THE

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA.

ARTICLE I..

THE INCARNATION.

BY PROF. JOHN A. REUBELT, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON.

"IT is one of the most important and sacred duties of modern theology to overcome, in keeping with the uniform impression of true humanity and personal oneness produced by the person of Christ as delineated in the New Testament, the contradictory dualism beyond which the church doctrine of the God-man has so far failed to advance, and that in such a manner that the substance of the catholic dogma be preserved, and all exploded errors be avoided."1

A threefold impression is made upon every serious and unprejudiced reader of the New Testament concerning Jesus Christ, to wit, that he is a real man, that he sustains a unique relation to the Deity, and that this relation grows out of the very substance of his being. Wherever, whenever, on whatsoever occasion, under whatsoever circumstances, Jesus meets us, he makes the impression on us that we are in the presence of a real man, who has all the attributes and wants of humanity — who thinks, wills, resolves, has emotions, grieves, rejoices, sleeps, travels, grows fatigued, needs

1 Dr. Delitzsch.

VOL. XXVII. No. 105. JANUARY, 1870. 1

rest, eats and drinks, not for a show, but to satisfy his real wants, etc. But this real man assumes a relation to the Deity which no created being can claim without blasphemy, saying that he is of one substance (ev) with God; that he was with God in heaven before he came down on earth; that he wishes to return thither after the accomplishment of his mission, representing himself as an ambassador of God, that he acts in God's name and stead, whose doctrine is not his own, but God's, who performs his miracles in the power of God, etc.

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His most intimate and highly gifted followers and disciples have both confirmed and enlarged these declarations of their Master. John tells us expressly that his Master had existed from all eternity in a capacity to which self-consciousness and personality belong, and that he in the course of time had become something that he was not always, namely, man. In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was toward (pós) God (Tòv eóv), and the Logos was God" (eós); and v. 14: "And the Logos became flesh." Nearly the same is affirmed by the Apostle Paul, who says (Phil. ii. 6, 7): " Who, existing in the form of God, considered it not robbery to continue in this Godlike state of existence, but emptied himself, having assumed the servant form, and having become in the likeness of men." Declarations to this effect abound in the New Testament; but these two may suffice for the present. Moreover, not only the highest honors that can be paid by an intelligent creature to another, but even supreme worship is paid to him by his disciples. He places himself on a level with the Father and the Holy Ghost in baptism; he is joined with them in invoking the divine blessing; he is represented as being intrusted with the government of the world, with hearing and answering prayer. These and similar declarations of Jesus concerning himself, and of his apostles and disciples made at first by word of mouth, and subsequently reduced to writing, that they might be an infallible guide for the church of all times to come

furnished to

the infant church the general outlines of the Saviour's image, and sufficient material to complete it in days to come; and the church set herself soon to work to draw from these data her Saviour's picture in detail, by endeavoring to become conscious of all she had of Christ through faith, by endeavoring to give a scientific expression to the contents of her faith.

Was she right in making this attempt; and did she succeed in it?

These two questions do not receive a uniform answer from all; some contending, not without a show of reason, that it would have been infinitely better if the church had contented herself at all times with the simple Bible teaching, with the inspired words of the evangelists and apostles; that all could have arrived by these means at a saving knowledge of the truth at any subsequent time, as well as in the days of the apostles themselves. And, if we bear in mind that all the parties that took part in the struggles that grew out of the christological question appealed to the Bible as the word of God, that in all the contending parties there were sincere and God-fearing persons that were actuated by the very best of motives, and that untold miseries were entailed by these contentions on countless multitudes, that the church herself was torn into hostile factions, etc., etc. if, we repeat, we bear all this in mind, we are almost ready to wish that no attempt as indicated had been made.

But, notwithstanding all this, the thing was absolutely necessary; the constitution of the human mind being such that it cannot hold anything permanently as its own which it does not understand, which it has not analyzed, reconstructed, and thus appropriated to itself in a scientific form. Christian theology is the necessary result and condition of Christian life; life-producing faith carrying in itself the fruitful germ of yvwσis, or knowledge.

The unchristian, bloody scenes that grew out of these attempts were, moreover, not their legitimate results, and ought never to have taken place; and we may trust that

the church has profited by past experience; that she will no longer persecute with fire and sword all dissenters; that individual believers will no longer look upon their own views as an infallible apprehension of the Bible, or on any creed or confession of faith as an infallible exposition of the oracles of God, and, for the same reason, on opposite views as the outgrowth of malice and wickedness, unfitting its advocates for the company of good men here and the enjoyment of the Saviour hereafter.

Without fear of successful contradiction, we say, therefore, that the labors of the church with regard to the Christological as well as all other Christian questions, were legitimate and necessary; and, if the results so far reached are not in every respect satisfactory, the efforts must be continued until perfectly satisfactory results are realized.

It is absolutely necessary to acquaint ourselves with the whole history of the Christological question during the eighteen centuries of the existence of the Christian church, in order to pass a correct judgment on the relative merits or defects of its present status, and to make, with some prospect of success, any effort to advance it to a higher state of development.

The human side of the Saviour- his humanity properwas never seriously questioned in the church. All doubts and erroneous notions on this subject had their origin and life outside of the church, and rested even here on a priori conclusions. Because matter is intrinsically evil, and because every emanation of light coming into contact with matter contracts a moral stain, a moral contamination, as many of the so-called Gnostics believed, they could not entertain the idea that the highest Eon, Christos, Logos, the Only-begotten, who dwelled temporarily in Jesus of Nazareth, should have occupied a material body. Jesus had, therefore, no actual, but only an apparent, body, which this high Eon had brought down from heaven. Being of an unchristian origin, these docetic notions had no permanency; but, after threatening for a while to eclipse the very splendor

of the church, they died away without leaving any traces; and when they reappeared in the Reformation period as admixtures with Christian truth they found but little favor with the people, and are, virtually, held by no one in our days.

Not so with the other, or divine, element in our Saviour. Although the greatest possible freedom from all preconceived notions must claim that the divinity proper of Jesus is distinctly taught by some writers of the New Testament, and is perfectly consistent with the teachings of all, although they do not expressly teach it, yet there have been at all times those within the bosom of the Christian church who denied the divinity of the Saviour, from the Ebionites in Judea down to the Unitarians of New England in the nineteenth century. But it may be said here, also, in perfect consistency with truth and charity, that the rigid monotheism of these parties is also the result of a priori reasoning. Their deistical notions forbid them to conceive of any change whatever in the Deity, and there is consequently no trinity of persons, and still less an incarnation of one of these three persons. Unitarian notions are certainly not the result of the teachings of the New Testament. In the Old Testament the incarnation proper of Jehovah, or of a divine hypostasis, was not taught as something to be looked for; incommunicability, as well as immutability, being some of the chief divine attributes. "Of all the theologoumena of those days, it must be said that they were either not hypostatical, but merely symbols. of the divine presence; or, if hypostatical, they were not really divine. The idea of the incarnation of the really divine is foreign to these theologoumena. ..... From the anthropological point of view we arrive at the same result. It was impossible from the Old Testament point of view to say that a man was God or his Son in a metaphysical sense; although it must be said that, if reality had not gone beyond these Old Testament ideas, the idea of God's revelation would have remained incomplete." 1

1

We find, accordingly, that when Jesus claimed really

1 Dr. Dorner.