
sphere is established by saving faith between a man and

UNION WITH CHRIST 335
his Redeemer. It is a union that lasts as the other does
not, and has effects the other can never have. Another
remarkable metaphor occurs in Gal 419, where he speaks
of Christ being formed as an embryo within the soul.1
And there is the ever-recurrent form " in Christ," with
its converse " Christ in you." But Gal 220 is the locus
classicus : " I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no
longer I who live, Christ lives in me." The writer feels
as if he had lost his old self and all but changed his
identity. There has been the importation of another's
personality into him ; what he was had ceased to be, and .
what remained had a better right to Christ's name than
his own. No doubt the verse was written at a white
heat, and the apostle, had he been cross-examined, would
have admitted that he did not after all mean that
Christ and Paul were so utterly identical as to be indis
tinguishable ; but this only indicates that language has
broken down under an intolerable strain, and that words
which at their best must always be general are unequal
to expressing a fact that is totally unparalleled. What
St. Paul asserts is at least infinitely nearer to truth than
its negation would be. He stands for a truly spiritual
union ; a reciprocal appropriation and interpenetration of
spirit by spirit. The bond between them is sufficiently
powerful to support the assignation of the same predicates
to both. Our solidarity with Christ is such that in His
death we also die ; in His grave we are buried ; with the
Eisen Lord, and in Him, we too rise to newness of life.
Nor can an attentive reader fail to notice that St. Paul's
greatest words on the subject of atonement occur in this
connection. Eo 81 is typical : " There is now no con
demnation to them that are in Christ Jesus"; and still
more emphatic is '2 Co 5U: "We thus judge, that one
died for all, therefore all died." There is a sense in which
Christ's death is, or becomes, ours. The sentence of
death, executed on the Head, takes effect eo ipso on the
members, not by a fictitious legal transference of role, but
1 Cf. Sanday, Christologies Ancient and Modern, 122.

336 THE PERSON OF JESDS CHRIST
in virtue of personal incorporation. The believer, in
familiar phrase, has " an interest " in Christ's death
because he has an interest in Christ Himself, and has so.
lived himself by faith into Christ's personal being that
old things have passed away, and all things — including
and centring in his old self — have become new.1
St. John, who speaks the last word on the great
Christian certainties, repeats still more convincingly the
assertion that union with Christ is the secret of redemption.
" This doctrine of a mystical union," says Professor Ernest
Scott, " in which the higher life flows uninterruptedly from
Christ to the believer, contains the central and character
istic thought of the Fourth Gospel."2 It is true that
Professor Scott goes on to argue that a totally unethical
and realistic factor enters into the Johannine conception.
Metaphysical categories, in his opinion, have ousted the
moral and religious categories of earlier Christian thought,
or at all events relegated them to a secondary place, all
possibility of man's participating in. the Divine life being
foreclosed until the very constitution of his nature has
been radically changed by the infusion of the higher
quasi-physical essence present in Christ. But it is very
difficult, if not quite impossible, to reconcile this view
with the emphasis which the evangelist uniformly lays
on faith. Union with Christ, alike in the Gospel and in
the First Epistle, is the intelligible outcome, as well as
the foundation and source, of ethical and spiritual ex
periences. At every point it is relative to" personal
apprehension of the word of life : " If that which ye heard
from the beginning abide in you, ye also shall abide in
the Son and in the Father" (1 Jn 22i). So too in the
Gospel it is through "belief" in the sense of personal
cognizance and self-committal that the impartation of the
life which resides in Christ is mediated to His people.
But the crowning proof that it is mistaken to interpret
1 For a striking argument that the Epistle to the Hebrews takes the same
line, cf. E. A. Abbott, the Message of the Son of Man, 83.
2 The Fourth Gospel, 289.

UNION WITH CHRIST 337
St. John's symbolic phrases in a literal or realistic sense
is the fact that these very phrases, or their equivalents,
are used freely by every powerful religious writer to this
day, not least by those to whom the realistic view is
abhorrent. This preliminary objection disposed of, we may note
the images by which St. John expresses union with
Christ. They are familiar to every one. Christ is the
Vine, in which believers are grafted as living branches.
He is the Bread of Life, by eating which they live for
ever. Exactly as in St. Paul, the mystic union is capable
of being contemplated alternately from either side, and
can be described equally by the phrases " ye in Me " and
" I in you." The first appears to mean that the Christian's
life is rooted in Christ and has in Him its encompassing
vital element and medium ; the second that He Himself
is present in His people as the living centre, the animating
principle, of their inmost being. Now in all such passages
we feel that the distinction between Christology and
soteriology, never more than provisional anyhow, has
simply disappeared. And the point to be emphasised is
this, that the experienced influence of Christ on men —
still the same for us as for St. John — leads perforce to
a certain definite view of His nature. He is definable
as the Person who can thus be our inward Life, while on
the other hand it is because He is this universal Person
that His relation to us can be of this interior kind.
Personality and possession mutually condition each other.
To sustain this unparalleled relation- to men, to impart
Himself to them so that they have Him within and can
hold fellowship with Him as with their own souls— this
is a capacity or act which we can only interpret as
specifically Divine.1 Not only so; the fellowship thus
1 Principal Fairbairn puts this well from the other side : "The nature
that is in all men akin to> Deity becomes in Christ a nature in personal union
with the Deity, and the unio personalis, which is peculiar to Him,, is the
basis of the unio mystica, which is possible to all " (Christ in Modern
Theology, 475). '¦'_ -r-'r' ; "'

338 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
established with Christ is set forth in the New Testament,
and is still felt by all believers as being intrinsically
and purely in itself fellowship with God. To have the
Son is to have the Father also. Union with Christ is in
no sense a preliminary step to union with God, or a pre
paration for it which may be ignored subsequently to the
attainment of the real goal ; it is union with God per se.
Or, to put it otherwise, the one is the method of the other,
the form in which it is held forth to sinful men. Now
this complex yet so luminous fact, that Christ is felt to
sustain a relation of indwelling in unnumbered souls, to
which their indwelling in Him corresponds — and that in
this relation they know themselves one with God — points
to the real argument for the higher being of Jesus Christ
which we feel to be implicit in the apostolic testimony as
a whole. Nothing can indeed be said as to the experimentally
verified coalescence of life between the Eedeemer and the
redeemed which is too emphatic for the New Testament.
At every point it is fundamental, for it interprets both
the forgiveness of sins and the sanctification of the
sinner. And if to-day many people still prefer the word
" mystic " to " moral " as an adequate description of the
believer's relation to Christ, this is in part because they
feel that the union in which they are personally identified
with Christ is far and beyond anything they have experi
enced in their relations to fellow-men, in part because the
word " moral " makes no provision, or an insufficient one
at best, for the fundamental truth that this unity is initi
ated on His side and sustained at every point by His
power. It may be, of course, that our conception of personality
must be revised before we can make much in a philo
sophical way of a fact like the mystic union, but some
thing of that kind is plainly needed and as plainly is
coming. We are far away now from the point of view at
which Strauss wrote that "Personality is that self-hood
which shuts itself up against everything else, excluding

UNION WITH CHRIST 339
it thereby from itself."1 This may be described as the
adamantine theory of personality ; the world of persons,
it implies, is best illustrated by a number of marbles in
a box, as to which the last word we can say is that each
of them is utterly outside its neighbour. Is that the
whole truth ? Is it even the best part of the truth ?
Surely those who have tasted the sacred joys of that
human love which is our best analogue to religious com
munion will feel that impenetrable solitude of spirit is not
the deepest thing in us. On the contrary, it is possible,
in some real degree, to escape from ourselves, and mingle
in love and thought and will in the lives of others. " We
are persons," as it has been put, " not by our power of
self-isolation, but by our power of transcending that
isolation and linking ourselves to others, and others to
ourselves." 2 The bearing of this on our present subject
is obviously to suggest that it is only an extension of
principles already implicit in our social existence as
human beings when we speak of a true solidarity of life,
a spiritual coalescence, between Christ and His people.
And if, as Lotze has argued so impressively, personality
in us is incomplete, and exists perfectly in God only, we
may well conclude that this self-communicating power
which we possess only in part will have its perfection and
fulness in Him, and therefore also in Christ who is God
apprehensible by us.3
Christian experience, then, as summarily described
1 Der christliche Glaubenslehre, i. 504.
2 Lofthouse, Ethics and Atonement, 117.
8 Browning touches this point and resumes our whole argument in the
well-known lines which conclude his Death in the Desert : —
" See if, for every finger of thy hands,
There be not found, that day the world shall end,
Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ's word
That He will grow incorporate with all,
With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,
Groom for each bride ! Can a mere man do this ?
Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do.
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God."

340 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
by the term mystic union, implies a Saviour at once
Divine and human.1
(4) We need not labour the point that Christ has
given to men the perfect revelation of the Father. To
redeem by authority, by atonement, by the gift of life — ¦
this is revelation. The words of Jesus are the voice of
God. The tears of Jesus are the " pity of God. The
wrath of Jesus is the judgment of God. All believers
confess, with adoring praise, that in their most sacred
hours God and Christ merge in each other with morally
indistinguishable identity. When in secret we look into
God's face, still it is the face of Christ that rises up before
us. To do Christ's will and God's is one thing. When
we inquire as to the precise content of the term " God "
for our minds, and ask how it has been authenticated, we
discover, it may be with some surprise, that without
reasoning we have transferred to God the features of
Christ — holy and almighty love. We are really thinking
of Jesus, with His essential features exalted to infinity.
Indeed, the late Dr. Martineau could go so far as to
maintain that Unitarians, worshipping as they thought
God the Father, have all the while paid their worship to
the Son.2 In regard to the fact, then, there can be
no dispute. Christ is the revealer of God. Than His
revelation none more perfect can be conceived. In Him
the Divine character appears in terms of manhood. It is
1 Principal James Drummond's fine Studies in Christian Doctrine (1908)
is written from an avowedly Unitarian standpoint, but it is difficult not to
feel that it is inspired by a view of Christ for which logical Unitarianism can
make no room. Thus at one point he speaks of Christianity as being
" Christ in the heart, the heart resting in Christ, so full of faith and life
' as to find itself at home in God" (275); and he writes later: "Jesus
is, to the heart that loves him, 'a quickening spirit,' one who forms the
interior life, and fills it with an abounding energy" (291); "Jesus
continues daily to dwell in the heart by faith, and to print there the
impress of his spirit" (301). Nor is there any attempt in his pages to
separate what has been fancifully called the Christ-idea from the Christ of
history. 3 A Way out of the Trinitarian Controversy.

CHRIST AS PERFECT REVEALER 341
set before us ; we are not told about it, but we are bidden
to behold it. How then does this aspect of His work — of
all aspects the most comprehensive and far-reaching — give
light on His person ? Can we say that the experience of
Christ's revealership holds a Christology in solution ?
The answer may be put briefly by saying that only He
can reveal perfectly who is what He reveals. If He be
less than quite identical with that which is made manifest,
the manifestation is so far religiously insufficient. If He
be but a replica of God in creaturely or angelic form —
more than man, perhaps, but only in some semi-divine or
Arian sense — the fulness of the Godhead could not be in
Him for us. For recollect what the Christian mind does.
It does not place Christ alongside of God, and argue from
one to the other; instead, it finds God personally present
in Christ and responds to Him so, immediately. As the
result of His being in the world, men possess and hold
God in quite a new way — a possession which is unintel
ligible save as mediated by a Divine reality. One less
than God, moreover, would in conscience have been
obliged to point men quite beyond Himself, to utter a
protest against the idolising love of His disciples, to warn
against a too close association of the gospel with His
person. This Jesus never does. Bather He lived out the
transcendent life which constituted His personality, con
fronting men as His Divine self, and letting the fact of
His being tell on their minds as a revelation. He has
put the Father within our reach, as faithfully and un
changeably Eedeemer, but He could do so only because He
was one with that which He conveyed.
Once more, therefore, the actual work or influence of
Jesus leads the mind spontaneously in the direction of a
certain interpretation of His person.
In conclusion, it may be noted that if the work of
Christ illuminates His person, the converse proposition also
holds good.1 The work is made luminous by the person.
1 Cf. Edgehill, The Revelation of the Son of God, 141-47.

342 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
We are not getting out of touch with the New Testament
when we insist on this ; we are only receiving on our
mind something of its richness and variety. To St. Paul,
for example, the fundamental truth about Christ was not
something He had done, but something that He was. His
action revealed His being. " What Christ did for men is
accounted for by what He is to God. The relationship of
Christ to God gave supreme worth in St. Paul's eyes to His
sacrifice, and turned the shameful cross into the glorious
revelation of God's love to mankind." 1 The Fourth Gospel
pursues this line. It seeks to understand the acts and
history of Christ in the light of the assured truth that by
original nature He was the Son of God. Whereas the
Synoptic, writers move rather from the historic facts to the
person they express. But the legitimacy of both methods
is indisputable. If, as we have seen, the work is the
ratio cognoscendi of the nature, not less true is it that the
nature is the ratio essendi of the work, and that we can
see this to be the case. Hence the positivism which
insists only on the facts of Jesus' recorded life, but will
tolerate no Christology, does not even apprehend the facts
in their proper fulness and significance. Just as in music
the import of a chord depends largely on the antecedent
phrases, quality as perceived being thus conditioned by its
context, so in Christian religion it is of immense signifi
cance for our appreciation of the cross whether we do or
do not understand that He who suffered there had come
forth in grace from the eternal life of God. There are
difficulties moreover in the doctrine of atonement — as our
study of the mystic union has clearly shown — which we
can elucidate only by taking the subject, in McLeod
Campbell's phrase, " to the light of the Incarnation."
It is indeed an error alike in method and interpretation
when the Atonement and the Incarnation are viewed as
rival or competing interests, either of which gains at the
other's cost. By some writers it has been contended that
the Atonement exclusively is the proper foundation of
1 G. G. Findlay, Hastings' DB. iii. 722.

WORK AND PERSON 343
theology, the Incarnation being excluded from the sphere
of doctrinal inquiry, on the ground that it is either
mysterious or subordinate ; by others, that the Incarnation
alone is what really counts, and that it mainly counts in
virtue of its significance for purely speculative problems.
But the contrast is false. There is no rivalry between a
tree-stem and its fruit, for each is only as related to and
determined by the other ; so the Incarnation and the
Atonement, the person and the work of Christ, have
concrete and intelligible reality only as they constitute
and define each other in the unity of a single experience.
Life exhibits no break or cleft dissevering the two ; in
Jesus Christ supremely being and doing are one. This is
true for us, who contemplate all that He was and did from
the outside, but it may be true also for His own mind.
It is possible that Jesus came to full self-consciousness, to
the complete apprehension of His own nature, in its
eternity before and after, through the accomplishment on
the cross of the work given Him to do.
We have now completed the discussion of certain
preliminary topics which lie on the threshold of Christo
logical inquiry. First, the need of Christology as such
was canvassed, and it became clear that this perennial
requirement of the Church cannot be secured either by a
verbal acceptance of tradition or by the positivism which
insists on bare facts and will hear nothing of interpretation.
Next, we sought to define the correspondence which must
obtain between Christological construction and the classical
delineation of Jesus contained in the New Testament.
Finally, it was shown that our view of Christ's person is
invariably determined by our conception of His saving
work. The following argument will contain two main parts.
In the first we shall examine the immediate utterances
of faith regarding Christ as it grasps Him in the ex
perience of redemption. In the second will be discussed
the transcendent presuppositions or implicates which

344 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
appear to be latent in these naive religious certainties.
These remoter principles are implicit in faith, and con
stitute therefore a true element in the doctrine; on the
other hand they are only implicit, not actual ingredients
in that of which faith is directly conscious. It is an
advantage of this division that we are enabled to do some
real justice to the unanimity of believers as regards their
personal and instinctive view of Christ, without being
unduly perturbed in advance by subsequent problems of
a more recondite nature on which opinions are certain
to diverge. As we have already seen, however, these
transcendent questions cannot be ignored on the ground
that metaphysic has no place in theology. " The power of
the Church to propagate her faith," it has been said, "is
largely dependent on her power to commend the great
truths of the Gospel to the understanding as well as the
hearts of men." 1 It is vain to suppose that the interest
in truth which is native to the religious consciousness can
be suppressed by the ukase of any philosopher or
theologian, or that people can be kept from asking
questions about Christ, His antecedents, the constitution
of His person, and His present relation to believers.
When these problems are once ventilated, theology must
even do her best to solve them, or — which is certainly
not less important — prove convincingly why they can
never be solved. 1 Tymms, Christian Idea of Atonement, i.

PART II.
THE IMMEDIATE UTTERANCES
OF FAITH.

CHAPTER IV.
CHRIST THE OBJECT OF FAITH.
It is desirable, as a recent suggestive writer has urged,1
that in Christology we should set out from some one truth
or principle, simple in character, as to which a wide
measure of consent may be assumed. Theologians have
always tended to mark diversities of opinion more than
agreement ; they have weakened their case by over
indulgence in this habit ; and the failure to strike the
note of harmony at the outset may — in view of the
immense variety of historic solutions — fill the student
with a sense of despair or revulsion, leading him to throw
up the problem as impenetrable. In view of this, we
shall do wisely to fix our starting-point in a conviction
shared by all Christian minds.
This conviction we find in the belief that Jesus is the
object of religious faith. We are called not to believe like
Him merely, but to believe in Him. Faith in God as
Litekatuke — Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 1908 ; Herrmann, Com
munion with God, 1906 ; Hogg, Christ's Message of the Kingdom, 1911 ; van
Dyke, The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, 1896 ; Kahler, Angewandten
Dogmen, 1908; Harnack, What is Christianity? 1901; Adams Brown,
Christian Theology in Outline, 1906 ; Bousset, Jesus, 1906 ; Forrest, The
Authority of Christ, 1906 ; Orr, Christian View of God and the World,
1893 ; Seeberg, Grundwahrheiten der christlichen Religion, 1903.
1 Haering, op. tit. 370 ff. 346

346 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Father is indissociably connected with faith in Christ as Son
It is true that a certain faith in God may exist independ
ently of Christ, but in such a case both " faith " and " God,"
which are always correlates, mean less than they do within
the Christian society. The first is something less than
childlike confidence ; the second is less than the God and
Father of our Lord. From the very outset, believers were
aware that a new apprehension of God had been mediated
to them by Jesus. One of the first efforts at definition of
a Christian is that implied in St. Peter's words : " Ye
who through Him do believe in God." The faith conveyed
by Jesus is no mere abstract truth separable from Himself,
as the truth of the law of gravitation is separable from
Newton. We are able to understand and use the laws
of nature while totally ignorant of those to whose research
and genius our knowledge of them is due, but the highest
and purest faith in God can be attained in no way but
one ; it comes through a believing response to the person
of Jesus Christ. It is what we see in Jesus that inspires
a triumphant certainty of God. All great saints in the
past, all who at this hour enjoy the peace of reconcilation
and are labouring with buoyant energy at the tasks of the
Divine kingdom, are evidences and illustrations of this.
The apostle's two-edged word is only a transcript of ex
perience : " Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not
the Father : he that confesseth the Son hath the Father
also." Apart from Jesus men may know much of
God — of His wisdom, His power, His sublimity, even His
benevolence ; but of His Fatherhood, with all the loving-
kindness to the sinful embraced in that great name, they
can know nothing. Nowadays we speak with easy assur
ance of the love of God. It appears as something obvious,
simple, self-explanatory. In fact, as the very familiarity
of the Gospel may have concealed from us, it is in Jesus
alone, and supremely in His cross, that assurance can be
found that God's mind to us is the mind of a true Father.
Hence it is literally accurate to say that the displacement
of Christ from a central position within the object of

FAITH IN GOD AND IN CHRIST 347
religious belief would so change and impoverish faith as
a mental attitude as to destroy its specifically Christian
quality. Its unique tone of finality, joy, and unreserve
would vanish, and its place would be taken by thoughts
and feelings not indeed quite meagre or unworthy, yet
incontestably sub-Christian in religious power and moral
inspiration. Full trust in God the Father, then, is uniformly associated
with trust in Jesus.1 It is this faith in Jesus which gives
unity to the New Testament, inspires all preaching worthy
of the name, and forms the vital continuity of the Chris
tian ages. Tet somehow it is independent of, or at least
distinct from, elaborated theories of Jesus' person. The
striking fact that so many modern thinkers, though not un
willing to admire Jesus and applaud His social programme,
should resolutely decline to acknowledge His supreme
authority and Mediatorship or to be indebted to Him
for everything worth calling life, and in this declinature
should be perfectly conscious that they are at war with
His own expressed conviction, is not without its lesson.
It proves that at this point we touch the very essence of
the Christian religion. Men are instinctively aware that
the Gospel summons them to an infinite resolve when it
bids them bow in self-abandoning trust at the feet of
Christ. This is not something we can do by making a
great effort, or putting a strain upon ourselves ; it is
something which, unaided, we cannot do at all. No man
can say " Jesus is Lord " but by the Holy Spirit. It takes
the very power of God to evoke such a confession as that.
When we look to Jesus, and, realising the significance of
the act, cast ourselves upon Him with adoring faith,
giving to Him with a solemn exultation " all that the soul
1 Harnack declares that " the Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do
with the Father only, and not with the Son " ( What is Christianity ? 144).
But he is equally emphatic on the other side. Thus we are told (DG.3 iii.
69 f.) that " the Gospel can only be grasped and held firm by a believing
self-surrender to the Person of Christ. Every relation to God is at the
same time a relation to Jesus Christ." Whether the two positions are com
patible is another matter.

348 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
can ever give to God," we have done what is supernatural.
It is specifically the work of God within us.
In faith of this type, be it noted clearly, God and
Christ are not held apart, or connected merely by inferen
tial reasoning ; they are apprehended together in a single
movement. In laying hold of Christ we lay hold of God
personally present in Him, but nowhere else offered to
us in this personal fashion, nowhere else certified and
conveyed to us as Eedeemer. Apart from Jesus, our ideas
of God are imperfect and misleading. He makes a revela
tion of the Father which is new and " legible only by the
light it gives." Of this complete faith in God, therefore,
Jesus is not merely the historic origin ; He is its abid
ing ground or medium. Trust in God and trust in Christ
are vitally correlative ; neither is definable in abstraction
from the other. We do not believe in God irrespectively
of Jesus, much less in Jesus apart from God or as wor
shipped independently for His own sake; we believe in
God the Father as He is made near and sure to us in
the Son. Only in the medium or Mediator is the great
reality ours. Hence faith never transcends Christ, never,
as in pseudo-mysticism, pretends to be superior to His
recorded life as a source of knowledge long since anti
quated, never tries to be wiser than historic fact. Jesus'
word is final in its precise truth to experience : " He that
hath seen Me hath seen the Father."
The classic exposition of faith in" this sense is the
New Testament. In its pages Jesus stands in the focus
of religion ; from first to last He is the object of that
mingled trust, awe, and love which we call worship. It
does not occur to any of the apostolic writers that this
is a fact requiring either explanation or apology. We
see not a trace of embarrassment ; at each point they are
speaking directly out of experience and striving to convey
the same new sense of. Christ to others. It is obvious
that the spirit of Jesus dominates their spirits, modifying '
belief, re-shaping ideals and enthusiasms, making new the

THE NEW TESTAMENT FAITH 349
soul's environment, transmuting the flow of conscious
thought, laying on the will an unseen constraint to that
service which is perfect freedom. To this more than
human influence they respond with an intensity which has
no reserves. They rest on Jesus only for all that can be
called salvation. Their monotheism is a passion which
repels idolatry as the one unpardonable sin ; yet in face
of this they put their whole faith in Jesus Christ. Somer
one has observed that a high Christology has often been
accompanied by a weak sense of God, but the implicit
censure, however, relevant to certain historic sentimental-
isms, is inapposite to the New Testament.1 Eeligion, as
religion, is theocentric to the core ; and the irresistible
impulse of which the apostles were conscious to give Jesus
the central place in religion was for them the final ethical
proof that He could not be lower than the highest God
head. As source of pardon, as giver of new life, as
medium and vehicle of a presence of God beyond which
the mind can never go, He conveyed to them the powers
of the higher world ; and if the traditional concept of the
Divine was incapable of making room for the creative
and unparalleled content of His person, it must perforce
be deepened and widened. It was at least certain that
He who made the Father known must have come forth
from the Father's life.
The primary documents of our religion, then, exhibit
it as a -distinctively Christian thing to believe in Jesus
as we believe in God Himself. Not only so, but we
should not miss the significance of the fact that the writers
of the New Testament lay on this faith-attitude an almost
exclusive stress. On this subject there is a finely toned
1 In the New Testament there is no duplication of the object of faith.
The idea that Jesus was a rival of the Father, or a surrogate, would of
course have proved fatal alike to the inward coherence of the new religion
and to its conflict with polytheism. But by the middle of the second
century popular and unguarded language had been used which placed Jesus
alongside of the Father as a second God," and in Gnosticism a kindred
tendency took unbridled forms. The. contrast with the New Testament is
instructive.

350 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
passage in Eitschl, which is not merely interesting on
other grounds, but incidentally does something to relieve
a familiar difficulty. He observes that in the New
Testament, in spite of our Lord's new commandment of
love, only the most sparing use is made of the conception
of love to Christ. But for this restraint, he urges, there
are good reasons. " As a generic idea love to Christ is
more indefinite than faith in Him. The former term leaves
it undecided whether we put ourselves on a level with
Christ or subordinate ourselves to Him. But faith in
Christ includes the confession of His Godhead and His
dominion over us, and thus shuts out the possibility of
equality with Him." " This," he adds, " is the evident pur
pose which leads the Beformers to elaborate the idea of faith
in Christ. If Christ takes the place of God, faith in Him
is necessarily a kind of obedience."1 The apostolic point
of view — religious, experimental, immediate — could
scarcely be better expressed than in the words : " Faith
in Christ includes the confession of His Godhead." This
is the implicit but inexorable note which runs through
the Christian message as a whole. Our souls bow down
instinctively before Jesus, who has saved us ; and in that
act of homage His deity comes home to us. It is not a
matter of reasoning but of intuition. There is no process
of logical conclusion ; our eyes are opened, and we have
a view of Christ which cannot be otherwise expressed than
by the confession of His Godhead. The New Testament
proves abundantly that such an experience is exactly
parallel to the normative experience of the first disciples.
We can see that in Christ's influence upon them they
perceived the act of God, drawing near in grace. It was
not that they placed Jesus alongside of God, argued next
that God must be like Jesus, and moved thus by syllogism
from the human appearance to the Divine reality. The
matter was much more direct, vital, and personal. - His
power told upon them overmasteringly, raising them to
communion with the Highest, and breaking all the bands
1 Justification and Reconciliation (Eng. tr. ), 593-94,

FAITH AS GENERATED TO-DAY 351
of sin ; they had accordingly no option but to give Christ
the loftiest place in faith, taking Him there and then as
the pledge and equivalent of the presence of God Himself.
Everything grew up out of the living contact of Jesus
with their souls ; all doctrine was but the confession that
in that human life God Himself was turning to sinners
and opening His heart to them. Of course the truth was
reached by slow degrees. " To the disciples," writes Pro
fessor Cairns, "Jesus was at first, perhaps, simply man.
But as their knowledge of Him widened, and deepened,
and cleared, the very endeavour to understand Him, to
make a unity of their thoughts about Him, led them on
to conclusions about Him that caused the spirit to thrill
with awe and wonder, and yet with joy. They became
aware of something mysterious and transcendent in Him,
something which was to the human lineaments of the
Character what the Thought is to the Word. Behind and
through Jesus they discerned — God, and that Vision it is
which causes the strange thrill and glow of their later
writings." x
In this experience of slowly dawning recognition, the
first disciples are surely the forerunners and exemplars of
many in our time. Indeed the situation of the modern
inquirer is in some ways curiously like theirs. They were
of course confronted with no august tradition on the
subject of Jesus' person ; as yet doctrine was all to make :
the Subject of it had to win His way into the sanctuary of
faith by the sheer power of a spiritual impression. That
impression could operate only by degrees, and while the
faith created by it involved a theology, it was so far a
theology in solution, not yet precipitated in formulated
doctrine. And once again to-day, for many the tradition
regarding Christ may be said to be non-existent. It has
at least no existence their minds can receive and grasp
when presented point-blank for their acceptance ; reverence,
equally with candour, bids them refuse assent to theorems
which they have no convincing grounds for acknowledging
1 Christianity in the Modern World, 155-56.

352 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
as true. Hence they come into the presence of Jesus with
a fresh, unbiassed soul. They have as it were regained
" the innocence of the eye " ; they can take vivid and
original impressions. For them at all events — whatever
may be the case for the Church — truth about Jesus has
all to be built up from the foundations. And the spectacle
of Jesus mastering these men, bending them before Him in
homage, admiration, obedience, and finally lowly trust and
worship, is the ever-renewed proof, such as doctrine needs
and will always find, that in giving Jesus the supreme
place our faith is based on irrefragable reality.1
It will no doubt be rejoined that faith has many
varying stages of maturity, and that this ought not to be
forgotten in a full discussion of the position attributed to
Jesus in the Christian consciousness. We may accept the
admonition. ( The place a man gives to Christ is naturally
determined by the personal ascendancy Christ has gained
over him and the obligations under which he feels Christ
has laid him as a sinner ; and in such a region, plainly,
there will always be manifold and delicate gradations.
In some minds there may be no more than a dim feeling
that in Jesus' presence life is nobler, clearer, more
profound ; in others, the sense that He is rightful Lord of
thought and conduct, or that He makes the Fatherhood of
God more real and sure, or at a later point, perhaps, that
1 Constantly we have need to remind ourselves that faith, in the
Christian sense, is no mere otiose acknowledgment of worth, or appreciative
recognition, given by us lightly or as from above ; on the contrary, it is
irresistibly wrung from us by One in whom all power dwells. The person
of Jesus wins complete dominion over us in an experience which transforms
our lives. We feel ourselves in the hands of immeasurable spiritual might.
In other words, faith is submission, capitulation, obedience ; looked at as
an attitude lasting on in time, it is loyalty. And it is a striking and
significant circumstance that the faith thus given to Christ is given in
opposition to natural inclination. Our first impulse is not to submit but '
to resent keenly the condemnation passed on our sinfulness by Christ's mere
presence, and to reject with a grudging envy the thought that He is higher
than we. Withal, faith is ethical; for though "it is the gift of God," it
comes through the overmastering influence of a person and the instru
mentality of the truth He brings. On the whole subject, see Herrmann's
priceless book, Communion with God.

JESUS AS SUBJECT OF FAITH 353
life in a universe which definitely negated Christ would be
unendurable. These are incipient forms of faith, not to be
ignored by one who desires to know how the Christian
mind becomes Christian. But they are something less
than faith in its typical and characteristic form. They are
not equivalent to that attitude which in utter self-com
mittal gives to Christ solemnly the predicates of Best and
Highest, and knows Him as living, present, and divinely
strong to save. Now, in analysing faith, as the fruitful
soil of doctrine, we are obviously bound to choose its most
distinctive form, in which its constituent qualities and
content attain most salient expression. We have to ask
what Christ is, not for cool intellectual criticism, or for
the historian's imaginative sympathy, or even for the
movements of a sincere and eager aspiration, but for the
complete faith which casts itself down into the depths of
His grace as the embodied Holiness and Love of God.
The mistake of interrogating faith at one of its lower
stages, rather than at the highest, appears to be mainly
responsible for the obstinate contention that Jesus is but
the Subject and Example of faith, not in strictness its
proper object. It is a view which has never been wholly
unrepresented in the Church, and it is powerfully and
widely advocated now. Jesus, it is held, showed us what
faith is ; He did not personally claim to be " believed in."
He was the prophet of an ideal higher than Himself.
To think otherwise is to indulge a venial but misleading
tenderness for tradition. The error of ascribing to Christ
an absolute religious significance is indeed no recent one ;
already in New Testament days the first wrong step was
taken. " The disciples," says Albert EeVille, " forgot the
distinction maintained by the Master, between the pure
religion which He taught and exemplified, and faith in His
person. Jesus Himself, and not the religious realities
which Jesus had revealed to the consciousness, became the
object, properly speaking, of the religious belief." The
blame for a change so radical and so unfortunate rests
23

354 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
chiefly with St. Paul. " He gave to the person of Jesus,
as the object of faith, an importance so absolute, so
exclusive, that Christianity, instead. of remaining the faith
of Jesus Christ became with him decidedly faith in Jesus
Christ."1 Ever since the Church has perpetuated his
error. In recent years this general view has become more
self-confident, with the result that in certain quarters the
Church is earnestly exhorted to return, even thus late,
from the " Gospel of Christ " to the more pure and
primitive "Eeligion of Jesus," from faith in the Son of
God, as a transcendent Saviour, to the religious beliefs
which Jesus held.2 Is this an appeal to which we can
respond ?
It betokens a mental attitude, clearly, which has much
affinity with the ideals of the eighteenth century. The
rationalism of that earlier day attached only minor im
portance to fellowship with God, and the cardinal truth
that salvation has reality only as God takes the first step
was not so much denied as urbanely relegated to obscurity.
A high place was given to the dignity of man. It was
felt that he possessed an inherent capacity to raise himself
toward God and pursue the tasks of harmonious self -culture.
To inspire him for such an enterprise there was needed
less a Eedeemer than a not too pre-eminent Example and
Pioneer. Of course in a religious atmosphere of this kind,
in which the thought of man predominates over that of
God, the question of Jesus as object of faith has lost its
interest. The sense of debt to Him is undermined; He
is but primus inter pares. In wide circles the same
presuppositions have now regained currency; and the
comparative study of religions, or at least the principles
of research deemed necessary for its pursuit, have been
1 History of the Dogma of the Deity of Jesus Christ, 29, 40.
2 A recent frank expression of this view is Heitmiiller's article, "Jesus
Christus," in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1911), Bd. iii.
375 ff. It takes an extreme form in P. W. Schmiedel's inexplicable assertion
(Die Person Jesu im Streit der Meinungen der Gegenwart, 1906) that his
religious life would suffer no vital loss though it were proved that Jesus
never existed.

THE IMMANENT VIEW OF HISTORY 355
regarded as justifying a certain partial displacement of
Jesus from the centre of the Christian consciousness.
History, it is argued, has no place for absolute person
alities, yet such a personality Jesus must be if men are
to believe on Him in the religious sense. Past phenomena
are only relative at the best ; each fact or process has its
exactly fixed place in the uniform sequence of effects and
causes. Its place in the sequence makes it what it is.
When this philosophy is confronted with Jesus Christ, it
will evidently be under a strong temptation to disparage
His uniqueness, not arbitrarily but on principle. It will
regard itself as obliged to show Him to His place in the
normal progress of events, and in doing so to frown down
excited talk respecting an impassable difference between
Him and all other children of men. Each single fact is
the creature of its conditions ; as conditioned, it is and can
only be relative. Hence the fact of Christ also is relative,
possessing no unique or indispensable significance for the
religious mind. The- spiritual content of His life, the
impression stamped on the apostolic faith, cannot be of
final importance for the world. Doubtless its value is
great as an index of the Power on which all things
depend ; it may even be supreme among the infinitely varied
phenomena by which the great Noumenon is revealed.
But only in unguarded moments can we designate it as
absolute. For absolute facts there exists no room in a
universe like this. Even Eitschl overstepped the mark
in his effort to exhibit the apostolic view of Christ as
permanently normative. What the modern mind insists
upon, and needs, is not the religion of the apostles but the
personal religion of the apostles' Master. He was in
reality the first Christian, and we are Christians likewise
in so far as we follow where He led the way.
To this we may reply, first of all, that the argument
as a whole rests on a conception of the historic process
as mechanically uniform which is silently assumed, but
nowhere substantiated by convincing proof. This means
that the emergence of a transcendent Personality, claiming

356 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
faith and worthy to receive it, is discounted from the
outset, as incompatible with the " laws " of history. Into
the complexities of this theme we cannot enter here. But
it may at least be remarked that the policy advocated by
the radical theologians is one rather of 'prescribing con
clusions to life and experience than of accepting whatever
fresh revelations may be conveyed through the medium of
fact. After all, if a transcendent Person should emerge,
it is essential that He be acknowledged. It betrays a
disabling bondage to a priori dogma, therefore, none the
less hurtful that it is unorthodox, when men approach a
stupendous problem with the tacit understanding that no
results can be accepted which fail to conform to a fixed
standard. To be told in advance how much you may
believe is always depressing, and the implied attitude is
moreover not one which encourages the hope that the
greatest things in Christianity will be handled with the
requisite sympathy and understanding. Yet the historic
faith in Christ, as the only-begotten Son, has achieved
results in the consolation and renewal of human lives
which justify it, if we may put it so, in asking a reverential
treatment at the hands of theories which have no such
agelong record behind them.
Again, it is noticeable that while the advocates of the
so-called " Jesus religion " employ the fundamental prin
ciples of Uniformity and Eelativity to veto His unique
transcendence, they yet affirm other cardinal truths with
which these principles are equally incompatible. An
instance will make this clear. Beligion is definable as
fellowship with God, and this fellowship has no reality
apart from prayer. Now to the writers under review
Jesus is no longer supernatural. The supernatural as such
has been discarded once for all. Yet it is surely obvious
that prayer— the vital breath of religion, as they truly
hold — is itself a completely supernatural thing which
shatters the monistic conception of the world as an
inviolable system of mechanical causation. Prayer, in
other words, has no meaning if the world is a complex of

PRAYER AND MONISM 357
rigidly determined forces, acting and reacting in pre
ordained ways. (When we pray, we implicitly declare
our faith that the mesh work of cosmic energies is the
instrument of a loving Will not confined by their limits or
exhausted in their effects, but capable of utilising them for
sovereign and gracious ends.^ The devout heart, that is,
assumes that reality contains transcendent factors ; when
we pray, God is freely communing with us, and leading us
to commune with Him. The world is built on such lines
as to admit thus of creative and original events.1 Hence,
in the light of prayer as an experience, it is vain to speak
of an unchanging and inviolable world-process, reducing all
things to one undistinguished level of uniform relativity,
and excluding inter alia the gift of a new, infinite, un
precedented Personality, in whom sinners may believe.
That is a false pre-conception with which personal
religion can hold no terms. But a universe in which
real prayer is possible has abundant room for a tran
scendent Saviour.
Once more, in the creed of this group of thinkers
the forgiveness of sin retains a central place. They
are sure that God receives sinners ; on no subject do
they speak with a more passionate or infectious thrill.
"We must not hesitate," says Bousset, "to acknowlege
that this is the highest and final point in our faith in
God when we can accept and conceive God as the God
who forgives sins."2 As regards this element in the
radical view of the Gospel two observations may be
made. In the first place, forgiveness also is a transcendent
supernatural reality. It is accomplished by a transcendent
God ; it is something to which neither nature nor humanity
is equal. In the soul of a pardoned man, as he well
knows, a change has happened which is inexplicable by the
mere action of immanent psychological forces. What has
happened is that the burden of sin — of sin that is ours
1 Of.- Wendland, Miracles and Christianity, ch. vii.
* Faith of a Protestant, 101.

358 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
and that cleaves to us with the warning that it will be
ours for ever — is lifted off, and we are dr&wn back in love
to the Father's heart. The gates of righteousness, which
seemed closed against us eternally, are set open once again.
God forgives ; none but God can forgive ; and when in
this creative fashion He removes the power of sin to expel
us from His presence, the act is one to which the normal
processes of phenomenal reality are instrumental, but no
more. As such an act it involves infinitely more than
cosmic relations of invariable sequence. It brings God
Himself into a man's life in an immediate (yet not
unmediated) way and establishes a new connection in
which He and that life shall henceforth stand to one
another. The forgiveness of God, imparted to us in His
sovereign love, is a deliverance from the necessities and
fatalities of evil in which science and history seem to
involve us. It is the experience in which we really
become persons — not things, nor links in a chain, but free
men. Doubtless the men of to-day are gravely tempted
to doubt the possibility of pardon, especially if they have
felt the influence of that sombre naturalistic pessimism
which haunts the modern mind, bidding the guilty endure
their fate, as best they may, with dumb brave stoicism.
But in unnumbered lives all these misgivings have vanished
in the presence of Jesus Christ. Fact has proved too
strong for necessitarian logic. The man to whom pardon
has become real knows once for all that within and above
cosmic law there is a Father, that he is faced by no mere
silent impersonal tendencies but by the living God Himself,
who puts forth His hand to meet and grasp ours, ushering
us through forgiveness into a new and blessed world of
good. Here, then, once more the deepest things of experi
ence compel us to break with the conception of a
mechanically determined system of law (except, as it has
been put, as " a scientifically useful fiction "). In forgive
ness, as formerly in the case of prayer, we find ourselves
in contact with a universe not really interpretable as a
closed circle of forces, all the changes in which can be

FORGIVENESS AND MONISM 359
computed in advance by a mind sufficiently powerful. It
is a universe rather whose apparent iron uniformity is
but a fragment of the whole. God is a free spirit, able
to bring events to pass which transcend all finite forces
acting with mechanical rigour, able to release into the
phenomenal order the pent-up fulness of His own Divine
activity. Eeality is rich, plastic, full of unimaginable
potentialities. It is susceptible of new departures, and the
preferential action of God affects its movement by way
of real initiation. What this implies for our argument
is tolerably clear. It implies that no a priori ground
exists for asserting it to be impossible that history — the
scene of the original and unparalleled — may exhibit the
figure of a supernatural Eedeemer as far superior to normal
manhood as man is to the animals. Whether such a
Person actually exists is of course a question to be decided
ultimately by spiritual conviction, not by considerations
of philosophic theory. But if He is real, if we are aware
that in Him God is touching us and bringing us to com
munion with Himself, He is thereby constituted the
object of religious faith in the proper sense. For to
" believe " in Christ is simply to confess that in Him we
find God.
Not only so. The "Jesus religion," in the sense
under review, is a religion of unclouded fellowship with
the Father ; but if the presupposition that this relation of
fellowship is mediated by Jesus be withdrawn,1 it becomes
a problem of the utmost gravity how sinful men can attain
to it. To speak as if without more ado we could adopt
Jesus' undimmed filial consciousness is to play with words.
How shall we copy on our own account His felt union
with God ? How shall we venture to say with Him : " All
things are delivered unto Me of the Father " ? It is not
1 According to Weinel (Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 284 ff. ),
Jesus never regarded Himself as fulfilling a. mediatorial function, for He
knew that no mediator was required. For a brief interesting account of
Troeltsch's similar view of Christ, see the Report of the Fifth International
Congress of Free Christianity, 237 ff.

360 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
possible. The confusion at this point is probably owing
to a misinterpretation of the fact that the religious
man longs for union with God. His deepest yearning is
for the life of unclouded sonship. But longing manifestly
is not possession ; desire comes short of perfect and secure
fulfilment. In fidelity to the facts we are obliged to
recognise a difference of type between the filial conscious
ness of Jesus and our own.
If then we are summoned not to have faith in Jesus
but to share the faith He had, our reply is that the demand
is one which of ourselves we cannot satisfy. Its point
of view is sentimental rather than religious ; for senti-
mentalism is the mood whose eyes are closed persistently
to vital facts. And here the vital facts are incontestable.
For one thing, Jesus' communion with God was a secret of
His own soul ; but so far as He revealed it openly, we can
see it to be quite inimitable by us. His relation to the
Father was immediate ; ours, as He taught, is only in and
through Him. Moreover, the consciousness of sin leads us
to crave a ground of confidence external to self in our
approach to God. Had we been sinless, some reason there
might be in ' the modern invitation bidding us believe like
Jesus rather than in Him, but, irrespective of other con
siderations, the single quality of guilt is enough to debar
us from the assumption of religious independence on a
par with His. The obstacle is insuperable from our side,
and it is final. If we are to reach that inner sanctuary,
we must be led thither by One who is Himself in perfect
and uninterrupted union with the Father, and who in love
manifests and seals the Father's purpose to a world of sin.
A convincing and intelligible presentation of God is required
which will turn our fear into glad confidence. We have
need of such a revealing fact — which can only be a personal
Life — as will exert upon us an inward compulsion, and
give us in a moral experience the certainty of God's
redeeming nearness. It is because men in every age have
found this in Jesus that they have put faith in Him as
God apprehensible by man.

JESUS' FAITH, AND FAITH IN JESUS 361
The suggestion that the " religion of Jesus " represents
the essence of Christianity may be dismissed as an im
pressionist and superficial error. It rests at bottom on
a quite inadequate conception of what is required in a
faith which shall not only admonish but redeem. Historic
ally it is without foundation. Christianity emerges in
history as faith in Jesus the Christ — a fact now admitted
by all scholars, of whatever type. What we call Christian
piety appeared first in the world not as a characteristic of
the mind of Jesus, but as the distinctive religious attitude
of His disciples. He had indeed a vital and indispensable
connection with faith, but as regards the precise nature of
that connection there can be no dispute. He was faith's
creator, not its mere illustration. He evoked it, but He
did not exemplify its specific quality of penitent, self-
renunciation. He made no effort to propagate in the souls
of His disciples an exact reproduction of His own filial
consciousness ; they were not and could not be sons in
the precise sense of His peculiar Sonship. Only once
were the words uttered, " No man knoweth the Father
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to
reveal Him," and they can never be repeated. No
prophet or apostle has dared to take them on his lips.
And if it stands condemned by history, the modern hypo
thesis is still less convincing for religion. It is an
impossible Gospel for the sinful. To approach God as
Jesus did, with all His directness and serenity of feeling,
but without His mediation, is an enterprise totally beyond
our powers. If the Gospel becomes a demand for a faith
like that of Jesus, how does it differ from a new Judaism ?
It is no more a great Divine gift, but an additional load
for men whose hands already sink in weakness and despair.
To invite us to the task is to plunge in darkness all whose
conscience is alive, and who refuse to ignore the self-
estimate they are irresistibly impelled to form in Jesus'
presence. From this hopeless situation we escape only
as our eyes are opened to behold in Jesus one whom
we receive and rest upon for salvation. He is the revela-

362 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
tion, as Herrmann puts it, " that conquers every doubt.
Our yearning to meet a personal life that shall resolve
every element of separation between us and it into pure
trust, and thus give our spirits a home, is the longing for
the living God. But we find it satisfied in Jesus in every
moment when the recollection of Him takes away our fear
of the abyss, and delivers us from the confusion and
perplexity of the evil conscience." 1
1 Communion with God, 141-42.

CHAPTER V.
THE EXALTED LORD.
In the previous chapter we embarked upon a detailed
scrutiny of the immediate utterances of faith regarding
Christ, and there emerged the fundamental conviction
that He is Himself the object of saving trust. Faith in
God as Father is rooted firmly in the faith which appre
hends Christ as Son. This result must now be defined
with more exactness. The Christ thus apprehended is in
fact the transcendent or exalted Lord.
At various points the conclusion has been forced upon
us, that within the New Testament the proper object of
faith is not the historic Jesus, but the Lord who lives
to bless and rule.1 True, this full-grown belief could not
be reached at a single bound ; preparatory stages led to
it; yet they were after all merely provisional and intro
ductory. The faith of the disciples differs by a wide
remove from that of the apostles. The attitude of His
followers to Jesus prior to the crucifixion, notwithstanding
its revolutionary significance, is not so far the distinctive
attitude of Christians to their Lord. A new era opens
with the resurrection. Certainly the risen Christ is the
same person as formerly, otherwise the apostolic gospel,
Literature — Swete, The Apostles' Creed, 1894 ; Kaftan, Dogmatik*,
1909; Milligan, Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord, 1892;
von Dobschiitz, Ostern und Pfingsten, 1903; Meyer, Die Auferstehung
Christi, 1905 ; Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche, 1897-98 ; Wendt,
System der christlichen Lehre, 1907 ; Schlatter, Das christliche Dogma,
1911 ; Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, 1907 ; J. Weiss, Die
Nachfolge Christi, 1895.
'Cf. Lobstein's finely toned article, "Der evangelische Heilsglaube an
die Auferstehung Christi," ZTK, 1892, 342 ff.

364 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
devoid of a point d'appui in history, would have become
inept, since no one can preach a great Unknown, or ask
for loyalty to a formula. At the same time Christ is
now regarded in a light so new and all-transmuting that
old terms of description become inadequate. The Man
of Sorrows bears the Name which is above every name;
He is the First and the Last ; in Him dwells the fulness
of the Godhead. It is not survival merely in a figurative
sense whereby He persists "in lives made better by His
presence," with the posthumous influence of the saint;
the power of His resurrection reveals itself as a present
and universal activity, a reality on which men lean, and
to which they appeal in prayer. He gives a Divine life
within the soul, and He sustains it. Union with Him,
not assent to doctrine, is redemption. This is the dis
tinctively Christian attitude to Christ, as it appears in
the New Testament ; and unless the records are of no"
value, it represents an estimate and a mode of behaviour
evoked in believers by the appearances of the risen Lord
and the subsequent manifestation of the Spirit.
It is an attitude, moreover, which has been perpetu
ated in the Church. Wendt, who holds no, brief for
orthodoxy, has said truly that faith in Christ as risen
involves these four definite propositions : first, He lives
really, not in the memory of disciples only ; second, He
lives personally, not as an entity now resolved into its
ultimate constituents; third, He lives in heaven, not in
the region of the dead ; finally, He lives in the fullest
possession of blessedness and power.1 An impressive
type of religion may no doubt subsist on less than this,
but the typically Christian mind has always felt that for
the triumphant discharge of her mission to humanity the
Church depends on the real presence of her Lord, gracious,
omnipotent, eternal. Faith's object must be now and
here. Past incidents may have been crammed with
meaning for onlookers, but unless they point to a reality
which does not pass, and with which we can have
1 System, 399.

FAITH LOOKS UPWARD, NOT BACKWARD ONLY 365
immediate (though by no means unmediated) relations,
they have no more importance for the modern mind
than the notes of a bank long since extinct. Belief in
the continued presence of Christ, therefore, is in no way
the result of argument, though it may be argumentatively
defended ; it is an instinct of the Christian soul, compar
able in depth and clearness, in many instances, to belief
in the reality of an external world. Further, that it is
no hallucination may be gathered not only from its
ministration to the noblest type of character, but from its
harmony with Jesus' mind and promise. On the eve of
death, He bade the disciples anticipate a future which
should be marked not by decay and impoverishment but
by fuller victory, because inspired by His unseen guidance,
and in which therefore greater achievements were possible
than even during His own life. One can perceive, indeed,
that much of the composure with which the evangelists
record the limitations of knowledge or power observable
in the historic Jesus is owing to their profound realisation
of the fact that the earthly ministry was but the first
chapter of a career which merged at last in universal
glory and dominion. In view of the denouement, they
could afford to be entirely candid.
The conception of union with Christ gathers these
impressions into one and articulates their meaning. It
represents all believers as joined to the Lord in a spiritual
fellowship of life, in a union not mediated outwardly by
rite or ceremony, but produced and sustained by self-
abandoning trust in a living Person. All this, which is
not theology but religion, has obviously no meaning what
soever save as implying the reality of a Saviour raised
above limits of time and space. Men could not be thus
intimately one with a Life that was, but is not. No fact
which has ceased to be can form their link with God.
Hence we may supplement the results of the last chapter
by asserting that if Christology is to reproduce the
Christian certainty, it must define faith in Jesus as faith
in Him as the living and transcendent Lord.

366 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
To certain minds this may well appear a reactionary
and perverse appeal to orthodox tradition. Tradition,
however, has comparatively little to do with it. In
great measure orthodoxy is a question solely for expert
theologians, no one else knowing precisely what ortho
doxy is. But the layman too has fixed beliefs, of which
a brief and lucid compendium may be found in the best
Christian hymns. And any one who is at pains to
analyse the doctrinal implications of an ancient hymn
like the Te Deum, or a modern hymn like " Jesu, Lover
of my soul," may satisfy himself as to the futility of
supposing that bare reverence for tradition inspires the
Church's affirmation of Christ's perpetual presence. What
faith longs for, and is assured of possessing, is the en
lightenment, direction, power, and consolation ministered
by One who Himself passed by the ways of human life,
and in the veiled place where He dwells on high is not
unmindful of His followers' need. The men and women
who made Christian history have been animated by the
faith that the exalted Lord can make the limitless re
sources of His transcendence available for the humblest of
the saints. If by sympathy He shares their pain, they
also share in the blessedness of His life with God.
Of this conviction the most natural and explicit
sign is the offering of prayer directly to Christ. From
the very outset a synonym for " believers " was " all that
call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."1 The
practice is one from which many recoil, on the ground
that prayer to God in Jesus' name, and this only, is
normally Christian. But the New Testament, while
corroborating their main principle, does not appear to
justify the inference they have drawn. The self-restraint
and what may be called the spiritual tact of the apostles
in this domain are manifest, yet we can perceive both
that they prayed to Christ and that when they did so it
was not because they regarded Him as nearer to them
selves and of a more compassionate sympathy than God
1 1 Co l2.

PRAYER TO CHRIST 367
the Father, but because God and Christ are utterly and
wholly one. Thus every petition after all is " to the
glory of God the Father." How vital this undertone is,
Herrmann has shown. " Prayer to Christ," he writes, " is
a very delicate matter. It may very easily be misused.
Hence its use is by no means a sign of special maturity
and clearness of belief. It is in general true prayer only
when for the Christian at the moment of prayer every
difference between the Person of Jesus and the One
personal God is done away. He who truly prays must
be conscious that he is raised inwardly to the One
personal Spirit apart from whom there is no God. If
prayer to Christ be not elevation to this God, it is no
Christian prayer."1 Christ, that is, represents to faith
simply God Himself come forth for our salvation, and to
speak to Him in prayer is to commune in adoring trust
with One made known to us in a love and power that
passes knowledge. It is the nature of faith as such to
be in contact with ultimate reality, and since for faith
Jesus and God are inseparably one, prayer, which is
faith's vital expression, must apprehend both in a single
indivisible act and movement of adoration.
Every one familiar with modern literature about Jesus
is aware that much of it presents a conception opposed
to this in most cardinal features. It is not denied
that in a real sense our relation to God is mediated by
Christ, yet it is a Christ whose direct influence on men
ceased at death. On a few minds He left an impression
so profound that we can still touch Him through tradition
and institution, and in multitudes of souls His image is
even now engraved. He lives, as others do, in the work
He accomplished; He conveyed to men the content of
His own spiritual life. But He does not act on us from
1 Worum handelt es sich in dem Streit um das Apostolikum, 12 (quoted
by Mozley, Ritschlianism, 190) ; cf. J. Weiss, Die Nachfolge Christi,
156-58, and a very full and balanced statement in Thieme, Von der GoUheit
Christi, 52-65.

368 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the unseen. In the natural poetry of faith we may
speak as though He did, but it is poetry, not fact. His
presence is departed, though we can drink in the spirit of
His words and thus indirectly have communion with His
mind. Does this afford a sufficient basis for specifically
Christian life ?
Take the assertion that the direct influence of Jesus
terminated at the crucifixion — what does it imply ? This
at least, surely, that His earthly disciples received an
impression of His significance more deeply and intensely
personal than any now available. At death His influence
was reduced in ways never to be compensated. Doubtless
to His own mind it might seem expedient that He should
go away and come again as an immediate personal activity,
in the Spirit which should touch men with a quickening
power and transform their souls ; but His recorded ex
pressions on this subject, we are told, are the ardent but
unauthorised offspring of religious fancy. Now to such a
plea it may surely be replied that life can only be im
parted by a living Person. Even Christ's words, apart
from Christ Himself, are powerless to change men.
Moreover, it gravely modifies our impression of Jesus'
incomparable greatness if it be ascertained that He passed
out of contact with His people. If like all others He
was forced to acknowledge death's separating power, and
to commit the future of His cause to the influence of
evaporating reminiscence, how dubious and partial His
victory ! Is this, in sober truth, a supposition which
will account for the felt power of Christ to regenerate
and transfigure — an efficacy of moral redemption which
the experience of consecrated missionaries proves to be
acting on the world to-day on an unprecedented scale?
The writers of the New Testament are surely more con
vincing when they tell us that the method of Divine
revelation after Jesus' death continued to be in essence
what it had been formerly. In the days of His flesh
Jesus made God known through His personal humanity
in such modes that thenceforth the revelation became

THE INFLUENCE OF A PRESENT LORD 369
inseparable from its human medium. The same Jesus,
inhabiting now a sphere in which His influence is uni-
versalised, continues to reveal the Father and to bestow
a regenerating life through the instrumentality of His
own personal impression. We can still be united to Him
through faith. On this view, the Divine working has
been marked by continuity at each stage. Throughout,
the living Person of Jesus is the ultimate force in Christi
anity. Its real content and power are dissipated if it
be cut loose from an immediate relationship with Him,
mere teaching, preserved in books or traditions, being
substituted for the life-giving influence of a present Lord.
Difficult then as belief in the continued activity of
Christ may be, for the Christian its negation is involved
in graver difficulties still. It is not merely that God
has kept Christ's memory fresh and living. It is that
Christ has been exalted a Prince and Saviour. On any
other view our Lord was totally in the dark concerning
the future of His cause, for it is certain that He
anticipated His spiritual presence with believing men
until the end. The proffer of this unseen companionship
invariably formed part of the Christian message. That
He was mistaken in an anticipation which has been
abundantly fulfilled in saintly experience, becomes more
incredible as the question is considered. Error is not
thus the fruitful soil of triumph. Only the Living can
prevail. Those who shrink from impeaching the provi
dential course of the world will feel that grounds more
convincing than any yet put forward are required to prove
that He who so taught and wrought in the power of
God has withdrawn into silence and inaction, as an idle,
if interested, spectator of the progress of the task He
inaugurated on the earth.1
To the Christian consciousness, then, Jesus is exalted
as ever-present and almighty, or, in the profoundly signifi
cant word of the New Testament, He is " Lord " (Kiipios).
1 Cf. Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, 459.
24

370 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
His interposition was no transitory episode, but has
become by its transcendence an eternal and all-determining
factor in the relationship of God to man. To apprehend
this is in essence to know what the apostles mean by
Lordship. In the declaration of St. Peter that " this Jesus
whom ye crucified, God hath made Lord and Christ"
(Ac 236), the phrase defines Him explicitly as sovereign
in the spheres both of grace and nature. Of grace first,
be it noted, of nature by way of consequence. This is the
real order in which the truth is mediated to faith, and
in which alone it is charged with spiritual power. We
first recognise Christ as Lord within the range of indi
vidual personal life, and expand this initial assurance later to
universal and absolute dimensions. It has been attempted
to distinguish the power of the exalted Christ, exercised
solely for redemptive ends, from the sheer metaphysical
omnipotence of God ; x but the distinction is untenable.
In view of the indivisible unity of the cosmos, it is futile
to represent the sway of Christ as embracing the Church
but not the total universe. No partition of influence
is conceivable. To exclude even a portion of reality from
His dominion is to suggest such an eventual dualism as
must become intolerable both to faith and reason. At
the same time His sovereignty bears peculiarly upon the
Church in so far as the believers who compose the Church
are conscious of and responsive to His perfect will, His
supreme aims thus being realised by their instrumentality.
His purpose prevails not by abrupt fiat, but through the
mediation of saved men.
The resurrection of Christ marks the point at which
this sovereign power was first made effective. Through
a vast resulting expansion of activity the Son then became
indistinguishable from the Father in the sense that He
is now possessed of power to realise in human lives
a salvation which is union with God Himself. Tradi
tional theology largely obliterated this aspect of the
resurrection as a " crisis " in the constitution of Christ's
1 For instance by Bo von, Dogmatigue Chritienne, ii. 167 f.

THE CRISIS OF THE RESURRECTION 371
person — naturally enough, since it regarded His person
ality as something completely given from the first by the
positing side by side of the Divine and human natures.
We lose a distinctive element in New Testament thought,
however, if we slur over the universalising transition
which made resurrection the culminating stage in Christ's
whole development, and conferred on Him a mode of
being in harmony with His spiritual greatness. Standing
off from the whole spectacle of His career, we can discern
that One who had it in Him to become what we now
worship could not reveal Himself fully as Lord while He
dwelt on earth. Not till He rose to transcendent dominion
could the secret be revealed. After the resurrection, if
we are to be guided by apostolic intuition, He was
somehow greater than before. He received a new place
in human faith. Men now honour the Son even as they
honour the Father. And thus, in our human way, we may
say that the incarnation has not gone for nothing. It
is one of the most treasured convictions of the Christian
mind that in the Divine sympathy for the children of
men there is now a depth and intimacy to which that
earthly career contributed, that the Son who came forth
from the Father has taken out of time an eternal gain.
So the grace which flows to us has been enriched by all
things which Jesus underwent. God and man are one,
but the unity results not from the formal juxtaposition
of abstract natures, but from spiritually costly experiences
of reciprocal possession and coalescence. There is now
a Person in whom the focus of a human life is become
indissolubly one with the last reality of being, so that
the heart of man and the heart of God beat in the risen
Lord with one pulsing movement, one indistinguishable
passion to save and bless.
It is important to observe that the glorifying of
Christ by resurrection is no mere spectacular epilogue to
His earthly mission. On the contrary, it is part of the
full glorifying of the Father. Not otherwise could it
have been clear that the revelation mediated by Christ is

372 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
God's last word of grace, beyond which not even infinite
love can go. The meaning of Christ was the disclosure of
the Father as perfect love, but it is frequently overlooked
that this love could not be recognised as perfect save
as exhibited in prevailing absolute power as well as ap
pealing moral beauty. Apart from the manifestation of
an almighty love in the experience of the Eevealer, the
content of the revelation must needs have been frag
mentary and ambiguous. Eesurrection, therefore, crowned
the demonstration of God's love as the absolute power to
which all reality is subservient, and which no sin of
man or independent ordinance of nature can ever defeat.
But this display was protected from the danger of mis
construction in semi-pagan ways by the fact of the Cross,
in which the same Divine love suffered for the guilty.
When Jesus passed into the heavens, it was as bearing
within Him the fruit and issue of that suffering. His
glory always is the glory of the Crucified. The pain of
the Eighteous One is become the day-star of the world.
All that we have said is implicit in the language of
the first Christian creed — Jesus is Lord.1 These great
words, to be read rightly, should be read twice, the stress
falling alternately on predicate and subject. Jesus is
Lord — He lives now in the Divine glory, omnipresent
and almighty in His redeeming love. But also this Lord
is Jesus — the Son of Man who was made in all things
like His brethren, and at last bowed Himself down in
shame and agony and death. Self-renouncing love on
the world's throne, Christ sovereign through His passion —
this, in its pure essence, is the apostolic faith ; and is it
wonderful that those who possessed it, or rather were
possessed by it, should have made the New Testament
unequalled in the world's literature for glad hopefulness
and serenity ?
This revolutionising faith also implies that if even
now the Church recognises the sovereignty of Christ,
it will one day be recognised by all. He shall yet be
1 1 Co 12s, Ph 2".

THE GIVER OF THE SPIRIT 373
manifested in modes not less wonderful than those of
His first appearing. The instinctive conviction that His
work must reach consummation and perfected fruition
has always been a chief influence stimulating the Church
to formulate worthy conceptions of her Lord. When the
writers of the New Testament looked into the stretching
future, they beheld Jesus Christ occupying a central
position in the last decisive scene of history, and the felt
greatness of His person, far from crushing them in dumb
awe, thrilled their imagination, dilated their reason,
and lifted up their kindled minds to new, undreamt-of
thoughts concerning His relation to God and man. A
creative religious experience will always provide the terms
in which it may be fitly stated.
The relation of the exalted Christ to His followers is
described by apostolic writers in two conceptions, which
have been felt as representing two cardinal interests of
faith. These are the conceptions of Christ as Giver of
the Spirit and Intercessor with the Father.
At present, as I think, justice is done to the concep
tion of the Spirit neither by the severer forms of
traditional orthodoxy nor by modern Liberal Protestantism.
If our faith on one side is solicited for a certain corpus of
doctrinal theory, on the other we are pointed to the
Carpenter of Nazareth, the heroic Man of the first century.
In neither case is fellowship with a present Lord made
central. This must deepen profoundly our sense of value
in the New Testament conception of the Spirit. For it is
only as the Spirit — one with Christ Himself — comes to
perpetuate the spiritual presence of the Lord, and to cast
light on the unending significance of His work, that we
are quite liberated from the impersonal and external,
whether it be lifeless doctrine or the historically verified
events of an ever-receding past. Only through the Spirit
have we contact with the living Christ. It is particularly
in the pages of the Fourth Gospel that this large and
fruitful idea is presented.

374 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
¦
The coming of the Spirit, however, is not to be
conceived as forming a compensation or substitute for the
absent Christ; it is the higher mode in which Christ
Himself is present. " I will come to you " and " when
the Comforter is come" occur interchangeably, and any
doctrine of the Trinity which finds this an insuperable
obstacle stands so far convicted of tritheism. Between the
Spirit and Christ in the heart no experimental distinction
can be made. The one is the method of the other. That
the Spirit should have overshadowed the historic Christ
by opening a new and loftier stage of revelation is a
notion which the apostolic mind could not have formed.
As it has been expressed, " the office of the Spirit consists
in declaring the mind of Jesus and perpetuating the work
He had accomplished in His earthly life. . . . The Spirit
is the perennial source of new revelation, and yet this
new revelation is only the unfolding, ever more largely
and clearly, of what has already been imparted in the
life of Jesus. All our knowledge of God and His truth
is ultimately derived from the historical manifestation,
which conveys a different message to each succeeding
time, but can never be superseded."1 The glorified
Saviour is identical with the Jesus who sojourned on
earth, and the work resumed under larger conditions, with
an access of Divine power, is but the continuation of His
earthly task, in the light of which it must be interpreted.
It may help bur apprehension of Christ's exaltation if we
inquire, very briefly, why the earthly life of Jesus should
have had to close before the Spirit was poured forth.
(a) It is through the Spirit that men become persuaded
of Jesus as Eedeemer, but prior to the crucifixion His
Eedeemership had not been fully manifested. Apart from
His death in behalf of sinners, Christ is not completely
known as Saviour, for salvation consists in being recon
ciled to God in view of Jesus, while on the other hand
before Calvary the holy love constitutive of His inmost
being was incompletely revealed. To bear fruit, the
1 Scott, The Fourth Gospel, 351.

THE SPIRIT SUBSEQUENT TO CALVARY 375
corn must fall into the ground and die. Thus, until in
the accomplishment of His vocation Christ had tasted
death for every man, the full object which should evoke
the whole-hearted faith He desired still awaited realisation.
The mind of the disciples was still unready ijpr the great
gift. " Even before the ratification of the new covenant
in His blood, the Messianic gift of the Spirit was ready
to be bestowed upon all who by faith would appropriate
this privilege, yet not till after our Lord had ' finished '
His work were the conditions of receptivity present which
permitted of the full outpouring." x
(b) But the resurrection of Christ equally with His
death is vital to the Gospel message; hence only after
He had risen could that message be proclaimed in its
entirety. Apart from the resurrection the revelation of
God's love in Christ is obviously faint and indecisive.
Haering points out admirably that if that love is to
evoke joyous and unreserved faith, it must reveal itself as
not merely patient of death but triumphant over it.
And triumphant in the fullest sense — i.e., not only.'
sustaining Jesus in the last agony and inspiring Him'
to the end with trust unconquerable, but charged with
sovereign power to deliver by abolishing death and
t inaugurating for Him a new career of redemptive activity. '
i Looking at Calvary we say, This love deserved to conquer ;
looking to the risen Lord we add, And in fact it has
conquered/ It has proved itself not merely the noblest
but the most potent force of which we have any knowledge
— supreme in reality as in idea. Amor vincit omnia — till
Christ had risen the ultimate truth of this saying might
be doubted ; since then, none in whom He dwells can
question it. The Spirit came, therefore, in connection with
a completely unveiled Gospel which now proclaims a
Divine grace as almighty as it is compassionate.
(c) The coming of the Spirit is equivalent to the
return of Christ as an unseen and abiding presence, yet
while Jesus lived on earth this more intimate fellowship
1 Hogg, Christ's Message of the Kingdom, 213.

376 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
could not be realised. On earth He had been manifested
as a human individual, hedged about by physical
necessities, absent from these followers that He might be
with those. And before " I am glad for your sakes that
I was not Jhere " could pass into " Lo, I am with you
alway," a vast transformation in His mode of existence
must occur. It was death and resurrection which formed
the transition-point and installed Him in a new order of
conditions, through which He became the indwelling life
of His Church. " This universality of operation, both
intensive and extensive," writes Dr. Forrest, "cannot
belong to the Divine while clothed and localised in ' flesh
and blood ' ; it must be liberated from these bonds before
it can attain it. The external factor must disappear ere
the Incarnate can enter into His glory." 1 Thus only
after the resurrection could the Spirit of Christ — or
Christ as Spirit — be shed forth as a widespread, actual
experience. The second mode in which the risen Lord is presented
in the New Testament as sustaining active relations to
believers is that of Intercession. One is occasionally
tempted to ask whether this conception is not one of
which we moderns have lost the key. Nor need we have
any scruple in conceding to the full that the representa
tion of Christ's heavenly intercession partakes largely of
symbolism. Yet symbols may have a definite and even
an inexpressibly precious significance. It was so with
the Intercession of Christ. " The apostles," it has been
said, " mention this sacred function with a kind of adoring
awe which is quite peculiar even in the New Testament.
It seems to have impressed them as one of the unimagin
able wonders of redemption — something which in love
went far beyond all that we could ask or think. When
inspired thought touches it, it rests on it as an un
surpassable height."2
Admittedly the limits of human faculty interpose a
veto when we attempt to explain specific acts in which
1 Authority of Christ] 350. 2 Denney, Studies in Theology, 162.

THE INTERCESSION OF CHRIST 377
our Lord's intercession may consist. It would be
meaningless, for example, to conceive of it as taking place
in words or spoken entreaty. Words imply distance and
duality of a kind incongruous with the identity of life
subsisting between Christ and the Father. Theirs is a
unity that needs no language. On the other hand, it
would be not less erroneous to empty that intercession
of all personal significance. Apparently we do right to
image it as involving at least His mediatorial presence
before God, with knowledge of each of us and with pity
for each — His glorified person being, as it were, a
ceaselessly prevailing appeal to the reconciling work
accomplished on the earth, and also a fact which recalls
intensely the perpetual needs of men still tried and
tempted as Christ had been. Thus our Lord's intercession
implies at the least that He is concerned with real
participating sympathy in the experiences of His Church,
this sympathy being projected into His fellowship with
the Father, as a true and living element in its content.
In that Divine communion, those who once were purchased
at so dear a price are never forgotten. " With love and
longing infinite " He who made Himself utterly one with
men in life and death is still consciously identified with
His brethren ; and the spirit and aims of the great
Advocate we may gather from His parting petitions in the
Fourth Gospel. "The faith of the Church, and the
prayers which it utters — the responsibilities which it
exercises — in virtue of its faith, will still have that
support from the great soul of Christ which during His
visible ministry had been the stay of the disciples in their
first steps in the new life of the Kingdom." 1
These are vast religious conceptions. They are concep
tions which have imparted tone and substance to Christian
preaching at its best ; they have also supplied strong
motives for consistent and impressive Christian life. For
the soldier of righteousness it is a very fount of power to
reckon on the interest and companionship of the Captain
1 Hogg, ut supra, 218.

378 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of salvation ; to the humblest believer it is everything to
rest in the love of that unseen Friend whose faithful care
is unaffected by change of time or dignity. It is part
therefore of the best Christian conviction that as our Lord
now lives in God, and God in Him, His thought and power
are constantly directed to all believers, and that in these
most real relations with men He acts, as it were, from
within the very being of God Himself. His right and
ability to act, moreover, are grounded morally in the
abiding value of His sacrifice, in which our interests were
completely and finally identified with His. The succouring
love our prayers draw forth is not created by our prayers.
Bather its validity is the steadfast background and potency
of all we now receive.
The danger which has long shadowed faith in the
exalted Christ is that of an unbridled and capricious
mysticism. Ideas gained currency respecting His inter
position in human lives which have no relation to His known
character. The glorified Eedeemer has been isolated from
the historic Jesus, while the individual soul has in turn
been isolated from the vital organic brotherhood of the
Church. Eitschl poured a heavy fire upon the religious
illuminati in every age who, arrogating the right to un
mediated fellowship with Christ, have shown a marked
disposition to regard the historic narrative of His life
as but " milk for babes." x It is well known to what
fanatical excess such an attitude has led. A shallow and
unwholesome fancy, often combined with morbid erotic
passion, produced a type of sentiment and belief totally
dissimilar from the religion of the New Testament. Specula
tion, from an opposed yet kindred point of view, has
endeavoured to supersede the facts of history by the idea
of a noumenal Christ or Christ-principle, which should
expand the narrow faith of the Church into a religion for
humanity. The circumstance that the earthly Jesus was
trammelled by restrictions of space and time, and only
1 Theologie und Metaphysik, 25 ff.

THE PERILS OF MYSTICISM 379
through death passed into a higher and boundless life, is
transformed into the position that the truth present in
Christianity is per se absolute and eternal, with a content
grounded in reason not on fact, and wholly independent
of the fugitive and alogical elements of the time-series.
For the larger meanings of Jesus' work, accordingly, we
must look not to the Spirit unfolding truth in the Christian
mind of successive generations, but to " the speculative
fancy, wandering at its own pleasure and arriving from
time to time at new beliefs." Thus the exalted Christ
vanishes in a mist of sentimentalism or dialectic. The
living Person is discarded, and instead we are offered a
dream of passion or a lifeless philosophic principle. In
exposing the untenability of such conceptions and their
claim to rank as authentically Christian, Eitschl has done
a peculiarly important service. He has effectually refuted
the attempt to dissolve the person of Jesus in sub-personal
factors — mystical or speculative — by pointing out that
validly Christian views of Christ are distinguished by two
marks: they predicate of the risen Lord those personal
features which are present in the historic Saviour, and they
insist on the fundamental obligation to obey His command
ments. No conception of His glory can be true which
fails in either of these two ways.
In one respect, however, the interpretation which
Eitschl places upon Christ's present sovereignty is inadequate.
He contends that if this sovereignty is to possess a
verifiable sense for our minds, we must find all its
characteristics in Jesus' earthly career.1 Now the historic
Jesus displayed His Kingship by exerting a unique moral
power upon things — by control of circumstance, by
ascendancy over human souls, by triumph over obstacles,
by patience in suffering, by faithfulness unto death. These
alone, Eitschl argues, are the tbkens of sovereignty ; and
the Christian message is to the effect that just by enduring
the world's hatred, even in its direst consequences, Jesus
overcame the world and broke its power for ever. We
1 Justification and Reconciliation, 454 ff.

380 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
shall all concede that such a view contains an immense
percentage of truth. Too often the majesty of Christ has
been depicted in purely secular and unethical forms,
more resembling the displays by which savage chieftains
have sought to overawe the explorer than the holy and
redeeming Love we are familiar with in the New Testament.
No conception, assuredly, can be right which does not
start from and revolve round the ethical forces through
which Jesus overcame evil with good. But is this the
whole truth ?
Not, it appears, if we read the utterances of the
believing consciousness in a plain natural sense. When
faith calls Jesus Lord, simply and without qualification, it
certainly implies not only that He overcame the world
by invincible goodness but that all power is His in heaven
and earth. He is omnipotent with the omnipotence of
God; to Him belongs absolute might to continue and
consummate the work begun by His life, death, and victory.
Short of this the Christian mind is not expressed. When
we analyse this conviction, moreover, making explicit its
unconscious logic, we discover its latent reasoning to run
in something of this form : Not only is Christ all-good,
but there is a mode of being which answers to perfect
goodness and brings it completely to effectual manifesta
tion Or, to put it otherwise, unity with God means for
Jesus a real participation in that transcendent power to
make the good prevail which constitutes deity in (so to
speak) its external aspect.
Yet though the interpretation set forth by Bitschl
may be thus deficient, as a transcript of full Christian faith,
he insists on the much-needed lesson that our relation
ship to Christ, though immediate, is not unmediated. In
this there is no inconsistency. I have immediate com
munion with my friend ; yet all I know of him — all our
bygone talk, meetings, mutual service — are present in that
communion to make it what it is : its present is mediated
through its past. So too the relation of the Christian to
Christ because personal is direct ; none the less, however,

THE DOCTRINE OF THE REAL PRESENCE 381
is it dependent on the facts of history. Save on the basis
of His recorded life, fellowship with Him is . meaningless.
Nothing else will keep the Christian religion true to type.
But this is not the equivalent of saying that in this
fellowship we must at every point go round consciously
by the historic Jesus. Certainly we do not make this
dAtour by the past in our intercourse with friends. Besort
to memory in this deliberate and habitual fashion would
be evidence that genuine intimacy did not as yet exist.
Faith in the glorified Lord who is also present ad
mittedly forms a vital factor in New Testament religion.
It is, besides, the great evangelical reality which Eoman
theology has perverted into the Bodily Presence of Christ
in the transubstantiated elements of the Eucharist. That
doctrine we cannot pause to examine now. It is an attempt
to translate into material and therefore misleading terms
a fact which is intensely and objectively spiritual. Never
theless it is a positive doctrine ; it answers to a real
craving; and it is certain that it can never be displaced
by mere negations. In the Christian mind there exists an
imperious longing for actual union with the Eedeemer,
for immediate fellowship with One who forgives sin and
aids the struggling soul in its passionate pursuit of holiness.
And the real strength of the theory of Transubstantiation
and the Bodily Presence, it has been said truly, "lies in
the impression of multitudes of men, that if they surrender
their faith in the awful mystery of the Eucharist, Christ
will seem no longer near to them. If He is not present
in a supernatural way upon the altar, they think that
they must lose Him altogether ; and they are accustomed
to speak about our own service as a mere ' commemoration
of an absent Lord.' " 1 If we are to meet the exigencies
of the soul in an age when the exclusive claims of Eome
are felt as more than ever alluring by minds which historic
criticism has perturbed, it is not enough to proclaim the
greatness of a long-departed Hero. The world requires a
living Person, in whose present grace sinners may find rest.
1 Dale, Essays and Addresses, 24.

382 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
It need scarcely be added that many aspects of the
doctrine under review must always remain in shadow.
The conditions of the world invisible lie beyond our ken,
embracing numerous subtle and elusive problems which
it is vain to treat of. How Christ can be a person, yet
ubiquitous ; where His throne is situated ; what are the
nature and qualities of His ascended body — in regard to
such matters a certain type of mind (like most children)
is often curious. But why should we pretend to know
where all is unknowable ? To such inquiries we must
answer that the longing for personal knowledge of Christ
the Lord is satisfied not by apocalyptic vision or the
pathetic efforts of mistimed logic, but from the Gospel story
of His words and deeds. " The secret things belong unto
the Lord our God ; but the things that are revealed belong
unto us and to our children for ever." x Christ, as depicted
by apostolic men, is present with us still, present to
save to the uttermost ; His person, thus qualified and
conditioned, is the great object held forth in the Gospel;
and what is requisite for its apprehension is in no sense
a vivid historical imagination, still less the trained faculty
of dialectic, but a sincere, .lowly, and obedient trust
> Dt 292».

CHAPTEE VI.
THE PERFECT MANHOOD OF CHRIST.
In our analysis of the believing consciousness we now
come upon the clear and uncontested fact that, when faith
looks at Jesus Christ, whose present glory is continuous
with His earthly life, it discerns in Him uniquely perfect
manhood. Jesus is the Man par excellence. In this
treatise, however, we are concerned with His manhood less
as apologists than as students of His person. Or, to put it
otherwise, we wish not so much to prove it as to elicit
those features in virtue of which it can be described as
solitary and incomparable, and, in addition, as vitally
significant for redemption.
The New Testament no more attempts to demonstrate
the manhood of Jesus than the Old Testament to prove
the being of God. To the apostles Jesus is human
throughout in temperament, emotion, and attitude. It
might therefore have been supposed that whatever the
mysteries of His person, at all events the truth of His
humanity was too plain ever to be in doubt. But history
undeceives us. Docetism, rife in many quarters even now,
was the first Christological heresy. Even in the apostolic
age its influence may be detected. In the First Epistle of
John the Docetse seem to be alluded to indirectly, and the
writer in a strongly controversial passage takes occasion to
Literature — J. R. Seeley, Ecce Homo, 1865 ; Sanday, Outlines of the
Life of Christ2, 1906 ; von Soden, Die vnchtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu,
1904 ; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 1858 ; Bousset, Jesus, 1906 ; Mason,
The Conditions of our Lord's Life on Earth, 1896 ; Fairbairn, Studies in the
Life of Christ, 1880 ; H. Weiss, Vortrage iiber die Person Christi, 1863 ;
Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, 1894; Du Bose, The Gospel
in the Gospels, 1906 ; Drummond, Studies in Christian Doctrine, 1908,

384 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
reassert the truth of a veritable and indissoluble incarna
tion, as contrasted with the phantasmal theory of a Divine
Christ walking the earth as a protracted but none the less
unsubstantial theophany.1 Thus, while one of the first
disciples still lived, professing Christians were known to
whom it appeared incredible that Christ had been man,
and who held explicitly that His body was mere semblance.
Similarly it was a tenet of second-century Gnosticism that
our Lord had no real share in the material side of human
life. It was said that He took on a different guise to
different onlookers, and at different times. And in later
ages it is common to find Jesus' identity with us in
manhood either denied or in various ways curtailed, under
the erroneous impression that a deeper reverence is thereby
paid to His higher being. Thus a persistent tendency is
observable, even in common speech, to describe His
manhood in non-personal terms : it is a body, a temple,
metal fused with fire, a bush in which dwells the flame of
deity without consuming it.
It is not, of course, for us to censure these errors
harshly, at least in their more primitive manifestations.
In antiquity the belief prevailed widely that the body is
itself evil, radically and incurably ; not the seat or nidus
of sin merely, but its producing cause. Men who carried
this notion into the Church may well have found it hard
to concur in the assertion that Jesus' body was essentially
identical with ours. Again, if some questioned the reality
of His body, surmising that men saw and touched Him as
one may a figure in a dream,2 others, for whom His body
was quite real, were unable to believe that God incarnate
possessed a completely human soul. In such a case it is
doubtless open to us to say that they were dimly feeling
after the idea of Christ mystical — of a personal redeeming
1 56"8 ; cf. 221"23 41"3 416. It is a remark of Professor Burkitt's that
"the Gospels we have would never have become the official charters of the
Church but for the theological necessity of insisting upon the true human
nature of our Lord " (Gospel History and its Transmission, 263).
2 This may have sprung from the narrative of Jesus' walking on the sea.

HIS INDIVIDUAL MANHOOD 385
Life, that is, which is un con fined within the bounds of
separate or particular individuality but rather pervades
unnumbered souls with its own vitality and power.
However that may be, the Church has uniformly rejected
an outspoken Docetism ; this we may say unreservedly in
spite of the fact that arguments of an unconsciously
docetic order have frequently been employed in the long
debate, ancient or modern, as to the limitations of our
Lord's knowledge, or the possibility in His case of painful,
acute temptation. Christians have always felt that to
regard the Jesus of the Gospels as no more than an
abstract phantom is to take all meaning out of salvation.
To the pure Docetist, the Saviour has no history.
We cannot indeed overestimate the importance of the
fact that Jesus' redeeming influence on the world — all
that has induced men to call Him Lord and Saviour —
owes to His humanity at once its individual and its social
power, and is complete only with the completeness of His
manhood. It is as man that He takes His place in the
historic context. Of course the influence of Jesus is more
than historical; it is also what may be called super-
historical, or, in one aspect, timeless and eternal. But yet
this very quality of timelessness, whereby He becomes the
contemporary of all ages, and touches sinful hearts in every
land, conveying to faith the life of God, is something which
only secured its foothold in the world through its actual-
isation as a real element in the time-series, a perfect
earthly medium of grace. Had Jesus' manhood been ficti
tious or abridged, no fully saving power could pass forth
from Him to win mankind, and God were still far away.
As our initial datum we may select the truth that
Jesus, as man, was possessed of personal individuality.
He was not only Man, He was a man. This might seem
to be obviously implied in the facts of the Gospel narra
tive. It is not too much to say that no reader of the four
evangelists could conceivably arrive at any other im
pression than that the central Figure was veritably a man —
25

386 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
not merely a man, indeed, but a Jew of the first century
— unless a contrary view had been put into his mind from
outside. Nevertheless, as we know, traditional orthodoxy
came to a different finding. Slowly and by faint degrees,
it is true ; as late as Origen and Tertullian x it was openly
taught by Church teachers that Jesus was a man ; even
the homo in Leo's Epistle to Flavian, if taken seriously,
witnesses clearly enough to an individual humanity. But
at least by the time of Cyril of Alexandria the sense of
this individuality had become more dim in the Eastern
Church ; and we are not wrong, perhaps, in regarding a
marked drift in the contrary direction as one of Apollin
aris' least desirable legacies. The adjective ivv-rrbaTaTos
was expressly coined by Leontius of Byzantium to convey
the idea of a human nature which, not being personal
independently or in itself, yet found 'its personality in the
Divine Logos. But as time passed the more cautious
distinctions of Leontius were in part forgotten, in part
rejected ; and later thought in both East and West
betrayed a much closer affinity with the more uncom
promising anhypostasia than with the enhypostasia which
had been put forward by Leontius.2 The point of view
we may gather from Alcuin's well-known phrase : accessit
humanitas in unitatem personae filii dei. Hence the
unfortunate usage, still common in text-books, which
definitely predicates of Christ '' an impersonal humanity,"
a phrase on which, after using it, Dean Strong makes the
justly severe comment that " it suggests a kind of abstract
idea of man lying untenanted, and adopted by a Divine
Person, and it is obvious that it opens the door to
scholasticism of an unduly technical sort."3 We are
rightly told that the truth against which the phrase is
designed to safeguard is this, that the humanity of our
1 Cf. Athanasius, de Inc. c. 43.
2 But in Catholic theology the impersonality of Christ's manhood is
often ignored where the argument will not bear it : e.g. in the discussion of
His atoning obedience. There is a real sense, in other words, in which
Christ had to act for Himself before He could act for others.
8 Manual of Theology (2nd edit.), 130.

HIS INDIVIDUAL MANHOOD 387
Lord had no independent personality ; in other words, it
was intentionally framed as a bulwark against the re
current menace of Nestorianism. And so far, doubtless,
it has a certain historic title to be received. It is another
question whether the position it marks is one in which the
Christian mind can rest.
Be this as it may, this conception of a humanity which
is not that of an individual man is notoriously still held
by able writers. Thus, to take a recent example, Dr. Du
Bose argues strongly in favour of the Virgin Birth that
"the product of every natural union is an individual
person," and that "in the light of all that Jesus Christ
is to the Church and to humanity, His universality,
sufficiency, and ubiquity," it is impossible to believe that
He is only a human individual.1 In a later work he
grapples with the question still more directly, introducing
an objector who states the counter-position not only with
great impartiality, but, as I conceive, with unanswerable
force. " One says : You lay great stress upon the view
that our Lord was not a man, but man. I find this a
difficult conception ; does it mean that humanity has a
concrete real existence apart from the individual persons
who are human, and that this Universal becomes visible
in Christ ? If this be so, does it not lead us to a meta
physical realism, not now generally held ? " To this Dr.
Du Bose's answer, based on the right assumption that
faith needs a Christ who is universal, is that " the
universality of our Lord's humanity is only explicable
upon the fact that His personality is a Divine one. . . .
The concrete universal of humanity which may be found
in Jesus Christ belongs to it not as humanity but as God
in humanity. It is God in it which makes that particular
humanity of our Lord, His holiness, His righteousness, His
life, valid and available for all ; so that every man may
find himself in Christ and in Christ find himself." 2 The
1 Gospel in the Gospels, 212.
2 Gospel according to St. Paul, 297 (quoted by Sanday, Life of Christ in
Recent Research, 310).

388 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
same position is apparently taken by Dr. Moberly, who
writes : " If Christ might have been, yet He certainly was
not, a man only, amongst men. His relation to the
human race is not that He was another specimen, differing,
by being another, from every one except Himself. His
relation to the race was not a differentiating but a con
summating relation. He was not generically, but in
clusively, man." And his statement closes on the same
note as Dr. Du Bose by affirming that the relation of
[Jesus Christ to mankind is "a Spiritual property, so
sovereign, so transcendent, that it could only be a property
of a Humanity which was not merely the Humanity of a
finite creature, but the Humanity of the infinite God."1
These instances sufficiently prove the deep conviction with
which the idea has been set forth quite recently. The
gist of the conception may perhaps be put briefly somewhat
as follows: Because Christ as man is of universal and
organic significance for mankind, it is not possible that He
should be individual.
If, however, we take the problem into the light of
the Gospel story, it is difficult to avoid stating what seems
truth in terms precisely the reverse of this : Because
Christ is universal and central, He is also an individual.
It is His differentia, in short, to be the central individual.
Let it be noted, however, that to regard Christ as an
individual is in no sense equivalent to the position that
He is " only one of the sons of men peculiarly favoured
and most highly endowed." Too often the argument is
vitiated by this assumption. The writers I have named
constantly suppose that we must choose between saying
that Christ was not a man, but humanity inclusive, and
dismissing Him as but one more good man, a simple
member of the race, to whom we are related exactly as
one unit is to his neighbour. The alternative is quite
unreal. To call Christ an individual is but another way
of putting the fact that He can be distinguished clearly
as man from (say) Peter or Thomas. And the special
1 Atonement and Personality, 86, 89.

HIS INDIVIDUAL MANHOOD 389
philosophy of His uniqueness which denies that He was
a man is surely at war with this fact.
The truth is that the scholastic conception of the
universal humanitas as itself real and concrete no longer
satisfies the mind. In the domain of reality there is no
such thing existing independently as humanitas, or " man
in general." To say so leaves the validity of knowledge
untouched, since no one . can think of or mentally
represent a " man in general." No one can represent a
man who also is the nature common to all members of the
class " man." Of course it is true that particular existences
do in fact share a common character. Nor is this common
character a figment of the mind ; rather it explains why
different individuals, even though different, have the same
name. It indicates the common possession by " such
individuals of certain attributes or qualities. This, however,
while no less truly an aspect or function of reality than
the concrete instances in which it is exemplified, is per se
a pure abstraction, which has not and cannot have existence
independently or by itself. The real human universe,
then, is made up of individual men possessing common
properties or a common character. In any other light
humanitas is a purely enigmatical entity. Applied to our
question, this means that while mankind is in a true sense
one, and is qualified by solidarity, while also ; God has
mediated redemption through this oneness, we are not
therefore justified in saying that Christ is this oneness,
this solidarity incarnate. Eather it is in virtue of such
oneness, such bonds of mutual involution between life and
life, that we believe Jesus Christ, a real individual, to be
able to exert universal saving power. The individual,
'in short, is not the contrary of the universal ; in varied
degree he is the universal, in concrete form. Hence,
without ceasing to be individual, Christ may be the
universal, focal member of our organic race. No incon
gruity obtains, as between these two things. ¦ On the
contrary, it is matter of common knowledge that the
greater a man is — 'the more numerous the points at which

390 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
he has contact with, and affects, the human environment —
the more self-possessed and concrete his individuality.
We can only think of the Lord Jesus Christ as the. ideal
limit of this conjunction, linked to all men in His Divine
outflowing love, yet always master of His self-conditioned
life. As Bishop D'Arcy has expressed it : " The personality
of our Lord is the most distinct and concrete of which
we have any knowledge. ... To confuse the boundaries
which give the Ego its distinctness, for the sake of
making an abstract doctrine appear more intelligible, is
surely a dangerous error. Our Lord was very man,
and His Ego had all the self-possession and self-
consciousness which give to every human soul its personal
distinctness." x
I should therefore incline to say that what mainly
invites criticism in Dr. Du Bose's able statement is his
view of the individual. That cannot be defined simply
as the opposite of the universal.2 We may accept without
reserve his remark that " it is God in it which makes that
particular humanity of our Lord, His holiness, His righteous
ness, His life, valid and available for all," merely pointing
out that by thus using the words " that particular humanity
of our Lord " he grants all we ask. After all, it appears
Christ's humanity is particular or — the better word — in
dividual ; yet it is also universal. On the facts, then, there
is no dispute ; what leads to divergence of opinion is an
old but outworn philosophic conception of the universal.
If we are not to trust our intuitive perception that the
Christ we read of in the Gospels is an individual man, it
is hard to say what perception could be trusted.8 As we
follow His life, we become infinitely more sure of His
human individuality than we can ever be of the fallible
human logic which denies it.
1 Hastings' DCG. ii. art. "Trinity."
2Cf. A. D. Lindsay, Philosophy of Bergson, 189.
8 Dr. Mason points out that more than once in the New Testament Christ
is called not &vBpunros merely, but aviip, and that avf/p carries the sense of
distinct individuality (Conditions of our Lord's Life on Earth, 46-47).

HIS MANHOOD UNIVERSAL 391
Turning now to a new aspect, let us inquire whether
we can impart a more than logical sense to the universality
just affirmed. Can we fill it out with an ethical and
spiritual significance which reveals it as human, concrete,
intelligible ? In part we may, I think. We rightly
signalise, for example, the wondrous combination in Christ
of qualities which tend in other men to be only opposed
angularities, but which by their perfect harmony in Jesus
fit Him to be Saviour alike of the single life and of society.
Thus He was stern with an awful gravity that shook the
heart, made undreamt - of claims, and shrank from no
menace of judgment or unrelenting exposure of evil ; yet
He has given to men a new conception of love, and lives
on in their souls by the memory of a tireless pity that
received sinners, wept over their blindness, and at last bore
death itself in a passion to redeem. Between the two —
the indignation and the tenderness — there is no random
vacillation, no capricious change ; each rather is the
Bupport, content, and basis of the other. He lives above
the power of earthly things, yet with no disdain. Never
was ascetic less the captive of mere pleasure, yet life is
holy for Him in all its elements ; if He has not where to
lay His head, He can still be partaker in the innocent joy
of a wedding-feast. He ate and drank as a man with
men, He bade them pray for daily bread, He set forth
the uncareful happiness of children as model ; yet when
He calls they must leave home and goods and honour all
behind, as having no value in competition with the
Kingdom and its righteousness. There joined in Him
the loftiest consciousness of self and the lowliest humility.
He was more than Solomon or the Temple — He was the
Lord of His disciples, and the very Son of God ; yet He
is baptized at the hands of John, He comes not to be
ministered unto but to minister, He puts aside the glory
men can give. In His piety the two strands of fervid
ecstasy and quiet faith are so intertwined that it is
hard if not impossible to tell which predominates. In
His relations to others we see Him now as disposed to

392 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
private friendships, now as caring for the multitude, now
as the Solitary ; yet always and in every case Himself.
Thus, as von Soden has expressed it, " in the nature of
Jesus there was no lack of contrasts. But they are
always resolved in the wonderful completeness and
harmony of His being. The opposites are always in
equilibrium. Therefore His personality, many-sided as it
is, is not complicated. In the last resort they are not
indeed so many independent qualities ; but, strictly
speaking, under the action of His human nature and
its surroundings, they are just so many prismatic rays
in the diamond of His soul." 1 Now this incomparable
diversity of interests or qualities, all fused obediently in
a character single and distinct, like a flavour or a frag
rance, is part of what we mean by the universality of
Jesus' manhood. The true attributes of humanity meet
in Him, yet they meet in an individual life which thus
reaches out to every member of the race, and forms its
proper centre and rallying-point. In virtue of this ethical
universality, Jesus is more real, sure, and near to men of
every time than friend to friend. Christian missions are
the proof. Though set within a specific race and age,
He is none the less in the plenitude of His manhood the
Man of every age, the Elder Brother of us all.
This becomes still clearer when we survey the life-
work He accomplished. Here also is seen a perfect
harmony of the individual and the universal. For on
the one hand, the vocation given Him by the Father is
sharply limited and defined. The religious life is in
cumbent on all men ; but what we cannot fail to note is
that for Jesus it became a strictly exclusive and all-
absorbing task. This has occasionally been slurred over
in vague eulogies to the effect that He was complete,
ideal man, and under cover of this general description He
is represented as in possession of all the human talents.
"As' a philosopher," says one writer, "He would have sur
passed Socrates, as 'an orator have eclipsed Demosthenes."
1 Die wichtigslen Fragen im Leben Jesu, 88 (quoted by Sanday).

HIS MANHOOD UNIVERSAL 393
If this means that in philosophy Jesus' gifts were superior
to those of Socrates, in oratory to those of Demosthenes —
for consistency we are bound to add, in mathematics to
Newton, in painting to Velasquez — the statement, so far
as evidence is concerned, must be repelled as baseless. In
the fields of science or art Jesus was not supreme, for
there God has chosen to cast mankind upon their own
exertions ; and it is surely clear that, by engaging in any
of these specialised lines of service, He would have for
feited just so much universality. For religion, concerned
as it is with man's relation to God, is the most manifold
and comprehensive of all interests, in contrast, to which
others are provincial; it was not possible therefore that
Jesus should confine Himself within more special bounds
except at the cost of becoming one of a class, and thus
failing in centrality. His life-work was unique, not in
the sense of being narrowly engrossed in a single sphere,
like that of the merchant, the politician, or the divine ;
but in the sense that it bore on that which is deepest in
all men. Non multa sed multum was the signature of His
career ; to put more into His life-programme would in fact
have been to put infinitely less. As He laboured solely
within the house of Israel, in order thereby to lay the
corner-stone of the Church universal and catholic, so,
with equal reason, He confined His life-work to the task
of Mediatorship that He might fulfil God's purpose for
all mankind.1 Yet in this life, limited to the central and the
absolute, His own consciousness found no omission, no
unfinished page. Of the dim regrets which toiture even
the best men, as they question half-sadly at the end
whether all has been done that might be done, there is no
trace. Jesus' life is a unity, woven without seam from
1 The late T. H. Green has expressed this finely : " It is because Jesus,
under limiting conditions, lived a life which is limited to no conditions, and
under special circumstances proclaimed a principle which is applicable to all
circumstances, that His life and His principle are rightly called absolute "
(Works, iii. p. xxxix).

394 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the top to the bottom. Even in Gethsemane, His
momentary doubt is not whether He must obey the
Father; rather it is an implicit question as to the
Father's will, an inquiry whether the cup now at His lips
has been placed there with the full intent that He shall
• drink it. Thus at the last it is on a noticeably specific
note that His mind rests: "I have finished the work
that Thou gavest me to dp." No vague or general
vocation had been appointed Him, nor yet one so circum
scribed as to fence Him off from all but a certain defined
class ; but the distinct, fundamentally universal task of
establishing the Kingdom and reconciling man to God.
As we have seen, it is supremely in the resurrection
that the universality of Jesus is illustrated and revealed.
As the climax of a human life, resurrection is wholly
exceptional ; and He of whom it is predicable is thereby
determined as both unprecedented and inimitable. True,
His victory over death is prophetic of ours in Him ; yet
all His uniqueness is still guaranteed by His mediation
to us of the last triumph. Through His rising from the
dead, the universality of life, of appeal, of redeeming
power which had from the first belonged to Him de jure,
took on de facto the mode of being which answers to its real
character. It rose above the bounds of space and time.
If till that crisis it had been exerted only in special
instances, though world-wide in essential import, it at
last became available and- effective for the whole world.
If till then He had been hedged in by physical restraints
— distant from Bethany when Lazarus His friend fell
asleep, so that it could be said, "Lord, if Thou hadst
been here" — henceforward He was known and felt,
everywhere and always, as an unseen Presence. Thus the
Jesus of history passed into the Christ of experience, not
in virtue of any mere change in the imagination of His fol
lowers, but by the objective universalisation of His power.
This individual yet universal life, again, is marked
in the fullest sense by reality and integrity. It is no

A COMPLETE HUMANITY 395
mutilated manhood we see in Christ. A proof that this
has been intuitively recognised is the fact that countless
believers have confessed to a deep sense of Christ's
perfect sympathy with their need and pain and joy.1
Not only so ; they have been conscious of a deep sympathy
with Him. As we contemplate His life, its action and
passion, the aspirations which move it and the sinless
infirmity by which it is encompassed ; as we listen to His
voice, or look upon His deeds of power and mercy, nothing
in it all is alien to our mind. It takes form and shape
in a medium with which we are familiar. And we can
say, not of their quality, which is untainted, but of their
nature, " These are our acts, our thoughts, our feelings ;
they are the very emotions and impulses of soul by which
we too are agitated. He speaks our tongue, He endures
our pain, our anguish and distress He bears with us, and
as we bear it. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,
nothing in human nature escapes Him who names Himself
Son of Man, nothing in life and nothing in death : He is
our Brother even to the end." 1
We may illustrate the integrity of Christ's manhood,
then ; what we cannot do is to prove it by logic. It is
impossible to strengthen by demonstration what is self-
evident from the first. To all who read the Gospels with
an open mind it is plain that Jesus was completely man.
Were it conceivable indeed that we were forced to choose
— as we are not — between the conviction that Jesus
possessed true manhood in all its parts, and the assurance
that He was the Son of God come in flesh for our salvation,
our plain duty would be to affirm His humanity and re
nounce His deity. Doubtless in point of fact both things
are sure to faith ; but none the less it is from the primary
and fundamental certitude of His unity with us in man
hood that we rise up to the truth of His higher nature.
He is at all events complete man, whatever more.
Let us briefly exemplify this by the various aspects
or elements of human life — corporeal, moral, social,
1 Gaston Frommel, Etudes morales et religieuses, 59 f.

396 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
emotional, intellectual, religious. Everywhere the integrity
of Jesus' life as man is clear. His body was flesh and
blood like ours. Its capacity of pain, of privation, of
fatigue ; its tears and agony and cries ; its shrinking from
the hour of death ; its sensitiveness to the contact of other
men ; its susceptibility to the influence of nature, felt in
the thrill of gladness begotten by the sunlight and the
flowers — all this is authentically human. Always the
body of Jesus, through its vital and mobile relations to the
world, served and nourished the growth of His self-con
sciousness. His moral experience too was human. Duty
was to Him a vast, solemn fact, presenting itself uniformly
as the Father's will ; as we read on we can discern that
even for this " Son " there was assigned a piece-by -piece
discovery of the right way, a gradual acceptance of un
foreseen responsibilities disclosed by the progress of life.
He must choose out His own path, develop His purpose,
do justice to His own nature. His career was no irre
sponsible adventure. Each step had moral value, and
called for insight, courage, fidelity, patience. Once more,
His emotional life reveals the shifting play of joy and
pain and wonder. The story of His soul is no surface
uniformly blank and regular, but a varied landscape, a
country with an atmosphere. The light and shade of
feeling move across it — love, anger, grief, compassion ;
to all He is humanly sensitive, not staying coldly on
the outmost rim of the capacity of emotion but entering
it with a natural immediacy; yet never seeking joy or
sorrow for its own sake only or permitting it to overmaster
the focus of consciousness. How He is altogether one
with His brethren in that piercing question, " Could ye
not watch with Me one hour ? " or in the tears at Lazarus'
grave preceded by that strange brief gust of " indignation,"
in which, as it would seem, His spirit revolted against
the miseries of the world and the broken hearts of those
that loved Him.1 That dying care for His mother ; that
peculiar affection for one disciple ; that look cast on the
'Jnll83.

HIS INTELLECTUAL EXPERIENCE 397
young ruler, or on the follower who a moment earlier had
forsworn Him : such traits of nature appear with simple
and vivid power, and they come not as exterior and
official evidences of a humanity which needs attestation
but as the spontaneous outflow of a human life that can
be nothing but itself.
Time was when debate gathered keenly round the
intellectual experience of Jesus. It was felt to be
perilous and revolutionary to hold that the normal
limitations of knowledge in His age and country must
in some true sense be predicated of Himself. The diffi
culty was rendered none the less acute by the fact that
the Gospels quite plainly ascribe to Jesus a certain range
of supernormal discernment both of human thought and
of future events. Still, preternatural knowledge, such as
may be more or less paralleled from the life of Isaiah,
Jeremiah, or St. Paul, cannot be regarded as the equi
valent of omniscience ; and omniscience is, after all, the
only possible alternative to a knowledge qualified by
limitation. The question can be decided solely by loyalty
to facts ; and these, it is not too much to say, are peremp
tory. Not only is it related that Jesus asked questions
to elicit information — regarding the site of Lazarus' tomb,
for example, or the number of the loaves, or the name of
the demented Gadarene — but at one point there is a clear
acknowledgment of ignorance. " Of that day or that
hour," He said, respecting the Parousia, " knoweth no
man, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son,
but the Father." 1 If He could thus be ignorant of a detail
connected in some measure with His redemptive work,
the conclusion is unavoidable that in secular affairs His
knowledge was but the knowledge of His time. It
was possible for Him to feel surprise. The subject is
one, however, on which controversy is over now. Con
servative writers freely admit the obvious significance of
the narrated facts. " That our Lord's knowledge," Dr.
Dykes has said, " advanced from infantile ignorance, and
1 Mk 1382.

398 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
advanced as that of other men does by the ordinary
methods by which men gain information ; that what He
thus came to know could not be at all times equally
present to His mind and was wholly absent from His
mind in the unconscious intervals of slumber; — this
simply follows from His possession of a human mind at
all. It is human to know in part, to retain much in
memory which is not present to thought, and at each
moment of consciousness to attend only to a very limited
sum of impressions and ideas." 1 In a recent work, Dr.
Sanday has devoted to the same topic a few pages of the
highest value. " We may venture," he writes, " to picture
to ourselves the working of our Lord's consciousness in
some such way as this. His life on earth presented all
the outward appearance of the life of any other con
temporary Galilean. His bodily organism discharged the
same ordinary functions and ministered to the life of
the soul in the same ordinary ways. He had the same
sensations of pleasure and pain, of distress and ease, of
craving and satisfaction. Impressions received through
the senses and emotions awakened by them were re
collected and stored up for use by the same wonderful
processes by which any one of us becomes the living
receptacle of personal experiences. His mind played
over all these accumulated memories, sifting, digesting,
analysing, extracting, combining, and recombining. Out
of such constituent elements, physical, rational, moral,
and spiritual, character was formed in Him as in any
one of ourselves, though with unwonted care and attention.
Not that we need suppose that the actual process of
character-forming was more self-conscious with Him than
it is with us. The forming of character is the un
conscious automatic effect of particular decisions of
judgment and acts of will. Conscience discriminates
between right and wrong; in His case it invariably
chose the right and eschewed the wrong. But out of the
midst of all these moral decisions and actions, out of the
1 Expos. Times, Jan. 1906, 152-53,

HIS RELIGIOUS LIFE 399
interplay of social relations, under the guidance of
observation and reflection, there gradually grew up a
sense of deliberate purpose, a consciousness of mission." x
Attention has recently been drawn, in a special manner,
to the perfectly human quality of our Lord's religious
life. The vivid simplicity of New Testament representa
tions has been felt anew, and, like the writer to the
Hebrews, men have dwelt on the piety of Jesus. For
long it had been half-forgotten how this colours His
whole experience. Take His most absorbing affection, from
which all others drew their strength and purity — His
love for the Father. It is easy to read the Gospels over
and over again and yet miss the greatness, of this love as
a simple consciousness, an atmosphere in which all action
is done and all feeling felt, the perpetual bright flower
of the absolute unity of will between the Father and the
Son. Or take His habit of prayer and faith, of asking
and receiving. No Christology is true which makes a
Christ for whom prayer is either unnatural or impossible.2
It is striking that the Fourth Gospel, which dwells with
such steady emphasis on His higher being, should exhibit
Him even more constantly than the Synoptics in the
posture and mood of prayer. He needs God, even though
sharer of His life. In Hebrews, too, there are daring
words as to the awful struggle in Gethsemane, and the
" strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save
Him from death." This is in no sense incongruous with
the power that dwelt in Him ; for prayer is the one
source of power. He is so great amongst men because
of that secret communion. Apart from God, He has no
thoughts, no desires, no will. Along with this is combined
a faith and receptivity which is not that of a frail sinner,
but of a sinless Son. The recurrence of the sweet and
deep name Father unveils the secret of His being. His
1 Christologies Ancient and Modern, 179 ff.
2 In his Von der GoUheit Christi, 41 ff., Thieme argues at length that
Jesus' habit of prayer compels us to reject His essential unity with God and
assert rather a representative unity.

400 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
heart is at rest in God. There is a trust born of communion
with the Father which in the narrative is not so much heard
as overheard — a confidence so deep-set and immovable
that even when in the last hour it could find in the words
of an ancient Psalmist the truest symbol and expression
of inward darkness, it yet clung passionately to the unseen
Lord and Friend. Here also the Fourth Gospel is richest
in memories. It is our most faithful record of this filial
dependence. " The Son can do nothing of Himself, but
,what He seeth the Father doing " ; '' He that hath sent
Me is with Me, He hath not left Me alone " ; " the Father
abiding in Me doeth His works"1 — these are typical
words out of many, and through them, as through a
transparent medium, we perceive that the focus of His
life and consciousness was not in Himself merely, but in
His unity with God. Only so could He make the Father
known. Eevelation, if it be more than a theoretic verbal
declaration, must come through an absolute reflection of
the Father caught by and flung out from a perfect human
soul, in whose depths men should read and love it.
The manhood of Jesus, then, is a manhood essentially
one with ours. His life is a distinctively human
phenomenon, moving always within the lines of an
authentically human mind and will, and constituting thus
a revelation of God in humanity, " not partly in it and
partly out of it." Yet it is just when this has been
made clear that we adequately realise the wholly
exceptional quality of this human life. Jesus may be
described as ideal or normal man ; but these just epithets
produce a totally wrong impression if we do not add
immediately that manhood of this ideal type has existed
but once in history.2 He is unique in virtue of His
sinlessness — the one quite unspotted life that has been
1 Jn 519 829 1410.
2 A character at once perfectly ideal and completely human is not in
conceivable, as has been maintained ; but how difficult the conception is
may be seen from the fact that it has never been represented with success in

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 401
lived within our sinful race. The deep and ineffaceable
impression made by Jesus on those around Him cannot
be dismissed as illusory. It is clear that His own con
sciousness of sin, had it existed, however faintly, must
have affected His demeanour; that His followers must
have observed the tokens of a bad conscience ; and that
such tokens, had they been present, must have profoundly
modified their view of Jesus. No one doubts, then, that
the disciples represented Jesus as without sin, and it is
morally inconceivable that they should have held to this
belief in defiance of better knowledge. Once the fact of
His sinlessness has been apprehended, however, we can
put forward strong antecedent grounds for accepting it.
Only a sinless person can guarantee the Divine pardon
of sin. If redemption is to be achieved, the Eedeemer
must stand free of moral evil. As the source of victorious
spiritual energy He must Himself be in utter oneness
with the will of God. The perfect moral health, the
unstained conscience, to which He is slowly raising others,
must be present absolutely in His own life. If He shed
His blood for the remission of sins, it is because He is
without spot or blemish. Like to His brethren in all
else, He is unlike them here. Yet it is no paradox to
say that such unlikeness makes His kinship perfect ; for
sin had made Him not more a man, but less. Sin de
humanises, and by its entrance the perfection of His
vital sympathy would have been irrecoverably lost.
Just here is our problem. As the record proves,
Jesus underwent repeated and acute temptation ; tempted,
we feel, He must have been, if we are right in counting on
His sympathy in the struggle. Yet are the temptations
of the sinless real ? In such a nature, what door can open
and let in the base allurement ? How can evil find
resonance where there is neither inherited bias to evil nor
weakness due to previous transgression ?
imaginative literature. Tennyson's Arthur and George Eliot's Daniel
Deronda are the best-known modern failures. Of Jesus only can it be said,
Das Vmulangliche, hier wvrd's Ereigniss.
26

402 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Now we must distinguish clearly between temptation
and sin. Temptation has become actual when the lower
aim is felt as in collision with the higher ; and if the
lower aim be justifiable in its own time and place, as an
appeal to inborn instinct, the felt shock of both within the
moral consciousness is not yet sin. Not even the struggle
that may ensue is sin. But sin is present when the
decision for the higher fails, or comes too slowly. Now
Jesus' nature, being integrally human, formed a medium
through which the solicitation alike of higher and lower
ends came knocking at His heart. It may well be that
certain species of temptation — to forms of evil we name
carnal — had virtually no existence for His mind. If it
was so, His redeeming power over the slaves of sensuality
is not thereby limited ; for to the completeness of the
Eedeemer it is not essential that He should undergo each
individual temptation by which men may be assailed.
What is essential is that He should be " schooled " in
temptation, should taste and see what it is to repel the
approach of evil through a lowly trust in God. But
however this may be, at least He was vulnerable in all His
normal instincts, emotions, desires. The longing for
triumph ; the impulse to take the shortest path to power ;
a fear of death which is something almost wholly physical ;
a shrinking from close contact with sin — these natural,
innocent tendencies and the like supplied very real
opportunities of rebellion. They constituted what Moberly
has called " the external capacity, and as it were machinery,
for selfishness " ; they meant a pressure on the will
against which force must be exerted in steadfast resistance
and with a real pain of conflict. Thus the Holy One
learned obedience. For the holiness of Jesus was no auto
matic necessity of being. It was possessed only by being
perpetually won anew, in a dependence of self-committal
which had indeed no relation to a consciousness of sin, as
with us, but which rested none the less on the felt need of
an uninterrupted derivation of life and power from the
Father. Precisely how this reality of tempted conflict can

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 403
have occurred within a sinless mind is no doubt inscrutable.
For us indeed it must be so ; Bince the only psychological
analogies we can use have their origin in our own sinful
experience.1 It may be that we speak too much of Jesus' conflict,
forgetting that His was a goodness altogether radiant,
victorious, full of charm. Holiness in Him revealed that
ease and mastery which belong to all perfection : " He did
the most wonderful things as if nothing else were con
ceivable." Yet, on the other hand, while temptation never
made appeal in Him to frailty resulting from previous sin,
He was not therefore absolved from painful effort. Sin
less temptations may be the most severe. The acquired
appetite of the drunkard may be resisted with benefit to
himself ; but the natural appetite of thirst, if persistently
denied satisfaction, will prove fatal. Not only so ; but the
resistance of temptation may be torture to a good man,
whereas a bad man yields easily. In the light of these
things we can see that our Lord, sinless as He was, had no
exemption from keen and cruel warfare. None was ever
tempted so subtly, and triumph came through agony.
Thus the great High Priest of men gained an inner view
of the tempted life, and can be touched with a feeling of
our infirmities. No miracle of Christ equals the miracle of His sinless
life. To be holy in all thought and feeling ; never to fail in
duty to others, never to transgress the law of perfect love
to God or man, never to exceed or to come short — this is a
condition outstripping the power of imagination and almost
of belief. Here is a casement opening on a Diviner world.
But it is essential that we should not leave the sin
lessness of Jesus as a bare, uninterpreted fact. Plainly
it is in no sense self-explanatory. It asks for deeper
elucidation and analysis. And reflection proves that the
ground or reason of it must be sought in our Lord's unique
1 Ultimately, it may be argued, the complete certainty that Jesus never
sinned is given by our faith in His person ; for there is no way of proving
experimentally the impossibility of a fact.

404 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
relation to God. The moral transcendence of Jesus' life is
unintelligible save as it originated in, and was nourished
by, a . vital and organic connection with the Father, who
alone is holy with the holiness manifest in Jesus. It is
vain to speak of Him simply as different from others in
degree ; the. difference is one of type. When we ask why
He uniformly triumphed over sin, whereas we fail, the
answer, as we shall see, must lie in that element of His
, being in virtue of which He is one with God.1 Or, to put
it otherwise, by the side of yet suffused with those
qualities in Christ which we are summoned to imitate and
reproduce, and which reveal Him as the pattern of filial life,
we discern a yet more august quality — inimitable, solitary,
supreme. It is a new and lonely type of spiritual con
sciousness, an unshared relation of identity with the Father.
Divinity is here the source and basis of perfect manhood.
And the bearing of all this on personal religion?
Has faith a vital stake in the complete yet wholly ex
ceptional humanity of Jesus Christ ? Only a partial
answer can be attempted now. The true manhood of
Jesus is of cardinal significance in four ways.
(1) It guarantees a veritable incarnation. If the
manhood of Christ is unreal, at any remotest point,
God has not quite stooped to unity with man. He has
not come so low as we require ; there has been reservation
and refusal ; some part of our burden, after all, has been
left untouched. " The unassumed is the unhealed." In
that case, no matter from what height Christ came, He
has not reached to us, but has stopped short. " A little
less, and what worlds away ! " But it has not been so.
The centre of the catholic faith is that God in Christ came
the whole way : " forasmuch as the children were sharers in
flesh and blood, He also in like manner partook of the same."
He drew near in person, that we might clasp Him as a
kinsman in our arms, and feel the Infinite One to be our
own. This has touched men most, breaking the world's
1 Cf. infra, chap. vii.

PERSONAL RELIGION AND JESUS' MANHOOD 405
hard heart. The measure of Jesus' humanity is the
measure of God's love. As it has been put, " love is not
in full possession until it can fully display itself " ; and as
Christ passed from depth to depth, entering one chamber
after another of human experience, and submitting at
length to death itself, He gave a proof of Divine love than
which nothing greater can be conceived.1 Any other
reading of the Gospel, such as that of modern liberalism,
offers a great view of God's love, but not the greatest we
can imagine. That we find only in the Life truly in
carnate. So that the reality of the manhood is cardinal.
There was a day, not long past, when prophetic inspiration
was thought of as submerging and all but obliterating the
prophet's consciousness. Of him it might be said : the
more a seer, the less a man. We have learnt that this is
really unethical, and that on these lines no sort of justice
can be done to moral personality. So there are ways of
conceiving the advent of God in human life which frankly
supersede the finitely personal, making human powers no
more than selfless organs of Deity. But to redeem us
God must not merely express Himself ; He must express
Himself in terms of an experience which is our own.
(2) It provides an essential basis of atonement. All
true Christian ideas in regard to atonement may be viewed
as aspects of Jesus' self-identification with the sinful. If
then He who lived and died for men had Himself been
man only in seeming, or in part, no expiation were after
all made in our name ; for only He can act with God for
man who speaks from man's side. It is as Christ became
our fellow, moving in a true manhood through obedience,
conflict, and death, that He entered into our condition fully
and availed in our behalf to receive from God's hand the
suffering in which is expressed the Divine judgment upon
sin. Jesus' manhood is the corner-stone of reconciliation.
(3) It secures the reality of a perfect example. Jesus
is our pattern in faith and prayer ; but it cannot be too
clearly understood that no act can be exemplary which is
1 Cf. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 204.

406 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
not first of all dutiful. The human Christ prayed, not in
order that He might furnish a model to His disciples, but
because to Him prayer was an inward need and duty. So
profound and unmanning was His fear in Gethseruane
that like the children of men He took refuge under God's
shadow, and was heard for His reverent trust. In our
temptations it is everything to know that He also was
tempted. And here that sinless manhood, which has
seemed at times to remove Him from us, and to make
sympathy impossible, reveals itself as the nerve and spring
of His redemptive power. It is not, one may surmise, to
those who themselves once fell in drunkenness or lust
that frail men and women instinctively look for aid and
hope ; it is rather to those who, although schooled in
fellow-feeling by temptation, have kept their virtue pure.
So Jesus' victory constitutes Him the source of victory
for men; in Him, if we may put it so, Divine grace is
humanised, and made available for sinners. Abstract
ethical and religious truth may prove lacking in power
to sustain the will; whereas it wins us as both vital and
vitalising when embodied in a living form. In the Son of
Man, the Word made flesh, perfect righteousness is put
within the range of trust and love. The fruits of the
Spirit are but the aspects of Jesus' character.
(4) It points to our eternal destiny. It is because
Jesus the Man has risen from the grave and passed to a
transcendent life with God that we too may triumph in
prospect over death. As St. Paul has expressed it, with
his most delicate precision in the use of our Lord's names,
"if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so
them also which sleep in Jesus shall God bring with Him."
For the resurrection of Jesus, our human Surety and
Comrade, is a test case; and as such it has fixed a
principle, revealing as it does how the Father's love and
power will deal with all believers. Thus once more the
central significance of Christ's true humanity is manifest.
On its integrity and perfect wholeness rest for us the
unspeakable consolations of faith in a blessed immortality.

CHAPTER VII.
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST.
In the foregoing chapters we have essayed to bring out in
order the immediate certainties of the believing mind as
it apprehends the person of Jesus. Three points have so
far been ascertained. First, the distinctive attitude of
believers to Jesus is that of faith. Secondly, in its most
characteristic moments He is beheld as the Eisen One,
exalted and transcendent above all limits of space and
time. Thirdly, He is recognised as perfect Man. In the
last analysis each of these three points is vital — each
involves and is involved in the others. In the present
chapter our scrutiny of the intuitive affirmations of faith
is completed, and we endeavour to signalise the truth that
it spontaneously regards Christ as the personal manifesta
tion of God in human form. Prior to all theories of the
fact stands this spiritual assurance that He is Divine.
It will appear that this is less a new additional result —
though it may be stated with a new emphasis — than the
one adequate method in which previous results can be
formulated. The question of Christ's divinity, as a doctrinal issue,
may obviously be approached from more than one side. It
may be approached, for example, by way of it priori
Liteeattjkb — Reville, History of the Dogma of the Deity of Jesus Christ,
1878 ; Dale, Christian Doctrine, 1894 ; Herrmann, Communion with God,
1906 ; Gore, Bamptpn Lectures, 1891 ; Contentio Verilatis, 1907 ; Nitzsch,
Evangelische Dogmatik2, 1896 ; Kunze, Dieewige GottheitJesu Christi, 1904 ;
Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 1893 ; Liddon, Divinity of our Lord,
1867; Dykes in Eoypotitory Times, Oct. 1905-Jan. 1906; Thieme, Yonder
GoUheit Christi, 1911. 407

408 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
postulate. Starting from the human need of redemption,
the theologian may inquire how the Bedeemer's person
must be constituted in order to satisfy this need, arriving
finally at the conclusion that since only God can redeem,
Christ must be a God-man, in whom divinity and humanity
are combined. Clearly, however, this severely logical
procedure, of which the Cur Deus Homo of Anselm is
the best-known instance, provides no independently real
guarantee of truth. Like the ontological proof of God,
it is a piece of purely conceptual argumentation, not indeed
without utility as giving to our thought direction and
expectancy, but incapable by itself of convincing modern
minds. To fix our idea of Christ by logic, even if our
point of departure be the infinite gravity of sin, must be
described as an infidelity to the fundamental principle that
Christology is always experimental, and that the relevant
experience is kindled by the touch of fact. The real
Christ is given in history, not constructed in the laboratory
of consciousness. The second method is the experiential. Not the need
of redemption but the fact of redeemed souls is the datum.
Taking a line laid down by Sehleiermacher, the argument
moves back from the influence of Jesus on men to the
character of His person as influential cause. Of this Man
who does a Divine work upon us — opening to the estranged
a way into God's communion, making goodness an assured
career — we have no option but to predicate personal
Godhead. The Eedeemer is as the redemption. We have
already seen that as a mode of proceeding this is quite
essential to a spiritual conception of Christ. By any other
route we reach only historical information or statutory
dogma. True faith in Jesus' higher nature is a personal
confession. It is the result of our finding in Him " the
presence and power of what declares itself to be not less
than God Himself." Apart from this, there is no recog
nisable reality in the doctrine of His Godhead.
Yet we must not too hastily conclude that an
experiential view is self-sufficient as it stands, with a

SOURCES OF BELIEF 409
cogency which requires no reference to the trans-subjective
sphere of things. After all, the primal and creative source
of belief concerning Jesus is recorded fact. Hence the,
question of His divinity has in recent times been
approached chiefly from the side of His self-consciousness
as unfolded in the Gospels. We are justified in assuming
that in- works and life and word Jesus veritably revealed
His inmost being. No assertion of His loftier nature is
tenable which is out of relation to His convictions about
Himself ; if to the end He remained personally unconscious
of transcendent oneness with God, our affirmation of it
will produce no impression. The final court of appeal,
therefore, is Jesus' witness to Himself as echoed and
apprehended by the believing mind. Faith is a response
to His self-presentation. We are obliged to call Jesus
what He called Himself and what the new life He inspires
proves Him to have been.
As to the fact that Jesus constrains men to assert His
Godhead — constrains them alike by His self-revelation
and by His redeeming influence in their lives — no question
is really possible. In believing Him to be God the
Christian consciousness may be right or wrong, but that
it does actually believe this is incontestable. It knows
Him as supreme, transcendent, and only to be adored.
No one will plead that a consideration of this sort covers
or vindicates the countless subtle refinements of ecclesiastical
Christology ; none the less, however, it points with un
wavering conviction to what is properly the heart and
substance of Christological belief, the truth that Christ
is God incarnate. To this the Church has expressly
committed itself age after age. Not indeed that faith is
always fully aware how much is involved in giving Christ,
experimentally, the highest place. Even under strong
pressure, men have frequently chosen to ignore the
intellectual conclusions in which religious practice ought
reasonably to terminate. Moral acceptance of Christ's
divinity, combined with a refusal to acquiesce in its
explicit affirmation, is no unfamiliar phenomenon. It may

410 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
be due to philosophical agnosticism in part, or to a
conception of God more ontological than ethical which
on that account is. felt to have no recognisable oneness or
identity with the historic Jesus. Whatever the cause, at
least it is certain that many sincere minds to-day are
conscious of perplexity and reluctance when presented
with eredal statements that in very truth " God was
in Christ." As a symbol or metaphor dimly shadowing
the greatness of His redemptive powers they are eager
to accept these words. But they are staggered by the
doctrine, as a doctrine, that Christ is personally one with
the Highest.Nevertheless, if we may not rest in an eventual antinomy
which holds religious and intellectual convictions apart for
ever, it is incumbent on us to enunciate the right conclusion
which follows from Jesus' felt power in life. What He
is to us reveals what He is truly in Himself; and the
revelation may and must be put in words. Our findings
in earlier parts of the argument leave us no choice. Thus,
it may be remembered, we were led to the conclusion
that Christian Theology must embrace Christology as a
vital and integral constituent ; but Christology is only a
reasoned account of how the Man Jesus has for us the
value and reality of God. Christ is part of what believers
mean by " Godhead " ; and this fact, which merely as
a fact is unquestioned, must be taken seriously in our
doctrinal formulations. Again, the moral authority of
Christ presents itself in the Christian conscience as invested
with absolute supremacy, as infinite with the infinitude of
God ; also a fact which insists on doctrinal interpretation.
It means that the voice of Jesus finds us at depths of our
being accessible to God only. Again, we have an intuition
of Divine suffering in the cross. Involuntarily we are
made aware in presence of Christ's passion that it is God
Himself who bears our sin and carries our sorrow; that
the judgment upon evil uttered at Calvary is manifested
through suffering veritably Divine, and that Christ shares
the Divine life He thus pours out for sinners. Again,

EXPERIENCE AND CHRIST'S GODHEAD 411
Christ abides within His people, His life pervading theirs
with a creative underived power; but this capacity to
inhabit, the inner man, kindling life by an originating
impulse, is clearly something not predicable of a simply
human personality. If He be the Giver of a Divine
spiritual energy, how escape the assurance that He is
Himself Divine ? Or if He reveals the Father perfectly,
must He not participate by right of nature in that which
He reveals ? Finally, we arrived at the clear position
that specifically Christian faith in God the Father is linked
indissociably to faith in Christ the Son. Without any
duplication of the object grasped by faith — which would
be polytheism — believers cast themselves down into the
depths of Christ's compassion, and in Him find rest for
their souls. Yet nothing can be more certain than that
in this sense Christians can believe in God only.
How shall we describe this wondrous Person, in whom
these attributes of power and supremacy are found, this
Jesus who transmits a life no one else had transmitted to
Him ? He is highest in the highest realm we know ;
through Him, as first cause, our race has received the
creative inflow of the Unseen pouring from fountains of
the great deep. Which is the right predicate ? How
name the Presence that constitutes Him our Eedeemer ?
Surely it is very God Himself. Nor in His case can we
employ that supreme term seriously except as we employ
it in its loftiest meaning; conscience will be put off
with nothing less, for conscience is monotheistic through
and through. " The supreme thing," it has been said, " is
for Christ to be really God to the affections, the conscience,
and the will. He whom I obey as the supreme authority
over my life, He whom I trust for the pardon of my sins,
He to whom I look for the power to live righteously, . . .
He, by whatever name I may call Him, is my God. If I
attribute the name to another, I attribute to Christ the
reality for which the name stands: and unless, for me,
Christ is one with the Eternal, He is really above the
Eternal — has Diviner prerogatives and achieves Diviner

412 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
works." a We cannot debar Him from the highest place.
The hypothesis that while more than man He is less than
God, has lost all interest for the human mind. That issue
was fought to a finish, and will not be reopened ; all agree
that with the victory of Arius the Church would have sunk
into polydemonistic heathenism. Faith knows its Lord as
Divine equally in value and fact — not a higher angelic
visitant, not a man sainted or deified, but a historic
incarnation of the only God there is.
So far we have searched for the exact descriptive term
apposite to One who does for us a specific service and
sustains towards us a specific relation. By simple tran
script of experience we predicate of Christ true deity.
Nothing more high is possible, nothing lower is veracious.
But this immediate utterance of faith is found on examina
tion to harmonise with the only admissible interpretation
of certain notable features of our Lord's human experience.
That unique manhood asks to be explained in the sense
that we are bound to seek for its dynamic ground and
sufficient reason. To stand before the fact of Christ dumb
and uninquiring is impossible: Nor is it enough to pro
nounce Him only an exception to the normal course of
things, a variation, a mysterious and inscrutable Solitary
who is dispensed unaccountably from our conditions. This
is to restate the problem, not solve it.
I would single out three distinct aspects of Christ's
unique humanity which are intelligible only if construed
as based upon and vitally conditioned by His true God
head. These are His sinlessness, His special Sonship, and
His transcendent risen life.
(a) Jesus' complete freedom from sin is obviously more
than a moral accident without parallel before or since.
In the supreme point of view — that of the Divine purpose
to save men — His complete victory over sin is not some
thing merely which happened ; it is something which
was bound to happen. Faith cannot acquiesce in the
1 Dale, Christian Doctrine, 313.

SINLESSNESS IS DIVINE 413
thought that conceivably the Divine redeeming plan might
have been frustrated ; yet frustration would have been had
Jesus yielded to temptation even once. On the other hand,
the realisation of a plan which is Divine is necessarily
due to God ; to 'God's presence in Christ, accordingly, we
must ascribe the stainlessness of His career. It was not
humanity which achieved its own salvation, using this
particular member of the race as agent or medium ; re
demption as a whole and in every stage is something of
which God properly is Doer, by whom each decisive saving
act is done. And this means that all hung upon Jesus'
sinless fulfilment of His vocation, while yet if that fulfil
ment was to issue in salvation it could never be the in
dividual unauthorised exploit of a man, but the outcome
rather of a thought and energy in which was moving the
very life of God.
Not only so ; but a study of what we may call the
life-history of sinlessness— all that mediates it as a quality
of adult consciousness — shows it to be possible only in
One whose interconnection with the tissue and fibre of
human life is, somehow, conditioned. For when in us
the stage of infancy passes into childhood, the marks of
congenital imperfection are already evident. Sin in us
may be described as a thing of nature — of a nature radi
cally social in antecedents and environment — before it is
a thing of full conscious volition. Now the mature adult
life of Christ was pure from all trace of sin, which means
that in His case this initial derangement or sickness of
soul was absent wholly ; during the months and years of
the soul's awakening those strong efficacious germs of evil
which unfailingly develop within us later, left Him un
touched. In other words, there was that in Him from
the first which offered a completely effective resistance
to the corrupt influence of environment, obviated the dis
turbance of His perfect spiritual growth, and secured the
inner fount of subsequent feeling and will from all defile
ment. Hence, when the infant Christ woke up gradually
into clear ethical experience, it was with a nature un-

414 . THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
tainted, immaculate, nowise handicapped from the very
outset by seeds of evil already germinating in the soil
of character. In all others the earliest stirrings of self-
consciousness are vitiated by a hereditary disposition to
go wrong ; in Christ this predisposition is non-existent, for
in our human circumstances a sinless personality cannot
be preceded by a sinful infancy. How shall we account
for this quite exceptional life-story ? If we feel dissatisfied
with agnosticism or with a merely positive acknowledg
ment' of the exceptionalness as a fact, if we wish to see it
based in some real intelligible ground, this, it appears,
can only lie in Jesus' possession of some inward and
essential relationship with God, a living actuality which
formed the conditioning prius of His ethical self-determina
tion, and gave rise to such formative impulses as secured
that He should pass through the immaturities of childhood
with an undiminished and unimpeded capacity to accom
plish His redeeming task. Not indeed that Jesus' unity
with God is a natural phenomenon, manifesting itself by
(as it were) purely mechanical automatisms. His original
oneness with God stands here solely for the potentiality
and basis of sinless manhood ; but it stands for nothing
less than this. The sinless preface to a sinless adult life
is in itself suggestive of a vital and inherent identity
with the Divine. " It is a miracle," Kahler has said,
" which you cannot explain merely by an uncorrupted
basis of nature. It is intelligible only if this Child
entered on earthly existence with other contents of
personal life given Him from the beginning than we
all; if in all forms and at every stage of His souMife
there was working itself out an unconditionally inde
pendent Will, if God's grace and truth are become flesh
in Him." x This means, in psychological terms, that from
outset to end no desire, motion, conception, or resolve
existed in the soul of Jesus which was not the affirmation
and execution of the will of God, dwelling in Him and
informing His entire life. Only one limit to God's pres-
1 Der sogennant historische Jesuss, 54,

PERFECT SONSHIP IS DIVINE 415
ence in Him remained — the limit of finitude. In His
every act, " in the patience and the venture and the sacri
fice of self which lost life only to find it," we behold
adoringly the human life of God.
(b) The Gospels reveal Jesus .as living' in a relation
toward the Father of peculiar intimacy. It is a relation
which He Himself designates as that of Sonship, but the
Sonship is such as to be per se unattainable by others ;
" as there is only one Person who can be called the Father,
so there is only one who can be called the Son." J The
consciousness of thus belonging to God dates at all events
from the Baptism. Many great sayings of Christ evidently
presuppose this impassable difference between the Son and
all mankind. Moreover, He at no time leaves it doubt
ful that this His peculiar Sonship is the medium to the
world of God's redeeming life. Sonship, that is, is not
something which denotes and interprets His likeness to
the men around Him — His presence on their plane, His
temptability, His lowliness, the limitations of His know
ledge; it is something which signalises His distinction
from them, His incomparable and transcendent dignity.
Not because but though He was a Son, He learned obedi
ence through suffering. The term certainly implies sub
ordination; none the less it points to and emphasises an
unshared position of nearness to God by which His very
person was constituted. All this comes to the surface in
the greatest Christological passage in the New Testament,
Mt II25-30, the climax of Jesus' witness to Himself. In
spite of attempts to re-write these verses, we are justified
in saying that the knowledge of God professed by Jesus
is conceived exclusively as given in and with His filial :
consciousness. He does not mean to tell us how the Son
came to know the Father, any more than how the Father
came to know the Son. He is speaking of a knowledge
possessed by the Son, qua Son. As the context indicates,
it is a knowledge of the Father which comprehends His
formerly incompletely revealed purpose to save men, and
1 Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 268,

416 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
of the Divine will and nature of which that purpose, now
realised in Jesus, is a manifestation. In communicating
to sinful men what they can receive of this life-giving
truth, Jesus is the Father's perfect organ, the measure
of His perfectness being stated in the unqualified and
quite amazing words : " No one knoweth the Son save
the Father." There is that in Jesus which is so great, so
worthy of His mission, so infinite, that it is comprehended
by the Father only.
It is then agreed on all hands that Jesus lived in
a perfect reciprocal understanding with God ; it is agreed,
further, that according to the documents this Sonship
signified for Jesus' own mind a unique and incommunicable
relation to God and man. Assuming the truth of Jesus'
interpretation, how far does a relationship carry with
it a theory of its own nature ? Is it a simple fact not
admitting of deeper scrutiny ; a fact to be accepted, not
explained ? Is the Sonship exhausted in Jesus' mental
experience of it, or is that mental experience itself the
phenomenon, the symptom and manifestation, of an un
created noumenal reality ?
The point is one of difficulty. Thus by many writers
the Sonship of Christ is virtually defined as the equivalent
of His feeling of unity with God ; He was Son because
He knew God in a specific manner — that of uninterrupted
filial communion. Dissatisfied with this, others have
insisted that behind the will and thought of Jesus stood
a Divine substance or nature, of which will and thought
are but ^attributes, and which is somehow real apart from
them. This, however, is equally unsatisfactory with the
position it controverts, and indeed has no meaning except
on the assumption that substance as a category is higher
and more adequate than Subject, or intelligent conscious
Will — a view against which the history of philosophy
since Kant has been one long and convincing protest. If
we have learnt anything from the modern criticism of
categories, it surely is that no category can be higher
than personality or self-consciousness. For us, then, the

SONSHIP AS ETHICAL 417
proper inference is that the essential and' noumenal
divinity of Christ the Son ought to be formulated in
conceptions other than substance or nature and the like,
which really oppose the metaphysical aspect of Sonship
to the ethical. Theology has been seriously discredited
in the past by neglect of the truth that our Lord's Son-
ship, whatever more, is ethical through and through,
and that unless we could fill up the idea of Sonship
with the love, trust, and obedience which make life filial,
it would mean nothing for our minds. From these mis
understandings, however, we are slowly being freed.
Perhaps the modern danger is that in our new-found joy
in the ethical, we should forget that the ethical is also the
metaphysical, that it represents the key to being as such.
The ultimate and central reality of things is Will. Now
the will of Christ as Son is one with God's will not
partially, or intermittently, or by way of metaphor ; it is
one identically. No doubt we speak loosely of making
our wills one with God's ; but although our wills may be
harmonious with God's will, or obedient to it, or (so to
speak) parallel with it, they are never really one with it.
Yet such real unity is precisely what we predicate of
Christ; the self-conscious active principle of the Son's
life subsisted in perfect and identical union with the
Father. This of course does not carry us once more
beyond the moral relations of love and trust ; that were to
de-ethicise Sonship all over again. What is meant is
that these relations must be interpreted at their full
value — as significant of truth proper, not mere metaphors
— and when we take them so, it appears that essentially
(which means not in virtue of some ineffable substance,
but in that central Will by which personality is con
stituted) Christ is one with God. The name Son, there-,
fore, signifies two things : first, Christ's true subordination
to the Father ; secondly, His inherent and personal unity
with the Father. The Divine intimacies of His relation
to the Eternal are only interpretable in terms which
exhibit Him not merely as the perfect saint, but as
27

418 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
One whose ' life is definitively centred within the life
of God. (c) The risen Life. As an additional third point,
this is strictly relative to the former two. Jesus' utter
sinlessness, His unique Sonship, and finally His exalted
life constitute a chain of facts not properly intelligible
apart from His personal divinity. They are mutually
illuminative facts. The resurrection was not the only
event which revealed Christ's greatness, but it did reveal
it. By it He was declared Son of God with power, and
its significance, for the first witnesses, was due to the
fact that it arrived as the climax and interpretation of
the incomparable life by which it was preceded. Jesus'
freedom from all sin and His unprecedented experience
of filial communion had stirred deep questionings which
the resurrection answered. Hitherto the . disciples had
perceived the transcendent quality of His being only by
faintest intuition ; now at length all things fell into place
as His inherent oneness with God was realised. They
beheld Him thenceforward in "glory" — entered, that is,
on a career of redeeming efficacy which embraces the
whole world and pervades the secret chambers of the
soul. That faith we share ; their argument, accordingly,
we repeat (though it may be in other forms), that this
exaltation to the exercise of an omnipotent and universal
love indicates a more than creaturely being which needs
for its true and precise explication the categories of the
Divine. Obviously this argument would be worthless
if, for Jesus, resurrection were no more than re-
animation. But the resurrection of Jesus is really
differentiated from all imaginable parallels by its sequel,
by all to which it formed the porch and gateway. The
sovereign power of His risen life is something in which
ex hypothesi He can have no successor. Thus the trans
cendent activities briefly described in the word " exalta
tion " not only point in the same direction as Jesus' sin
lessness and special Sonship ; it is harmonious with them :
there is an interior correlation between the perfect filial

IS GODHEAD THE RIGHT WORD ? 419
life and the universal glory in which at last it merged. I
In each case an unshared experience proclaims an unshared
identity with the Divine. It is part then of the final truth
of things that only He to whom belongs the free inde
pendence of the Infinite over against the finite can fill
the place in which Christian faith now beholds its Lord.
And yet the question may be asked, asked by faith not
unbelief, whether " Godhead " is the perfectly right word.
Haering's expositions of the Christian view of Jesus is so
admirably clear and loyal that a peculiar interest attaches
to his suggestion of a doubt.1 Not that he questions the
historic claims of the word " Godhead." To think of
Christ as of God has, he points out, been the hall-mark
of Christian life and Christian theology throughout the
centuries, except in Eationalistic circles of the eighteenth
century. Further, although the designation of Christ as
" God " seldom occurs in the writings of the New Testa
ment, as fair exegesis will admit, yet to infer that the
early Church felt the designation a too lofty one would
be erroneous. Various other expressions are equivalent.
Christ is bracketed with God the Father ; titles reserved
for Jehovah in the Old Testament are ascribed to Him
with unembarrassed simplicity. What the Christians
meant, indeed, is shown by the impression made on the
non-Christian world, which had not the least objection
to a new additional deity being included in the pantheon,
but instantly recognised that to worship Jesus Christ
was a wholly different matter, implying as it did a revolu
tionising change in moral attitude. It is not going too
far to say that the Church, aware of the loose usage of
" God " in heathen quarters, must have been peculiarly
sensitive to the perils of misconception within the
Christian community itself, and must therefore have been
at especial pains to ensure that the term was attributed
1 Dogmatik, 425-26. Cf. also a deeply interesting passage in Harnack,
Aus Wissenschaft und Leben, ii. 70-71, where it is suggested that "God-
manhood " alone is the correct term.

420 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
to Jesus' person with a quite new significance. Haering
inclines on this ground to believe that the infrequency
of the word in the New Testament is due really to its
defect in clarity, its liability to misconstruction, and the
fatal ease with which it could be made to yield the poly
theistic suggestion of " a second God." Pursuing this line,
he contends that everything faith longs to say about
Christ can be said, adequately and lucidly, without em
ploying the term " Godhead," e.g. by the phrases Son of
God, Lord, or simply Jesus Christ. All believers are
united in the confession of Jesus Christ ; but under the
conditions in which we moderns live the assertion of His
" Godhead " is certain to divide. It will prove a burden
and perplexity to many who nevertheless adore Jesus as
their Lord and Saviour.
A second typical statement on the same side is that of
Faut.1 Granting the absolute character of the redemption
which Jesus mediates and in consequence the absolute
character of the Mediator's person, he yet holds that the
difficulties of predicating real deity are insurmountable.
He insists that Godhead was first ascribed to the exalted
Lord. But if we go so far, in logic we must go still
further and attribute Godhead also to Jesus of Nazareth —
which gives us pause. It is unfitting to speak of the
historic Christ as God, medium of the final revelation
though He be. For it blurs the interpretation of His
earthly life; also it conflicts gravely with Jesus' mono
theism. The one thing we dare not do is to create anta
gonism between faith in Jesus and His own creed. It
is simply unevangelical to dim the clear shining of the
Gospel by dogmatic assertions which collide with trust
in one only God, the Father Almighty.
In reply, it is to be observed in the first place that the
presence of difficulties cannot be final as an objection to
a given view. On any view the difficulties are immense,
the facts are full of them. Excessive simplification of
the data is often the bane of scientific inquiry ; and in the
1 Die Christologie seit Sehleiermacher, 97-98.

IS GODHEAD THE RIGHT WORD? 421
present instance the data may be so complex or many-sided
that — provided we have made up our mind to interpret
them doctrinally — nothing but a complex interpretation
will serve. It is also questionable whether the feeling
that Godhead is an unfitting predicate, as blurring the
outline of the human Jesus, may not be due to the abstract-
ness of the conception, and a too purely logical view of the
attributes it implies. Of course the notion of deity may
be construed in ways which render Christ's true manhood
indistinct or actually dubious ; but these ways are wrong.
Thus, confusing, as logicians say, the dictum simpliciter
with the dictum secundum quid, we may argue that since
Godhead as such is omniscient and omnipresent, the
Divine Christ must have been so ; whereas the question
can only be decided by the recorded evidence of the
Gospels, from which alone we can learn what Godhead
signifies in an Incarnate experience. Or again, placing
the reality of God not in His will and character but in
an inscrutable and unethical substance, we may conclude
that deity could be present in Christ only by being laid
alongside of His manhood, not in qualitative identity but in
quantitative juxtaposition; and this also will prevent our
seeing the individual Jesus as intelligibly Divine. It will
mislead us, in Moberly's phrase, into keeping open a non-
human sphere of the Incarnation. It was precisely the
wish to read the divinity of Christ through His true
humanity which inspired the Kenotic theories of His
person ; and whatever may be thought of certain speculative
details in which they became entangled, it is still con
ceivable that the principle they represent, not necessarily
in the older form, may succeed in mitigating the diffi
culties of the problem.
Even if difficulties remain, still the facts which the name
" God " indicates may be so organic to Christian experience
as to force us, even against our will, to insist upon its
truth. We may not be able (as it were) to get our hand
round the reality to which it points, but we perceive or
feel its presence. For after all, Christianity lives not in a

422 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
vacuum but in the world of real men. It is preached to
keen and independent minds, who ask questions they wish
to be answered. Is it possible to proclaim Christ in such
an audience as Lord of all, who shares the throne of God,
on whom faith and love and hope depend, the transcendent
source of new life, the unseen Presence that arraigns the
conscience and sustains the fainting heart, without evoking
the simple interpellation : This Christ of whom you speak,
is He, or is He not, one with the Ultimate Beality whom
we name God ? If Christianity is a religion, not a con
tribution to moral philosophy, where do we place Him in
the sphere of things, on God's side, or merely on ours ?
When once these questions rise, they cannot long be
evaded ; no well-intentioned conspiracy of . silence, no
combination of ultra-cautious propositions, will avail to
suppress the interrogator whose Christology in reality is
part of his spiritual life. Had the Church passed by the
question in the creeds, the outsider would have raised it.
We have seen that writers like Haering are themselves
clear that to speak of Christ's " Godhead " is justifiable if
we thereby mean simply to express an authentically religious
faith; and certainly we mean no more. It is only as a
brief statement of the Gospel that the term has any value.
But what is here contended is that the Gospel cannot be
expressed completely apart from this word, because the
word " God " has no synonyms. What the believer wishes
to assert is not that Christ is manifestly superhuman and
so far partially Divine, but that His will, the personal
energy which moved in Him, is identically the will of God.
Now that, in the last resort, can only be affirmed in one
way. " In the work Christ does upon us," writes Herr
mann, " we get a view of His Person which can only be
rightly indicated in the confession of His Deity." 1 Give
faith its own way, not curbing or tutoring or sophisticating
it, and this is the predicate for which it asks.
If it be said that deity, though possibly implied in the
believing view of Christ, is at all events not necessarily
1 Communion with God, 142.

ACQUIRED DIVINITY 423
a conscious implication, this may be readily conceded. At
the same time, it is the very business of theology to bring
faith's content to complete consciousness, and to articulate
in explicit and coherent terms what may lie enfolded in
unreflective experience. So by a wide circuit we return
to our starting-point ; to the conviction, namely, that Chris
tology as such is meaningless save on the presupposition
of Christ's Godhead, while on the other hand His Godhead
is no random or arbitrary postulate, but the reverse side
of the assurance that He is the proper object of saving
faith. " Worship God through Christ, and Christ only as
God," is an axiom inviolable and sacrosanct.
Is there the promise of light in the suggestion that
Christ's Godhead, though real, has been acquired ? The
idea sounds mythological, certainly ; yet it is not wholly
without advocates in recent literature. Thus, in his well-
known book on the Gottheit Christi, Schultz can speak
of Jesus at one point as a man " who became God in be
coming the Christ." 1 Beyschlag has put forward a similar
view. A few Eitschlians also may possibly have covered
an opinion rather like this with the phrase that Christ has
for us the religious value of God — in forgetfulness of the
maxim that usus sine re est figmentum. Now to find in
the New Testament the conception of a deity which became,
is simply a forlorn hope ; since the Jewish mind was by
its very constitution incapable of applying to God the
category of creation.2 It belongs to deity, not indeed to
be immutable but to be eternal — not born out of nothing
or moving from zero to an actual positive magnitude. So
faith views Jesus not merely as One who through grace
rose to a union with the Highest comparable to that
achieved by saints, though far more intimate, but as One
whose development in Divine-human personality took place
1 725-26.
2 I cannot follow Titius in his plea that the name " God " is employed in
the New Testament with a certain fluidity and indecision which would
admit of its being seriously applied to a creature. He cites 1 Co 85,
2 Co 44, Jn 1034(- (Theologische Rundschau, 1905, p. 365).

424 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
within His own native sphere of transcendence. Eeal
gains there were which accrued from His ethically
conditioned triumph — a new, universal place in the faith
and adoration of mankind ; but the quality of being which
made this place befitting, and which empowered Him for
its functions, reveals itself as no creation of time but an
eternal fact. Further, on the hypothesis according to
which the Godhead of Christ represents an extraneous
acquisition, we surrender the vast New Testament con
viction (implying a new thought of God) that the first
step into the human sphere taken by God in Christ was,
one of self-abnegation. Love, the spirit which gives its
own life to others, is the inmost reality of Christ and
of God, and it was manifested transcendently in His
historical advent. It was because deity was His from
before all time that He possessed the unspeakable gift to
lay on love's altar. On the other hand, the conception of
an acquired divinity stands on a lower ethical plane; it
has parted with the aspect of sublimity.1
Thus a point emerges which in such debates it is
only too easy to ignore — -the commanding place of the
incarnation in the Christian message. If the Church's
mind is to retain a luminous and defensible faith in our
Lord's divinity, that faith must present itself as so
wonderful in intensity and range, in triumphant redeeming
power, as to admit of no rival or surrogate. Let men
perceive that in Christ there stands before them One who
in spiritual being — that is, in will and character — is
identical with God Himself, that in Him we have to do
with nothing less than the Eternal, and at once it becomes
plain that revelation can go no further. In other words,
the dimensions of this revelation form the differential
1 Thieme has recently contended that we should drop the adjectives
"Divine" and even "Divine-human," and proposes instead that Jesus
should be characterised as " the Human Representative of God in ruling the
world" (Von der Gottheit Christi, 65). Does this make things easier?
Curiously, it is the revival of an old Judaistio conception of the Messiah
(Renan, Vie de Jisus, 258).

THE GOSPEL OF INCARNATION 425
feature of Christianity. It is not that Jesus Christ, even
if viewed as a historic personality with such a limited and
derived resemblance to God as is possible to other men,
may not convey a real manifestation of the Father — His
judgment and His mercy, His irreconcilable antagonism
to sin, His unwearied passion to reach and win the sinful.
" In what Jesus does to us," says Herrmann, " we grasp the
expression God gives us of His feeling towards us, or God
Himself as a Personal Spirit working upon us. This is
the form in which every man who has been reconciled
to God through Christ necessarily confesses His Deity,
even although he may decline to adopt the formula." 1
Now by " declining the formula " is meant occasionally
that the restricted and humanitarian Christ is sufficient
for human need, and to this the answer is simply that we
can conceive a far more glorious Gospel. We can conceive
the thought that God Himself should be present to heal
and save. And we judge that the most glorious thought
of God, always, is truest. Love in essence is desire and
will to suffer for the sake of the beloved : to enter his
condition, to take his load, to renounce every privilege.
Not to send a sympathetic message simply, or appear by
deputy, but to come in person, obstacles and counter-
reasons notwithstanding. Otherwise love is not known as
love. Even of God it is true that he who would save his
life must lose it.2
Humanity in every age has put its final misgiving into
the question whether God, if there be a God, is near to
us actively in love. It is a question audible in the deeper
undertones of the world's literature as well as in those
desperate experiments of supplication of which the lower
religions are full. Only in the message of Christ's identity
with God does it obtain an answer. Certainly we are
not justified in using such ideas in a priori modes, so
dictating beforehand how a Eedeemer must be fashioned.
Yet if our thought has been educated and expanded by
1 Communion with God, 143.
2 Cf. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 198 ff.

426 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
our discoveries in Jesus we shall have courage to believe
that the Love manifest in Him would shrink from no
moral possibility essential to the accomplishment of its
aim. This, so far from being a romantic modern notion,
was from the very outset the living core of apostolic
preaching. The discovery of Jesus' real identity had
created a quite new conception of Divine grace. " Herein
is love," writes St. John, " not that we loved God, but that
He loved us, and sent His Son." And the message broke
the world's hard heart. Our former insistence on Christ's
true manhood is in no sense incongruous with this, much
less its refutation ; for the acceptance of the authentic
human experience seals the eternal love as infinite. Thus
it is religion, not theology, which has the deepest stake
in the divinity of Christ. Let men be persuaded that it
is after all a metaphor only, an over-wrought symbol, the
adoring hyperbole of which must be quietly confessed in
the sane mood of reflection, and the high appeal which has
so long moved them will be impoverished past remedy.
The glory of God's love will fade into dimmer hues.
There will remain problems no word but this can solve,
and needs which no lesser gift can satisfy.

PART III.
THE TRANSCENDENT IMPLICATES
OF FAITH.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF INCARNATION.
At an earlier point, in a brief forecast of the argument,
we proposed to deal first with the immediate utterances of
faith regarding Christ, in the second place with such
remoter implicates or presuppositions as faith may involve.
The first part of our task now lies behind us. We have
sought to analyse and vindicate the instinctive or naive
content of faith. It has been made clear that for the
believing consciousness Christ has a central and incom
municable place in the religious sphere, that He reigns
for ever in the sovereign glory of His resurrection, that
He is perfect Man, and that He is inherently Divine. Of
these positions the Church is well assured ; when it looks
into its own mind, it finds them there.
We now turn to consider the transcendent problems
which the person of our Lord, thus believed in, offers to
intelligence in its work of constructive synthesis and inter-
Literatttre — Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 1903 ; Reischle, Theologie
und Religionsgeschichte, 1904 ; Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentums
und die Religionsgeschichte, 1902 ; Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian
Religion, 1903 ; Walker, The Spirit and the Incarnation, 1901 ; D'Arcy,
Idealism and Theology, 1899 ; Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity,
1899 ; Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, 1890 ; Biedermann, Christliche
Dogmatik, 1869 ; Gess, Christi Person und Werk, 1870-87.

428 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
pretation.1 Mysteries of faith can never be secluded from
the activities of reason; for the mind must strive to
discover its own unity even in its supreme object. If
Christianity proclaims Jesus as the keystone of the arch
of history, the redeeming presence of God in time, it must
not shrink from the attempt to think out and think
through the implied questions as to His ultimate relation
to God and man, and the union of Godhead and manhood
in His person. Among these questions one of the fore
most and most baffling is the idea of incarnation. By
asserting the divinity of Christ we have bound ourselves
to the doctrine that He is in some real sense God incarnate,
and we must now inquire as to the general significance
and credibility of this conception.
It has often been suggested that incarnation in the
case of Christ is rendered improbable by the fact that
allied beliefs occur in various ethnic religions. The con
viction that deity may take embodied form in this or that
great man was widely spread, for example, in Greece and
India. Out of this ineradicable mental tendency have
sprung a multitude of myths resembling the Christian
story. And this, it is held, discredits our doctrine from
the first. Jesus was deemed to be God incarnate only
because in that age the thought-form of incarnation was
commonly applied to impressive personalities. Men stood
ready with the conception, and no grave sense of intel
lectual difficulty restrained their use of it.
But it may be pointed out that in a moral world it is
no argument against the reality of a particular event that
its occurrence was expected. To those who believe in a
loving God it must always appear antecedently credible
that He will make answer in person to the religious
yearnings, the mysterious hopes, the infinite premonitory
1 They are real problems, and theology will always strive to solve them
by reasoned thought, but we are much more sure of our facts than of our
theories. While the fact of Christ's oneness with God is certain for faith,
interpretations of this oneness will vary to the end. But every form of
interpretation presupposes the initial impression of His transcendence.

PAGAN THEOPHANIES 429
gleams with which devout minds have been filled. These
considerations do not entitle us to disparage concrete
evidence. But if in the record of the past we encounter
One whose self-consciousness was undeniably unique, and
who has been able to communicate to men a new Divine
life, we need not refrain from acknowledging Him as God
manifest in the flesh merely on the ground that there have
been many " pagan Christs." The wants and longings
which led men to worship these redeemers of heathenism
were inspired of God, and into the empty pathetic hands
thus stretched to the skies He was in due time to put the
perfect fulfilment of the world's desire. Such experiences
formed the preparatio evangelica of ethnic man. They
constitute no proof that a real incarnation did not come at
last; at least they do so only if we illegitimately assume
that incarnation is per se impossible. Indeed they
corroborate our faith, for it is in keeping with what we
know of the Divine providential action that the final
redemption should not have been given abruptly, but in
relation to a rudimentary apparatus of ideas by which it
might- be apprehended. As it has been admirably put :
" If we are so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is
it odd that Patagonians (and others) should dream of a
Son of God." 1 These immemorial premonitions were not
the cause of the Gospel, but they enabled men to
appreciate it when it came.
Furthermore, it may be taken as certain that the first
believers did not borrow their greatest thoughts of Christ.
The source of their vocabulary — of such terms as " Lord "
and " Eedeemer " — is comparatively unimportant ; in any
case, older associations could not have dictated the
apostolic use of words. Echoes of pagan terminology may
doubtless occur in the New Testament, since there is no
copyright in phrases ; but the resemblance is in expression
only, not in meaning. We must" not be imposed upon by
what is but a specious verbal coincidence. Current ideas
of incarnation or apotheosis, far from impressing men of
1 Chesterton, Religious Doubts of Democracy, 18.

430 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
St. Paul's stamp, were dismissed as. abhorrently blasphe
mous. No pagan tales of theophany can have helped out
a Jewish apostle with his Christology, whatever may have
been the case with his Gentile hearers. It was his unique
experience of Christ, not the common habit of naming the
Emperor " Son of God," that led St. Paul up to the loftiest
summits of doctrine. He felt that in Jesus the Lord there
had been given him One of whom other " lords " were
false and usurping shadows.
And yet again, the Christian idea of incarnation is
sharply differentiated from all others by its purely ethical
quality. To the most cursory reader of the Greek myths,
on the other hand, it is plain that the Divine life is
conceived as moving on the lines of the physical world.
To quote Sir W. M. Eamsay : " The Divine nature, which is
the model and prototype of all the activity of man, was
seen living and dying in the life of trees and plants, of
grass and corn. . . . The life of nature never ends ; it
dies only to be born, different and yet the same. Men
mourn for the dead god, and immediately their mourning
is turned into joy, for the god is reborn." 1 The funda
mental conception of deity is imperfectly moralised.
Apollo could be pictured as the son of a wolf-mother.
The avataras of the god Vishnu, as narrated in Hindu
legend, betray in a variety of features the lowering
influence of a strongly pantheistic view of the world.
The Hindu mind is also lacking in a sense for history ;
and when we meet with the idea of incarnation in " the
encyclopaedic aggregation of cults and customs we know as
Hinduism," we must carefully guard ourselves against
supposing that supreme significance is thereby attributed
to some real personality, with a distinct place in the time-
series. The single fact that for Hinduism history belongs
to the realm of the illusory, while for Greek thought its
reality, in comparison with the unchanging forms of being,
is at most second-rate, is enough to prove how far in each
case the underlying philosophy differs from the Christian.
1 Hastings' DB. (Extra Volume), 123-24.

PAGAN THEOPHANIES 431
It is significant that both in Greek and Indian myth the
notion of a god becoming man appears in the most varied
circumstances and with the most diverse colours. The
metamorphosis takes place often, in many ages and many
lands. Incarnation and apotheosis melt into each other ;
for if the conception of Godhead is such that a whole
pantheon can be formed by the successive promotion of
princes and heroes, a plurality of Divine advents may be
easily conceded.
In Christianity, on the other hand, the idea of
incarnation, controlled as it is by a perfectly ethical
idea of God, is once for all lifted to a higher plane. It
is ethically conditioned, sustained by ethical motives,
directed to an ethical goal or final end. Jesus comes to
achieve a spiritual redemption, in modes appealing to mind
and conscience; and the qualities which bring men to
recognise Him are love, holiness, and redeeming power.
Only those who owe Him salvation can realise His higher
nature, and it is moral regeneration which gives the vision
of His glory. This is frequently ignored even in modern
statements, which confuse the ethical quality of Christ
with what is physical or natural in man as such, and,
misled by the erroneous premise, talk loosely of the Christ
in every man. But for all religion controlled by the New
Testament our Lord is not merely an incarnation of God;
as others may be in their own place ; He is the unique and
essential appearance of God in history. No duplication is
conceivable. Thus whatever dim foreshadowings of truth
may have visited the ethnic mind, they fail utterly to
explain the full and spiritual Christian faith. They are
shifting expressions of man's thought of God, not God's
self-expression to man.
No conception has seized the modern mind more
powerfully than that of Divine immanence, and we must
now inquire how it is related to the higher thought of
incarnation ? Let us first clear up our minds as to the
kind of immanence Christian men are free to assert. It

432 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
must be in harmony with that ethical monotheism which
the Old Testament transmitted to the New. Immanence
as expounded, for example, by Spinoza, who, though no
materialist, yet declares that God is a being neither mind
nor matter, but revealing Himself in both, and not appar
ently more in one than in the other, has always failed to
meet the requirements of conscience. Nor will any view
suffice which — often no doubt unconsciously — represents
God as an extremely attenuated kind of matter diffused
throughout space. It is also necessary that we should
avoid confusing immanence with identity. God inhabits,
pervades, moves, inspires the world ; in this sense He is
immanent as the soul is immanent in the body, with a
dynamic ubiquity involving a directly active relation to
each part. Yet soul and body are not identical, nor by
analogy is God identical with the world. In order that
the will of God may be the energy of the universe, it must
be transcendent to that which it indwells. No one can be
so keenly aware of the limits of the Divine immanence as
the sinner, to whom repentance has brought home the
divergence of self and God with a vivid realisation which
is sharpened and registered by the sense of guilt. In
short, we cannot operate with any conception of immanence
that blots out, or shows indifference to, ethical distinctions.
But this all views eventually do which have been formed
on the analogy of space in relation to its contents.
Fidelity to moral fact, then, obliges us to emphasise, as
a fundamental principle, the truth that Divine immanence
is essentially a matter of degree, and that the degrees of it
are morally conditioned. This means that in adjustingjhe
idea of incarnation to it we~ob'tain muchjess light or help
than might have_been "supposed from the conception of
Divine immanence in nature— the progressive manifesta-
tion_of_God in matter, as it has been called ; primarily for_
the reason-that matter is jncapable ..of assimilating or
reflecting the chara^teristic^ualities of God, holiness and
love. It must always be for us an opaque and. inscrutable
problem ;how the impersonal, the. unconscious or merely.

DEGREES OF IMMANENCE 433
sentient, can be the organ or abode of Supreme Mind. So
inadequate is form to content that they seem for ever
incommensurable. More light is derivable from the Divine
indwelling in man, as revealed by the voice of conscience.
But we rise still higher when we consider the inestimable
privilege of Divine sonship conferred on all those who are
united to God by faith ; for in them, and their renovated
being, there is seen a free realisation by man of the
righteousness, the blessedness, and the glory of the Divine
life. Christian experience then proves the reality of
union with God; only, the union so proved iB no mere
nature-fact, but the object of aspiration, faith, and effort.
Now of this Divine inhabitation we are entitled to regard
Christ as the transcendent climax, shedding the light of
interpretation on each preceding stage. All that can be
named Divine immanence comes to itself in Him and is
consummated, for in Him alone there exist ethical condi
tions which make form and content equal to each other.
And on the valid principle that lower modes of being are
explicable by the higher, it is clear that the conception of
immanence is more significant and luminous if we start
from the person of Christ, and the absolute presence of
God in Him, than if our point of departure be the Divine
permeation of the universe as a whole. To move down
from God in Christ is more convincing than to move up
from God in nature. It is in Jesus, not elsewhere, that
the true light shines by which we_mayjread the Wider
problem. Creation finds its key in redemptive incarnation.
" In short," as it has been put, "there is no problem raised
by the idea of God manifest in the flesh as to the relation
of the Divine nature to the human in the unity of one
person, or as to the historical origin of such a relation, i.e.
its beginning in time ; or as to the action of the limited
manhood on the illimitable Godhood, which is not equally
raised by the inter-relations of God and nature. For in a
perfectly real sense creation is incarnation ; nature is the
body of the infinite Spirit, the organism, which the Divine
thought has articulated and: filled with the * br,ea.th of life,
° 28

434 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
But while the problems are analogous, the factors which
promise solution are more potent in the case of the in
carnation than of creation. For in nature the idea of God
demands for its expression no more than physical and
logical categories, but in Christ the categories become
rational, ethical, emotional, i.e. they involve personal
qualities and relations rather than mere cosmical modes
and energies. And so, by investing God with a higher
degree of reality and higher qualities of being, it makes all
His attributes and, relations more actual, all His actions
and ways more intelligible and real." 1
One true mode of describing Christ, accordingly, is to
speak of His person as representing the absolute immanence
of God.2 For the Divine indwelling must vary in quality
and intensity with the receptiveness of man; hence as it
deepens it must from time to time involve new departures,
turning-points, crises of an epoch-making character. Of
these the life of Christ is the last and highest. He opens
a new order; we may certainly put it so if we add that
in this new order He is unique. And by using the term
" immanence " we mark the fact that even in Christ the
influx of Godhead is not unrelated to the past. For God
has been coming to man from the beginning. Very specially
the Divine Spirit dwelt in the prophets, enduing them
with power and insight ; yet His presence there was after
all only intermittent and partial : a broken, fitful, im
perfect thing, with a vast discrepancy between the earthen
vessel and the higher gift. From the very outset the
tendency or movement of Divine love has been toward
such a self-expression within finite consciousness as must
evoke faith and hope and love in their fulness ; with
Luther we may say that God has always longed for
humanity as His own form of existence. At each point
our thought is of course hampered by the mystery of time
in relation to eternity. None the less, we see God as it
were ever on His way to incarnation, moving on by new
1 Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 479.
* Kirn, Dogmatik, 106 ; of. Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 77.

ABSOLUTE IMMANENCE IN CHRIST 435
accesses of self-communication, approaching always nearer
to complete personal union, in creation and prophecy and
redemption. It is in this direction that our minds are
led by the great Johannine conception of the Logos or
Eternal Son ; for the Logos, now manifest in Jesus, is but
a name for the one God as He ever goes forth to the world
in self-revealing act.1
To meet this Divine self-impartation, on the other
hand, there comes the true receptivity of man ; a recep
tivity deeply grounded in his ethical constitution, and
capable of endless expansion under the purifying and
enlightening influence of God. The Divine bends towards
the human, and in Jesus is realised the ideal limit of their
confluence. A humanity which is never self-sufficient
requires the Divine as its very life, while to this needj
there answers a boundless love energising in holy power;
No wholly mean or mechanical theory of rhanhood and its
conditions has room for the thought of incarnation. That
goes only with an ennobling thought of man. Thus the
characteristic of Godhead, to give self and appropriate
1 It is perhaps from this point of view that the speculative mind will
always tend to approach the cosmical Christology of the New Testament,
as expressed, e.g., in Colossians and the prologue to the Fourth Gospel. The
process of the world, culminating in redeemed man, is interpretable as the
gradual reproduction in time of a Divine sonship, a filial life, grounded in
and modelled on the eternal Sonship characteristic of the inner life of God.
In sonship we find the ideal principle which unifies and renders intelligible
the phenomena of finitude. It enables us to see all creation and history
in the light of a single spiritual conception, which is, however, not merely
an imperfect human symbol but represents the intra-mundane self-fulfilment
of a personal originative principle interior to the being of God Himself.
In the words of Dr. Forrest : "As all creation is in its final purpose but
the self-projection of the divine, or the realisation without the Godhead
of that sonship which eternally exists within, it can only find its goal in a
rational and spiritual being, who not merely receives but returns love in
a conscious fellowship. The filial will in us is not simply our human
response to the divine; it has its root in the divine nature" (Christ of
History, 183). The past and future of mankind, nay, all reality of what
ever kind, is to be construed through the fulness of grace which has come
to us in Jesus Christ and has its source within the Divine life. What we
receive from such intimations as those of Colossians is something more than
a Christian view of the universe : it is an ultimate view of God.

436 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
the personal life to which self is given, and the character
istic of manhood, to need and be susceptible of such infinite
bestowal, are finally correlative ; and although, considered
in themselves, they entitle us to assert only the possibility
of incarnation, not the fact itself, yet they prepare the
way for intelligence in its effort to construe the one
Divine-human person of Christ.
But we have spoken of absolute immanence; and the
emphatic adjective is witness to the fact that in Christ
immanence reaches its climax. It is a climax which
crowns the series by its likeness to the past and transcends
it by singularity and difference. The self -giving God is
wholly present in Jesus. So new, so decisive is the act
that it can be compared to nothing but creation. If
prophets were inspired by the Spirit for their vocation,
the same Divine life fills Jesus with an organic unity and
totality which constitute Him the final self-presentation
of God in the human sphere. Bestowal and apprehension
can go no further. Without bestowal there is no salvation
from above, no amazing sacrifice on the part of God;
without apprehension as a moral act or process we are
still on the plane of nature. And in both these ways the
fact of Jesus is incomparable. What has been realised
in Him is not simply more than the past, measured back
ward from His advent; it is likewise more than all the
future : for through Him is mediated now and for ever
that union with God which is salvation and blessedness.
At this standpoint it becomes clear that the loose and
confused notion of "incarnation in the race," which has
been offered as a profounder substitute for the Christian
view, is out of harmony with concrete fact. Any attractive
ness it may seem to possess is in reality owing to a crude
obliteration of moral distinctions,, resting on the mistaken
assumption that the relations of God and man are com
pletely interpretable in physical and logical categories.
But reality as it is when moral conditions have been
withdrawn is not the reality in which we live. Our
deepest ground for predicating divinity of Jesus is the

ABSOLUTE IMMANENCE IN CHRIST 437
presence in His life of that love, holiness, and redeeming
power which constitute the essential definition of Godhead ;
but when we survey humanity as a whole, or in its
individual members, this ground of predication is plainly
lacking. Whatever be the truth as to the latent moral
potencies of man, the actuality is notoriously imperfect.
It is futile, therefore, to employ terms at this point which
suggest that God was as really though less completely
incarnate in Judas as in Christ. It is not even true that
in due time we shall be as Divine as Christ. We are
not called upon to be for God that which Christ was ;
hence it cannot be our ideal, or anything we can aspire
to, that we should become Sons of God in the same sense.
To the end, be the acquired likeness what it may, the
difference of person and vocation must remain. To the
end our life will be derived, mediated through His unique
life ; and the colloquial use of the same term — Sonship —
to denote our differing relations ought not to cajole us
into a superficial identification of the two. In respect of
immanence, accordingly, the last word lies with conscience.
The final objection to saying that all minds are parts of
God is not merely that thoroughly wicked persons exist,
but that we are all wicked in our measure. If man is part
of God simply qua man, so that my experience of sinning
is positively and in something of the same sense God's
experience, deity has ceased to be moral. Thus we are
justified in asserting not merely that immanence is a thing
of degree, but that the degrees of it are ethically qualified.
" Universal incarnation " ignores this patent fact. It is
true that the work done for God by a creative personality
is the measure of the Divine presence or the Divine energy
immanent within him ; but it is only because the work he
does is God's, resembling the Divine in quality and purpose,
that the higher presence is discernible.
Evolution — or immanence stated in dynamic terms —
is the unfolding within the world of the Divine principle
of life. One mode of conceiving Christ, therefore, though
it may not be the most significant mode, is to regard Him

438 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
as the transcendent crown of Evolution. It has been
objected that the principle of Evolution must needs veto
the reality of a Person who is the final revelation of God
because His personal advent in time, and attachment to
whom constitutes the absolute religion. Now it is true
that certain forms of evolutionary metaphysic are incom
patible with the finality of Christ, as they are incompatible
with unconditional values of every kind. But they are
modes of thought which reject the divinity of Christ
because they may be said to have first rejected the
divinity of God Himself — -His eternal personality, His
absolute holy love, His power to enter human life. This
is not the place for a detailed scrutiny of their philosophic
claims. But at least it may be said that they offend
either by applying to self-conscious life the too meagre
conceptions of natural science, or by a culpable neglect of
the maxim that whatever is evolved must be conceived
as having first existed in an involved or potential form.
Apart from this, however, the ethical principles underlying
most of the objections urged at this point of view are
dubious in the extreme. Thus the doctrine of the
incarnation, of the Divine life as present in a single
finite spirit, has been impugned as essentially "unjust."
" The Idea," according to Strauss, " loves not to pour all
its fulness into one example, in jealousy towards all the
rest." Some colour might be lent to this strange miscon
ception were the forth-streaming Divine life represented
as having been totally confined to Jesus, His so exclusively
as to be available for no one else. But in truth the love
of God is concentrated in Jesus only that it may fill the
world. " Out of His fulness have all we received, and
grace upon grace."
Finally, it may be pointed out that one familiar
assumption is an assumption and no more. Frequently
it has been taken for granted that the absolute union of
the human and Divine is only at best a dim forecast or
far-off prevision, and that the consummation of the
evolutionary process, by the nature of the case, must

INCARNATION AND EVOLUTION 439
arrive only at its close. As an ex parte impression this
may have an interest, but its claim to rank as a dictum
of reason must be disallowed. History can show examples,
such as the faultless art of Greece, of spiritual movements
culminating in a perfection never repeated in later times.
Hellas has not reproduced Phidias, or Sophocles, or Plato.
It is vain to lay down a priori rules for the movement
of the world. The cosmic process, as it has been put,
" may be like a symphony in which at definite points new
instruments appear even in moments of absolute stillness.
To say, moreover, that the most perfect instrument, most
significant for the whole symphony, must appear at the
end, is an arbitrary assumption." x One who is not only
the goal but the means of human perfection must appear
within the course of history.
It is clear then that Divine immanence, construed in
a Christian sense, and regarded as having attained in
Christ a culmination which is sui generis, is interpretable
only in the light of a great implication. It implies not
the contrast, but the mutual affinity, of the human and the
Divine. It implies that God is deeply kin to man, who
is made in His image, while man in turn is susceptible of
God. To assume an ultimate dualism in this sphere is to
condemn the Christologian to failure from the start. " If
our notions of divinity and humanity contain heterogene
ous or contradictory elements, it is a truism to say that
we can no more combine them in the conception of one
and the same personality than we can think of a square
circle, or a quadrilateral triangle, or a straight curve."2
But in the view of Scripture there is no such inherent
disparity between the Divine and human as to make
their union inconceivable. The likeness to Christ which
St. John holds forth as the future heritage of saints must
have its root and ground in the essential constitution of
humanity. Man is the son of God, even if a lost son ; and
it is his proper destiny to be partaker of the Divine life.
1 G. B. Foster, Finality of the Christian Religion.
2 J. Caird, Fundamental Ideas, ii. 105.

440 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
If, as we know him, he appears incapable of personal one
ness with the Eternal, it is to be remembered that his
nature has been completely manifested in Christ alone,
and that the potentialities thus disclosed are not the less
human because they have emerged once, and only once,
in history. Infinite and finite spirit alike share in ethical
self- consciousness. To each we ascribe mind, will, and
feeling. None but the personal God could be incarnate
in such a being as man ; none but a personal humanity
could be the medium of Divine life in time.
Thus far it has been assumed that the incarnation of
God in Christ is remedial in aim. It was an act of love
for the salvation of the world. Whatever our theoretical
conception of the doctrine of atonement, it is assumed in
the preceding pages that the Cross reveals to us the im
pelling motive which led to the personal advent of God.
It is only in the light of the Cross that we see Christ, who
is an abstraction apart from it ; and it is to the Cross we
owe that profound and poignant interest which alone'
makes it worth while to have a Christology at all. But
we must now glance briefly at the theory which denies
this, or which at least contends that it is a limited and
narrow reading of the facts. According to this view, the
incarnation would have taken place quite apart from sin.
Even a sinless race must have required, and wouhT have
received, just such a manifestation of God as was contained
in Jesus, enabling it to reach the full height of its develop
ment. _The very make of the universe impJigj_CJTrjst^and
while in the absence of sin His career would have been
differently conditioned, and in particular would have been
crowned with a different issue, yet He must still have
come forth in pursuance of an original and unchangeable
Divine purpose. What shall we say of this view, which
is covered by great names ? 1
1 It is strongly maintained by Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine,
ii. 218. See also Westeott's essay on the "Gospel of Creation" in his Com
mentary on 1 John,

THE INCARNATION AND SIN 441
No one will claim to prove it by the explicit teaching
of the New Testament. While there are many texts in
which the mission of Christ is directly associated with the
conquest of sin, no instance can be quoted on the other
side. "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself"; "He loved us and sent His Son to be the
propitiation for our sins " ; " Since then the children are
sharers in flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner
partook of the same, that through death He might bring
to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the
devil " 1 — these passages from St. Paul, St. John, and the
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, are typical of many
more. It is possible, no doubt, to go behind these plain
words and construct for the apostolic mind a wider view, ,
in which the reference to sin is incidental, and which puts
the incarnation in its place as an unconditioned element
in the Divine world-plan. But against this it may be
urged that it would involve the complete readjustment of
the New Testament perspective. It attributes to the
apostles a willingness to abstract from the problem of
sin, in what is ultimately a speculative interest, of which
they have given no sign. We cannot think of them as
prepared to define the relation of God and man apart from
the experience of redemption.
Nor is this all. The theory has the weakness of
every purely hypothetical assertion; for it must be ad
mitted that the only universe known to us is one in which
sin is real. Not so real, certainly, as God Himself ; this
much of truth is suggested by speculative attempts to
interpret sin as mere negation, not to say an imperfect or
undeveloped form of goodness : but possessed of such a
degree of positive reality that in the absence of Divine
counteraction it will destroy us. In that case, the wise
will regard with suspicion problems so hypothetical as
barely to be capable of intelligible formulation. The
question: "What would have occurred if Christian
experience had been completely different from what it
1 2 Co 519, 1 Jn 410, He 214.

442 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
is ? " is ultimately devoid of meaning. Our conception
of Christ, as we have seen, is relative to His redeeming
work ; strike out the redeeming work, even by supposi
tion, and the materials for a judgment disappear. The
content of the term " Christ " becomes uncontrollably
obscure. Experimental theology can have no concern
with those imaginary situations which the mediaeval
dialectic sought to cover by the scientia media of God, but
which, as the use of that indomitable scholastic device
admits implicitly, have no relation to our knowledge.
It will not do to reply that a central fact like the
incarnation cannot ultimately have depended for realisation
on the "contingency" of human sin. From the human
angle, of course, sin may be described as a contingent
element, in so far as it has no necessary or absolute
existence, and we are able to conceive its abolition. But
we cannot transfer this to the Divine side. We cannot
argue that because sin is an intrusion it is also a surprise
for God, an unforeseen and disturbing emergency for
which secondary provision had to be made. We cannot
conceive of Him awaiting the issue of man's first contact
with temptation with a feeling similar to what we know
as suspense. His prescience of the world was a prescience
also of moral evil. Sin was before His mind from the
first; His redemptive thought is as eternal as His creative.
In point of fact, redemption and creation are presented to
us as an organic unity, forming a single historic process ;
and it is idle to attempt a disintegration of this unity or
to draw out by logic the consequences of a radical change
in our conception of what the process is. Nothing, indeed,
can be more deeply characteristic of the Christian con
sciousness than the assurance that the redemptive love of
God had no beginning, but forms the essential core of His
thought of man.
For it must be again said firmly that from the
outset Christology has been controlled and inspired exclu
sively by a soteriological interest. And redemption must
still be the light of all our seeing. If the idea of incar-

THE INCARNATION AND SIN 443
nation is to retain a secure hold of pur minds, we must
find its great raison d'etre in the dread problem created
both for God and man by the reality of sin. Because sin
had desolated humanity and man must have forgiveness
if he is to live in God's sight, therefore God became man.
But this means an insuperable difficulty for the theory
before us. If earnest men who are conscious of pardon
and its untold blessedness, yet awake to the difficulties
of belief, have to choose between saying that the incarna
tion is credible because it is per se implied in the nature
of God and man, and saying that it is credible because a
stupendous work had to be accomplished in rescuing the
guilty, their choice is simple. Assert that the incarnation
was for the atonement, and a view of its purpose so vivid,
so ethical, and so profound enables us in some real measure
to apprehend the fact, however unique and wonderful.
Eemove this vital reference to sin, and Christ as we know
Him appears in a purely philosophic relation to the most
vital things in Christian experience. Thus one result of
construing the personal presence of God in Jesus as a
corollary from the intrinsic nature of Infinite and finite is
to reduce the question from the level of historic and
ethical truth to that of speculation, to minimise the
gravity of sin, as a fact so vast and awful as to require
nothing less than this for its annihilation, and to impair
the sense of adoring wonder with which forgiven men
contemplate the miracle of Divine love.1
1 It is convenient to touch here on the objection which employs what I
may call "astronomical intimidation." Can we believe, it is asked, that a
tiny planet known to be but a speck in the stellar immensities was chosen
as the scene of the astounding miracle of incarnation ? Why this special
favour to one world out of myriads ? Does not our cosmical insignificance
veto the notion as a preposterous incredibility ? But this, as has been said,
"is simply an attempt to terrorise the imagination" (Simpson, Fact of
Christ, 116). Its plausibility vanishes when we recall the love of God and
the greatness of the soul. To find difficulty in the thought that our sphere
was "selected" for the incarnation is in the first place to assume— what we
cannot know — that other worlds are inhabited ; and secondly, to forget that
man is not less man though there may be beings like him in other worlds,
while it is only if the power of God were limited that the probability of His

444 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
visiting us redemptively would be lessened by their existence. The real
point, however, is that considerations of quantity, in space or time, are
totally irrelevant in a discussion of infinite spiritual issues. If God is the
Father revealed in Jesus, the presumption lies not in anticipating too much,
but too little. The notion that incarnation is unworthy of God's dignity
ignores the superiority of the moral to the physical, and, though it may
appeal to minds in unconscious sympathy with Nietzsche, erects material
magnitude into the supreme criterion of value. It was derogatory to God
to become man only if the end contemplated were less than the highest
good. No one who believes in the incarnation would of course deny that it
is opposed to " common sense " ; but common sense is after all only a rough
deposit of common eveuts ; while the incarnation, on any theory of it, is
wholly unique. These considerations are not obsolete because in the main
they are very old, but their cogency obviously rests on a conception of
incarnation determined by its remedial purpose.

CHAPTEE IX.
THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF THE SON.
It may safely be asserted that the idea of Christ's pre-
existence, when it becomes explicit in the Christian mind,
does so distinctly by way of inferential interpretation.
It is less a conscious element in the faith which appre
hends salvation in Jesus than a conception of reflective
thought ; or to put it otherwise, we predicate it of our
Lord only in virtue of what we already know regarding
Him, as sole Mediator and our indwelling Life. Were
He but one more man in the world, not uniquely and
incomparably Eedeemer, it would not have occurred to
the writers of the New Testament — it would not occur
to any one now — to affirm that prior to His earthly life
He had lived elsewhere. His career would then be dated
from His birth, and the attempt to refer His existence
to eternity would lapse as mere fantasy. If, however, we
instinctively place Him on the Divine side of reality, as
One not destined to be judged but Himself the Judge of
quick and dead, with a Sonship not simply charismatic
but essential, the thought of His eternal being will be
apt to follow of itself. It will rise unbidden in our minds.
His uniqueness, we shall say, has its ground and explana
tion in uncreated being.
We have already seen that no convincing reasons can
Literature — Lobstein, La Notion de la pre-existence du Fits de Dieu,
1883 ; Bornemann, Unterricht im Christentum2, 1891 ; Denney, Studies in
Theology, 1894 ; GrStillat, Expose" de Theologie Systematique, 1888-90 ;
Schaeder, Theozentrische Theologie, 1909 ; Beyschlag, . New Testament
Theology, 1895 ; Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1901 ; Mpzley,
Ritschlianism. 1909. • :
446

446 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
be given for denying that Jesus Himself spoke expressly
of His pre-temporal life.1 But only the Fourth Gospel
alludes definitely to the subject, and, if we may assume
that its representations are founded in historic fact, there
is much attractiveness in the suggestion that Christ's
consciousness of eternal being is not so much reminiscence
as knowledge formed slowly in His mature mind. " We
must maintain," writes Dr. Garvie, " that the contents of
the consciousness of the child Jesus growing in wisdom
and in favour with God and man were not identical with
the consciousness of the Eternal Word and Son, that
Jesus did not in His temporal existence remember the
circumstances and conditions of His pre-temporal state.
... It is simply impossible to imagine or conceive a
continuity of self-consciousness from Word or Son in
pre-incarnate state through the moment of incarnation,
the developing and expanding mind of the boy and youth
to the maturity of the man Jesus. We must maintain
that the consciousness of eternal relation as Son to the
Father, as Word to the world, emerged in the conscious
ness of Jesus in the course of His history, and in His
temporal condition its eternal presented itself as a pre-
temporal form. Independent of history it is represented
as prior to history."2 This has the advantage of enabling
us to regard pre-existence as a profoundly religious
thought for Jesus' own mind — an aspect or expression
of His awareness that He was connected with the Father
by bonds to which time was irrelevant. The absoluteness
of the relation involved its eternity. As He grew and
strengthened, the consciousness of God as Father also
grew and filled His whole mind ; and we may believe
that a time came at last when the sense of this indefinably
profound connection became explicitly what it had always •
been potentially — a clear perception of the union of Son
with Father as increate and unbeginning. This is still
irrespective of the further question whether the distinct
consciousness of His eternity was vouchsafed only in
1 Cf. supra, pp. 29, 106. 2 Studies, etc., 85-86.

PRE-EXISTENCE FOR JESUS' MIND 447
certain high hours, or formed from the time of its
emergence a permanent background in His mind. If as
He looked forward, gradually His eyes were opened to
the destiny awaiting Him, He also looked backward and
realised that behind or above Him lay a timeless unity
with God in which earthly life formed an infinitely
momentous episode. When such knowledge was attained,
and through what media, we cannot tell. But it is
natural to suppose that it came to Him in the fulness of
manhood, as something enfolded in the complete signifi
cance of His filial relation and now drawn into clearer
light by brooding thought on His redemptive mission.
As with His certainty of triumph over death, it flowed
from an inward spring.
The conception of pre-existence was also employed
by the apostles in setting forth to the imagination the
absolute significance of their Master. Allusions to the
pre-incarnate life of Christ never occur in the Epistles by
way of dialectic flourish or random ornament ; the belief
is put forward, rather, as a fundamental certainty, and it
is assumed that every Christian will appreciate the vast
truth for which it stands. It has a prominent place in
the religious conviction of St. Paul, St. John, and the
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Nothing at all is
specified in that life " ere the worlds began to be," save
the agency of the Son in creation ; no curious speculative
or mythological details are offered regarding the relation
ship of Father and Son " in the counsels of eternity." 1
Further, the only pre-existence in which apostolic writers
are interested is not ideal but real and personal. The
love which entered history in Jesus could come only
through a personal channel.
Now the element in this apostolic belief from which
the modern mind revolts most emphatically is of course
its cosmic reference — the suggestion, in other words, that
1 But the idea had a genuinely religious bearing on their sense of the
continuity of the Christian movement with the history of salvation in
Israel, and this St. Paul expresses in his own way, 1 Co 1 04.

448 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Christ is both the Divine Agent in creation and ' the
unifying principle of finite being. On a certain view of
Christ, this is no doubt mere madness. If He is but one
of the innumerable waves on the sea of human life, sinking
as it rose, a voice which sounded forth its message and
fell to silence, to speak of His cosmic function and
significance may well seem no more than the devout
symbolism of an uninstructed fancy. On the other hand,
if we hold Him to be the organising centre of that world
of values by which faith lives, and in which it has its
being, then, we may argue, not merely is it conceivable
that He should be central also in the world of facts, but
the two things — if there is ultimately a single universe
— are inherently and indissociably linked together.
Bedemption and creation constitute a spiritual unity.
Creation is consummated in redemption, which at long
last discloses the principle which has been operative and
controlling in each successive period of cosmic develop
ment. If perfect love, moreover, demands a true mutuality
of giving and receiving, a reciprocal personal immanence
of life, it may reasonably be held that Father-Sonship is
the ultimate Divine reality, of which and through which
and to which are all things ; and that the universe of
created being, whether physical or spiritual — the sphere,
that is, of the recipient and the responsive — has Sonship
for its deepest ground and motive-power, sonship in man
thus forming the finite reflex and product of Eternal
Sonship in God. Many have felt that the cosmic
Christology of the apostles, interpreted on these lines,
tends to lose its alien aspect and gains a secure hold on
intelligence. It is interpretable as suggesting not simply
that Christ, now revealed as Divine by His exaltation,
must have been Divine from before all worlds, but also
that God has progressively stamped His own essential
character on His workmanship, moving upward in His
work to find at length in man an adequate image and
true child, who in free obedience can apprehend, answer,
and reproduce the Eternal Love which seeks him. So we

THE OBJECTION FROM HISTORY 449
catch sight of two great things: first, a potential basis
for incarnation, since human nature is thus filial in its
formative idea and therefore capable of receiving the Son
in sensu eminenti ; secondly, the intrinsic nobleness of
humanity. For what must be the kinship and likeness
between Godhead and manhood when into the frail vehicle
of our life that wondrous treasure could be poured !
Criticism unfavourable to the idea of Christ's pre-
existence has moved, broadly speaking, on two main lines
— the historical and the conceptual.
(a) During the last two decades, scholars have laboured
zealously at the investigation of points in the contemporary
religious thought of Palestine and Alexandria to which
belief in the eternity of Christ might be fastened, and it
is assumed that very moderate success in this search
entitles us to discount the apostolic thought as the
natural but obsolete result of religious syncretism.
Harnack1 pleads that certain Jewish apocalypse-writers
had come to assert pre-existence of the Messiah. In that
age it was customary to express the peculiar value of a
person or thing by distinguishing within it essence and
appearance, hypostatising the first, and then lifting it
into sheer transcendence above the limits of space and
time. Not only were great men credited With pre-
existence, such as Adam, Enoch, or Moses, but even the
tabernacle, the temple, and the tables of the Divine law.
The idea, in short, was one which primitive Christianity
found ready-made, and which naturally it utilised to set
forth the enduring value and felt mystery of Jesus' person ;
other conceptions such as supernatural birth and the
incarnation of the Word being employed for the same
purpose. That its similarity to a prior idea must discredit the
Christian belief could only be conceded on the obviously
untenable assumption that no true idea is ever providen
tially prepared for. It may well be that certain current
1 Dogmengeschichte*, i. 115-19.
29

450 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Jewish theologoumena operated by suggestion, just as
Greek ideas of incarnation made way for sublimer thoughts
connected with Jesus. But such possibilities, which are
not to be denied, no more explain St. Paul's characteristic
usage of pre-existence, say in Ph 2, than In Memoriam
is explained by the fact that every word found in the
poem existed previously in the dictionary. In the Jewish
conceptions, be they what they may, there is nothing
corresponding to the ethical fact of pre-temporal Divine
self-sacrifice, which alone engages the apostle's attention.
Apart from this, however, we are bound to ask whether
Harnack is right as to his facts. Dalman, an unrivalled
authority, has denied emphatically that a general belief
in pre-existence was a Jewish characteristic ; Bousset and
he, indeed, leave it very questionable whether the older
Babbinism asserted anything more than the pre-existence
of the Messiah's name. But in any case the Christian
and the Jewish conceptions have properly no resemblance.
In Babbinism the celestial archetype is only a double of
the earthly object ; in the New Testament, the very
signature of Christology is the faith that the Divine Son
passed from glory to humiliation ; and it is mere inaccuracy
to say that these ideas are equivalent, or analogous, or that
one of them suffices to explain the other. What is asserted
of Jesus goes far beyond all previous assertions: the
elements of the idea are new and are combined in new
ways. Not only so ; it is one thing to speculate freely
on pre-existence in the abstract and quite another to
believe in the eternal reality of a specific Person, with
whom the speakers had lived in the most intimate associa
tion. This last is only explicable by an overwhelming
religious impression.
(b) More frequently, however, objections have rested
on grounds of theory. Thus Eitschl, from the standpoint
of theological positivism, has insisted that the predicate of
deity is applicable only to Christ's earthly life, on the
principle that theology must not ask how the person of
Christ derives from God, or has come to possess its felt

THE OBJECTION FROM THOUGHT 451
supreme religious value. We want facts, not theory.
" The eternal Godhead of the Son," he writes, " is perfectly
intelligible only as the object of the Divine mind and will,
that is, only for God Himself. But if at the same time
we discount, in the case of God, the interval between
purpose and accomplishment, then we get the formula that
Christ exists for God -eternally as that which He appears
to us under the limitations of time. But only for God.
since for us, as pre-existent, Christ is hidden." x This is
put from a standpoint we have already seen reason to
reject ; and if we do not feel ourselves precluded on
principle from the transcendental interpretation of experi
enced facts, we are at liberty, assuming the grounds to
be sufficient, to infer the eternity of Christ from His re
vealed greatness. Again, it is difficult to fix precisely the
meaning of the words : " Christ exists for God eternally
as that which He appears to us under the limitations of
time." Either this is tantamount to an assertion of ideal
pre-existence, in which case we may for the moment
reserve it, or it definitely means something more. If it
means more, however, the particular additional element of
meaning must be pronounced unintelligible or at least
inadequate. On the one hand, God can only know things
as they are, hence Christ's existence in time cannot figure
in the Divine cognition as an eternal fact, which it is not ;
on the other hand, if this is not Eitschl's meaning, what
he has done is to negate for the Divine mind the differ
ence between the pre-temporal condition of the Son and
that on which He entered by incarnation, thus cancelling,
expressly from the highest standpoint, the personal Divine
sacrifice involved in our Lord's mission. But if Christ
had a pre-incarnate life in any sense, obviously it must
have been otherwise conditioned than His self-manifesta
tion on earth. And faith will refuse to annul the differ
ence between the two — between " the form of God " and
" the form of a servant " — finding as it does in this differ
ence the very measure of God's love.
1 Justification and Reconciliation (Eng. tr.), 471.

452 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Wendt has also contended1 that it is impossible to
maintain the personal pre-existence of Christ without
falling into Tritheism, at all events if with Western tradi
tion we interpret the eternal being of the Son as involving
full equality with the Father. We may choose to con
serve the Divine unity by regarding the eternal Word or
Son as essentially Divine, but not personal, or as personal,
but not properly Divine. To combine the two is fatal.
It wrecks monotheism by introducing plurality in God.
Not only so ; but pre-existence is incompatible with Jesus'
spiritual life as man. For then we should have to con-
, ceive the personal Logos as having been united in Him
' with a complete human life — a dualism which makes a
true ethical experience impossible. The second objection
has already been dealt with. As regards the first, it is
plain that Wendt's argument is valid only on the assump
tion that the Logos or Son, conceived as eternal, is a
person in the usual acceptation. Passages may unques
tionably be found in otherwise good writers on the Trinity
which justify the assumption, by their naively uncon
scious defence of Tritheism. But it is rash to neglect the
famous caution of Augustine : Dictum est, Tres Personae,
non ut diceretur, sed ne taceretur? In reality, the word
" person " is forced upon us by the poverty of language.
Since no better offers, we employ it to mark our belief in
a real distinction within the Godhead — a differentiation
of being or function; not to affirm the reality of inde
pendent conscious beings, qualified by separate " essences."
The eternal principle or distinction to which the fact of
Christ refers us, we designate Son or Logos. Each of
these terms has advantages ; each no less clearly has
grave defects. "Logos" no doubt avoids the suggestion
of " person " in the sense of individuality, a sense which
it is quite certain persona did not bear till long after it
had become a terminus technicus of Trinitarianism. " Son,"
however, is even more attractive, inasmuch as it keeps our
1 System der christlichen Lehre, 368 ff.
2De Trin. v. 10.

IS THE PRE-EXISTENT ONE A PERSON? 453
mind firmly at the ethical and spiritual plane of thought,
in the faith that moral relationships, of love, of trust, of
obedience, are not strange to the inner life of deity, but
find there both an eternal basis and a perfect realisation.
Also it provides that our conception of the Eternal Son
shall retain a true continuity with the Christ of history,
to whom the name " Son " primarily belongs. " As far as
nomenclature is concerned," Moberly observes, " the words
' Father ' and ' Son ' express most primarily and most un
reservedly the relation between the Eternal and ¦> the
Incarnate, between God as God and God as man; and
analogously rather than primarily, in dim suggestion
rather than directly, those eternal relations which are
hardly capable of any other than an indirect and analogous
expression." 1 Thus Wendt may be answered ; but the
answer, let it be conceded frankly, is one which from the
nature of the case cannot be made really cogent or con
vincing ; for the realm of discussion here is such that we
have to resist firmly the temptation to lay an undue
crudeness of emphasis on those aspects of it which we
least comprehend. We may indeed (and must) throw
back our minds, by postulate, from the data of redemptive
history to antecedent realities of an eternal order ; but
this does not authorise us to mount up into that rare and
high domain and expatiate at large in a transcendence
which has lost touch with controlling facts.
But to this it may be replied : You urge the pre-
existence of Christ, because, as you hold, nothing else or
less can signalise the marvellous exhibition of redeeming
love implied in His being here at all. "Ye know the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He were rich,
yet for your sake He became poor " — in a verse like this,
so often quoted with emphasis, there is surely little or no' ,
significance unless the pre-existent One is a " person," a
" self " in the usual connotation. Is not the apostle simply
proclaiming that the Jesus Christ we know stooped down
in grace to save the lost ? How can this be, if the
1 Atonement and Personality, 213.

454 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Eternal " Son " is not a person, i.e. an independent centre
of self-consciousness and self-determination ? Now — apart
from the consideration that subtle problems of theory were
not before the apostle — it may reasonably be held that
when the Christian mind gratefully responds to the love
exhibited in the incarnation, it is not concerned to maintain
that this Divine passion of self-abnegation was felt, and
expressed in act, by the pre-existent One as a separate
individuality. Enough that the manifestation of love was
a manifestation of Divine love, sublime and overwhelming;
pnough that the sacrifice undergone prior to Christ's
advent took place within God's very being, and that out
of the Divine life-fulness, at love's behest, He came forth
whom in the fields of time we know as Jesus. Further,
it must be remembered that faith no less than theology
revolts from Tritheism. Hence it must see the pre-
incarnate One in God, not alongside of God, not as an
entity to be known and appreciated in abstraction from
God. Thus in a purely religious interest it is equally
misleading to regard the eternal " Son " as a mere im
personal law or force or principle on the one hand, and
on the other as an independent Divine individuality.
" Not from any wanton intrusion into mysteries but under
the necessity of breaking silence," we designate Him an
eternal personal mode or distinction within the one self-
conscious life of God.
A refuge from these perplexities has been sought by
numerous modern thinkers in the conception of ideal pre-
existence.1 There was no time when Christ was not in
the Father's purpose. He is as old as the saving love of
God ; His mission, embracing life and death and triumph,
formed eternally an integral and cardinal element of the
1 The conception of ideal pre-existence has been criticised as though it
simply meant that Christ pre-exists in God as theorems relating to the circle
do in its definition. But this is misleading. It ignores the element of
redeeming Will which is central in the Christian thought of God, and which
has nothing corresponding to it in the sphere of mathematics.

IDEAL PRE-EXISTENCE 455
Divine plan. Thus Lobstein, to whom pre-existence is
distasteful because it savours of metaphysic, prefers to
replace it by the idea of election. From eternity it was
decreed that one day there should be born into human
history a Person uniquely endowed, and possessed of the
fulness of the Spirit. This being so, we are entitled, he
maintains, to say that Jesus Christ, the Divine Son, had
reality in God's thought from before all time, as willed
and chosen by the Father. It would perhaps be a fair
criticism that a theory like this transcends immediate
religious experience quite as definitely as orthodoxy itself,
and that to speak of the eternal contents of God's mind is
even tolerably speculative. But, apart from this, it is
noteworthy that the New Testament is quite familiar with
the distinction of pre-existence and election, and enforces
it without hesitation. When St. Paul declares that the
saints were chosen of God in Christ before the foundation
of the world,1 he conceives them as having had what may
be called ideal reality for the prescience of God through
infinite ages, and as having been embraced in His gracious
design to call them, in due time, to faith and service. But
he never dreams of saying that they pre-existed. No't
even of apostles does he say that. Now if this obvious
Jewish category, which Babbis had applied freely to Old
Testament saints, lay simply waiting to be used, why has
he not used it ? Certainly not by accident. On the
contrary, the predication of election in the case of
Christians, and of pre-existence in the case of Christ,
constitutes one of the apostle's most characteristic modes
of accentuating the essential difference between them.
It is, of course, true that Christ, both in His own mind
and in that of the apostles, stands in positive relations to
the Divine fore-knowledge. But we do not exhaust the
special connection of Christ with God by relating Him
merely to the Divine thought. So far He is on the same
plane as the creatures. The filial connection is so close
that we must also think Christ as eternally related, and
1 Eph 1*.

456 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
related as an eternal fact, to the will of God — as the
timeless object of His producing and sustaining love.
The thought and will of God cannot be conceived save as
imparting reality to Christ. Or, to put it otherwise, the
Father revealed in the Son cannot be thought as fully
real in abstraction from the Son in whom alone we
apprehend Him.
By some recent thinkers the conception of our Lord's
pre-existence has been defined as in strictness only a
Grenzbegriff: a conception, that is, indicative of reality
lying just across the border-line of our knowledge, yet
looming on us indefinably, as it were, out of penumbral
mists. It affirms, as Kirn has put it, " that the historic
Christ has eternally a central and universal place in God's
saving purpose, and that the content of His life — i.e. His
holy redeeming love — is rooted in God and belongs to
the eternal content of God's transcendent life. Hence,"
he proceeds, " it were better to speak of the supra-historic
character of the revelation given in Christ than of the
pre-historic existence of Christ with the Father." x This
particular Grenzbegriff, it is contended, is an ideal concep
tion placed on the very limits of human cognition and
employed in self-defence by the believing mind as it
strives to conserve to the utmost the impression of un
speakable Divine love vouchsafed to us in Christ. In
other words, pre-existence. is a symbol. Now, that the
eternal being of Christ, if known at all, is known by faith
and in faith only, will at once be conceded. On the other
hand, symbols have real meaning ; if faith speaks to us of
Christ's pre-existence, be the language as symbolic as it
may, it speaks of it as real. The object symbolically
conceived lies, it is true, on the farther side of terrestrial
knowledge, but in this respect it resembles all the other
transcendent objects of which faith is sure, e.g. the present
sovereignty of Christ. It therefore appears that the con
ception of a Grenzbegriff, when thoroughly elucidated,
indicates that the real object dimly grasped in our neees-
1 Dogmatik3, 107.

DIFFICULTIES OF THE CONCEPTION 457
sarily symbolic forms is in no sense emptier or poorer
than the symbol, but, like all transcendent facts in Chris
tianity, infinitely more rich and full.
In the light of these discussions, we need have no
hesitation in confessing that the pre-existence of Christ
outstrips our faculty of conception, and that no theoretic
refinements alter this in the very least. Not merely are
we faced here by the impossibility of beholding the life
of God on its inward side, which means that thought is
working altogether apart from experience ; but in addition
we encounter once more the haunting and insoluble
enigma of time as ultimately related to eternity. And
other not less formidable difficulties remain. We cannot
think eternity crudely as equivalent to time without
beginning and without end ; and the chronological quality
of pre-existence is therefore fatal to its adequacy as a
final or coherent representation of what, ex hypothesi, is
above time. Christ cannot after all be pre-existent in any
sense except that in which God Himself is so relatively to
the incarnation ; and our instinctive use of " eternal " as
the epithet befitting God suggests that the idea we wish
to convey regarding Christ should also be expressed by
the terms " eternity " or " supra-temporality." Again,
when we speak of the pre-existent One, what is, as logicians
say, the subject of discourse ? Who pre-exists ? Not the
historic Jesus, exactly as He is known in the Gospels.
The Church has never affirmed that the humanity of
Christ was real prior to the birth in Bethlehem ; and if,
as must be admitted, certain apostolic statements, inter
preted au pied de la lettre, have the appearance of saying
quite the opposite, it must be considered that this was
inevitable in the case of men using the intensely concrete
language of religion, not the coldly correct phraseology of
the schools. Neither can we simply equate the pre-
temporal One with the exalted Lord, for incarnation as
such means that these two " estates " are separated by a
vast redemptive act of self-humiliation, initiated on the
Divine side of reality. These are a few of the perplexities

458 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
by which we are met in the effort to derive from history
the content of " the Pre-existent."
We have then to concede that the idea of pre-existence
is an imperfect means of representing eternity in forms of
time. And if problems so baffling gather round it, the
pre-temporal being of the Son cannot surely be a datum
for faith — part of the message, that is, which we hold
forth as evangelists with the hope of creating faith where
as yet it does not exist ; it must rather be a corollary or
implicate to which conscious faith gives rise. It is, I
believe, a thought of which fully conscious Christian belief
will not consent to be deprived, but at least theology cannot
start from it.1 The question, let it be noted, is one not of
antagonism but of order. It should be clear that whether
we can or cannot discriminate between elements united to
form Christ's person, at least there is no admissible
point of departure but the given realities of fact. Christ
in the New Testament is nearer to our minds, as well as
more fundamental for religion, than any prior potencies
out of which He rose. Detailed speculations on the
.pre-incarnate life, like professedly minute descriptions of the
Divine self-consciousness, betray in fact a culpably Gnostic
tendency, and are apt to end in the suspicion that when
once we have penetrated to the eternal Godhead latent in
Jesus, the human and temporal facts of His career lose
more than half their value. As a protest against this, we
can even appreciate the famous remark of Herrmann, in a
conference at Eisenach, when he bade his audience turn
from speculation on the subject of pre-existence "with
hearts as cold as ice."
Nevertheless in both cases — that of the Divine self-
consciousness and that of Christ's pre-existence — Christian
intelligence pondering on its data will always insist, I am
convinced, on postulating the ineffable reality. It is
essential to recollect that what the New Testament affirms
1 Cf. Herrmann, Die Religion im Verhaltnis zum Welterkennen und
Sittlichkeit, 399, 438 ff.

THE POSTULATE OF FAITH 459
is not the eternal being of this or that chance individual,
but of the Lord Jesus Christ, with His arresting and
unparalleled self-consciousness, His present glory, His
almighty power to save. Thoughts are in place regarding
Him which elsewhere must be irrelevant. Soon or late
the question must rise : Are the dimensions of our con
ception of His person so deep and broad and high that
nothing is consonant with them, or with the effort which
the soul makes in apprehending them, except the faith
that He lived in God before all things ?
It is this belief, as a matter of - history, which formed
the seed-plot of all Christological and Trinitarian reflection.
Where Hes its religious interest ? Surely in the Christian
certainty that salvation is of the Lord. Faith's view of
the world, be it remembered, is always and unconditionally
theocentric. And the argument which this yields,
though capable of being drawn out in syllogistic form, is
really intuitive. Only the eternal God can save; Christ
is Saviour; therefore in eternity both before and after,
Christ is one with God. He who fills the soul's horizon
can be no mere incident of human history, but must have
His roots of being within unbeginning deity. Otherwise
in the last resort it is a Man who is given, or assumes, the
central place in faith's universe, with the inevitable result
that theology, while remaining Christocentric, ceases to be
theocentric.1 It is only kept theocentric by the unflinching
faith that the Christ in whom we believe is not merely
One who lived a life of uninterrupted fellowship with
God, so constituting the perfect Exemplar of religion, but
One whom we are justified in referring unequivocally to the
Divine side of reality, not as having attained that place
progressively, nor even as having received it by privileged
election, but as having emerged in love " from the bosom
of the Father." When this is denied, it is frequently in
obedience to a relativistic view of knowledge. Men have
made up their minds that no phenomenal historic facts can
disclose the Divine noumenal reality, though they may
1 Cf. Schaeder, Theozentrische Theologie, 175 ff.

460 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
imperfectly symbolise it ; and if Christ has the religious
value of God, no one can really determine the ultimate
relation of this practical religious supremacy — this quality
of being morally indistinguishable from God — to the
unknown and inaccessible life of God as such. In an
argument of this kind, however, it is too much forgotten
that — revelation and faith being vital correlates — a partial
and conditioned revelation can never evoke more than a
partial and conditioned faith. And this brings us to the
crucial point.
It will not be seriously questioned that the chief glory
of the Christian religion is its characteristic conception of
the Divine love. God's love in Christ is triumphantly set
forth as something infinite and measureless. But is it
really so, apart from Christ's eternity ? Is it the fact,
His eternity once denied, that we cannot imagine a
vaster exhibition of Divine mercy to the world ? If in
Christ we have something less than " God's presence and
His very self," because He grows on the soil of human
nature, as simply human, it is surely clear that the scale
on which the love of the Eternal has been made manifest
is now gravely altered. We have somehow to abridge
our once glorious vision of self-sacrifice as the inmost core
and focus of the Divine life. It is not that God cannot
be known as Love apart from His incarnation in Christ. To
say so would be false. But it is not false to say that apart
from the gift of Christ out of an eternal being, God's love
would not be displayed so amazingly, in a form and magnitude
which inspire, awe, and overwhelm the soul. A Christ who
is eternal, and a Christ of whom we cannot tell whether
He is eternal or not, are positively and profoundly different,
and the types of faith they respectively call forth will
differ correspondingly both in spiritual horizon and in
moral inspiration. Our sense of Christ's self-abnegation —
His lowliness, His grace, His utter passion of sacrifice — is
perceptibly expanded or reduced according as we do or do
not hold that He who bore these things had entered by
Divine volition into the situation of which they form a

PRE-EXISTENCE NOT SPECULATIVE 461
part. Something which is irreplaceable drops away when
His eternity has been cancelled. The Gospel can never be
the same again, and the loss is borne not by speculative
dogmatic but by personal religion. Especially the preacher
has parted with a certain leverage of moral appeal no
more to be regained. It is harder now to persuade men
that God loves us better than He loves Himself.
Considerations of this simple and familiar kind may
help to dissipate the impression that the conception of
pre-existence is incurably " speculative " or " metaphysical."
Whatever these formidable adjectives mean, they at least
mean something which it requires a strong intellectual
effort to apprehend. But in this esoteric sense the con
ception is not speculative in the least. On the contrary,
it is constantly found in hymns of childhood. It is of
course intensely difficult in its' remoter implications, as,
for that matter, are also the conceptions of moral freedom
or the -Divine personality. And the proper inference
to draw is that belief on this subject must follow faith in
Christ Himself, not precede it. We cannot know the pre-
temporal as we do the earthly life of Christ, or even as we
do (in a real sense) His life of exalted glory. The stage
in His career at which we meet with Him is after
Bethlehem, not before it ; we meet with Him supremely
in His recorded words and actions ; and he who has not
found God in the record of these three sinless years can
have no stake of a vital or intelligible kind in the question
whether they stand out against an infinite and eternal
background. But indeed the Church has clung to faith
in Christ's pre-existence on purely religious grounds. She
has clung to it as the only means open to human thought
of affirming the priceless truth that He is not the perfect
Saint merely, offered by humanity to God, but the beloved
Son sent forth by the Father, cast in grace upon "this
bank and shoal of time," that in love He might give
Himself for us all. It scarcely admits of doubt which of
the two views will inspire the more subduing Gospel. ' Men
sav that the conception of eternity mingling thus with

462 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
time is too vast for truth ; with the apostles we may
answer that its vastness is its evidence, since the God
made known in Jesus gives only gifts so great that none
greater can be conceived. To part with the glory and
wonder of this faith is in a grave measure to part with the
native joy of the Christian religion, and to remove the
scene of sacrifice from heaven to earth will inevitably
stimulate the less worthy impulse felt at some time by all
to preach about man instead of God.1
1 It is significant that a modern theologian like Haering of Tubingen,
in his peculiarly rich and stimulating Dogmatik (1906), should offer the
following sympathetic rendering of our theme, though with the reminder
that at this point knowledge largely passes into symbol. "The love of
God," he writes, "which acts on us in Christ the Son, is so utterly God's
love and the active self-disclosure of His being, that it is eternally directed
upon Him as Bearer of this eternal love. And this not only in the sense
of ideal pre-existence — for then He were but the temporal and historic
correlate of God's eternal love — but even irrespectively of His earthly
existence ; God's love directed upon Him is the love of the Father to the
Son in the secret of the eternal Divine life, or, to put it so (since no other
terms are possible), in a real pre-existence. Also — to take the other side of
the same conception — this Son, loved eternally of God, is not only sent by
the Father into the world ; He has come by His own loving act" (449).

CHAPTER X.
THE SELF-LIMITATION OF GOD IN CHRIST.
Certain phenomena in the recent history of British dog
matics entitle one to speak of a strongly revived interest in
what are known as the Kenotic theories of our Lord's
person. Nor is this renascence at all surprising. For the
criticism poured upon the Kenotic hypothesis on its first
announcement, though frequently described as shattering,
does not impress the reader of a later generation as having
been particularly sympathetic or far-seeing. It was in
part the hostility of the unimaginative. And some of
the objections had that very bad quality in an argument,
that they proved too much. They failed to allow for the
distinction between a principle and the forms in which it
may be applied.
A quickened sense of the real issues at stake has
induced several living theologians to re-open the problem
on Kenotic lines. It would be foolish to say that anything
like a movement has begun. . But the coincidence of result.
is striking when we take a series of important works
published within the last fifteen years. I need not pause
upon the books of Principal Fairbairn . and Dr. Forrest,
Literature — Gifford, The Incarnation, 1897 ; Thomasius, Christi Person
und Werk, 1853 ff. ; Gess, Christi Person und Werk, 1870-87; Frank,
System der christlichen Wahrhtifi, 1894; Godet, Commentary on St. John's
Gospel, 1877 ; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ2, 1881 ; Bensow, Die Lehre von
der Kenose, 1903 ; Forsyth, Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 1909 ; Gore,
Dissertations, 1898 ; Weston, The One Christ, 1907; Mason, Conditions of
our Lord's Life or, Earth, 1896 ; Powell, Principle of the Incarnation, 1896 ;
Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 1906 ; Adams Brown, Christian Theology
in Outline, 1906. 468

464 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
though it is noteworthy that Dr. Forrest's attitude to the
Kenotic view has become even more decisively that of
championship in his Authority of Christ (1906) than in
his Christ of History and of Experience (1897). In a
valuable article on the Trinity, Bishop D'Arcy, after
speaking of the subordinate character of the divinity of the
Son as portrayed in the New Testament, adds : " It is this
derivative character which helps us to realise that the
limitations to which He submitted during His life on earth
involved no breach of His Divine identity. . . . His
Divinity is dependent from moment to moment upon the
Father; and therefore there is no difficulty in accepting
what seems to be a necessary inference from the facts of
the Gospel history, that, during our Lord's life on earth,
there took place a limitation of the Divine effluence."1
On kindred lines Principal Garvie and Mr. W. L. Walker
appear to be at one in regarding the temporal kenosis, if.
the phrase may be permitted, as the symptom and mani
festation of an eternal process of self-emptying native to
Godhead as such. Mr. Walker, taking the Cross as the
distinctive symbol of the inmost being of deity, insists on
this timeless background of the earthly drama. " The life
of God," he writes, " is for ever the same life of self-denial
and self-sacrifice, because it is the life of perfect Love.
Out of His overflowing fulness He, is constantly giving of
Himself in creation in order to find Himself again in those
whom He has raised to participation in the Divine life.
This is that eternal kenosis in which ' the Son ' is for ever
passing out of 'the Father' and again returning to the
bosom of God." 2 It is also from this point of view that
Dr. Garvie finds it possible to harmonise the higher being
of Christ with His searching experience of temptation, and
to reach a more spiritual construction of His miracles.
"The miracles," he contends, "did not lessen the self-
emptying of the incarnation"; for there still existed
conditions of an ethical character under which alone the
derived power could be employed, namely, intense sympathy
1 DCG. ii. 762. 3 Gospel of Reconciliation, 169.

RECENT KENOTIC VIEWS 465
with man and absolute trust in God.1 Notwithstanding
this, Dr. Garvie claims the right to criticise the older forms
of Kenoticism, and does so with much severity; thus
acknowledging the distinction just laid down between a
principle and the varying methods of its application. In
1907 Bishop Weston published a work of high ability,
entitled The One Christ, in which a reserved and circum
spect yet clearly-marked form of Kenotic theory was put
forward and defended at full length. He speaks, for
instance, of the Christ of the Gospels as " the Son of God
self-restrained in conditions of manhood." "We seem
committed by the Evangelists," he writes, " to the opinion
that the Incarnate did really and truly become man, follow
ing the law of human life from its very beginning ; so that
the law of self-restraint, self-imposed before the act of
Incarnation, required of Him that He should taste of the
unconsciousness or practical unconsciousness of the unborn
child " and " made it both necessary and possible that in
the state of His humiliation He should have no consciousness
that His assumed, human soul could not mediate." 2 And,
to take a final example, in 1909 there appeared Principal
Forsyth's rich and living volume, The Person and Place of
Jesus Christ, the closing chapters of which are an exposi
tion not so much of a speculative theory of the incarnation
as of certain vital religious postulates inseparable from firm
belief in Christ's divinity. Taking the Kenotic idea as clue
(rightly combined with the conception of a progressively
realised Incarnate person), he argues that "we face in
Christ a Godhead self -reduced but real, whose infinite
power took effect in self-humiliation," and adduces the
further consideration that "as God, the Son in His freedom
would have a Kenotic power over Himself corresponding to
the infinite power of self-determination which belongs to
deity." 3 The difficulties of such a view impress him as
more scientific than religious. And yet in spite of this
Dr. Forsyth nowhere confuses the principle with specific
1 Studies, etc., 234. a The One Christ, 190, 181, 184.
8 Lecture XI.
3°

466 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
' examples of it, but feels free to say that there is something
presumptuous in certain older Kenotic efforts to body forth
just what the Son of God must have undergone in becoming
man. These typical quotations, which it would be easy to
multiply, indicate that the conception they involve is once
more striving for expression. It is a conception of immense
religious significance. Somehow — to describe the method
exactly may of course be beyond us — somehow God in
Christ has brought His greatness down to the narrow
measures of our life, becoming poor for our sake. This
must be taken as seriously in dogmatic as in Christian
piety, and a place must be found for the real fact which it
denotes in our construction of the Incarnate life. To
surround or accompany it with neutralising qualifications
is inept. The difficulties of a Kenotic view are no doubt
extremely grave ; yet they are such as no bold construction
can avoid, and in these circumstances it is natural to prefer
a view which both conserves the vital religious interest in
the self-abnegating descent of God (Deus humilis) and ad
heres steadfastly to the concrete details of the historic record.
Obviously these details constitute our sole medium of
revelation; and orthodox writers are occasionally prone to
forget that it is no merit in a Christological doctrine that
it claims to deal successfully with remoter problems not
forced on the mind by New Testament representations of
Jesus, while at the same time it makes our one trust
worthy source of information, the Gospel narrative,
dubious or unintelligible. Our only use for a theory is
to synthesise facts definitely before us, not to do some
thing else.
Take the central thought of the Gospel, which has
captured and subdued the Christian soul, and let us ask
whether it has received full justice at the hands of ecclesi
astical Christology. God in Christ, we believe, came down
to the plane of suffering men that He might lift them up.
Descending into poverty, shame, and weakness, the Lord was
stripped of all credit, despoiled of every right, humbled to

VALUE OF THE KENOTIC CONCEPTION 467
the very depths of social and historical ignominy, that
in this self-abasement of God there might be found the
redemption of man. So that the Gospel tells of Divine
sacrifice, with the cross as its unspeakable consummation ;
the Saviour's lot was one of poverty, suffering, and humilia
tion, until the triumphant death and resurrection which
wrought deliverance and called mankind from its grave.
Hearts have thrilled to this message that Christ came from
such a height and to such a depth ! He took our human
frailty to be His own. So dear were human souls to God,
that He travelled far and stooped low that He might
thus touch and raise the needy. Now this is an unheard-
of truth, casting an amazing light on God, and revolution
ising the world's faint notions of what it means for Him to
be Father ; but traditional Christology, on the whole, has
found it too much to believe. Its persistent obscuration of
Jesus' real manhood proves that after all it shrank from the
thought of a true " kinsman Eedeemer " — one of ourselves
in flesh and spirit. Christ's point of departure was Godhead,
no doubt, yet in His descent He stopped half-way. The
quasi-manhood He wore is so filled with Divine powers as
to cease to belong to the human order.
He became poor — there a new light falls on God, who for
us became subject to pain ; but one may well feel that the
light is not enhanced but rather diminished if with tradition
we have to add that nevertheless He all the time remained
rich. For in so far as He remained rich — in the same
sense of riches — and gave up nothing to be near us, our
need of a Divine Helper to bear our load would be still
unsatisfied. What we require is the never-failing sympathy
which takes shape in action, " entering," as it has been put,
" into conditions that are foreign to it in order to prove its
quality." Jesus' life then becomes a study in the power,
not the weakness, of limitations, while yet the higher
Divine content transfigures the limits that confine it.
And it is just this sympathy without reserve which appears
when the fact of Christ becomes for us a transparent
medium through which the very grace of God is shining.

468 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
God, we now know, is love ; but it was necessary that He
should live beside us, in the form of one finite spirit, in
order that His love and its sacrifice might be known to
men and win back their love. So Browning thought of it : —
"What lacks then of perfection fit for God,
But just the instance which this tale supplies
Of love without a limit ? So is strength,
So is intelligence ; let love be so,
Unlimited in its self-sacrifice,
Then is the tale true and God shows complete."
There are obvious differences between the older Kenotic
theories and the new. For the Christian thinker of to
day is more reserved and proportionally less vulnerable
on points of speculation. A favourite charge against the
older construction was the charge of mythology. Kenoti-
cism, it was said, was like nothing so much as pagan stories
of the gods.1 The reproach is natural on the lips of one
who totally repudiates the idea of incarnation. If a man
does not feel that in Christ we stand confronted with the
outcome of a vast Divine sacrifice — with what is nothing
less than an ineffable fact of Divine history — for him the
problem which Thomasius and the rest were trying to solve
(and, as a preliminary, to state) has of course no existence.
He cannot see what the discussion is about. But the more
recent Kenotic statements have the advantage that they
aim rather at proceeding by way of interpretative postulate,
a parte post, so reaching after the Kenotic conception as
the key by which alone it is possible to unlock the
problems of the historic Life, but not venturing, as some
earlier hypotheses had ventured, to expatiate in the domain
of speculation a parte ante, or to describe the steps in which
the incarnation was actualised with theosophical minute
ness. We have learnt from Lotze, many of us, that it is
vain to ask " how being is made." It is vain to speak as
if the view-point of Deity were our own, or to ignore the
peripheral character of our judgments; and any con-
1 Some of the modern objections were anticipated by Celsus (cf. Glover,
The Conflict of Religions, 246).

THE FUNDAMENTAL DATA 469
struction of Christ's person in which the modern mind is to
feel an interest must start from, and proceed through, the
known facts of His human life. The known facts, we say
advisedly ; for discussion has made it clear that Kenoti-
cism, be it right or wrong, does not in the least depend for
its cogency on two or three isolated passages in St. Paul.
We have only to place side by side the two words of Jesus :
" Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,"
and " Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, neither
the Son but the Father," to have the entire problem before
us. It is present in the unchallenged facts of the New
Testament, whether or not we choose to theologise
upon it.
Four positions may be taken, I think, as implicit in
the completely Christian view of Jesus ; and it is difficult
to see how Kenoticism in some form is to be avoided by
one •who asserts them all, and at the same time believes
that a reasoned Christology is possible. They may be
put as follows : —
(1) Christ is now Divine, as being the object of faith
and worship, with whom believing men have immediate,
though not unmediated, fellowship.
(2) In some personal sense His Divinity is eternal,
not the fruit of time, since by definition Godhead cannot
have come to be ex nihilo ; His pre-mundane being there
fore is real, not ideal merely.
(3) His life on earth was unequivocally human.
Jesus was a man, a Jew of the first century, with a life
•localised in and restricted by a body organic to His self-
consciousness ; of limited power, which could be, and was,
thwarted by persistent unbelief; of limited knowledge,
which, being gradually built up by experience, made Him
liable to surprise and disappointment ; of a moral nature
susceptible of growth, and exposed to life-long temptation ;
of a piety and personal religion characterised at each point
by dependence on God. In short, He moved always
within the lines of an experience humanly normal in

470 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
constitution, even if abnormal in its sinless quality. The
life Divine in Him found expression through human
faculty, with a self-consciousness and activity mediated by
His human milieu.
(4) We cannot predicate of Him two consciousnesses
or two wills ; the New Testament indicates nothing of the
kind, nor indeed is it congruous with an intelligible
psychology. The unity of His personal life is axiomatic.
Now it is impossible to think -these four positions
together save as we proceed to infer that a real surrender
of the glory and prerogatives of deity, " a moral act in the
heavenly sphere," must have preceded the advent of God
in Christ. We are faced by a Divine self-reduction which
entailed obedience, temptation, and death. So that religion
has a vast stake in the kenosis as a fact, whatever the
difficulties as to its method may be. No human life of
God is possible without a prior self-adjustment of deity.
The Son must empty Himself in order that from within
mankind He may declare the Father's name, offer the great
sacrifice, triumph over death ; and the reality with which,
to reach this end, He laid aside the form and privilege
of deity is the measure of that love which had throbbed in
the Divine heart from all eternity.
It is clear that the value of this discussion, if any, will
lie not in the untrammelled nature of a speculation, but
in the luminous explication of historic fact. We would
know the limits within which must lie the truth we are
seeking, but there is no suggestion that it is given to man
to watch God as He becomes incarnate. Yet once it has
been made clear that Christ is God — since redemption is
as typically a Divine work as creation — the possible alter
natives are few. It may be said that He acquired God
head — which is pagan. Or that He carried eternal deity
unmodified into the sphere of time — which is unhistoric.
Exclude these options, and it only remains to say that in
Christ we are face to face with God, who in one of the
distinguishable constituents of His being came amongst
us by a great act of self-abnegation. But there is no

FINAL INSCRUTABILITIES 471
possibility of forming a precise scientific conception of
what took place ; for that, be it reverently said, we should
have to become incarnate personally. We cannot know
with final intimacy any experience through which we have
not passed. Everywhere in life, in nature, in history, in
personality, there are, for each of us, irreducible and
enigmatic facts, which we can touch and recognise and
register, but of which we never become masters intel
lectually. Nature itself is full of new beginnings, of real
increase, of novel fact not deducible from the previous
phases of the cosmos; and this we are bound simply to
report, admitting its inscrutability. In short, there is an
alogical element in things, not to be measured by the
canons of discursive mind. Over and over again it
meets us in theology. There is for example the relation
of an eternal God to events of time. No mystery could be
deeper than the fact — -accepted by all types of Christianity
— that the Eternal has revealed Himself notably in a
human being who lived at the beginning of the
Christian era, and that the meaning of Jesus is at once
immersed in past historic fact and perpetually present to
faith. But if this difficulty, so opaque for minds like ours,
is an essential implicate of belief in revelation, may it not
be that such mystery as is involved in the passage of the
Son from His eternal being to a life of limitation and
growth is inseparable from a reasoned conviction of
Christ's higher nature ? Have we the right to ask that
Christology should be more transparent than Theology ?
Whether we are dealing with the surprises of nature, the
free personal entanglements of history, the antinomies of
grace and freedom, or the incarnation of the living God,
plainly we must follow the same path. If the facts con-
' tain a wonderful and transcendent element, the theory by
which we elucidate them will reproduce this wonderfulness
and transcendence. In any case, being is too rich and
manifold for us to lay down a priori regulations to the
effect that this or that, even though worthy and , morally
credible, is impossible for God.

472 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
It is essential, however, that the categories we employ
should be genuinely moralised. Our theological calculus
must rise above the physical and partially mechanical
conceptions which served the Ancient Church. There will
always be metaphysic in Christology, but it ought to be a
metaphysic of the conscience, in which not substance but
Holy Love is supreme.1 Nothing in Dr. Forsyth's treatise
is more wholesome or more inspiring than his sustained
contention that we may help our age to conceive the
incarnation by giving full scope to this ethicising vein.
He shows that the habit of ethical construction must be
carried over the whole field. A real kenosis is a moral as
well as a theological necessity : the impulse from which it
sprang was moral ; it is the moral constitution of God
head which made it possible ; moral forces sustained the
self-reduced Life on earth and gave it spiritual value. As
it has been put, the conditions under which Christ lived
" were the moral result of a moral pre-mundane act, an act
in virtue of which, and of its moral quality continued
through His life and culminating in His death, Christ
redeems and saves." 2 And yet in all this there is nothing
of mere dull " moralism," draining the red life-blood out of
a great Gospel ; instead, the incarnation comes home to us
as an ethically appealing act of God, not overwhelming us
by display, but subduing, because enlightening and per
suading, the conscience and the will.
This is too often ignored when the discussion comes to
circle round the idea of Divine immutability. For then
the subject of kenosis may be canvassed quite irrespect
ively of holy love, the changelessness of the Absolute —
with its implicit denial that prayer is answered, or that
there can be such a thing as a Divine saving act — being
used to put the very idea of Divine self-limitation out of
court. Sheer unchangeableness is, of course, something
1 Cf. a suggestive article by Drown in the Hibbert Journal for April
1906. 2 J. K. Mozley, reviewing Forsyth, in the Journal of Theological Studies
for Jan. 1911, p. 300.

DIVINE ATTRIBUTES ARE MORAL 473
against which no human pleading can bear up ; but it is
worth asking whether it ought to figure in a Christian
argument. The immutability to which certain writers
appeal would really involve — given a world of changing
moral agents — the gravest ethical caprice. God would be
arbitrary, inasmuch as in varying moral situations He
would act with mere mechanical self-consistency. Now it
is not at all excessive to say that what Christ reveals in
God is rather the infinite mobility of absolute grace bent
on the redemption of the lost, the willingness to do and
bear whatever is compatible with a moral nature. What
is immutable in God is the holy love which makes His
essence. We must let Infinitude be genuinely infinite in
its moral expedients ; we must credit God with infinite
sacrifice based on His self-consciousness of omnipotence.
We must believe that the love of God is "an almighty
love in the sense that it is capable of limiting itself, and,
while an end, becoming also a means, to an extent ade
quate to all love's infinite ends. This self-renouncing, self-
retracting act of the Son's will, this reduction of Himself
from the supreme end to be the supreme means for the
soul, is no negation of His nature ; it is the opposite, it is
the last assertion of His nature as love." 1
This may be put otherwise by saying that omnipotence
— in this discussion a quite fundamental attribute — exists
and operates in a moral universe and under moral con
ditions, and that if we think away this pervasive ethical
quality from almightiness, it is not predicable of the God
we Christians believe in. Now, while omnipotence is in
one sense limited or conditioned by holy love, in another
sense it is magnified. In virtue of that love, its range of
possibility broadens out endlessly. God's moral freedom
opens doors to Him which otherwise are shut. May it
not be that only the perfectly Holy is free to transcend
self and live in other lives, the sinful being so immured in
self that for them it is impossible to overflow the estrang
ing bounds, and pass into alien forms of experience ? Love
1 Forsyth, op. tit. 313-14.

474 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
with resource like God's has a boundless capacity of self-
determination. For us men and our salvation, it may well
be, He committed Himself, in one aspect of His personal
being, to a grade of experience qualified by change and
development, thus stooping to conquer and permitting the
conditions of manhood to prevail over His own freedom.
If the alternatives are an unethical conception of immuta
bility and a pure thought of moral omnipotence, which
makes room for Divine sacrifice, the Christian mind
need not hesitate. Every theory which accepts a real
incarnation must deny that the lowliness of our life is
incongruous with Godhead, and hold that, as it has been
put, our Lord became "representative of mankind not
only on the sacrificial side but also on the side of human
weakness." 1
Can analogies be found which help us with the
thought of Divine self-limitation ? None certainly which
take us the whole way. It is the very depth of nature
in deity which makes the idea of self-confinement
difficult ; for we cannot see how infinitude could narrow
its own circle. Yet it is noteworthy that always in the
human world growth of moral nature brings with it a
deepened power of self-abnegation. Elevation of life
means more power to descend. From omnipotence let
us now turn to omniscience. Here it is easy to make a
commencement. We are constantly limiting our actually
present knowledge without altering our personal identity.
We do this when we voluntarily close our eyes, or fall
asleep, or, for love's sake or duty's, withdraw our minds
1 " For supreme Spirit subject was to clay,
And Law from its own servants learned a law,
And Light besought a lamp unto its way,
And Awe was reined in awe,
At one small house of Nazareth ;
And Golgotha
Saw Breath to breathlessness resign its breath,
And Life do homage for its crown to death."
(Francis Thompson, Selected Poems, 28.)

OMNISCIENCE AS LIMITED 475
from the sources of mental interest and enrichment. Dr.
Forsyth has recently elaborated these analogies with
special care. He selects the instances of the reduction
or obscuring of self-consciousness by a drug voluntarily
taken in self-sacrifice ; of the musical genius, who re
nounces the practice of his art for social love and service
until " the first brief years of artistic joy and fame might
well seem to him at moments almost to belong to another
life " ; of the young keen philosopher, who at the call of
family need abjures the life of speculative thought to
merge himself in the pedestrian actualities of an existence
far from " the native land of his suppressed powers." In
each case the mental field is narrowed and impoverished
at the behest of sympathy. Or we may urge the analogy
of the man summoned by need of fatherland or city to
abandon the high simplicities of refined private life,
where the transparent moral situations are easily con
trolled, and insight is equal to duty, for the coarser and
often baffling moral perplexities of war or politics, with
the resulting all but incessant conflict between competing
forms of right action — between the legitimate claims, say,
of kindred or old friendship, and of national or civic trust.
At first it may seem as if he had mutilated his moral
being by a descent into the field of dubious practical
compromise. Increase in a certain kind of knowledge
entails a multiplication of perils for his conscience. But
yet, given a true man — of Lincoln's stamp- — character
visibly strengthens under the strain. Just through these
hardships of ethical decision, and the stern duty of
temporarily averting his mind from the lucid moral
rules that once sufficed, and of searching out with care,
and it may be agony, the more complex principles needed
to guide him in the multiform intricacies of the new life,
the man's inward stature and moral reach expand. The
utterances of his moral consciousness are deeper now,
broader, more worthy of man at his best and highest.
Some picture like this may render it less impossible to
conceive the free act of God in Christ as He subdued

476 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Himself to the conditions of human life. The analogy,
I am aware, holds solely in this point, that the " Son " left
a sphere above the conflict of good and evil that in love
He might enter a world of pain, struggle, and dependence ;
yet as an analogy it has the advantage of moving always
within the field of ethical experience. It was in the
province of moral realities, of knowledge at its highest,
that He who humbled Himself to the death of the cross
gained the name above every name.
Of course no analogy is commensurate with the
Divine fact. Too often we form ideals of self-sacrifice,
only to discover with shame that they are partial tran
scripts of our character, and that we are unable to
conceive anything more than a certain degree nobler than we
are. And this means that we are ethically incompetent to
imagine all the Divine capacity of self-renunciation. We
can but believe in it as more than we could ask or think.
How then shall we speak intelligibly of the experience
undergone by God the Son as He passed into the sphere
of change ? a Thomasius, as we have seen, taught the
abandonment of relative attributes of deity such as
omnipotence and omniscience, and the retention of
essential attributes like holiness and love. But the
distinction is not one which can be maintained. For
one thing, it is only if creation is not eternal, if there is
not always a world to be ruled and known and pervaded,
that the term "relative" holds. Apart from this, and
assuming that the world had a beginning in time, still it
must be held that once the world is there the Divine
relations of omnipotence, omniscience, and the like are as
really essential as righteousness or grace. Each is a
necessary determination of Godhead. "In short," as it
has been put, " we cannot think away the relative
attributes of God without at the same time thinking
away the relation. But this holds not of God merely,
but of all subjects whatsoever. Dispersion into the
colours of the spectrum is not essential to sunlight as
1 Cf. the argument of Bensow, Die Lehre von der Kenose, 272 ff.

ATTRIBUTES IN TRANSPOSITION 477
such, but so soon as we use a prism this relative attribute
of light cannot but appear." x
Thus to talk of the abandonment of this or that
attribute on the part of the Eternal Son is a conception
too sharp and crude, too rough in shading, for our present
problem. God ceases to be God not merely when (as
with Gess) there is a self-renunciation actually of the
Divine self-consciousness, but even when such qualities
as omnipotence are parted with. Still, though not parted
with, attributes may be transposed. They may come to
function in new ways, to assume new forms of activity,
readjusted to the new condition of the Subject. It is
possible to conceive the Son, who has entered at love's
behest on the region of growth and progress, as now
possessing all2 the qualities of Godhead in the form of
concentrated potency rather than of full actuality, Bvvdjiet,
rather than ivepyeia. For example, in its eternal form
the absolute intelligence of God acts as an intuitive and
synchronous knowledge of all things; when the Eternal
passes into time, however, knowledge for Him must take
on a discursive and progressive character. Similarly, a
man who has tested his own abilities may know that all
mathematics is potentially in his grasp, although in point
of fact he has mastered no more than is needful for his
calling. So Christ, who in virtue of His relation to the
Father had Divine knowledge within reach, took only
what was essential to His vocation. Though on many
subjects He shared the ignorance as well as the knowledge
of His contemporaries, yet He had at command all higher
truth which can be assimilated by perfect human faculty.
In His unique knowledge of God He knows that relatively
to which all else is but subordinate detail. This is the
1 Bensow, op. tit. 125.
2 I say all qualities equally, ethical and physical ; for while no stain of
'sin ever touched His holiness, it is clear from Jesus' reply to the youth who
called Him "good Master" that we cannot predicate of Him the changeless
and untemptable perfection of God per se. There is a modification therefore
even of the attributes which Thomasius calls immanent, but the modification
is not in their essence but in their form of existence.

478 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
kind of spiritual omniscience that seems to be claimed for
Him in the Gospels.
The same principle may be applied to omnipotence,
provided we bear well in mind that there is no such
thing, even in God, as an omnipotence which is not
morally conditioned. God is almighty in the sense that
He has power to do whatever He may will; and that
He may will, for the sake of His human children, to
limit His almightiness, translating it into a form com
patible with our experience, is very credible to those who
believe in the supremacy of Holy Love. Not only so,
but in the historic Jesus there is a derived power over
the souls of men, as over nature, which may be viewed
as a modified form of the power of Godhead. It is not
omnipotence simpliciter, but it is such power within the
human limits as we feel to be akin to almightiness and
prophetic of the hour when the Eisen Lord should say :
" All power is given Me in heaven and in earth." Omni
presence is more baffling ; and yet perhaps only at first
sight. We have to strip off the false deistic or pantheistic
associations with which the idea has become encrusted,
and to recognise that what faith asserts of God is not
that He is everywhere present in an infinitely extended
universe, with a physical ubiquity like that of ether, but
that He is absolutely superior to, and independent of, the
limitations of space and distance. But as the Eternal
may enter time, so He may have positive relations to
space and the spatial life we live. Now this transcendence
of spatial limitations, combined with these positive relation
ships, is present or implicit in Christ's redemptive mission
— in His triumphant capacity, that is, to accomplish in
Palestine a universally and eternally valid work un
hampered by the bounds of " here and there." As part
of history, His work has a date and place, yet its power
far transcends them. So the eternal form of Divine
existence and the time-form are here vitally related to
each other. The exchange of the one for the other is no
negation of God's specific being; it is the supreme

RESTRICTIONS OF THE HISTORIC LIFE 479
energetic act of perfect Love. Love is the link which
binds the pre-temporal Word to the living and dying
Jesus. It may be said that such a conception of " potentiality "
means in strictness that the human Jesus became God by
slow degrees ; but the objection cannot, I think, be made
good. This is no case of a mere man rising at last to
Divine honours; throughout the Person in view is One
whose life is continuous with the life of God, in whom,
as an infinite fountain, there exists eternally all that
Jesus is to grow to. What Christ is by potency, with a
potentiality based in His personal uniqueness, God is
actually for ever. Moreover, the willed latency to which
the properties of absolute Godhead are reduced in the
life of earthly change and shadow is destined to be re
placed, through moral triumph, by the fulness of life
dwelling in the exalted Lord. From beginning to end
there is no breach of personal continuity, nor any ascent
of bare manhood to a greatness it has neither right to
hold nor power to wield.
The Gospel facts reveal the outcome of this Divine act
of self-abnegation. It is a life wholly restrained within
the bounds of manhood. Outside the conditions imposed
by the choice of life as man the Son has no activity or
knowledge. At each point His experience is mediated
through the authentic powers of manhood : thought, feeling,
volition, speech are qualified by the supreme fact that now
He lives in finitude and must make His own finite and
successive adjustment of the relationships which obtain
between perfect man and the Father, between the true
Brother and His brethren. The primary act of will by
which He came here has made it impossible that He
should arbitrarily pass into the non-human sphere, for its
moral quality and content persist in all His experience on
earth. It was vital to His human goodness, as to His
piety, that He should dwell within the self-chosen limits,
evoking from mundane conditions the utmost they are cap-

480 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
able of yielding to a sinless nature. Abnormal power and
knowledge, it is true, are His intermittently ; but at each
juncture they were such as His work demanded, and faint
analogies even to His possession of the Spirit may be found
in the life of prophet and apostle. He was simply bound
to be what He seemed to be. Prayer and death are the
seals of His oneness with us. He needs God, even when
He shares His life ; and in prayer He finds Him day by
day. And as death is the most real thing we do, so Jesus
died when His hour had come, lying down under the sod
as one in whom there dwelt no power which a perfect man
hood could not mediate. " In His human life on earth, as
Incarnate," writes Moberly, "He is not sometimes, but
consistently, always, in every act and every detail, human.
The Incarnate never leaves His Incarnation. . . . What
ever the reverence of their motive may be, men do harm to
consistency and truth by keeping open as it were a non-
human sphere or aspect of the Incarnation. This opening
we should unreservedly desire to close. There were not
two existences of, or within, the Incarnate, side by side with
one another. If it is all Divine, it is all human too. By
looking for the Divine side by side with the human, instead
of discerning the Divine within the human, we miss the
significance of them both." 1 It is fatal to tamper with
the Gospel stories by checking our first instinct to
understand them humanly; by applying an unknown
standard of divinity we shall but lose the man, and be
no nearer God.
This, however, brings up the question whether the Son
Incarnate can ever have known Himself to be Divine. Was
the kenosis such that it annulled even the consciousness of
a higher relationship ? Some writers have contended that
to the end Christ remained unaware of His being God
in flesh, urging that on no other terms can we assert the
genuinely human character of His experience. In par
ticular, it has been held that while sin was an impossibility
for Jesus, we may conceive this impossibility as having been
1 Atonement and Personality, 97.

JESUS' CONSCIOUSNESS OF DIVINITY 481
hidden from Himself, so that He faced each new conflict
with that reality of effort, that refusal to count the issue a
foregone conclusion which is vitally characteristic of moral
life. And from this it might seem to follow that His
primary descent into the sphere of finitude had veiled in
nescience His eternal relationship to the Father. Yet we
need not entangle the two positions with each other. It
can only have been in mature manhood and perhaps inter
mittently that Christ became aware of His divinity — which
must have remained for Him an object of faith to the very
end. Now, if incarnation means Divine self-subjection to
the conditions of our life, it does not appear that even
such a discovery on Christ's part of His own essential Son-
ship must inevitably suggest to Him the total impossibility
of moral failure. But while His assurance of victory can
never have been mechanical, or such as to dispense Him
from vigilance, or effort, or seasons of depression, it was none
the less real and commanding. There is no reason why His
consciousness of unique intimacy with the Father, and of
the crucial importance of His mission, should not have im- •
parted to Jesus, in each temptation, a firmly-based con
fidence of victory, though He knew not in advance how or
how soon the final triumph would be vouchsafed.
In any case, it is only by degrees that the full meaning
of His relationship to the Father, with its eternal implicates,
can have broken on Jesus' mind. The self-sacrifice in
which His earthly life originated drew a veil over these
ultimate realities. But if He lives in glory now, and if an
uninterrupted unity binds the present majesty to the
mortal career, we are led to believe that the veil must
gradually have worn thinner and more translucent, until,
at least in high moments of visitation, He knew Himself
to be God conditioned in and by humanity. In whatever^
ways the significance of His relationship to God betrayed)
itself, His unshared unity with the Father must at length
have come to stand before His mind definitely as constitu
tive of His personality. Otherwise we should have to
think of some moment of mysterious apocalypse — at the
3i

482 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
resurrection presumably — when in conditions to which we
can attach no ethical significance the Eisen Lord awoke to
His own divinity. This has no relation to the data of the
New Testament. The subject, however, of the gradual ex
pansion of the Divine-human experience will come before us
in the next chapter. I only note here in passing what
will there be dwelt on.
It would seem that the self-imposition of limits by
Divine love must be conceived of as a great supra-temporal
act by which, in the almightiness of grace, the Son chose
to pass into human life. An infinitely pregnant act ; for
in truth it involved all the conflict, renunciation, and
achievement of the life to which it was the prelude. But
it is not possible to conceive of this act as having been
continuously repeated throughout the earthly life. We
cannot think of the Incarnate One as confining Himself
from moment to moment, by explicit volition, within the
frontiers of manhood. That would simply lead back to the
old untenable conception of a krypsis by which the Divine
•Self in Christ veils His loftier attributes, now less now
more, and is actuated in each case by didactic motives.
To return thus to a theoretic duality of mental life in our
Lord against which all modern Christology has been a
protest, is surely to sin against light. The acceptance of
human relationships — to nature, to man, to God — belongs
to the eternal or transcendent sphere, as a definitive settled
act ; it is not something consciously and continuously re
newed in time. What is continuous with the decisive act
of self-reduction is the moral quality of the life on earth,
the permanent self-consecration of Jesus' will. But the
self-limitation, transcendently achieved as a single, final
deed, inaugurates a permanent condition or state of life,
amid circumstances of change and suffering once for all
accepted. Two lines of argument often supposed to be vital to
a complete Kenotic statement are noticeably absent from
the foregoing exposition. First, no psychological theory is

QUESTIONS HERE PUT ASIDE 483
attempted as to the relations of the Divine and the human
in Christ. All efforts to divide the ground here go astray.
To construct a theory of how two streams of consciousness
or will co-existed, or mingled, in the same personality, we
must first ascertain that there are two streams ; and this
has never yet been proved. What seems evidence of the
dualism is that mysterious clairvoyance on Christ's part, in
hours of exalted self -consciousness, which recurs at intervals
in the Gospel story. This, however, in no way represents
a mental or spiritual duality ; it is rather a profound and
luminous intuition on Jesus' part of His own infinite
significance both for God and man. Besides, the ethical
interpretation of motive and meaning is of more importance
than any psychological theory of method. Exactly how
the Divine qualities in Christ, brought from the eternal
sphere, were adjusted to the human lot we do not know
and cannot tell ; but the redemption He accomplished by
life and death and victory is proof that the truth of God
head was His inmost being, while yet He was our brother
in humanity. In the second place, our exposition is silent as to the
" Word " or " Son " apart from His incarnation. In the older
theology much is said as to the Logos extra carnem — in
traditional phrase — as constituting the permanent and
essential background of the Logos in flesh. It is held that
we can make affirmations as to the unbroken maintenance
of cosmic functions by the infinite Logos, " filling all things
and uncircumscribed of any," even during the earthly life
of Jesus ; the Logos unlimited, that is, not only furnishes
the power of the Incarnate life, but simultaneously lives
in a universal creative relationship to the cosmos as a
whole, to which the human and developing relations of
the Incarnate sphere are simply additional, though with
an independence of their own. The Word or Son is thus
described as living at two centres, united indeed by what
we may call continuity of personal beii.g — as the bay is
still one with the vast ocean — yet distinct in scope and
dispensation : on the one hand, the Word omnipotent and

484 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
omniscient, who dwells in all creatures by virtue of
inalienable ubiquity, on the other the Word voluntarily
restrained in manhood. And of these two co-existing
states, the eternal and changeless state is the abiding
dynamic ground of the temporal.
My reason for passing over this in silence is not
that various analogies — more or less relevant and instruct
ive — could not be adduced to illustrate the idea of a
personality functioning in a dual relationship to its en
vironment. x Yet even so, a closer scrutiny reveals the
fact that all such analogies are defective at one or more
vital points. Thus, to take one detail, the Logos incarnate
has ex hypothesi no direct knowledge of the cosmic
activities predicated of the Logos extra carnem. But there
are two considerations of more importance. First, the New
Testament data are insufficient. Bishop Weston has said
that " the general tendency of the New Testament is
towards the doctrine of the permanence of the universal
life and cosmic functions of the eternal Word " 2 — their
permanence, i.e., during Christ's life on earth. But the
phrases he has cited from St. Paul and the Epistle to the
Hebrews can be made to carry his interpretation only by
a petitio principii ; for in both writers the term Son, as
scholars are virtually agreed, has reference primarily to the
historic and exalted Christ. Nothing else can be assumed
to be in view. At most, then, apostolic statements on the
subject — even if we suppose them to have had the problem
before their minds — leave it undecided. St. John does not
even know what is meant by the " Word incarnate " without
looking at the story of Jesus ; and we may therefore regard
it as improbable that he would have cared to enter on
speculations as to the non-incarnate Word.
Secondly, it is scarcely possible at this point to acquit
certain traditional arguments of a tendency to ditheism.
Thus it is urged that the cessation of the incarnate Word
from His universal activities must produce a cosmic chaos.
But a plea so dubious would seem to involve the far greater
1 See for example Weston, op. tit. 151. 2 Ibid. 115.

RITSCHL AND KENOTICISM 485
religious peril of so separating the Father from the Son in a
cosmic reference as to endanger the monotheistic view of
the Trinity and negative the inseparabilis trinitatis operatio
so memorably emphasised by Augustine. If the term
" person " in Trinitarian doctrine is more than " aspect," it
is certainly less than " individual." After all, it is a funda
mental truth that the world is upheld by God, not by a
constituent or part of God. There are spheres in which
division of labour is unmeaning. We must simply confess
that we know nothing of an existence of the Logos apart
from but synchronous with His reality in Jesus, and that
statements of a dogmatic character on the subject have no
apprehensible reality for our minds.
It will be seen that these considerations bear with
equal force on theories of an opposite kind. They bear, for
instance, on Godet's view that during the period of the
earthly life, when the existence of the Son within the God
head was interrupted for a time, the Father. Himself effected
what is normally effected by the mediation of the Word.1
But this is to be wise above what is written. Over all
such problems there hangs a curtain, alike for discursive
knowledge and for faith. And no employment can be less
rewarding than the construction of hypotheses for which we
possess no data.
Perhaps the strongest blow aimed at the Kenotic
principle came from Bitschl, when he said that by very
definition it deprives us of the right to say that we find
God in Jesus. For the Kenotist, as he puts it, " Christ,
at least in His earthly existence, has no Godhead at all." 2
Were the charge made out, it would mean that the incrimin
ated class had repeated the mistake of the earlier Logos
Christology, which, as we have seen, taught men to find in
Jesus, not God Himself, but an inferior Divine essence. A
full reply to the accusation would have to inquire whether
the Eitschlian conception of what is meant by predicating
1 Commentary on St. John's Gospel.
a Justification and Reconciliation (E.T.), 410.

486 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Godhead of the historic Christ is itself satisfactory. It may
be pointed out, however, that what Eitschl regards as
an insuperable difficulty — the absence of certain Divine
qualities — is simply essential to the personal advent of God
in time. Surely there is truth in the argument of a
suggestive writer, that wherever God reveals Himself, the
veiling is as real as the revelation. " Chemistry does not
show any more of Him than there is in chemistry ; the
revelation will be all shut up within its laws and limitations.
May we not expect that in history, on the plane of human
affairs, the same law will obtain ? If God does not put
more of Himself into chemistry than chemistry will hold,
we may expect that He will not put more of Himself into
humanity than humanity will hold. And thus the self-
limitation, the self-emptying of Deity which we are told is
an impossible conception, becomes the first condition of any
revelation at all."1 The position defended here is that
only so — only by contracting His Divine fulness within
earthly limits — could the redeeming God draw nigh to
man. Further, the life of Jesus exhibits to us precisely
that rendering of true deity in human terms, that absolute
perfectness of life " in short measures," which answers to
the Kenotic principle as rightly understood. We read the
Gospels, and we find that in Jesus there was faith and hope
and love in perfect fulness ; that He lived in unbroken
intimacy with the Father ; that He manifested God to men
as absolute holiness, love, and freedom ; that He acted a
Divine part in the experience of the sinful, forgiving their
iniquities and imparting a new and blessed life. In Him
there is realised on earth the human life of God, and it is
a life whose chiefest glory consists in a voluntary descent
from depth to depth of our experience. It is the personal
presence of God in One who is neither omniscient nor
ubiquitous nor almighty — as God per se must be — but is
perfect Love and Holiness and Freedom in terms of perfect
humanity. 1 Brierley, Aspects of the Spiritual, 35.

DR. SANDAY'S PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY 487

NOTE ON DE. SANDAY'S PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY.
In his Christologies Ancient and Modern (1910), Dr. Sanday
has outlined a new and hitherto unexplored view of our Lord's
person which we notice here both for its extremely stimulating
quality and for the vivacious debate evoked by it. He is con
vinced that we understand the incarnation better by using the
analogy of the meeting of Divine and human in ourselves. Now
"the proper seat or locus of all divine indwelling, or divine
action upon the human soul, is the subliminal consciousness"
(p. 159). The influence of the Spirit plays upon the roots of
our being. In comparison with conscious states the subconscious
are "subtler, intenser, further-reaching, more penetrating. It
is something more than a mere metaphor when we describe the
sub- and unconscious states as more 'profound'" (p. 145). This
is illustrated from another sphere. " The deepest truth of
mysticism, and of the states of which we have been speaking as
mystical, belongs not so much to the upper region of conscious
ness — the region of symptoms, manifestations, effects — as to the
lower region of the unconscious" (p. 155). And the novel
feature of Dr. Sanday's theory is the definite position that " the
same, or the corresponding subliminal consciousness is the proper
seat or locus of the Deity of the incarnate Christ" (p. 159).
Thus we are to conceive the union of the human and Divine in
Christ. We may draw a horizontal line, he writes, " between
the upper human medium, which is the proper and natural field
of all active expression, and those lower deeps which are no less
the proper and natural home of whatever is divine. This line is
inevitably drawn in the region of the subconscious. . . . What
ever there was of divine in Him, on its way to expression whether
in speech or act, passed through, and could not but pass through,
the restricting and restraining medium of human consciousness.
This consciousness was, as it were, the narrow neck through
which alone the divine could come to expression " (pp. 165-67).
Dr. Sanday lays stress on this figure of the "narrow neck" as
applied to our Lord's human consciousness. The expression is
human completely human; but that which is expressed is
neither human alone nor Divine alone ; but Divine and human
fused or blended. While the Divine and the unconscious are

488 THE PERSON OF JESOS CHRIST
not equated, it is held that the unconscious is the sphere within
which Divine and human coalesce. Their mutual influence
takes effect below the dividing-line at which the resultant con
sciousness emerges.
I can only summarise the objections to which this striking
argument seems to be exposed. With Dr. Sanday's unreserved
declarations as to the unity and consistency of Jesus' life, and
his acceptance of the position that "there is no possible or
desirable division between what is human in Him and what is
Divine," there will, I imagine, be general sympathy. But we
must ask whether his special solution of the problem can be
permanently maintained.
(a) Is the superiority of the unconscious really tenable?
Subliminal process is no doubt an indispensable concomitant of
all mental life; psychology would, however, class it not as the
higher form, but as a subordinate and ancillary condition of the
fully conscious. Its content and quality are alike derived from
consciousness; in Professor Stout's words, "it is an organised
system of conditions which have been formed in and through
bygone conscious experience.'' From the ethical point of view
the difficulty is still graver, and I do not find it mitigated by
what has been urged as to the " live " and active character of
the contents of subliminal mind, or its independently receptive
contact with the universe. Does the subconscious have moral
qualities of any kind ? It yields not merely the inspirations of
genius or heroism, but the disordered and incoherent absurdities
of dreams ; is a vague and dubious magnitude of this sort
calculated to help us to interpret Jesus ? Why should we take
this half-lit region of psychic life, regarding which we can only
speak hypothetically or at second-hand — since it cannot of course
be known directly — and say that it offers a truer and more worthy
dwelling-place or medium of Godhead than is provided by the
full intensity of consciousness? I question whether Christian
mysticism is really on Dr. Sanday's side. The mystics appear
to refer the soul's participation in God to His presence in their
consciousness, their knowledge, will, and feeling — at least pre
dominantly. Lastly, the subconscious has affinities rather with
sleep, infant life, and animal instinct ; which suggests that it is
of a character too humble and inarticulate for Dr. Sanday's
greater purpose.
(b) Inferentially the new theory involves a conception of

DR. SANDAY'S PYSCHOLOGICAL THEORY 489
deity as unknowable. God is not conscious mind known to or
in conscience and reason, but touches us rather beneath the line
of clear thought and moral volition. Yet Christians define Him
as love and holiness existing in the form of Absolute Personality ;
love conscious, ethical, rational. But this is something we
simply cannot put in terms of the unconscious. We know what
is meant by saying that the love which looked out of Christ's
eyes, touching men's lives and making all things new for them,
was literally the love of God Himself. But how shall we speak
of a Holy Love whose fit home is in the subliminal 1 The only
epithets rightly applied to deity have hitherto been drawn from
the sphere of conscious will and reason ; if they are vetoed, as
the new theory appears to veto them, God becomes indescribable
and unknown. Further, the facts which have been appealed to
all through the ages in proof that in Christ deity and humanity
were combined, are those of His spiritual authority, His sinless
ness, His redeeming power, His filial consciousness, and the
like. Certainly there is mystery in the manifestation, but the
mystery is in these forms of consciousness, and is, I feel, in no
way relieved by being referred to an inscrutable non-conscious
background. (c) Does the new hypothesis really evade the haunting
dualism of tradition ? It is proposed that instead of a vertical
line between the two natures, as in older doctrine, we should
draw a horizontal line between the upper human medium and
the lower deeps where deity has a home. Dr. Sanday, it is true,
insists that the interfusion of Divine and human is effected in
the region of the subconscious, so that it is in a subliminal whole
where the union has already been realised that the resulting full
consciousness arises. But this in no way alters the fact that the
full consciousness in question is merely human, so that to reach
the Divine in Jesus we must still quit the human sphere. We
still argue from one to the other, passing in either direction
by a distinct movement of transition; we do not see them
identified or merged in living oneness, as both faith and the ideal
Christology are clear we must.
In a later pamphlet (Personality in Christ and in Ourselves,
1911) Dr. Sanday concedes that he may have made the boundary-
line between conscious and subconscious rather too sharp. The
action and reaction between the two spheres is mutual and
incessant. Nor does he wish, as he explains, to treat the

490 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
subliminal as per se superior to the supraliminal. But if this be
so, the question is whether one of the main arguments for his
theory as a whole has not vanished. "We must be able to
predicate of the subconscious a deeper affinity with the Divine if
it is to rank as par excellence the receptacle for indwelling or
incarnated Godhead, an affinity which I have argued cannot be
made out.1
1 Cf. with the above two full and suggestive articles by Professor Henri
Bois in the Montaubau Revue de Thiologie for July and September 1911,
which deal at considerable length with Dr. Sanday's theory and its critics.
Professor Bois agrees with Dr. Sanday in holding that the subconscious is
the psychological locus of the indwelling of God in Jesus, but rejects the
orthodox Trinitarian background of the new hypothesis.

CHAPTER XL
THE SELF-REALISATION OF CHRIST.
One defect in traditional Christology, of which the best
modern thought is sensible, is a tendency to construe our
Lord's person in rigid and quiescent terms which are
hostile to the idea of development. The Cyrilline theory,
whatever its discretion in statement, left no place for
growth in the Incarnate. He is represented as being
complete mit einem Schlage, at a single stroke. The whole
significance of His personality is given by fiat from the
very outset. It is forgotten that a static theory of a
dynamic reality must prove false, and that ethically
qualified life unfolding within time is subject by definition
to change and progress through which it attains to be
explicitly and in act what it is by fundamental constitu
tion. It was a symptom or consequence of this initial
error that the fact of the historic Jesus' growth in power
and knowledge came to be totally ignored, or, if not
ignored, referred exclusively to His manhood. Humanity,
even the humanity of God, it was conceded, must exhibit
real modification and increase ; hence the humanity of Jesus
doubtless possessed these vital characteristics of a dilating
and self-augmenting life. But to speak of Godhead
as patient of change is self-contradictory. Deity is
insusceptible of growth or diminution.
To-day, however, there is a natural reluctance to
Literature — Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, 1890 ; Forsyth,
Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 1909; Weston, The One Christ, 1907;
Orr, Christian View of God and the World, 1893 ; Edwards, The God-Man,
1895 ; Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, 1907 ; Bensow, Die Lehre
von der Kenose, 1903. 491

492 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
break up Christ's single person into the two unrelated
halves which any such view must postulate. His life, we
are sure, is a unity both in being and doing ; and all our
efforts to show how it is one, and what sort of one it is,
presuppose this unity as apprehended from the first by the
Christian consciousness. If growth is predicable of one
aspect of the whole, it is predicable of the whole to which
that aspect belongs. It is inconceivable that what went
on in Christ's manhood made no difference in His total
person. Furthermore, change is a necessary condition of
life in history, in which finite reality comes to itself
through the issues of free and motived action. In par
ticular, every reality of the kind called " ethical " not only
realises but wins its life through interaction with a chang
ing environment which serves to educe and reveal its
latently moral character. Life for every moral agent lies
open in the direction of the future ; he is becoming that
which he has not been and is not yet. He lives by
moving; to make the same choice for ever would be to
make no choice at all and ipso facto lapse from the moral
plane. If, then, our Lord belongs to concrete history, His
person cannot be a scene of stagnation ; and the activity
and movement constitutive of it is no mere evanescent
accident, but vital to His individuality. There must be a
sense in which His being is ever approaching completion.
Finally, the maxim that development in Christ is excluded
by the absolute immutability of Godhead is one, as we
have seen, to be accepted only with great reserve.
Inferences derived from the abstract conception of deity
must be confronted, in this field, with the essential
distinction between God per se, in His transcendent being,
and God as He comes forth in self-impartation to spirits
immersed in space and time. If the incarnation be a fact,
it is obviously a fact involving the self-subjection of the
Divine life to ethical laws and conditions of existence
which are so far irrelevant to Godhead as such and apart
from the incarnate relationship. The conception is
difficult, of course; but the difficulty is one inherent in

MORAL LIFE A SCENE OF GROWTH 493
the assumed facts. God in man is by supposition other
wise qualified than God as absolute, "Himself unmoved,
all motion's source " ; and one deep-reaching qualification,
apart from which there could be no true human life, is
liability to real activity, growth, evolution within the
time-series. And if, to leave these generalities, we
contemplate the Christ of history, first at the outset of His
career, next at its termination, we are clearly aware that
the comparison reveals a movement between these points;
a process whereby the significance of His personality has
been enhanced. At the end it includes more of those
qualities in virtue of which He is definable as Eedeemer.
"As God in manhood," writes Bishop Weston, "as God
self-conscious in manhood, He is not at birth perfect in
the sense of complete attainment ; but only in the popular
sense of beiug free from sin and from the lack of anything
necessary to Him at the stage of life in which He was." 1
There is a becoming, and it yields an access of being.
We have the less need to dwell on these abstract
principles, because stages or crises in Jesus' life can
be indicated where, as in veins below the surface, the pulse
and flow of movement is discernible, and the coalescence
of the Divine and human within Him can be viewed as a
process. To take only three instances : His baptism, His
death, and His resurrection cannot have passed and left no
mark. The result must have been to deepen the involu
tion and co-inherence of the two mobile factors of His life
and to secure their more perfect mutual irradiation. His
baptism was in itself a token of a faith matured through
resistance to early temptations ; it sealed Him as One who
had sustained unimpaired His filial relation to the Father,
and in the long effort had acquired full ability and
independence of moral life. And by sealing it, it made
this moral character still more irrevocably fixed. But
1 Op. tit. 291. It is noticeable that the evangelists do not place Jesus
vividly before us till He has reached the maturity of His strength ; they
do not dwell on His childhood, for our attitude towards a little child is not
the fitting attitude to our Redeemer.

494 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
this decisive act of self-identification with the sinful must
have been inspired more by perfect faith than by a full
perception of its implications, which only the future could
disclose. When it transpired later that nothing would
avail but the uttermost sacrifice of death, Jesus' acceptance
of this final obligation, in a series of experiences interpret
able at their height by the transfiguration — when love to
men filled His expanding soul and by inward act He
avowed His willingness to share their lot to the uttermost
— raised Him to a yet sublimer plane, a more completely
redemptive fulness and glory of moral being. But above
all He fulfilled His person through His death and
resurrection. Who can fail to see that Christ was more
Himself — more fully and completely all that is denoted
by the name Christ — when death was past, than when as
a child He lay in Simeon's arms ? 1 By His resurrection, St.
Paul declares, He was installed as Son of God with power.
Thus the Eisen Life came not ex abrupto, or from without,
but at the point when the life-content of Godhead had
taken completely realised form within Him and become
the mighty principle of an exalted and redeeming life
in the Spirit. Mediated by experiences now past, and
supremely by the experience of the cross, the identification
of self-imparting Godhead with finite human forms was at
last perfected, and the Divine noumenon, if we may call
it so, become wholly one with the human phenomenon.
And this plerosis, or development and culmination of the
Bedeemer's person, is an event or fact which answers
spiritually to the great kenosis from which it had begun.
The two are moral correlates. On the privative act of
renunciation, lasting on in moral quality throughout the
earthly career, there follows the re-ascent of self-recovery.
He who lost His life for our sake thereby regained it.
It may help to make this general conception more
luminous if we recur to the Christological axiom that our
Lord's person and work constitute a single reality. If the
work is dependent on the person, and moves through it to
1 Cf. Kahler, Angewandte Dogmen, 65.

DEVELOPMENT IN JESUS* PERSONALITY 495
achievement, the person is in some real sense dependent on
the work, fulfilled by its mediation, integrating all its virtue.
It is not in our minds merely that the two condition each
other, but objectively and in themselves. Now the work
is admittedly a process. As part of history it could not be
given en bloc ; it had its times, its order, its movement from
less to more. Hence real growth is predicable also of
Christ's person ; the union of God and man in Him was
more completely actualised at death than at birth, when
He rose than when He died. As the discharge of His
vocation proceeded, His personality — which as an ethical
constitution could not be unfait accompli from the outset —
expanded into its own fulness. What He did flowed from
what He was, but also He was in a real measure all that
He did. He was creating Himself continually. In each
moment of His present there was a constitutive persistence
of His past, as His redeeming soul dilated in Divine
capacity, not only modifying its quality but also increasing
its intensity. Thus the cross was not for Him eventually
a defeat; it was the last consummation of His person.
The principle touches every side of life. There is the
ever-increasing degree in which His body became minis-
trant to the spirit ; there is the growing moral stability
which comes from duty done, from new responsibilities
accepted. There is advance in His reasoning thought, in
His mental fitness to be the medium of truth, His adjust
ment of personal relationships, His holy aversion to sin
mingled with the knowledge that He is identified with the
sinful, His awareness of supremacy over man and of one
ness with the Father. He could be tempted, as God can
not. The creaturely weakness which quivered in Gethse-
mane had still to be clothed with power. All this, how
ever, it is impossible to abstract from His person. It has
no reality our minds can apprehend to say that He
matured in mind, in character, in self-consciousness, but
that His personality or Ego remained throughout immut
ably behind a veil, as a substratum unaffected by the
phenomena of change. The word " person " has no content

496 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
when we remove moral character, religious consciousness,
and the mediatorial function which both subserve. Wher
ever reality exists of the kind we call " personal," it cannot
be described adequately either by reference to a quite
changeless Ego which abides untouched beneath the shift
ing mass of our whole psychical existence, the flux of
experience, or in terms exclusively of the shifting flux
itself. The fact is a combination of both. The concep
tions of static identity with which our study of person
ality usually begins have to be laid aside, and we learn to
conceive spiritual being rather as that which by its nature
moves from potency to achievement. The concrete fact,
in other words, presents itself as a moving continuity, a
continuity which is lived — the core of it persisting, yet the
modification of change not less real ; while neither aspect,
abstract and hypostatise it as we may, exists save in and
through the other. Indeed, it is no bad figure which
symbolises personality by a melody, in which each note is
continuous with the rest and exhibits a tone-colour and
value dependent on the whole, the melody meanwhile per
petually building itself up in successive notes which in turn
subtly reflect the entire musical conception. However
faulty the illustration, it serves to bring out the fact that
the anterior stages of personal life pass, by a dynamic pro
gress, into the later and richer stages, and that if we are to
state the full truth, we must speak not only of a continuity
of being but of a continuous becoming. It is no defect in
finite personality that it should have this character ; it is
simply its nature. And already we have seen reason to
contend that it was into this developmental form of exist
ence that Divine love and life passed, when Christ was
born to traverse all the authentic stages of human life.
Objections to this view may be raised from two sides.
It may first be urged that the notion of an unperfected Life
which still is perfect cannot be maintained. If we predicate
change and progress of the Incarnate, not as man only, .but
in His one Divine-human personality, is not this to assert

OBJECTIONS TO THIS VIEW 497
defect and shortcoming ? If it be so, the fault lies with
our human speech. "Imperfect," as meaning "uncom
pleted " or " inadequately realised," has become encrusted
with illegitimate moral associations suggestive of sin or evil.
But any given stage of a development short of the highest
is not of course deficient in this moral sense. We dis
tinguish the seed from the tree as " imperfect " only if we
have first taken the tree as our criterion of reality. So
regarded, imperfection is but a name for finitude ; on the
other hand, the finite, and it only, is capable of being per
fected through the eventual realisation of- its idea. It is
of course this gradual and ethically mediated attainment of
perfection which we ascribe to Christ. His life is a
process which runs its course in time, and moves from a
basis of constitution to a climax. To exist humanly is to
unfold capacities originally present in nuce ; the differential
feature of Christ is the unique degree of capacity posited
in the fact that He is God's Son in flesh. Whereas in any
other child or youth there exists the potency only of a
completed finite self -consciousness, in Christ the potency is
infinite. Secondly, it may be said that this application of the
category of growth to Christ is equivalent to the assertion
that though originally merely human, He became Divine.
How can we think the life-content of Godhead as being
gradually conveyed in its fulness to Jesus, the individual
man, in proportion to His receptivity, without transferring
the realities of incarnation to His life on earth, so that-
incarnation finally appears as the resultant of His human
career, rather than its antecedent ground ? This criticism
is probably due to the frequent use of the brief but inac
curate phrase "gradual incarnation." But what is meant
by those who use the phrase is simply to call attention
to the ethically mediated development or self-fulfilment
of a life which is, by original constitution, Divine-human.
Such development they hold to be a moral necessity of the
case, since, as Dorner puts it from an earlier standpoint,
" the two-sided Unio cannot at the outset exist in the
32

498 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
sphere of knowledge and volition proper, which presuppose
self-consciousness ; for neither human will nor conscious
ness can be actually existent at the outset." 1 This effort
to construe the whole in ethical terms, which can never be
satisfied by the juxtaposition or even the interpenetration
of two disparate substances, leads naturally to a theory of
the kind now described. To the Divine movement of self-
impartation, a human recipiency in Jesus must answer at
each point, the content more and more adjusting itself to
the capacity of the form.
Our case then is this : First, it is never to be for
gotten that there is a Christ at all only in virtue of an
unspeakable Divine sacrifice. That fixes His proper plane ;
also it makes possible a redeeming Life in human form.
Secondly, everywhere in the moral world, and so for Christ,
it is a law that we have and inherit only that which we
also win for ourselves, appropriating the initial gift by
action, will, liberty. Thus we can believe that when Jesus
came to Himself absolutely, through life, death, and the last
victory, it was as fulfilling, and triumphantly entering
upon, His implicit being. The gain of life for Him was
in a sense regained. It was progress in personal unity with
Godhead, not progress to it from outside. The life grew
and moved onward to its mighty climax ; death and victory
set the crown upon it all ; and the whole vast movement
retains its moral quality because it came to pass through
an unceasing conflict with sin and death and tragedy, sus
tained by perfect dependence on God and perfect love to
man. So there unfolded in Christ that which had been
enfolded within Him by the Eternal Love, to be restrained
wholly by the bounds of manhood. Notwithstanding the
personal identity which unites the Child of Nazareth to
the risen Lord, this newness of life-content, this dynamic
advance in ripened and articulated nature, is a cardinal
element of the whole fact.
Thus the whole personality of Christ, as it has been
expressed, " is not something given at the start by the
1 System of Christian Doctrine, iii, 335.

BRIEF RECAPITULATION 499
existence side by side of the Divine and human natures,
but something achieved by His life's action."1 And of
this self-fulfilment the presence of God in Jesus is the
permanent underlying ground. It is not simply that God's
care specially fostered a certain child, youth, man. Bather
it is that the indwelling God, who is Love and Power, so
formed and irradiated this expanding life that from within
it became the perfected personality it was by potency.
As instrumental factors of this growth many things may
be specified — e.g. inborn disposition and the influences of
ancestral piety — but the distinctive force is given by the
personal inhabitation of God. There came — the order we
cannot fix — the knowledge of His unshared connection
with the Father. There came a sense of personal
Eedeemership, of a place and function answering to
ancient promises of a Servant of the Lord who should save
by vicarious pain. There came the discovery, through
action, of His own inherent power to rescue lost men from
all their sorest troubles, from the load of sin and the
destroying powers of nature. Everything which can be
truly said regarding the growth of His Messianic conscious
ness is in place here. Living in that age and land, He
could only awake through certain thought-forms, coloured
by ancient human experience, to His singular position in
time and history. But the power resting on Him as
Messiah He enjoys as His own possession It could rest
only on the Son. More and more He takes possession of
it, till at last, on the immortal side of death, it fills Him
in absolute and final measure.
But this general interpretation, as I' believe, may be
surveyed from a yet wider point of view, even if in candour
we have to admit that a problem is far from completely
soluble which contains, and is created by, two imperfectly
known factors.2
1 J. K. Mozley, ut supra.
2 On what follows cf. Kahler, Wissensehaft der christlichen Lehre1,
325-56.

500 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
The unification of Divine and human life in Christ
may be regarded as the focus and meeting-point of two
great spiritual movements of an essentially personal
character. From above comes the creative initiating
movement of God towards man, directed by the saving
purposes of Holy Love. From beneath comes the yearning
movement of man toward God, in faith and love and hope.
These two personal currents — of salvation held forth and
communion longed for — join and interpenetrate in the one
person, Jesus Christ, in a fashion completely concrete,
historical, apprehensible. In this confluent unification,
which does not cease to be progressive because its locus has
now come to be once for all within His single personality,
is given the specific and final expression of an active
relationship of God to the world posited with its very
existence as His creation — rooted, therefore, in His eternal
being. For Him redemption is re-creation ; in it creation
comes to its final goal. The writer who first named
Christ " the Word " saw Him as the supreme expres
sion of this Divine purpose for the world, so that all
He utters by life and passion rests on and discloses
some aspect of the Eternal Life as its ever-present
background. In all His relations to the finite, then, God appears in
this specific light, this attitude of redemptive will. His
presence in Jesus consummates the plan. It is He who
calls the Divine-human person into history; it is He who
sustains and perfects Him by a real indwelling which acts
and re-acts upon a true human experience. In Christ,
that is, the personal redeeming distinction or aspect in
God through which He goes forth into the world, to save
by truth and grace, takes historical form in the conditions
of finite life. The Highest becomes a means to man's
chief end. Becent attempts to conceive of God as
Purpose, rather than as Infinite Thing or Quantity, are
again raising our minds to the- thought of Him as ever
engaged with and on finite souls, moving toward them,
energising within them, essentially directive, actual, and

INCARNATION AS A DIVINE CLIMAX 501
active.1 But long before the Gospel had set this forth as
the "far-off, Divine event to which the whole creation
moves." And its whole centralised meaning and power is
gathered up in Jesus.. He is " the Incarnation, the Fulfil
ment, the expression in conditions of time and space, of
that Intending Will which is coming to itself in the
universe of human souls."2 There is no longer any
question of a quiescent Divine substance planted in bare
mechanical juxtaposition with impersonal manhood; in
Jesus' soul, rather, is given the spiritual life-content of
God, the outgoing of His infinite redeeming Self into the
experience of a growing finite spirit.
Further, on the human side the progressive and irre
versible unification in Christ of life Divine and human
was from the first conditioned by a unique basis of human
personality, the ground of the future complete unity. The
unity, as a fact lived out in time, was mediated by the
gradual voluntary appropriation, on Jesus' side, of the
Divine fulness of love, truth, holiness, power. In virtue
of this appropriation, through the instrumentality of an
obedience which never faltered, the human life of Jesus
became the absolute organ of the Father's self -bestowal. |
The impartation of God is focalised in a decisive spiritual
personality. Thus on both sides, the originative equally with the
receptive, real conditions can be found for that personal
life-unity which was to be accomplished through the
experiences of Jesus. In God all things begin from His
eternal purpose to make Himself, in His Sou, the means to
the chief end of man; in Jesus is posited a uniquely
qualified life, in special relations to the Father, and free
like no other in history from the taint or disability of sin.
These two, meeting and permeating in ways which the
kenosis had made possible, issue finally in Godhead
perfectly mediated into oneness with manhood. The basis
and guarantee of that result are given ab initio; what
i Cf. W. Temple, The Nature of Personality (1911).
* Hutton, Authority and Person of our Lord, 9.

502 the Person of jesos christ
cannot be given, so long as the process remains moral, is
the last consummate form. The life of Jesus, far from
being episodic or accidental in the highest point of view,
was constitutive of the person who emerged from it. In
the words of Dr. Forsyth, whose exposition of this general
view I have found deeply suggestive : " In Christ we have
two things, the two grand actions of spiritual being, in
final peace and eternal power. We have the whole
perfect action of Godhead concentrated through one factor
or hypostasis within it and directed manward both to
create and redeem ; and we have also the growing moral
appropriation by man's soul moving Godward of that
action as its own, as its initial Divine nature and content.
... As His personal history enlarged and ripened by
every experience, and as He was always found equal to
each moral crisis, the latent Godhead became more and
more mighty as His life's interior, and asserted itself with
the more power as the personality grew in depth and scope.
Every step He victoriously took into the dark and hostile
land was an ascending movement also of the Godhead
which was His base." 1
Hence we may regard the union alternately and
equally from two points of view, each of which is defined
by the other. As the Father's gift, in a purpose infallibly
sure of execution, it is Divinely real from the outset and
sub specie aeternitatis. But also it is humanly actualised
in time ; it comes to fruition in One who " passes from a
destiny to a perfection through a career." What we see
during the earthly life is the aspect of creaturely un-
perfectedness, becoming perfect " in short measures " ; at
the resurrection it is made clear how much had always
been latent in this Life by very origin, and how eventually,
and, to the insight of faith, quite fully and irrevocably, the
active and redeeming life of God is now become the vital
content of humanity. If this be scouted as implying an
antinomy, I should not be careful to deny it, nor do I
think that the work of theology can be done without
1 Op. tit. 338, 349.

ETERNITY AND TIME 503
encountering antinomies at every point where we touch
the relations of eternity and time. At all events, this
very difficulty meets us squarely as soon as we try to
think out the meaning of Christian redemption. Bedemp-
tion, as a concrete fact, insists in being contemplated in
just these two ways. It is the outcome of eternal love, in
whose designs there can be no breakdown ; but also, as we
know it, it is a temporal experience, successive, continuous,
expectant. It is, yet is to be. Moreover, from the
standpoint of theory it will always be impossible to inter
pret the receptivity in time of the believing soul as any
thing but the rival of the eternal grace which saves ; in
experience, on the other hand, grace fulfils itself in volition,
and we find it liberty to yield to God. Thus religion itself
is unintelligible if once we define eternity and time as
sheerly disparate or mutually exclusive, or assume that our
nature is impervious to God. And this Christian experi
ence of being saved is positive evidence, given in immediate
consciousness, that the union of God and man is a reality,
achieved in regenerate men, however faintly, and that as a
reality it is subject to conditions of growth in time.
If then we see clearly that God and man are not
definable as opposites, and that time is susceptible, of
eternity, it will not seem incredible that there should have
existed in Christ, under conditions never again repeated, a
gradual coalescence of life Divine and human. It may be
this is one reason why the New Testament does not
hesitate to summon the Christian to share the very
experience of Jesus — to be baptized with His baptism, to
die His death, to live with Him the resurrection life.
Divine though He be, it is not impossible that we should
be one with Him. Such oneness is indeed the final end
of His mission, and the nature of the real, always, is homo
geneous with its end. Christ, in other words, was God
incarnate in such modes that — in spite of the difference
between Saviour and saved — we may follow Him on an
ascending journey, and lay hold on a redeeming life which
He has made real, near; and sure to us by translating it

504 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
into the progressively appropriated content of His own
soul. It is fact humanly given in Him, His by personal
assimilation and ownership, that it may be saving fact
received by man. First He lived the grace He was, finally
He installed it in our world by death, and entered on
universally redemptive sway. But the fount and origin
of the whole was the vast pre-temporal transcendent act
of self-abnegation on the part of God.
It will be agreed that if the self -limitation and the self-
fulfilment of God in Christ, with which this chapter and the
last have been concerned, are real and credible, they are also
morally correlative. The juxtaposition is not accidental, or
due to a mere craving for logical symmetry. Each answers
to the other by an ethical necessity. The manifested Divine
fulness which faith beholds in the exalted Lord, inconceiv
able though it be in one who grows on the soil of human
nature, as merely human, is intelligibly continuous with the
life prior to resurrection, and fitly crowns it. " Worthy is
the' Lamb that was slain to receive power and glory and
blessing." Thus what He rose to requires that what He
rose from — the frailty and the cross — should in turn have
been the self-limiting of an absolute Life and Love, of a
glory which could be resigned because it could also be
resumed. This on one side. On the other, the moral glory
of the kenosis points to the almighty consummation of
the plerosis or re-ascent. God in His transcendence is not
definable as moral character simply; there is a mode of
being answering to the Holy Love which He is ; and this
Godhead of manifestation, unrestrained by phenomenal con
ditions, is visible in Christ as risen. Here, at the core of
reality, the world of fact and the world of value inter
penetrate. Once the Divine mode of self-revelation in
historic life had ceased, the limitations of earth and nature
dropped away ; and Christ entered, by a transition of which
we can see the moral fitness, into possession of all power in
heaven and in earth. It is this conception which the New
Testament sets forth under the guise of a reward bestowed

DESCENT AND ASCENT CORRELATIVE 505
on Christ for His obedience — " the Name which is above
every name." We are led to think of Him as somehow
greater for having lived. Finally, it is perhaps not im
possible to mark the traces of these two corresponding
moments or movements in our Lord's person. His being is as
it were the theatre or locus in which the man ward movement
of God, characterised by redemptive self-limitation, blends
with the Godward movements of man in obedient faith and
hope and love. The sustained approach of the Deus humilis
finds its essential counterpart in that rising perfection, that
Te\e«oo-t?, as it is described in Hebrews, which He acquired
as He successively seized the occasions which His vocation
as Saviour placed before Him. What we behold is a
personality creating its own form by a series of .acts, of
surmounted moral crises, of renunciations conceived and
accomplished duly ; the enlarging life thus offering an ever
more adequate organ and medium of self-revealing Godhead.
As He stooped to save, He grew in the stature of Divine
humanity. Apart from this strain or element of Divine-human
self-realisation in Christ, our thought of Him must be
always incomplete. Exclusive emphasis on the Divine self-
reduction leaves a picture lacking in the glorious majesty of
the Eisen Lord. Along with the self-renunciation goes ever
an ascending line of self-fulfilment and re-conquest, mediated
in moral ways, and the two movements are distinguishable
in the total experience of which Christ was Subject. Each
shares the other's moral rhythm, and is fused or merged
with it in spiritual unity.
Such thoughts, it may be said, are extravagant and
metaphysical. Even if we believe them, can we actually
think them ; can we place them before our mind in artic
ulate and lucid form ? This notion of a Divine kenosis,
restraining God by His own act to human measures, still
more perhaps this companion idea of a plerosis or self-
acquisition, whereby the synthesis of God and man in
Christ, though given in potency, is also progressively

506 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
actualised — can they be handled or even held by reason ?
They seem rich and imposing, as conceptions ; may they not
on examination prove bankrupt, their fancied wealth turned
in a moment, like the fairies' gifts, to withered leaves ? I
am far from seeking to minimise the objections which may
be raised on behalf both of tradition and of liberal theology.
It is noticeable, indeed, that in certain classical treatises
on Christology the two main principles set forth in this
chapter and the last are viewed as essentially incongruous
and antagonistic, not, as I have argued, mutually correlative.
Nevertheless, I cannot avoid the conviction that it is in
this direction, and no other, that we are led by the facts
alike of the New Testament record and of experience ; and
that these facts are such as make it a natural task for the
Christologian to discover, apprehend, and make patent, first
to himself and then to the Christian mind, the harmonious
structure of some general theory of this kind ; to do this at
least in its main outlines and dominating principles.
As for the charge of inconceivability, it is of course
peculiarly hard to meet. Yet even here, the main ideas of
which these chapters have been so faltering and imperfect
an exposition may perhaps challenge comparison, as regards
mere capability of being thought, with the constructions of
recent speculative philosophy, be it Hegelian, Bergsonian,
or materialistic. The conception of Godhead self-renounced
and self-fulfilled in Christ is surely child's play in contrast
to the marvels of the absolute dialectic, of the intuitive
method, or of naturalistic evolution as interpreted in terms
of matter. Whereas the Christologian has at least this
advantage, that the mystery he reports is a mystery of
grace. Holy love is his last criterion of reality. The
greatness, the mercy, the glorious power of Jesus Christ,
who ransomed us with His blood, and who, after all
creatures have received of Him, is still as endless as in the
beginning— these are facts which have conveyed to the
human mind a totally new impression of what God is, and
of the lengths His love will go to redeem the world. He
who has stood by this ocean of Divine mercy, as it stretches

THE MYSTERY OF GRACE 507
from his feet to incomprehensible distances, will not too
much complain that our estimate of Christ should thus
bring us, ere we are aware, to the verge of silence. Still,
if we are to think of Him at all, and to think consistently,
there are certain ideas in which we are obliged to throw
out our minds at the tremendous fact. One such idea is
surely this, that if personal Godhead enters history, it must
be in virtue of its own omnipotent self-reduction ; another,
that in the historic Christ — living, dying, risen — there is
found a deepening and culminating synthesis, within a
single integrate life, of the Divine and human factors to
which faith bears equal witness.

CHAPTEE XII.
CHRIST AND THE DIVINE TRIUNITY.
Christianity, as heir of the Old Testament, is a form
of ethical monotheism which yet has learned to conceive
God in a new way. Naturally the experience of redemption
through Christ was felt from the first as reacting on the
idea of God who alone can redeem. It was felt as necessi
tating new distinctions in a Divine nature which had once
been regarded as bare and unfigured simplicity. Those
who look up to an omnipotent Christ, and who see in Him
the very life of God incorporate, subsisting from before all
time, are obliged, unless they resolve not to think, to
adjust this conviction to the basal and commanding fact of
the Divine unity.
But the operation of the Spirit is as characteristic an
element of Christianity as the incarnation. If, in virtue of
Jesus, faith is rooted in the actualities of the past, in
virtue of the Spirit it finds its perpetual dynamic in the
present. The principle of life and power known as " Holy
Spirit " is no one casual factor in perfect religion by the
side of others ; it is that to which everything else con
verges, and apart from which nothing else — not even the
revelation of Jesus — could take effect. So the Father
disclosed in the Son is imparted in the Spirit. The
Literature — Kirn, article "Trinitat" RE. xx. ; D'Arcy, article
" Trinity " in DOG. 1908; Sehleiermacher, Sammtliche Werke, i. 2, 1836;
Illingworth, Doctrine of the Trinity, 1909 ; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology,
1889 ; Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 1893 ; Orr, Christian View of
God and the World, 1893 ; Rothe, Dogmatik, 1870 ; Hutton, Theological
Essays3, 1888 ; Drummond, Studies in Christian Doctrine, 1908 ; Arm
strong, The Trinity and the Incarnation, 1904 ; Martineau, Essays, Reviews,
and Addresses, II. ; Adams Brown, The Trinity and Modern Thought, 1906.
508

THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPERIENCE 509
presence of the Spirit comes but as a higher mode of
Christ's transcendent influence, the climax of His work.
"Through Him we have access by one Spirit unto the
Father " J is a great comprehensive Pauline word ; and in
such a verse the experience out of which flowed the New-
Testament faith in a Triune God grows transparent. It
is the experience of a differentiated yet single Divine
causality in redemption. If then the Spirit belongs to the
sphere of the Divine, not of the human even as redeemed,
room must be made for it also within the believing thought
of God. Its omission leaves that thought incomplete.
We speak in the sense of the New Testament, therefore,
when we say that " the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in
their unity constitute the God whom we know as the God
of our salvation." 2
The doctrine of the Triunity found in Scripture, how
ever, is naive and experimental. There is nothing of
reflection or design about it, nothing a priori, nothing that
consists in or comes out of the manipulation of abstract
ideas. It is due to an irresistible induction as objective in
its own way as that which established spectrum analysis.
If God is in Christ, not figuratively but in reality, and if
the Spirit gives a renewing Divine life, these central facts
must somehow be gathered into a unitary conception of
Godhead. The intuition, then, that God is triune is born
of experience ; this is the direction in which the Christian
mind is spontaneously led : but there is no need to infer
that a concept thus experimentally generated may not also
have immense philosophic value. On the contrary, it may
well prove, as Bagehot held, " the best account which
human reason could render of the mystery of the self-
existent mind." What does follow from the unspeculative
thought of the New Testament is that we must not force
upon it the distinctions of later times. These distinctions
soon became rigid ; apostolic language was alive and fluid.
Thus 2 Corinthians, which opens with a double salutation
in the name of " God our Father and the Lord Jesus
»Eph 218. 3 Denney, DCG. i. 744.

510 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Christ," ends with a triple benediction invoking "the
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and
the communion of the Holy Spirit." Yet the God of whom
in each case St. Paul was thinking is the same, and his
variant phrases cover exactly the same ground. When the
bipartite is replaced by the tripartite formula, no change in
denotation is intended; except for the fellowship of the
Spirit, the grace of Christ and the love of God would not
be ours. No fourth name is ever added to the sacred triad,
and Harnack is much less convincing than usual when he
argues that at one point it was something like an even
chance that " the Church " might have been given the place
in the formula now occupied by the Spirit.1 The fact is
that the Spirit was unquestioned from the first, the epithet
" holy " marking it off from spirit in general as exclusively
and specifically Divine.
Spirit means life and power, the saving energy of God
within human life ; and it is the uniform teaching of the
New Testament that Christ, who possessed this Spirit in its
fulness, has mediated it to all believers. Hence to call the
Spirit impersonal must ultimately be meaningless for a
religion to which the gracious power of God can never be
a mere " thing." Could the love of God be shed abroad in
our hearts by the non-personal ? Could a natural force
enable men to confess Jesus as Lord ? True, a mono
theistic New Testament has nowhere described the Spirit
as a " separate personality " ; it is indeed more than ques
tionable whether such a general abstract idea as "peison-
ality " had then attained general currency. Yet in the
last resort the Spirit of God must be as personal as God
Himself. So true is this, that it is only by interior union
with the personal Spirit that our proper personality is con
summated. To have within us, as the soul's life, the very
Spirit that made the inmost being of Jesus, is bestowed by
Jesus, and commends Jesus to the heart — this is to be
perfected in personal being. By unity with such Spirit
man first is fully man.
1 Constitution and Law of the Church, 265-66.

THE SPIRIT OF JESUS 511
We cannot too much ponder the fact that in Chris
tianity the Spirit is identical with the Spirit of Jesus. This
alone gives the idea precision and reality. For St. Paul, a
path-breaker in this field, the phenomena of the Spirit, as
an ethical power, drew their value and permanent signifi
cance from their connection with the personality of Jesus ;
and it is clear that so long as the Spirit mediates the
historic Lord to men, distilling the Gospel (as it were)
through His life and death, Christianity can never sink
into impotent sentimentalism, but is secured by the native
strength of fact against the pessimism and defective moral
inspiration which so often accompany impersonal views of
grace. It follows that in the sphere of practical religion
it is impossible to distinguish between the Spirit and Christ
in the heart. Each blends vitally with the other. The
Spirit is but the form or mode of the Lord's presence.
What is given in the Spirit is Christ transcendent and un
limited; otherwise, His Godhead would be a phrase and
nothing more.1
The attempt to force a literal harmony on the un-
theorised Trinitarian utterances of, say, Eomans 8 or St. John
14-16 is certain to be disastrous. Thus for St. John it is
the Father who, in response to the Son, imparts the Spirit
to abide with the disciples for ever. St. Paul, simply re
cording and enforcing what were to him facts of the
spiritual life, can teach that the Father is Lord, and the
Son is Lord, and the Spirit is Lord ; while yet for his real
mind there are evidently not three Lords, but one only. It
would not be difficult, using barely arithmetical methods, to
elicit from such passages an average view which reduced
the Godhead to a species consisting of three individuals,
with distinct departmental offices, and constituting one
God only as collective humanity is man. This might be
done obviously, by a cold insistence on the antinomies of
the letter. Nevertheless, the Trinitarian thought of the
Church be its shortcomings what they may, has been one
1 Cf. Schaeder, Theozentrische Theologie, Erster Teil, 27, 144-45, 165-67.

512 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
sustained effort to show that this, as an interpretation, is
wholly false and mechanical, and that minds whose
sympathy and insight are quickened by religious faith can
attach a profoundly real sense to what might seem only
verbal dexterities in the sphere of the ineffable. All for
whom the doctrine of the Trinity has any positive kind of
meaning are at one in this conviction. They are clear
that a view of God must be attained which will embrace
vitally the Divine person of Christ and the not less Divine
work of the Spirit.
Nor is this all. Up to a certain point, all Christians
are unanimous as to the content of the required doctrine.
They are unanimous in holding that God has been re
vealed in a threefold way. Eedemption is a historical fact,
or series of facts ; and in that history there has been a
manifestation of Father, Son, and Spirit. The Eternal has
been disclosed in Jesus Christ, by whom He reconciled the
world ; He speaks in our heart still by a spiritual presence
that guides to the truth contained in Jesus. This is a re
deeming Gospel — it proclaims that God is not far off,
approachable only at long last by hard thinking or ascetic
sacrifice, but that He came amongst us in His Son, and
still dwells in our souls as Giver of life. Now in essence
the doctrine of the Trinity is but a brief confession of these
facts ; and thus far, let it be repeated, all believers are
agreed. They are agreed as to the essential religious data
which doctrine must assert, even though the Christian in
telligence which asks questions may decline to stop short
with this simple assertion.
At this point, then, there occurs a divergence between
the advocates of what are called the economic and the
.immanent views of the Divine Triunity. According to
the economic or modal view, we see the triune God in the
revelation He has given, and in that vision we rest.
Creation, redemption, renewal are the stages or phases of
His self-disclosure. Why go further ? Why pretend to
step outside experience, or use language, which of course
cannot be verified, as to the Divine nature in itself ? The

THE ECONOMIC THEORY 513
fact of Christ is ultimate; it is vain to get behind it and
try to see its conditions. It is vain to hypostatise an
element in Christ which never had discernibly a separate
existence, but is simply our mental articulation of an
individual reality, an aspect artificially detached by our
thought. Enough for us to behold God in history and
Christian life, and to confess Him as known within that
field. With the positive half of this theory no other view can
have any quarrel. It is true that Father, Son, and Spirit
are relative, properly, to the historic revelation. The
term " Son," for instance, unquestionably points in the
first place to the Jesus of the Gospels, not to the Second
Person of the Trinity.1 If theologians have given it an
eternal or supramundane reference, the extension has been
secondary and inferential. Not only so ; its economic
form was that in which the doctrine of the Trinity first
came to be set out in theory. Tertullian's doctrine is of
this kind. His consuming interest in monotheism led him
to insist with all his powers that distinctions affirmed of
Godhead are distinctions within a fundamental unity. So
he teaches '' a Trinity of dispensation or of function, like
the assignment of parts or duties in a household : the
work of the Father has special relation to the creation,
conservation, and government of the universe; the work
of the Son has special relation to the redemption of man ;
and the work of the Holy Spirit is the continuation of
this." z With all his side-glances at speculation, Tertullian
has not forgotten that the Trinitarian idea sprang out of
history. History alone, then, is our true point of departure ; but
when men call a halt at the outer boundary of historical
experience on the ground that to transcend fact is to
speculate, and that speculation is injurious to faith, it
must be answered that all such proscription is unavailing.
1 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 181-99 ; cf. the important Note B
to chap. viii. of the same work.
8 Sanday, Christologies Ancient and Modern, 26.
33

514 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
In the first place, men will persist in thinking, whatever
notice-boards may be set up by the well-meaning theo
logical positivist to warn the trespasser of impending
dangers. It is, moreover, illegitimate to insist on re
stricting the Christian mind to the supremely practical
language of the first disciples, whether on the Trinity or any
other aspect of the creed. There is no topic on which the
theologian finds his material in the New Testament ready
and merely waiting to be lifted. It is not thus we can
deal with such topics as the Personality of God, of which
no theoretical exposition is given in Scripture; or the
Atonement, of which passionate apostolic utterances are
not fitted, and were not designed, to anticipate the
intellectual rationale demanded by each new age. So is it
with the Trinity. Here too we search the New Testament
in vain for theories ; but assuredly we encounter great
vital data which it is our duty to cross-examine and
explicate and synthesise without being too much concerned
by the recurrent charge of having strayed into the domain
of metaphysic. In addition to this, it is plain that some forms of the
economic view, by the stress they lay upon its negations,
go far towards cancelling the facts with which all theories
must start. This occurs, for example, when it is con
tended that the threefoldness of Divine revelation is merely
phenomenal. God appears to be triune ; He is not really
so. Our minds, according to this interpretation of the
relativity of knowledge — which is here introduced, with all
its ambiguous paralogisms, into the arcanum of faith — -hide
from us the real nature of things ; we know objects not as
they are, but as they seem to us. We can neither tell
precisely what is the amount of distortion of truth indis-
sociable from our processes of cognition, nor can we rectify
the error. Now this theory of knowledge, which is
ultimately agnostic, leaves phenomena in no positive or
definable relation to reality. Applied to the Christian
thought of God, it means that for us God is Father, Son,
and Spirit; but these appellations in no way answer to

THE TRINITY AS IMMANENT 515
real facts which qualify His essential being. But if in
general we reject this singular view of the self-defeating
nature of cognition, and insist, on the contrary, that our
minds in very deed know real things, and that phenomena
are a true index, though of course an incomplete one, of
concrete being, there is no seriously tenable argument for
ignoring this principle in the doctrinal construction of the
personal life of God. Our believing apprehension of
Father, Son, and Spirit is in contact not with appearance
only, but with reality. If God shines through Christ to
our believing apprehension, then by way of this historic
medium we see into the Divine nature.
For the rest, it may be convenient to proceed by way
of comment upon, or reply to, the best-known objections
to the conception of a Trinity immanent in the Divine
life. (a) It may be urged that the notion of an immanent
or ontological Trinity is an attempt, and a reprehensible
one, to think the Godhead as God is in Himself, with
abstraction from His relation to the world. Now, since
God is actually related to the world, we are the subjects of
hallucination (it is held) if we imagine that by leaving that
relation out of sight we attain to a more profound and in
ward knowledge of His being. For out of that relation God
is seen precisely as He is not, either in Himself or otherwise.
Nor is this all. Beligion surely has no concern with a
Divine existence which by definition is conceived apart
from the world and humanity. In the New Testament
everything said about God has a direct bearing on man's
redemption, on God's final purpose with His children ; and
there is no possible stage of thought at which we are
justified in ignoring this vital reference.
This may be otherwise put by saying that the idea of
an essen'ial Trinity is condemned by its indifference to
history. The concept of the Logos, applied early in the
second century to denote the second Person in the Godhead,
is bound up incurably with this grave fault. For what

516 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
it primarily indicates is not the revealing significance of
Jesus — in which sense it is quite legitimate — but cosmic
reason, either as a principle of philosophic thought or as
a rational Power permeating the universe. Now in this
sense it is not a religious notion at all. The interest it
satisfies is logical or cosmological. Hence the problems to
which it relates have nothing to do with Jesus the Son of
God ; they pertain to the purely metaphysical problem of
Infinite and finite, of the One and the many.
The burden of this first objection is then that the idea
of an immanent Trinity has no religious meaning or im
portance. Now this is a point of view which it is not
quite easy to appreciate. It is indeed self-evident if the
Godhead of Christ be first denied, but otherwise it is
as obviously erratic and short-sighted. For if Christ
be Son of God essentially, religion has surely a real
and keen interest in viewing the relation of Son to
Father as unbeginning. By an irresistible impulse it
will " eternalise " that relation, just as it does the electing
love of God manifested to men in time. For the Christian
mind it means everything, as was proved by the early
controversies, that the Sonship of Christ is no mere
temporal creation, but the expression within time of an
eternal fact. Now to see that Christ is Son from before
the ages is to see also that God is Father by inherent .
nature, that this is His essence. It is to plant the
Fatherhood firmly inside the Divine, as the current
Unitarian form can never do. Concede as we may that
to lift the relationship of Father and Son to the eternal
plane lends no new content to our knowledge of God's
interior life; that the Trinitarian concept is empty if
sundered from the roots of history and experience ; that we
become irresponsible and fantastic so soon as in our
thought of God we cast loose from revelation within the
world. Yet religion has assuredly an interest in noting
that the meaning of Son is eternal or intrinsic, not
adventitious, so that the Divine Fatherhood had not to
wait for perfect self-expression till Jesus was born and

ETERNAL FATHERHOOD 517
grew to manhood. In such a view there is a final vindi
cation of the Fatherhood which faith has always valued,
and the absence of which is always felt keenly. It is not
an idea divorced from history; it is an attempt, on the
contrary, to set forth the absolute background of reality
from which history derives its significance, and to exhibit
the gift of Christ as flowing from the life of God. To
contend, moreover, that it is a conception of no religious
worth is flying in the face of experience. M. Edville,
certainly no advocate of Church tradition, is noticeably
emphatic on the point. " The Trinitarian God," he writes,
"is a living God. He is not the unknown principle
seated at the centre of all things, blind and deaf, producing
worlds like a fermenting substance without knowing either
what He is or what He does. Nor, again, is He the
purely ideal term of the ' Universal Becoming,' that God
in process of continual evolution who does not create the
world, but is created by the world ; a future God who will
be, but at present is not, or who at least only murmurs as
yet in the cradle of the human consciousness. Finally,
He is not the dreary God of Deism, that supreme
mechanician retired within the icy depths of His own
eternity, and without permanent or active connection with
the works of His capricious genius. None of these Gods
is a being we can worship. To present them to the human
spirit hungering after religion, is like giving stones to the
poor instead of bread."1 He proceeds, it is true, to re
commend the notion of Divine immanence in the cosmos
as a fit modern substitute for the Trinity ; but it is plain
that this notion, so far from mitigating the problems
of sin and sorrow, leaves them precisely as they were
before. Certain suggestive writers have sought to present the
Trinitarian idea to the modern mind by construing it in
more general terms. It points merely to the richness of
the Divine existence. It tells in broken human words
that the life of God is various and deep and manifold. It
1 History of the Dogma of the Deity of Jesus Christ, 153-54.

518 THE PERSON OF JESDS CHRIST
rejects the audacious yet contemptible illusion that we
have fathomed or surrounded God by our soaring cogita
tions. Along with this, it is sometimes asked why the
Divine elements or factors should be only three ; may
there not be -many others, as yet unknown to us, or re
vealed in other worlds ?
Much in this contention, we may grant, is an index of
great and imposing truths. The history of thought has
proved the worthlessness of a conception of God which
pictures Him as a bare, single, isolated unit of deity.
Without active distinctions essential to His being, His
own spiritual nature and His relation to the world are
alike unintelligible to our minds. Life as such is ever
complex, with a complexity that deepens and intensifies
as it mounts in the scale of being. The inner structure
of animate things reveals a constantly increasing differ
entiation, combined with and constituted by an always
finer and more perfect unity. Variety and organic oneness
exist in and through each other. Human life, moreover,
unveiled to us on its inner side, is the very type and
criterion of a manifold held together in vital unity, a
multiplex fulness or diversity which yet is articulated and
harmonised in one focal identity. It is an impressive
argument, therefore, which holds that if Godhead also is
seen as involving a real variety in unison — distinct
functions irradiated vitally from a single centre — this
ultimate intuition falls into line with, and completes,
the lower forms of cognition. We have a right to ask
whether deity can be an eternal life, or can be thought as
such, except on terms implying a varied wealth of inner
content. But while this is so, it is surely a departure
from Christian ground to break off abruptly at this point.
What the revelation mediated in history denotes is no
mere vague wealth of Divine existence ; but eternal
Fatherhood, eternal Sonship, moving within the eternal
life of Spirit. If we have real data for any transcendent
induction, it is this induction we must make. The
Christian mind has no interest, so far as I can see, in

A DIVINE OTHER-THAN-SELF 519
affirming that in God there is an undefined fulness or
complexity, or that still other intra-divine factors, like
those we call Son and Spirit, may one day be disclosed.
Our thought is bound by the historic sources of Christian
truth — the spiritual content present in Jesus and sealed
to men in the Spirit.1
(b) Trinitarian doctrine of the type now in question
implies at least a duality in the Divine life, in virtue of
which God's love and knowledge are superior to time ; but
it may be held that this essential other-than-self is given
in the universe as a whole. If we do not believe that the
universe began to be, we have no need to speculate further
as to the absolute existence of the Eternal. Moreover,
the argument for a vital duality can never yield a trinity ;
it gives no help in conceiving the third Person of the
Godhead, thus failing at a crucial point.
One feels that the last part of this objection is un
answerable, and must be accepted frankly. No speculative
argument known to the present writer has the slightest
value as proving a third Divine distinction which is either
" Holy " or " Spirit." And the fact is a strong reminder
that the origin of the idea of Spirit, in its Trinitarian
meaning, lies not in philosophic thought, but in history
and life.2
But the former part of the objection cannot be
1 Cf. the striking words of Professor G. W. Knox : " The Johannine
writings, which presupposed the Pauline movement, are a protest against
the hyper-spiritualising tendency. They insist that the Son of God has
been incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and that our hands have handled and
our eyes have seen the word of life. This same purpose, namely, to hold
fast to the historic Jesus, triumphed in the doctrine of the Trinity ; Jesus
was not to be resolved into an aeon or into some mysterious terlium quid,
neither God nor man, but to be recognised as very God who redeemed the
soul. Through him men were to understand the Father and to understand
themselves as God's children. Thus the doctrine of the Trinity satisfied at
once the philosophic intelligence of scholars and the religious needs of
Christians. Only thus can its adoption and ultimate acceptance be explained.
Its doctrinal form is the philosophic statement of beliefs held by the common
people, who hod little interest in theology, but whose faith centred in Jesus "
(from article "Christianity," Encycl. Brit. 11th ed. vol. vi. 284-85).
2 Cf. Thieme, in ZTK. (1911), 84 ff.

520 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
sustained. Nothing is easier than to write vaguely of the
world as adequate either to the knowledge or the love of
God, yet on closer scrutiny nothing could be more uncon
vincing. After all, the only rational creatures known to
us who are capable of appreciating God's love, and return
ing it, are human beings. That other spiritual beings may
exist is of course very credible, but we cannot seriously
be held to have direct cognition of them. Therefore it is
to argue purely from our ignorance when the world, or the
universe, is held to be a sufficient eternal object. If the
world means the physical cosmos, it cannot properly be
loved at all, not to speak of its loving the lover; if it
means or includes finite spirits, we have no certainty that
these have existed from the first, for men began to be
quite recently. So that if we are in quest of an adequate
object of the Divine love and knowledge, and if by
adequate we intend, as we should, an object which not only
receives the forthcoming of the eternal Self-consciousness
but responds to it, with equal infinitude, then this object
exists nowhere within the universe ; it is to be found only
in God Himself. Subject and object are correlative, be it
in finite or in transcendent Mind. In perfect knowledge
or love or action, object and subject are necessarily
conceived as personal in quality; and when thought
reaches the ideal limit of those relationships, it rests in a
distinction which yet is mediated unity.
The value of such considerations may be illustrated by
the well-known attempt of the late Dr. Martineau to
resolve the problem. As against pantheism, which admits
of nothing objective to God, since He is but the inner side
of nature, Dr. Martineau (so far at one with Hegel and
Spencer) argues powerfully that the Divine Spirit must
distinguish itself from what is other. "The moment we
conceive of mind at all," he writes, " or any operation of
mind, we must concurrently conceive of something other
than it as engaging its activity. . . . God, therefore, cannot
stand for us as the sole and exhaustive term in the realm
of uncreated being ; as early and as long as he is, must

A DIVINE OTHER-THAN-SELF 521
also be something objective to him."1 This other-than-
self for God he discovers first in matter-filled space ; later
and more adequately, he believes, in finite centres of
individuality, furnishing a province of real being objective
to God in the complete degree. But if we refuse " to
stake God's existence on the eternity of matter and finite
creatures," 2 while yet we agree with Martineau in regard
ing a personal self-expression or object as necessary for the
Divine Spirit, it will be natural to resort to the great New
Testament conception of the unbeginning Word, in whom
is given the resonance of life vital to either love or
knowledge in perfect form, yet not separate from God as
we from other selves.
Thus reason may find its own in the Christian
certitude that love Divine is from everlasting to everlast
ing. When we think of God in Himself, possessed of that
subjectivity, that centralised thought, activity, and feeling
without which self-consciousness is but a name, it is not as
a formless Void that we conceive Him, or as a silent vast
Omnipresence ; it is as the home of the loftiest and most
spiritual relations manifested in human life. Fatherhood
is no acquired attribute ; we cannot image that love as
sleeping before it woke to shed its beneficence on an
object other than itself. It is not creation which enables
us to interpret the absolute Personality. Bather it is our
view of that Personality which enables us to interpret
creation ; for no God complete in loneliness could feel the
impulse to create, least of all to create potential sons. In
other words, the relations of God and man become
luminous in view of the interior Divine life. That
life is neither loveless thought, nor abstract thought,
nor mere boundless energy; we are nearest to the
infinite truth when in Fatherhood and Sonship we
symbolise vital distinctions apart from which Godhead
cannot be.
It is easy, of course, to call this metaphysics, and so
1 Seat of Authority im, Religion, 32.
a T. Vincent Tymns, in The Ancient Faith in Modern Light, 82.

522 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
dismiss the topic with a word. But the accusation is a
harmless one unless it can be proved that metaphysics, in
this connection, is anything more than a name for
persistent thinking. Faith in Christ will always constrain
thoughtful men to construe in reason His ultimate relation
to God and man, so far as this is possible ; and the limits
of possibility can be ascertained in no other way than by
actual experiment. There is no mode of knowing whether
we are on the way to truth save the process of knowledge
itself. Eeligion, certainly, has no interest in suppressing
the instinctive effort of the mind to follow out this supreme
inquiry to the farthest point. As it has been expressed :
" The reasons which prevent us from acquiescing in the
proposal to banish the metaphysical element from our
theology . . . are to be found in the nature of the
metaphysical interest itself. That motive is not merely
speculative ; it is intensely practical. It is the desire for
a unified world-view which voices itself in the demand for
a philosophical theology."1 No one to-day will dream of
constructing a Trinitarian doctrine a priori ; the sufficiency
of the syllogism in such a realm has ceased to be obvious :
but the clear duty of the Christian thinker — as will be
acknowledged once more when the present disparagement of
reason has passed by — is to relate Jesus Christ intelligibly
to the inmost and eternal life of God. He has no option
but to do this ; his instinctive impulse is to do it ; and the
impulse is restrained only in obedience to a particular
theory of knowledge. Why the effort to translate the
initial certitude of faith — which no subsequent speculative
procedure can impair — into a luminous conviction of the
mind should be flouted as superfluous, or even as an
attempt upon the Christian religion, it is not easy to see ;
and reason is sure to avenge itself by the gibe that faith,
in submission to the unintelligible, is simply indifferent to
the truth. There is room in theology for a knowledge that
is not so much disinterested as interested purely in its
1 Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, 159. The whole of his
finely-toned chapter on the Trinity should be read.

ETERNAL LOVE AND ITS OBJECT 523
object, and cares enough about God to know Him in His
own nature.
(c) It may be objected, finally, that the duality within
the Godhead is the equivalent of ditheism. To say that
love is not love if there be no beloved; to maintain
that Divine love is " social," with an unbeginning
relation of Father and Son — if at least by Son is meant
a conscious being, distinct alike from God, the world, and
the human Jesus ; this, it is urged, is to drift into a
polytheistic view of deity. Moreover, the " social " con
ception of God has not the slenderest title to pose as
orthodoxy proper. It is notorious that Augustine rested
upon a trinity in the individual human mind — memory,
understanding, and will in one place ; the mind, self-
knowledge, and self-love in another — and that he used
this psychological analogy without misgiving to interpret
the supreme Godhead, arguing on this basis that each of
the Persons singly is equal to all the Persons together :
each, that is, is simply God in a certain aspect. In like
manner, Aquinas views the three Persons as respectively
the principles of Origination, Wisdom, and Will. There
is obviously no tritheism in a construction based on the
analogy of a single human self-consciousness.
It is of course undeniable that Church theology has
often preferred a psychological line of this sort. One
disadvantage, however, is that Trinitarian doctrine in this
form has no perceptible relation to the historic Christ, whose
true Godhead it was meant originally to record and
synthesise with older conceptions of the Divine. Why
"understanding" in Augustine's first theory should be
the eternal equivalent of the Divine Son who lived on
earth, it is difficult to comprehend. What he offers is
but a distinction of ideas, or of psychical constituents,
quite unrelated, so far as can be seen, to the historic
antecedents by which the doctrine must be judged and
sanctioned. But when we turn to the form of doctrine inspired by
the analogy of love as implying a real duality, a subject

524 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
and an object in complete reciprocation, the difficulties
of a genuine and unflinching monotheism become more
grave. True, the word " Person " is not in itself decisive. A
high authority has said that " Person, in Trinitarian usage,
is a mode of being which serves as a ground or basis
(a real ground or basis) of special function, but just stops
short of separate individuality. It implies distinction
without division." x Words in such a realm are more or
less arbitrary, and must be taken in a sense appropriate to
their objects of denotation ; and it is certain that inroa-Tao-Ks
in Greek theology, and persona, its Latin equivalent, do not
mean now, and never have meant, what we usually intend
by Personality. In strictness, then, as was argued pre
viously, we use the word " Person " from simple poverty of
language : to .indicate our belief, that is, in the reality of
Divine distinctions, not to affirm separate conscious beings,
possessed of separate " essences." If it be said that this
description of such interior distinctions is negative merely,
the comment, however just, is by no means fatal to its
validity. Most Christian thinkers are agreed that God is
causa sui, and that He is omnipresent ; yet when we look
into our own minds, are not these phrases, however
necessary, laden with a sense predominantly negative ?
When we use them, we are affirming that God owes reality
to Himself alone, and that He is nowise limited by space.
The conceptions, in other words, can never be positively
defined, yet we are obliged to grant their truth.
At this extreme point we obtain most real help,
perhaps, from the thought that in God conditions essential
to love, which in us imply mutually exclusive personalities,
may exist without such exclusion, in a unity that is more
and deeper than the distinction. One feels that too often
the criticism of Trinitarian doctrine has rested on a narrow,
individualist conception of personal life; a conception
animated and controlled by a static view of human experi
ence. For it is clear that even in human love the inter-
1 Sanday, Personality in Christ and in Ourselves, 19.

PERSONALITY NOT IMPERVIOUS 525
personal exclusion just referred to is largely overcome.1
This is simple matter of fact, and the best philosophy has
not been slow to recognise it. Take these words of Nettle-
ship on the ideal of life as universal love. " So far as we
can conceive such a state," he writes, " it would be one in
which there would be no ' individuals ' at all, in the sense
in which individuality means mutual exclusion : there
would be a universal being in and for another : ' conscious
ness ' would be the consciousness of ' another ' which was
also ' oneself ' — a common consciousness." 2 What if this
transcendent ideal is for ever real in the life of God ?
May not we, looking still towards the innermost recesses,
believe that in Him a merged and blended 'unity of love
with its equal object is eternally attained ; attained none
the less because our divisive and spatialised logic is
incompetent to set it forth without tritheistic error ?
Bergson has taught us that it is impossible to think even
the vital unity of movement or of life, save intuitively ; so
the Godhead, which does not any more than life itself form
a picture we can see, may signify Father, Son, and Spirit
as members or manifestations of a single Divine life beyond
the limits of time, forming together the supreme instance
of individuality. This interfusion of personalities in a
common life, never realised save imperfectly • by us, may
have been fully actualised and unimpeded in the love hid
in God from all eternity.
Thus, faintly, under the form of idealised human
relationships, we envisage that which perpetually evades
our grasp. How can we, whose being is finitely individual
and (so far) apart from other selves, apprehend God truly
or with perfect clarity ? We cannot place our minds
inside that transcendence or perceive it inwardly by
feeling; for only that which we have lived can ever
become luminous to us. But at least we may refrain from
imposing upon it our own particularity. If there be
» Cf. supra, p. 338 f.
s Philosophical Remains, vol. i. 42 (quoted by Temple, The Nature of
Personality, 76). See also Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 156 ff.

526 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
mystery in the Trinitarian conception, a deeper mystery,
and one aggravated by ethical enigmas, must always lie
in the notion of a solitary God, without love, void of
thought, incapable of movement, divorced from all reality.
We read the great words : " Father, glorify Thou Me with
Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee
before the world was " ; and as their solemn and elusive
wonder lingers on the soul we feel again how noble and
subduing is that vision of the One God which beholds Him
as never alone, but always the Father towards whom the
Son has ever been looking in the Spirit of eternal, love.
Yet it is in the unity of God as known in Christ that
our minds come finally to rest. The triune life is
apprehended by us for the sake of its redemptive ex
pression, not for the internal analysis of its content. The
problem can never be one of ontology mixed with
arithmetic. Throughout, our aim is bent on history and its
meaning, as we strive to apprehend the one God in His
saving manifestation. To this point of view faith is
constant. From this point the doctrine must set out
only to circle round at last to its fruitful origin. God as
Holy Love we name the Father ; this same eternal God,
as making the sacrifice of love and appearing in one finite
spirit for our redemption, we name the Son ; God filling
as new life the hearts to which His Son has become a
revelation, we name the Spirit. In this confession we
resume the best it has been given us to know of the
eternal God our Saviour.

APPENDIX.
JESUS' BIRTH OF A VIRGIN.
During the nineteenth century the words of the Apostles'
Creed, "conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
Mary," were more than once the subject of vehement
dispute. Controversy prevailed among German scholars in
1877, and again in 1893 ; and on each occasion the after-
swell of the storm beat upon British shores. The theme is
one to be discussed quietly and without prejudice. For my
own part, I should not think of regarding explicit belief in
the virgin-birth of our Lord as essential to Christian faith —
otherwise, St. Paul was no Christian ; while, on the other
hand, the story has an exquisite natural fitness, and its
vogue is nearly impossible to explain save by the hypothesis
of its truth.
The main aspects of the problem are two — the critical
and the doctrinal ; distinct, indeed, yet in no sense separate.
Thus it is of the first importance to recollect that the
birth in question is that of Jesus Christ. Virgin-birth
is exceptional in character, as resurrection also is; and
on any showing Jesus was, as a person, utterly exceptional.
Apart from Him, the idea of supernatural conception is not
even plausible. Hence, whether we are to call the birth-
narratives only a childish attempt to utter Jesus' greatness,
or valid testimony to a historic fact, will much depend
on the spiritual impression He has made upon us. On the
other hand, it is not less true that if virgin-birth cannot be
put in any significant relation to Christ, and is merely
irrelevant to the believing interpretation of His self-
consciousness, its credibility is gravely lessened.
For a discussion of the critical problem, the reader is
referred to the commentaries and special studies. We can
touch only a few cardinal points.
In the First and Third Gospels, the higher Sonship of
527

528 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
Jesus is depicted as having been mediated in part by the
reception of the Spirit at His baptism, in part by abnormal
birth. Of the early variants in Mt l56 it has been said
recently that " such modifications as may be due to doctrinal
prepossessions are designed to re-set or to sharpen the
reference in the original text to the virgin-birth, not to
insert the dogma in a passage which was originally free
from it." 1 Nor has the case been made out for removing
Lk I34-35 as an interpolation, although this would give
us a Lucan version of which virgin-birth at first formed no
part. But Mark knows nothing of the story, nor does it
seem to have found a place in Q. The genealogies which,
if not contradictory, are certainly independent, connect
Jesus with David through Joseph, not Mary ; but this may
mean that the evangelists have only imperfectly adapted
these documents, which they found already in existence,
to the purpose of expressing legal kinship but not physical
parentage. In any case, Jesus must have ranked as Joseph's
son before the law. Various writers have dwelt on
the fact that Luke writes from Mary's point of view,
Matthew from Joseph's. As might be expected, therefore,
the narratives diverge; but they agree in the parents'
names, the places of birth and boyhood, descent from
David, and the special action of the Holy Spirit. It is
not a grave objection that the evangelists repeatedly
mention Joseph as Jesus' father. Quite consistently
they may reflect or report popular opinion in certain
places while giving elsewhere information drawn from a
private source.
Outside these narratives, the New Testament is com
pletely _ silent. Virgin-birth is not present in Gal 4*, nor
even hinted at; for the phrase "born of a woman" is a
familiar phrase, used by Jesus Himself of men as such
(Mt 1011). Few would say, with Westcott, that virgin- ~
birth is implied though not explicitly asserted in John l14:
"the Word became flesh." Still it is difficult to believe
that if John had regarded the story as inaccurate, he
would have uttered no word of protest. The Synoptics were
before him; silence, presumably, means not disapproval
but tacit aquiescence, coupled with a statement in his
Prologue of what he conceived to be a deeper truth.
There is no contradiction, such as has often been alleged,
between birth of a virgin and pre-existence, though in
1 Moffatt, Introduction to the Literature of the NT, 251.

JESUS' BIRTH OF A VIRGIN 529
point of fact no New Testament writer happens to mention
both. Luke, the Paulinist, can scarcely have been un
familiar with the idea of pre-existence ; and virgin-birth
may have stood in his mind less as the ultimate ground of
Jesus' Sonship than as the mediating occasion of His
presence, as Son, in the world. It is not easy to see why
a particular mode of birth should be thought incongruous
with the idea of pre-temporal life. Besch and Blass have
argued that with some ancient versions we should read the
singular pronoun in Jn l18 — not " who were born," but
" who was born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor
of the will of man, but of God " ; the subject thus being the
Incarnate One. But this is hardly serious. In the case
of St. Paul, again, silence can only mean ignorance of a
story even then jealously guarded within a narrow circle.
There is indeed much to be thankful for in the providential
circumstance that the method of our Lord's entering the
world was not at first made the subject of doctrinal
reflection. One thing, however, the silence of St. Paul does prove.
It proves that an apostle could hold and teach the eternal
Sonship of Christ without reference to virgin-birth ; which
in turn is good evidence that in the case of Matthew and
Luke the belief need not have been an irresistible religious
postulate. It was not a psychologically inevitable idea
which had to be introduced at any cost. The evangelists
felt that the testimony was good.
For history the really strong argument in favour of the
virgin-birth is the difficulty of accounting for the story
otherwise than on the assumption of its truth. Harnack,
who traces everything to Is 714, enumerates thirteen other
theories of origin ; x and the curious list might be added to.
If the Old Testament, however, shows any leaning, it is not
to glorify virginity as opposed to marriage, but rather the
other way. There seems to have been no expectation that
the Messiah's birth would be abnormal; not a trace is
discoverable of a Messianic exegesis of Is 714;2 while the
far-fetched way in which the verse is adduced by Matthew
shows that he is only clenching his statement with a proof-
text, not inferentially deriving a new fact. He simply
quotes Isaiah to repel innuendoes against Mary's honour.
s See Professor Buchanan Gray's masterly argument in the Expositor for
April 1911. 34

530 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
And the supposed influence of heathen mythology would
require a longer time than New Testament criticism will
allow. Further, in the Gospel story there is a pure and
beautiful reticence which has nothing in common with Greek
or Hindu narrations of birth from a Divine and a human
parent; narrations which anyhow do not tell of virgin-
birth at all, but of gods possessed with human passions. It
is indeed strictly veracious, as Dr. Orr has proved,1 to say
that no ethnic parallel to birth from a pure virgin has been
found. The contrary is often stated, but at the crucial
point the alleged parallel invariably breaks down; and
even radical critics are obliged to grant that pagan ideas,
if adopted by the evangelists, were transformed out of
all recognition.2 Not only so; but the early chapters of
Matthew and Luke are in tone intensely Hebraic. They
must have arisen in Palestinian circles. The attitude of
first-century Christians to pagan tales regarding the celestial
descent of Alexander the Great, Plato, or Augustus, can
only have been one of indignant horror. We are therefore
entitled to believe that in reading these early traditions
we have before us matter with a high claim to credibility.
Nor does it come to us divorced from the rest of the
evangelic story by a long, precarious interval of years. On
the contrary, even so radical a critic as Johannes Weiss has
expressed the view that the contents of Luke 1 and 2
may have circulated in the Jewish Christian communities of
Judaea " in the 'sixties." E
At the same time, considerations of history are not
decisive by themselves. The evidence might conceivably
be much stronger than it is, though, as it has been put, it is
" strong enough for rational acceptance." When we turn
then to more theological considerations, it is necessary to
have before us clearly what the negative argument exactly
is. While the origin of Jesus' person must be traced to
God's creative power, and thus to miracle in the true
sense, and while this is the proper religious significance of
the words, "conceived of the Holy Ghost," no conviction (it
may be held) is attainable as to the form or medium of this
Divine creation. We know that the Saviour is from above ;
we do not know how He came to be here in that character.
1 The Virgin Birth of Christ, chap. vi.
J Cf. J. Weiss in Religion in Geschichte u. Gegenwart, i. 1736-37.
* Die Schriften d. NT, i. 412.

JESUS' BIRTH OF A VIRGIN 531
Unless marriage is sinful, neither His sinlessness nor His
unique Sonship requires the guarantee of virgin-birth. If
we insist on such a guarantee, it is certainly not supplied
by the absence of human paternity. There is also the
motherhood of Mary, through whose natural relation to Him
sinful dispositions might be as really transmitted as through
normal birth.
With the inference drawn from these premises I do
not myself agree; but it is undeniable that the term
" miraculous " might justly be applied to the genesis of our
Lord's manhood even on this theory. We can say out of our
experience that He belongs to a higher sphere ; that the
resident forces of humanity were insufficient to produce
Him. In this sense at any rate He was no child of earth ;
He was the Son of God. But we dare not call virgin-birth
a sine qua non of Sonship. The immediate object of faith is
Christ living, dying, and exalted; and we cannot imagine
Christ Himself insisting on acceptance of the birth-
narratives as a condition or preliminary of personal salva
tion. At the same time, strong grounds can be adduced for
accepting the belief as in complete harmony with the
Christian thought of Jesus, as dove-tailing into the rest of
our conviction naturally and simply. But first it is well to
say emphatically that arguments drawn from biology as to
the possibility of what is called parthenogenesis are wholly
beside the mark. If the virgin-birth is real, its meaning
is indissociably bound up with its supernatural character ;
and this should be avowed frankly.
(1) There is the companion fact of the resurrection.
Supernatural conception is a most credible and befitting
preface to a life consummated by rising from the dead.
This is an argument the force of which grows upon one the
more it is considered. " It is in harmony," says Professor
Denney, "with that unique relation to God and man which
is of the essence of His consciousness, that there should be
something unique in the mode of His entrance into the world
as well as in that of His leaving it."1 The alleged singu
larity, in other words, is appropriate to the character and
the occasion. Leaving aside all efforts to prove virgin-birth
a necessity (e.g. to break the sinful entail), we have a right
to dwell on the fitness of such an exordium in a life which,
if we grant the transcendent victory over death at its close,
was in any case supernaturally qualified. The case is one
1 Standard Dictionary of the Bible, 423.

532 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
more for the application of the category of rb wpi-a-ov than of
rb &myy.a.?M. It was through the resurrection that Christ
entered on full activity as Lord; what more intrinsically
congruous than that His initial work on earth should begin,
as well as end, with that which marked Him off from all
other children of men ? If Christ is Son of God in a lonely
and unshared sense, free from all taint of sin, and Head of a
redeemed race, He is clearly so unexampled a person that we
cannot assume Him to have been subject either in birth or
death to all normal sequences. This is not indeed to prove
the virgin-birth. As it has been put : " It does not follow
that a thing actually happened, because it appears to us
likely and becoming that it should happen." Nor is it
to make the supernatural birth of Jesus the ground of,
say, His sinlessness. A moral fact is not explicable ulti
mately by one which is physical. But we may reason
ably insist on the vital unity or parallelism of spirit
and body, finding it wholly natural that a unique human
spirit should also have a body uniquely conditioned in its
origin. (2) One minor point may be glanced at. Some of those
who reject the virgin-birth of Jesus, while maintaining His
perfect sinlessness, explain this unique absence of moral
taint by summoning to their aid other supernatural factors ;
and it then becomes a question whether such intercalated
factors are not more miraculous, as well as more unintel
ligible, than the evangelic story. Sehleiermacher, e.g., has
argued that birth took place in normal ways, whereas the
creative power of God intervened to bar the transmission of
inborn sin. Of this it can only be remarked that it too
affirms a special act of interference on the part of God, and
one for which there exists in the record not the faintest
trace of evidence. Myst&re pour mystere, the account of
Luke and Matthew is to be preferred.
(3) The point of real importance is positive rather than
negative ; not the absence of a human father, but the over
shadowing presence of the Divine Spirit. The evangelists
do not lead us to regard the birth as derived from the Spirit
acting as bare power ; the event has an essentially ethical
aspect. This is furnished, we may consider, by the faith
and holy obedience of Mary, reacting upon the higher in
fluences from above. There is no magic in the miracle ; no
absence of mediating forces in the spiritual and moral realm.
Jesus is born a man, in a relation of true heredity to His

JESUS BIRTH OF A VIRGIN 533
mother, and, through her faith, to the grace and piety of the
past. His is a new humanity, unique in perfectness of
initial constitution, but grafted by God's creative act into
the older stem.
When we look at these two forms of evidence simultane
ously — the excellence of the tradition together with the
spiritual fitness of virgin-birth — they seem to involve each
other, much like the arms of a great arch rising up to meet
and join.
I have already expressed my complete incredulity as to
the existence of precise heathen parallels to the Gospel
story. But even if we grant the point, what then ? Then
we shall have once more to recognise that the ethnic world
had been dreaming of great things yet to be. As with ideas
like those of Incarnation, Atonement, Eesurrection, and
many more, some dim prevision of and craving for tran
scendent Divine realities had already visited the souls of
men. It was into no unspiritual world that the Christian
religion came, but a world rather of seething hopes and
dreams and premonitory glimpses. These hopes the
Gospel was to realise. But it realised them, we may believe,
not by borrowing ideas, or decking itself out in ancient
symbols, but by the exhibition of a fact within the field of
history in which were more than fulfilled the inextinguish
able yearnings of the world's desire.
In conclusion, I cannot deny myself the pleasure of the
following quotation from the Bampton Lectures of 1911,
Creed and the Creeds, by J. H. Skrine : " To some of us who
the most earnestly contend for the divinity of Jesus, may
we not say that this Underivedness is the truth for which
they are really contending, when they champion certain
articles of our creed which are of value only as the his
torical correlatives of that truth, or as symbols of it. Thus,
they assert the Virgin Birth of Jesus, as if the Divinity of
Christ stood or fell with that physical event. It is not so
— the manner of the Birth can have efficacy for human fate
only as a fleshly accompaniment of the spiritual event, the
entry into the human current of a force not derived from
humanity. This entry is what we have to prove. This
ought we to do, and not indeed to leavj^ the other undone,
but still to assure our hearts that, proven or found incapable
of proof or disproof, it cannot shake our faith that God sent
forth His Son; sent Him forth made of a woman; but
His Son. Sometimes now we fight for a symbol when we

534 THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST
should fight for the substance; as ere now in campaigns
of our countrymen, a regiment has lost a victory by a
useless strife to save the colours. Are we not liable to do
the same — to remember the banner, forget the battle?"
(P-176>

INDEX

I. SUBJECTS

Acts of Apostles, 39-44.
Adam, and Christ, 61, 146.
Adoptianism, 42, 126, 225.
Alcuin, 226.
Alexander, bishop of Alexandria,
179.
Alexandrian influences, on St. Paul,
69 ; on Hebrews, 85 ; on Fourth
Gospel, 116.
Anhomoeans, 192.
Anselm, 324, 408.
Anthropocentric Christology, 247-
250.
Apocalypse (of John), 88-93.
Apollinarianism, 151, 196-201.
Apologists, Greek, 140-4.
Apostles' Creed, 136-9.
Apostolic Fathers, 127-9.
Arian Controversy, 175-95.
Aristides, 140.
Artemon, 148.
Athanasius, 133, 144, 152-3, 173,
180, 183-8, 321.
Athenagoras, 140.
Atonement, determines our concep
tion of Christ, 329-33.
Augustine, 223-5, 323, 452, 523.
Authority, of Christ, 31-3, 326-9.
Baptism, of Jesus, 17, 135.
Barnabas, 126, 138.
Basil, 153, 192-3.
Basilides, 135.
Bernard, of Clairvaux, 227.
Binitarianism, 128.
Brenz, 238.
Callistus, 149.
Calvin, 73, 244.
Cerinthus, 129.
Chalcedon, Council of, 209-15.

Chemnitz, 238.
Clement, of Alexandria, 161-4.
Clement, of Rome, 126-7.
2 Clement, 127.
Communicatio idiomatum, 240.
Constantine, 180.
Constantinople, Councils of, 194,
218, 220.
Cosmic aspect of Christology, 69-71.
270, 435.
Creed, of Chalcedon, 212-5 ; its non-
finality, 292-9.
Creed, of Nicsea, 181.
Creed, Nicseno - Constantinopolitan,
Cross, Jesus' anticipation of the, 19.
Cyril of Alexandria, 205-9.
Development, in Christ's person, 272-
275, 491-507 ; a moral necessity,
491-6 ; objections to develop
mental view, 496-9 ; wider theo
logical relations, 499-504 ; relation
to Kenosis, 504-5.
Diognetus, Epistle to, 138.
Dionysiif correspondence of the,
170-1.
Discourses, in Fourth Gospel, 97.
Divinity of Christ, in St. Paul, 65-7 ;
in Apocalypse, 89-90 ; in Fourth
Gospel, 112-4 ; in sub-apostolic
age, 126 ; significance for faith,
407-26.
Docetism, 121, 137, 163, 298, 383-5.
Duns Scotus, 229.
Dyophysites, 215-9.
Ebionites, 124, 127.
Eternal Sonship. of Christ, 66, 83,
103, 132, 184-7, 190-1.
Eucharist, 133, 208, 381.

536

INDEX

Eusebius, of Csesarea, 180.
Eusebius, of Nieomedia, 183.
Eutychian Controversy, 209-11.
Evolution, and Christ, 437-9.
Exalted Lordship of Christ, in St.
Paul, 52-62; in Fourth Gospel,
106-7 ; significance of, for faith,
363-82 ; theological interpretation
of, 418-9.
Faith, Christ Object of, 345-53 ; not
merely Subject, 353-62.
Fatherhood of God, shown in Jesus,
340, 346-8. .
Forgiveness, imparted by Jesus, 32 ;
mediated through Jesus, 307, 359-
362 ; a supernatural reality, 357-9.
Gnosticism, Christology of, 134-6,
145.
Godhead, as predicated of Christ,
132, 419-23.
Gregory, of Nazianzus, 193, 200.
Gregory, of Nyssa, 193, 201.
Heavenly Man, 68-9.
Hebrews, Christology of, 78-87 ;
different from Pauline, 86-7.
Hegelian Christology, 256-64.
Henoticon, of Zeno, 217.
Hennas, 126-8, 138.
Hero, as description of Jesus, 288-
291.
High Priest, Christ as, 81, 84.
Hilary, 153, 174, 223.
Hippolytus, 150.
Historic Christ, in St. Paul, 62-5 ;
as standard of Christology, 306-
320 ; Herrmann's interpretation of,
315-7.
History, and the Gospel, 308-12 ;
and an absolute Personality,
355-7.
Homoeans, 192. •
Homoeousians, 192-3.
Homousia, 166, 171, 174, 181, 185-
187, 189, 235.
Hosius, of Cordova, 180-1, 191-2.
Humanitarianism, primitive, 123-4.
Human life and character of Jesus,
in Synoptics, 9-14 ; in St. Paul,
62-5 ; in Hebrews, 79-80 ; in
Fourth Gospel, 99-100 ; in Luther,
231-2 ; significance of, for faith,
383-406.
Ignatius, 126, 129-34, 138.
Immanence, and Christ, 431-40.

Immutability, Divine, 272, 472-4.
Impersonality of Christ's manhood,
206-7, 209, 385-90.
Incarnation, not explained in NT,
67, 120; as a process, 273, 491-
507 ; Christian idea of, 427-444 ;
remedial in purpose, 440-44.
Intellectual need for Christology,
285-305.
Intercession of Christ, 376-8.
Irenseus, 125, 144-7, 169.
Johannine Christology, 94-121 ;
influences productive of, 98-9.
John of Damascus, 222.
John the Baptist, 16.
Judge, Christ as, 33.
Justin Martyr, 124, 140-4,
Kant, 249.
Kara irdpua — Kara irvevixa, 127.
Kenosis, idea of, in St. Paul, 66-7 ;
in Fourth Gospel, 115 ; in Irenseus,
145 ; in Lutheran Christology,
241 ; in Reformed Christology,
243 ; in nineteenth century, 264-
272, 463-66 ; theological interpre
tation of, 463-86 ; data of inter
pretation, 469-70 ; analogies of,
474-9 ; limits of discussion, 482-5 ;
Ritschl's objection, 485.
Kingdom of God, Jesus' conception
of, 17 ; present and future, 24.
Kingship, of Christ, 379.
Knowledge, Jesus', of God, 105 ;
limitations of Jesus' secular, 397-8.
icopios, 6, 9, 369, 372.
Leo of Rome, 210 ; his Dogmatic
Epistle, 211.
Leontius of Byzantium, 217-8.
Lessing, 308.
Logos-conception, in St. Paul, 71 ;
in Hebrews, 85-6 j in Fourth
Gospel, 113, 116-20, 143; in
Greek Apologists, 140-4; in
Irenseus, 145-7 ; in Tertullian,
154 ; in Alexandrian theologians,
159-70 ; in Paul of Samosata, 171-
174 ; in Arius, 176-7 ; in Athan
asius, 187-8 ; in Cyril, 206-9 ; in
Lutheran and Reformed Chris
tologies, 240-4.
Lucian, 176.
Luke, Christology of, 5.
Luther, 230-7, 321, 325.
Lutheran Church, Christoloey of,
237-42. **

INDEX

537

Maroellus, of Ancyra, 180, 189-91.
Marcion, 136.
Mark, Christology of, 5.
Matthew, Christology of, 5.
Mediseval Christology, 225-9.
Melanchthon, 237.
Melito, of Sardes, 142, 149.
Messiahship of Jesus, 14-9 ; reserve
in His self-avowal, 17 ; includes
suffering, 19, 23, 24 ; and Sonship,
30; in St. Paul, 53; in Fourth
Gospel, 94-5 ; in suh -apostolic
age, 125.
Messianic dogmatic, 44.
Metaphysics, in Christology, 302-5.
Mithraism; 159.
Modalism, in Fourth Gospel, 112-3 ;
in Ignatius, 1 33.
Modern Radical School, 281-4, 353-
362.
Monarchianism, 147-53, 166, 169,
171-4.
Monophysite Controversy, 215-9.
Monothelite Controversy, 219-222.
Mysticism, 378-9.
Natures, two, doctrine of, 155-7,
214, 293-9.
Neo-Platonism, 159-61.
Nestorianism, 201-5, 208-9.
New Testament Christology, types
of, 1 ; motives of, 2-4.
Nicsea, Council of, 179-83.
Nihilianism, 227.
Nineteenth Century, Christology of,
247-84.
Noetus, 149-50.
Novatian, 157-8.
Odes of Solomon, 119.
Origen, 161, 164-70.
oi<rla, 174, 182, 186, 193, 202.
Patripassianism, 149-51.
Paul of Samosata, 171-4, 202.
Pauline Christology, 49-77 ; its ad
vance on primitive conceptions,
74 ; different from that of Hebrews,
86-7.
Person of Christ, in relation to His
work, 321-44.
Personality, not impenetrable, 338-9.
Peter, confession of, 18.
Petrine Christology, 44-8.
Philo, 69, 85, 116-7.
Piety of Jesus, 11-2, 399.
Plotinus/ 160.
Pneumatic Christology, 126.

Polycarp, 126.
Prayer to Christ, 125, 366-7.
Praxeas, 149-51.
Pre-existence, idea of, in St. Paul,
66-71 ; in Hebrews, 83-4 ; in
Fourth Gospel, 103-5; view of
Arius, 176-8 ; interpretation of,
445-62 ; objections to, 449-54 ; as
ideal, not real, 454-8 ; religious
value of, 458-62.
Presence of Christ, with disciples,
106, 364-5.
Primitive Christian view of Christ,
39-48.
Pythagoras, 161.
Q (the Gospel source), Christologyof, 5.
Reformed Church, Christology of,
242-5.
Revelation,complete in Jesus, 1 04, 840.
Ritschlian Christology, 278-81.
Robber Synod, 410.
Sabellianism, 144, 151-3, 190.
Sacrifice, of God in Christ, 271.
Salvation, physical idea of, 146, 298,
322.
Sehleiermacher, Christology of, 250-
256.
Semi-Arianism, 189, 191-5.
Sinlessness of Jesus, 35-8, 400-4,
412-5.
Socinianism, 245-6. \j
Son of David, 23.
Son of God, as Synoptic title of
Jesus, 25-31 ; in St. Paul, 65 ; in
Hebrews, 80-81 ; in Fourth Gospel,
102-5 ; in Apostolic Fathers,
128-9 ; theological interpretation
of, 415-8.
Son of man, as Synoptic title of
Jesus, 19-25 ; not used by St.
Paul, 54 ; in Fourth Gospel, 108.
Spirit, reception of by Jesus, 17, 124 ;
bestowed by exalted Lord, 42 ; as
part of Christ's being, 64, 127 ; cor
related with Christ, 45, 57-8, 128 ;
mediated through Christ, 373-6.
Sub-apostolic age, Christology of,
122-7.
Subconsciousness, 487-90.
Subordination, of the Son, in St.
Paul, 71-4 ; in Hebrews, 85 ; in
the Apocalypse, 92 ; in Fourth
Gospel, 101, 114-5 ; in Tertullian,
154 ; in Origen, 166 ; in Athan
asius, 188 ; cf. also, 464.

538

INDEX

Synoptics, Christology of, 1, 5-35.
<rm~fip, 75-6.
Temptation of Jesus, 12, 401-3.
Tertullian, 125, 148, 153-8.
Theocentric Christology, 247-50.
Theodore, of Mopsuestia, 201-2.
Theodotus, 148.
Theophilus, 140,
Thomas Aquinas, 228, 523.
Trinity, doctrine of, 153, 193-4, 508-
26 ; purely experimental in Scrip
ture, 509 ; economic theory, 512-
515 ; immanent theory, 515-26.
Tubingen and Giessen Controversy,
239.

Union with Christ, in St. Paul, 56,
334-5 ; in Fourth Gospel, 110-2,
336-7 ; determines our conception
of His person, 333-40.
Unitarianism, 173, 281-4, 340.
Universality of Christ, 391-3.
inrbara.™, 174, 182, 186, 193, 202,
207, 524.
Valentinus, 134.
Victor, bishop, 148.
Virgin-birth, 138-9, 253, 387, 627-
34.
Westminster Confession, 293.

II. AUTHORS

Abbott, 336.
Allen, 5.
Baur, 22, 50, 68, 85, 128, 221.
Bensow, 476.
Bergson, 291.
Bethune-Baker, 146, 147, 154, 163,
203, 204, 269.
Biedermann, 262.
Bigg, 162, 165-6.
Bonwetsoh, 201, 207, 213.
Bousset, 16, 21-2, 34, 88, 357.
Bovon, 370.
Bradley, A. C, 328.
Bradley, F. H., 38.
Browning, 339, 468.
Bruce, 79, 82, 245, 267, 277.
Bruckner, 51.
Burkitt, 20, 21, 99, 384.
Burton, 97, 116.
Caird, E., 263.
Caird, J., 199, 439.
Cairns, 351.
Caspari, 136.
Coleridge, 275.
Dale, 312, 328, 381, 411.
Dalman, 18, 22.
D'Arcy, 464.
Davidson, 82.
Deissmann, 62, 67.
Denney, 4, 17, 27, 28, 41, 46, 64,
93, 286, 329, 415, 509, 531.
Dick Fleming, 246.
Dorner, 213, 218, 267, 272-5, 440,
497.

Draseke, 201.
Drescher, 62.
Driver, 22.
Drummond, 99, 340.
Du Bose, 387.
Dykes, 200, 202, 208, 215, 222, 234,
239.
Edgehill, 341.
Ewald, 108.
Fairbairn, 61, 81, 258, 337, 433.
Faut, 261, 420.
Feine, 23, 34, 43, 63.
Findlay, 342.
Forrest, 35, 265, 271, 318, 435, 464.
Forsyth, 302, 465, 473, 475, 502.
Foster, 189.
Frommel, 253, 395.
Garvie, 369, 446, 464.
Gess, 267.
Glover, 144, 163, 468.
Godet, 268.
Goguel, 28.
Goltz, von der, 133.
Gray, 529.
Green, 393.
Gunkel, 51.
Gwatkin, 131, 174, 180, 184, 189,
195.
Haering, 38, 248, 322, 345, 419, 462.
Hahn, 137, 182, 192, 194, 197, 198,
209, 210, 212.

INDEX

539

Harnack, A., 2, 6, 9, 27, 29, 75, 116,
126, 135, 141, 148, 157, 164, 169,
172, 179, 194, 209, 218, 234, 269,
347, 419, 449, 510, 529.
Harnack, Th., 269.
Haupt, 97.
Headlam, 61.
Heitmiiller, 354.
Herrmann, 34, 232, 236, 315, 852,
362, 367, 422, 425, 458.
Hogg, 375, 377.
Holsten, 50.
Holtzmann, 18, 85, 122.
Illingworth, 188.
Irving, 276-8.
James, 311.
Jiilicher, 62, 68.
Kaftan, 24, 50, 286.
Kahler, 245, 299, 313, 414, 494, 499.
Kattenbusch, 136.
Kennedy, 19, 67.
Kirn, 272, 434, 456.
Knox, 519.
Kriiger, 215.
Kiihl, 27.
Lagarde, 15.
Lightfoot, 66, 69, 130.
Lindsay, 189, 235.
Lofthouse, 339.
Loofs, 72, 124, 128, 136, 144, 155,
166, 187, 194, 204, 208, 211, 215,
226, 267.
Lutgert, 115.
Macgregor, 425.
Martineau, 340, 520.
Mason, 398.
Mathews, 40, 95.
Maurice, 276.
McGiffert, 137.
McLeod Campbell, 275.
Moberly, 60, 189, 332, 388, 480,
513.
Moffatt, 52, 58, 76, 92, 528.
Mozley, 367, 472, 498.
Muirhead, 9, 24.
Mulert, 254.
Nettleship, 330, 525.
NiBbergall, 317.
Olschewski, 53, 57, 59.
Orr, 530.
Ottley, 130, 146, 205.

Peake, 70.
Purchas, 96, 115.
Rainy, 144, 149, 185.
Ramsay, 430.
Rede penning, 162.
Reischle, 75.
Renan, 102.
Rendel Harris, 119.
Reville, 353, 517.
Riehm, 83.
Ritschl, 250, 278-81, 350, 378, 450.
Robertson, 184.
Sanday, 22, 61, 98, 130, 144, 189,
399, 487-90, 513, 524.
Schaeder, 459, 511.
Scheel, 189, 224, 227.
Schlatter, 118, 290.
Schmiedel, 59, 354.
Schultz, 177, 423.
Scott, E. F., 8, 24, 95, 99, 109, 336,
374.
Scott, C. A., 91.
Seeberg, 128, 132, 139, 171, 173, 184,
222.
Simpson, 308, 443.
Skrine, 252, 533.
Strauss, 260, 338, 438.
Strong, 386.
Swete, 129, 138.
Temple, 501.
Thieme, 367, 399, 424.
Thomasius, 153, 266.
Thompson, 474.
Titius, 29, 72, 106, 110, 423.
Troeltsch, 357.
Tymms, 344.
Ullmann, 277.
Volkmar, 15.
Von Soden, 13, 15, 392.
Walker, 464.
Wallace, 258.
Warfield, 151.
Weinel, 21, 50, 59, 65, 359.
Weiss, B., 45, 83, 92.
Weiss, J., 5, 40, 52, 56, 65, 99, 105,
: 367, 530.
Weizsacker, 72. 99.
Wellhausen, 22, 34.
Wendland, J., 357.
Wendland, P., 76.
Wendt, 364, 452.

540

INDEX

Westcott, 119, 440.
Weston, 465, 484, 493.
Wobbeimin, 316.

Wrede, 15, 51.
Zahn, 42, 125, 132, 138.

III. REFERENCES

Genesis, l1, 104.
2 Samuel, 713"14, 25.
Psalms, 2, 16, 25 ; 7", 90 ; 33", 117 ;
10720, 117 ; 14710, 117.
Proverbs, 822, 154, 176.
Isaiah, 813, 47 ; 53, 19, 23, 43 ; 55",
117 ; 6019, 91.
Jeremiah, 2329, 117.
Matthew, 721, 26; 1032, 26 ; ll2ff-,
17; ll19, 20; ll27, 26 ff, 96, 106,
415; ll28, 12; 12™, 26; 1613, 23; 1623,
36 ; 1820, 110 ; 2663, 25 ; 2740, 25.
Mark, l1, 5 ; 210, 20, 23, 32 ; 3",
25 ; 66, 5, 14 ; 831, 18 ; 837, 26 ;
8s8, 34 ; 1018, 37 ; 1032, 33 ; 1332,
13, 26, 29, 397 ; 1539, 25.
Luke, 240"62, 26 ; 252, 10 ; 4M, 18 ;
1426, 326; 2218'-, 12; 2248, -20;
2419, 43 ; 2421, 15.
John, 1, 18 ; l1, 104 ; l13, 83 ; l1"18,
115 ff.; 1", 107; l18, 103 f. ; l29,
120 ; 313, 108 ; 314, 108 ; 316, 103 ;
Z2*, 110 ; 335, 95 ; 413, 110 ; 518,
103; 519, 100; 519"29, 103, 114,
5W, 95 ; 526, 102 ; 530, 99 ; 5s3,
111 ; 627, 108 ; 661, 110 ; 653, 108 ;
682, 108 ; 669, 102 ; 731, 95 ; 8W, 100 ;
829, 100 ;888, 104 ; S*6, 35 ;868, 104 ;
10", 100; 103», 112; 1033, 103;
1036, 100, 114; 1038, 112; ll41,
100 ; 1223, 108 ; 1223' 2i, 120 ; 1227,
99, 120; 1234, 108; 12«, 112;
133, 106; IS81, 108, 120; 149,
112; 14]0, 104; 1418'-, 42; 1420,
111; 1428, 98; 156, 110; 1519,
101; 1528, 98; 1613, 98; 1623,
72; 1627, 12, 111; 173, 101;
174-B, 107; 176, 101; 1721, 111 ;
1723, 110; 1734, 104; 2023, 107;
2028, 96 ; 2031, 94 ; 21, 96.
Acts, l7, 13; I24, 42; 222, 39; 223,
41 ; 2M, 46 ; 232, 41 ; 238, 40 ; 2s8,
43 ; 31S, 43 ; 318, 43 ; 319- » 44 ;
413, 43 ; 427, 43 ; 76S, 20, 43 ; 758,
42, 125 ; 789, 42 ; 1036, 41 ; 1038
40 ; 10", 41 ; 19*>, 43.
Romans, l3- *, 40, 47, 68, 64-5, 127 ;

4Mt, 53 ; 5, 68 ; 8s, 63, 66 ; 8s1 ";
55 ; 832, 65, 71 ; 96, 49, 72 ; 12B,
56 ; 149, 60 ; 1414, 56 ; 14", 61.
1 Corinthians, l2, 125, 366 ; l9, 65 ;
22, 53 ; Z23, 71, 73 ; 10", 66, 447 ;
1031ffi, 87; ll3, 71; 158ff-, 48;
1528, 72 ; 1544"9, 68, 87 ; 1545, 61.
2 Corinthians, 3", 59, 128 ; 46, 54 ;
410, 56 ; 57, 57 ; 519, 441 ; 86, 69 ;
89, 66; 122, 20; 12s, 42, 125;
1314, 59.
Galatians, 1", 62 ; 11B, 54 ; 220, 55,
65 ; 44, 66, 71, 74 ; 522, 57.
Ephesians, l21, 55 ; 218, 509.
Philippians, 21, 56 ; 25-7, 66, 75, 83,
172 ; 27"8, 37 ; 29, 60, 71.
Colossians, l13, 65 ; l15, 65, 83 ; 11SB-,
69 ; l16, 72, 118 ; l18, 57 ; l19, 71,
74 ; 29, 72 ; 215, 61.
1 Thessalonians, 416, 56.
2 Thessalonians, l12, 49.
Titus, 613, 139.
Hebrews, l1"4, 78, 83 ; l2, 82, 85 ; Is,
81, 83 ; l4, 84 ; l5, 85 ; l6, 85 ;
Is, 81 ; 1", 85 ; 23, 79 ; 29, 81 ;
213, 79 ; 2""16, 81 ; 2", 441 ; 32,
79 ; 314, 87 ; 414, 84 ; 41B, 37 ; 56,
81, 87 ; 57, 79 ; 58, 37, 79 ; 59,
80 ; 64, 87 ; 71', 84 ; 721, 79 ; 7s3,
78 ; 725, 78, 84 ; 7s7, 82 ; 81, 80 ;
82, 80 ; 86, 78 ; 9'2, 82 ; 914, 84 ;
916, 78 ; S24, 84 ; 918, 84 ; 105"7, 80 ;
122, 79 ; 12s, 79 ; 1224, 78 ; 1312
79 • 1320 85
1 Peter, l2,' 46'; l3, 47 ; l11, 45 ; l20,
45 ; 221, 37; 3'3, 47; 318, 46 ; 319, 46 ;
322, 47; 4«, 46;' 4", 47; 5'1, 47.
1 John, l7, 121; 221"23, 384; 2s3,
121; 41"3, 384; 42-3, 121; 410,
441 ; 415, 384 ; 5°, 121 ; 58"8 384 ;
52», 121.
Revelation, l5- 6, 90 ; l8, 93 ; l13, 89 ;
lis, 90 ; 227, 90 ; 3», 90 ; 314, 90 ;
56, 88; 513, 42, 91; 5s7 s; 88; 710,
91 ; 711 a; 91 ; 1414, 89 ; 1919, 90 ;
1913, 90 ; 218, 90 ; 2122' » 91 ;
2213, 90 ; 2218, 88 ; 2220, 125.