Person Of Christ (continued) – Person Of Christ (continued)

Person Of Christ (continued)

Now, John tells us that it was this Word, eternal in His subsistence, God's eternal fellow, the eternal God's self, that, as "come in the flesh," was Jesus Christ (1 John 4:2). "And the Word became flesh" (John 1:14), he says. The terms he employs here are not terms of substance, but of personality. The meaning is not that the substance of God was transmuted into that substance which we call "flesh." "The Word" is a personal name of the eternal God; "flesh" is an appropriate designation of humanity in its entirety, with the implications of dependence and weakness. The meaning, then, is simply that He who had just been described as the eternal God became, by a voluntary act in time, a man. The exact nature of the act by which He "became" man lies outside the statement; it was matter of common knowledge between the writer and the reader. The language employed intimates merely that it was a definite act, and that it involved a change in the life-history of the eternal God, here designated "the Word." The whole emphasis falls on the nature of this change in His life-history. He became flesh. That is to say, He entered upon a mode of existence in which the experiences that belong to human beings would also be His. The dependence, the weakness, which constitute the very idea of flesh, in contrast with God, would now enter into His personal experience. And it is precisely because these are the connotations of the term "flesh" that John chooses that term here, instead of the more simply denotative term "man." What he means is merely that the eternal God became man. But he elects to say this in the language which throws best up to view what it is to become man. The contrast between the Word as the eternal God and the human nature which He assumed as flesh, is the hinge of the statement. Had the evangelist said (as he does in 1 John 4:2) that the Word `came in flesh,' it would have been the continuity through the change which would have been most emphasized. When he says rather that the Word became flesh, while the continuity of the personal subject is, of course, intimatead, it is the reality and the completeness of the humanity assumed which is made most prominent.

(3) The Incarnated Person.

That in becoming flesh the Word did not cease to be what He was before entering upon this new sphere of experiences, the evangelist does not leave, however, to mere suggestion. The glory of the Word was so far from quenched, in his view, by His becoming flesh, that he gives us at once to understand that it was rather as "trailing clouds of glory" that He came. "And the Word became flesh," he says, and immediately adds: "and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). The language is colored by reminiscences from the Tabernacle, in which the Glory of God, the Shekinah, dwelt. The flesh of our Lord became, on its assumption by the Word, the Temple of God on earth (compare John 2:19), and the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. John tells us expressly that this glory was visible, that it was precisely what was appropriate to the Son of God as such. "And we beheld his glory," he says; not divined it, or inferred it, but perceived it. It was open to sight, and the actual object of observation. Jesus Christ was obviously more than man; He was obviously God. His actually observed glory, John tells us further, was a "glory as of the only begotten from the Father." It was unique; nothing like it was ever seen in another. And its uniqueness consisted precisely in its consonance with what the unique Son of God, sent forth from the Father, would naturally have; men recognized and could not but recognize in Jesus Christ the unique Son of God. When this unique Son of God is further described as "full of grace and truth," the elements of His manifested glory are not to be supposed to be exhausted by this description (compare John 2:11). Certain items of it only are singled out for particular mention. The visible glory of the incarnated Word was such a glory as the unique Son of God, sent forth from the Father, who was full of grace and truth, would naturally manifest.

That nothing should be lacking to the declaration of the continuity of all that belongs to the Word as such into this new sphere of existence, and its full manifestation through the veil of His flesh, John adds at the close of his exposition the remarkable sentence: `As for God, no one has even yet seen him; God only begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father--he hath declared him' (John 1:18 margin). It is the incarnate Word which is here called `only begotten God.' The absence of the article with this designation is doubtless due to its parallelism with the word "God" which stands at the head of the corresponding clause. The effect of its absence is to throw up into emphasis the quality rather than the mere individuality of the person so designated. The adjective "only begotten" conveys the idea, not of derivation and subordination, but of uniqueness and consubstantiality: Jesus is all that God is, and He alone is this. Of this `only begotten God' it is now declared that He "is"--not "was," the state is not one which has been left behind at the incarnation, but one which continues uninterrupted and unmodified--"into"--not merely "in"--"the bosom of the Father"--that is to say, He continues in the most intimate and complete communion with the Father. Though now incarnate, He is still "with God" in the full sense of the external relation intimated in John 1:1. This being true, He has much more than seen God, and is fully able to "interpret" God to men. Though no one has ever yet seen God, yet he who has seen Jesus Christ, "God only begotten," has seen the Father (compare John 14:9; John 12:45). In this remarkable sentence there is asserted in the most direct manner the full Deity of the incarnate Word, and the continuity of His life as such in His incarnate life; thus He is fitted to be the absolute revelation of God to man.

3. The Gospel:

This condensed statement of the whole doctrine of the incarnation is only the prologue to a historical treatise. The historical treatise which it introduces, naturally, is written from the point of view of its prologue. Its object is to present Jesus Christ in His historical manifestation, as obviously the Son of God in flesh. "These are written," the Gospel testifies, "that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (John 20:31); that Jesus who came as a man (John 1:30) was thoroughly known in His human origin (John 7:27), confessed Himself man (John 8:40), and died as a man dies (John 19:5), was, nevertheless, not only the Messiah, the Sent of God, the fulfiller of all the divine promises of redemption, but also the very Son of God, that God only begotten, who, abiding in the bosom of the Father, is His sole adequate interpreter. From the beginning of the Gospel onward, this purpose is pursued: Jesus is pictured as ever, while truly man, yet manifesting Himself as equally truly God, until the veil which covered the eyes of His followers was wholly lifted, and He is greeted as both Lord and God (John 20:28). But though it is the prime purpose of this Gospel to exhibit the divinity of the man Jesus, no obscuration of His manhood is involved. It is the Deity of the man Jesus which is insisted on, but the true manhood of Jesus is as prominent in the representation as in any other portion of the New Testament. Nor is any effacement of the humiliation of His earthly life involved. For the Son of man to come from heaven was a descent (John 3:13), and the mission which He came to fulfill was a mission of contest and conflict, of suffering and death. He brought His glory with Him (John 1:14), but the glory that was His on earth (John 17:22) was not all the glory which He had had with the Father before the world was, and to which, after His work was done, He should return (John 17:5). Here too the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. In any event, John has no difficulty in presenting the life of our Lord on earth as the life of God in flesh, and in insisting at once on the glory that belongs to Him as God and on the humiliation which is brought to Him by the flesh. It is distinctly a duplex life which he ascribes to Christ, and he attributes to Him without embarrassment all the powers and modes of activity appropriate on the one hand to Deity and on the other to sinless (John 8:46; compare John 14:30; 1 John 3:5) human nature. In a true sense his portrait of our Lord is a dramatization of the God-man which he presents to our contemplation in his prologue. V. Teaching of the Synoptic Gospels.

The same may be said of the other Gospels. They are all dramatizations of the God-man set forth in thetical exposition in the prologue to John's Gospel. The Gospel of Luke, written by a known companion of Paul, gives us in a living narrative the same Jesus who is presupposed in all Paul's allusions to Him. That of Mark, who was also a companion of Paul, as also of Peter, is, as truly as the Gospel of John itself, a presentation of facts in the life of Jesus with a view to making it plain that this was the life of no mere man, human as it was, but of the Son of God Himself. Matthew's Gospel differs from its fellows mainly in the greater richness of Jesus' own testimony to His Deity which it records. What is characteristic of all three is the inextricable interlacing in their narratives of the human and divine traits which alike marked the life they are depicting. It is possible, by neglecting one series of their representations and attending only to the other, to sift out from them at will the portrait of either a purely divine or a purely human Jesus. It is impossible to derive from them the portrait of any other than a divine-human Jesus if we surrender ourselves to their guidance and take off of their pages the portrait they have endeavored to draw. As in their narratives they cursorily suggest now the fullness of His Deity and now the completeness of His humanity and everywhere the unity of His person, they present as real and as forcible a testimony to the constitution of our Lord's person as uniting in one personal life a truly divine and a truly human nature, as if they announced this fact in analytical statement. Only on the assumption of this conception of our Lord's person as underlying and determining their presentation, can unity be given to their representations; while, on this supposition, all their representations fall into their places as elements in one consistent whole. Within the limits of their common presupposition, each Gospel has no doubt its own peculiarities in the distribution of its emphasis. Mark lays particular stress on the divine power of the man Jesus, as evidence of His supernatural being; and on the irresistible impression of a veritable Son of God, a Divine Being walking the earth as a man, which He made upon all with whom He came into contact. Luke places his Gospel by the side of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the prominence it gives to the human development of the Divine Being whose life on earth it is depicting and to the range of temptation to which He was subjected. Matthew's Gospel is notable chiefly for the heights of the divine self-consciousness which it uncovers in its report of the words of Him whom it represents as nevertheless the Son of David, the Son of Abraham; heights of divine self-consciousness which fall in nothing short of those attained in the great utterances preserved for us by John. But amid whatever variety there may exist in the aspects on which each lays his particular emphasis, it is the same Jesus Christ which all three bring before us, a Jesus Christ who is at once God and man and one individual person. If that be not recognized, the whole narrative of the Synoptic Gospels is thrown into confusion; their portrait of Christ becomes an insoluble puzzle; and the mass of details which they present of His life-experiences is transmuted into a mere set of crass contradictions.

See also GOSPELS, THE SYNOPTIC.

VI. Teaching of Jesus.

1. The Johannine Jesus:

The Gospel narratives not only present us, however, with dramatizations of the God-man, according to their authors' conception of His composite person. They preserve for us also a considerable body of the utterances of Jesus Himself, and this enables us to observe the conception of His person which underlay and found expression in our Lord's own teaching. The discourses of our Lord which have been selected for record by John have been chosen (among other reasons) expressly for the reason that they bear witness to His essential Deity. They are accordingly peculiarly rich in material for forming a judgment of our Lord's conception of His higher nature. This conception, it is needless to say, is precisely that which John, taught by it, has announced in the prologue to his Gospel, and has illustrated by his Gospel itself, compacted as it is of these discourses. It will not be necessary to present the evidence for this in its fullness. It will be enough to point to a few characteristic passages, in which our Lord's conception of His higher nature finds especially clear expression.

(1) His Higher Nature.

That He was of higher than earthly origin and nature, He repeatedly asserts. "Ye are from beneath," he says to the Jews (John 8:23), "I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world" (compare John 17:16). Therefore, He taught that He, the Son of Man, had "descended out of heaven" (John 3:13), where was His true abode. This carried with it, of course, an assertion of pre-existence; and this pre-existence is explicitly affirmed: "What then," He asks, "if ye should behold the Son of man ascending where he was before?" (John 6:62). It is not merely pre-existence, however, but eternal pre-existence which He claims for Himself: "And now, Father," He prays (John 17:5), "glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (compare John 17:24); and again, as the most impressive language possible, He declares (John 8:58 the King James Version): "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am," where He claims for Himself the timeless present of eternity as His mode of existence. In the former of these two last cited passages, the character of His pre-existent life is intimated; in it He shared the Father's glory from all eternity ("before the world was"); He stood by the Father's side as a companion in His glory. He came forth, when He descended to earth, therefore, not from heaven only, but from the very side of God (John 8:42; John 17:8). Even this, however, does not express the whole truth; He came forth not only from the Father's side where He had shared in the Father's glory; He came forth out of the Father's very being--"I came out from the Father, and am come into the world" (John 16:28; compare John 8:42). "The connection described is inherent and essential, and not that of presence or external fellowship" (Westcott). This prepares us for the great assertion: "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30), from which it is a mere corollary that "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9; compare John 8:19; John 12:45).

(2) His Humiliation

In all these declarations the subject of the affirmation is the actual person speaking: it is of Himself who stood before men and spoke to them that our Lord makes these immense assertions. Accordingly, when He majestically declared, "I and the Father are" (plurality of persons) "one" (neuter singular, and accordingly, singleness of being), the Jews naturally understood Him to be making Himself, the person then speaking to them, God (John 10:33; compare John 5:18; John 19:7). The continued sameness of the person who has been, from all eternity down to this hour, one with God, is therefore fully safeguarded. His earthly life is, however, distinctly represented as a humiliation. Though even on earth He is one with the Father, yet He "descended" to earth; He had come out from the Father and out of God; a glory had been left behind which was yet to be returned to, and His sojourn on earth was therefore to that extent an obscuration of His proper glory. There was a sense, then, in which, because He had "descended," He was no longer equal with the Father. It was in order to justify an assertion of equality with the Father in power (John 10:25,John 10:29) that He was led to declare: "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30). But He can also declare "The Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). Obviously this means that there was a sense in which He had ceased to be equal with the Father, because of the humiliation of His present condition, and in so far as this humiliation involved entrance into a status lower than that which belonged to Him by nature. Precisely in what this humiliation consisted can be gathered only from the general, implication of many statements. In it He was a "man": `a man who hath told you the truth, which I have heard from God' (John 8:40), where the contrast with "God" throws the assertion of humanity into emphasis (compare John 10:33). The truth of His human nature is, however, everywhere assumed and endlessly illustrated, rather than explicitly asserted. He possessed a human soul (John 11:27) and bodily parts (flesh and blood, John 6:53 ff; hands and side, 20:27); and was subject alike to physical affections (weariness, John 4:6, and thirst, 19:28, suffering and death), and to all the common human emotions--not merely the love of compassion (John 13:34; John 14:21; John 15:8–13), but the love of simple affection which we pour out on "friends" (John 11:11; compare John 15:14,John 15:15), indignation (John 11:33,John 11:38) and joy (John 15:11; John 17:13). He felt the perturbation produced by strong excitement (John 11:33; John 11:27; John 13:21), the sympathy with suffering which shows itself in tears (John 11:35), the thankfulness which fills the grateful heart (John 6:11,John 6:23; John 11:41; John 16:27). Only one human characteristic was alien to Him: He was without sin: "the prince of the world," He declared, "hath nothing in me" (John 14:30; compare John 8:46). Clearly our Lord, as reported by John, knew Himself to be true God and true man in one indivisible person, the common subject of the qualities which belong to each.

2. The Synoptic Jesus:

(1) His Deity.

(a) Mark 13:32:

The same is true of His self-consciousness as revealed in His sayings recorded by the synoptists. Perhaps no more striking illustration of this could be adduced than the remarkable declaration recorded in Mark 13:32 (compare Matthew 24:36): `But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, nor yet the Son, but the Father.' Here Jesus places Himself, in an ascending scale of being, above "the angels in heaven," that is to say, the highest of all creatures, significantly marked here as supramundane. Accordingly, He presents Himself elsewhere as the Lord of the angels, whose behests they obey: "The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity" (Matthew 13:41), "And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other" (Matthew 24:31; compare Matthew 13:49; Matthew 25:31; Mark 8:38). Thus the "angels of God" (Luke 12:8,Luke 12:9; Luke 15:10) Christ designates as His angels, the "kingdom of God" (Matthew 12:28; 19:24; 11:31,43; Mark and Luke often) as His Kingdom, the "elect of God" (Mark 13:20; Luke 18:7; compare Romans 8:33; Colossians 3:12; Titus 1:1) as His elect. He is obviously speaking in Mark 13:22 out of a divine self-consciousness: "Only a Divine Being can be exalted above angels" (B. Weiss). He therefore designates Himself by His divine name, "the Son," that is to say, the unique Son of God (Mark 9:7; Mark 1:11), to claim to be whom would for a man be blasphemy (Mark 14:61,Mark 14:64). But though He designates Himself by this divine name, He is not speaking of what He once was, but of what at the moment of speaking He is: the action of the verb is present, "knoweth." He is claiming, in other words, the supreme designation of "the Son," with all that is involved in it, for His present self, as He moved among men: He is, not merely was, "the Son." Nevertheless, what He affirms of Himself cannot be affirmed of Himself distinctively as "the Son." For what He affirms of Himself is ignorance--"not even the Son" knows it; and ignorance does not belong to the divine nature which the term "the Son" connotes. An extreme appearance of contradiction accordingly arises from the use of this terminology, just as it arises when Paul says that the Jews "crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8), or exhorts the Ephesian elders to "feed the church of God which he purchased with his own blood" (Acts 20:28 margin); or John Keble praises our Lord for the blood of souls by Thee redeemed." It was not the Lord of Glory as such who was nailed to the tree, nor have either "God" or "souls" blood to shed.

We know how this apparently contradictory mode of speech has arisen in Keble's case. He is speaking of men who are composite beings, consisting of souls and bodies, and these men come to be designated from one element of their composite personalities, though what is affirmed by them belongs rather to the other; we may speak, therefore, of the "blood of souls" meaning that these "souls," while not having blood as such, yet designate persons who have bodies and therefore blood. We know equally how to account for Paul's apparent contradictions. We know that he conceived of our Lord as a composite person, uniting in Himself a divine and a human nature. In Paul's view, therefore, though God as such has no blood, yet Jesus Christ who is God has blood because He is also man. He can justly speak, therefore, when speaking of Jesus Christ of His blood as the blood of God. When precisely the same phenomenon meets us in our Lord's speech of Himself, we naust presume that it is the outgrowth of precisely the same state of things. When lie speaks of "the Son" (who is God) as ignorant, we must understand that tie is designating Himself as "the Son" because of His higher nature, and yet has in mind the ignorance of His lower nature; what He means is that the person properly designated "the Son" is ignorant, that is to say with respect to the human nature which is as intimate an element of His personality as is His Deity.

When our Lord says, then, that "the Son knows not," He becomes as express a witness to the two natures which constitute His person as Paul is when he speaks of the blood of God, or as Keble is a witness to the twofold constitution of a human being when he speaks of souls shedding blood. In this short sentence, thus, our Lord bears witness to His divine nature with its supremacy above all creatures, to His human nature with its creaturely limitations, and to the unity of the subject possessed of these two natures.

(b) Other Passages: Son of Man and Son of God:

All these elements of His personality find severally repeated assertions in other utterances of our Lord recorded in the Synoptics. There is no need to insist here on the elevation of Himself above the kings and prophets of the Old Covenant (Matthew 12:41), above the temple itself (Matthew 12:6), and the ordinances of the divine law (Matthew 12:8); or on His accent of authority in both His teaching and action, His great "I say unto you" (Mark 5:21,Mark 5:22), `I will; be cleansed' (Mark 1:41; Mark 2:5; Luke 7:14); or on His separation of Himself from men in His relation to God, never including them with Himself in an "Our Father," but consistently speaking distinctively of "my Father" (e.g. Luke 24:49) and "your Father" (e.g. Matthew 5:16); or on His intimation that He is not merely David's Son but David's Lord, and that a Lord sitting on the right hand of God (Matthew 22:44); or on His parabolic discrimination of Himself a Son and Heir from all "servants" (Matthew 21:33); or even on His ascription to Himself of the purely divine functions of the forgiveness of sins (Mark 2:8) and judgment of the world (Matthew 25:31), or of the purely divine powers of reading the heart (Mark 2:8; Luke 9:47), omnipotence (Matthew 24:30; Mark 14:62) and omnipresence (Matthew 18:20; Matthew 28:10). These things illustrate His constant assumption of the possession of divine dignity and attributes; the claim itself is more directly made in the two great designations which He currently gave Himself, the Son of Man and the Son of God. The former of these is His favorite self-designation. Derived from Daniel 7:13,Daniel 7:14, it intimates on every occasion of its employment our Lord's consciousness of being a supramundane being, who has entered into a sphere of earthly life on a high mission, on the accomplishment of which He is to return to His heavenly sphere, whence He shall in due season come back to earth, now, however, in His proper majesty, to gather up the fruits of His work and consummate all things. It is a designation, thus, which implies at once a heavenly preexistence, a present humiliation, and a future glory; and He proclaims Himself in this future glory no less than the universal King seated on the throne of judgment for quick and dead (Mark 8:31; Matthew 25:31). The implication of Deity imbedded in the designation, Son of Man, is perhaps more plainly spoken out in the companion designation, Son of God, which our Lord not only accepts at the hands of others, accepting with it the implication of blasphemy in permitting its application to Himself (Matthew 26:63,Matthew 26:65; Mark 14:61,Mark 14:64; Luke 22:29,Luke 22:30), but persistently claims for Himself both, in His constant designation of God as His Father in a distinctive sense, and in His less frequent but more pregnant designation of Himself as, by way of eminence, "the Son." That His consciousness of the peculiar relation to God expressed by this designation was not an attainment of His mature spiritual development, but was part of His most intimate consciousness from the beginning, is suggested by the sole glimpse which is given us into His mind as a child (Luke 2:49). The high significance which the designation bore to Him is revealed to us in two remarkable utterances preserved, the one by both Matthew (11:27 ff) and Luke (10:22 ff), and the other by Matthew (28:19).

(c) Matthew 11:27; 28:19:

In the former of these utterances, our Lord, speaking in the most solemn manner, not only presents Himself, as the Son, as the sole source of knowledge of God and of blessedness for men, but places Himself in a position, not of equality merely, but of absolute reciprocity and interpenetration of knowledge with the Father. "No one," He says, "knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son ...." "varied in Luke so as to read: "No one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son ...." as if the being of the Son were so immense that only God could know it thoroughly; and the knowledge of the Son was so unlimited that He could know God to perfection. The peculiarly pregnant employment here of the terms "Son" and "Father" over against one another is explained to us in the other utterance (Matthew 28:19). It is the resurrected Lord's commission to His disciples. Claiming for Himself all authority in heaven and on earth--which implies the possession of omnipotence--and promising to be with His followers `alway, even to the end of the world'--which adds the implications of omnipresence and omniscience--He commands them to baptize their converts `in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.' The precise form of the formula must be carefully observed. It does not read: `In the names' (plural)--as if there were three beings enumerated, each with its distinguishing name. Nor yet: `In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,' as if there were one person, going by a threefold name. It reads: `In the name (singular) of the Father, and of the (article repeated) Son, and of the (article repeated) Holy Spirit,' carefully distinguishing three persons, though uniting them all under one name. The name of God was to the Jews Yahweh, and to name the name of Yahweh upon them was to make them His. What Jesus did in this great injunction was to command His followers to name the name of God upon their converts, and to announce the name of God which is to be named on their converts in the threefold enumeration of "the Father" and "the Son" and `the Holy Spirit.' As it is unquestionable that He intended Himself by "the Son," He here places Himself by the side of the Father and the Spirit, as together with them constituting the one God. It is, of course, the Trinity which He is describing; and that is as much as to say that He announces Himself as one of the persons of the Trinity. This is what Jesus, as reported by the Synoptics, understood Himself to be.

See TRINITY.

(2) His Humanity.

In announcing Himself to be God, however, Jesus does not deny that He is man also. If all His speech of Himself rests on His consciousness of a divine nature, no less does all His speech manifest His consciousness of a human nature. He easily identifies Himself with men (Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:4), and receives without protest the imputation of humanity (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34). He speaks familiarly of His body (Matthew 26:12,Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:8; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19), and of His bodily parts--His feet and hands (Luke 24:39), His head and feet (Luke 7:44–46), His flesh and bones (Luke 24:39), His blood (Matthew 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20). We chance to be given indeed a very express affirmation on His part of the reality of His bodily nature; when His disciples were terrified at His appearing before them after His resurrection, supposing Him to be a spirit, He reassures them with the direct declaration: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having" (Luke 24:39). His testimony to His human soul is just as express: "My soul," says He, "is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" (Matthew 26:38; Mark 14:34). He speaks of the human dread with which He looked forward to His approaching death (Luke 12:50), and expresses in a poignant cry His sense of desolation on the cross (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). He speaks also of His pity for the weary and hungering people (Matthew 15:32; Mark 8:2), and of a strong human desire which He felt (Luke 22:15). Nothing that is human is alien to Him except sin. He never ascribes imperfection to Himself and never betrays consciousness of sin. He recognizes the evil of those about Him (Luke 11:13; Matthew 7:11; Matthew 12:34,Matthew 12:39; Luke 11:29), but never identifies Himself with it. It is those who do the will of God with whom He feels kinship (Matthew 12:50), and He offers Himself to the morally sick as a physician (Matthew 9:12). He proposes Himself as an example of the highest virtues (Matthew 11:28) and pronounces him blessed who shall find no occasion of stumbling in Him (Matthew 11:6).

(3) Unity of the Person.

These manifestations of a human and divine consciousness simply stand side by side in the records of our Lord's self-expression. Neither is suppressed or even qualified by the other. If we attend only to the one class we might suppose Him to proclaim Himself wholly divine; if only to the other we might equally easily imagine Him to be representing Himself as wholly human. With both together before us we perceive Him alternately speaking out of a divine and out of a human consciousness; manifesting Himself as all that God is and as all that man is; yet with the most marked unity of consciousness. He, the one Jesus Christ, was to His own apprehension true God and complete man in a unitary personal life.

VII. The Two Natures Everywhere Presupposed.

There underlies, thus, the entire literature of the New Testament a single, unvarying conception of the constitution of our Lord's person. From Matthew where He is presented as one of the persons of the Holy Trinity (28:19)--or if we prefer the chronological order of books, from the Epistle of James where He is spoken of as the Glory of God, the Shekinah (2:1)--to the Apocalypse where He is represented as declaring that He is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End (Revelation 1:8,Revelation 1:17; Revelation 22:13), He is consistently thought of as in His fundamental being just God. At the same time from the Synoptic Gospels, in which He is dramatized as a man walking among men, His human descent carefully recorded, and His sense of dependence on God so emphasized that prayer becomes almost His most characteristic action, to the Epistles of John in which it is made the note of a Christian that He confesses that Jesus Christ has come in flesh (1 John 4:2) and the Apocalypse in which His birth in the tribe of Judah and the house of David (Revelation 5:5; Revelation 22:16), His exemplary life of conflict and victory (Revelation 3:21), His death on the cross (Revelation 11:8) are noted, He is equally consistently thought of as true man. Nevertheless, from the beginning to the end of the whole series of books, while first one and then the other of His two natures comes into repeated prominence, there is never a question of conflict between the two, never any confusion in their relations, never any schism in His unitary personal action; but He is obviously considered and presented as one, composite indeed, but undivided personality. In this state of the case not only may evidence of the constitution of our Lord's person properly be drawn indifferently from every part of the New Testament, and passage justly be cited to support and explain passage without reference to the portion of the New Testament in which it is found, but we should be without justification if we did not employ this common presupposition of the whole body of this literature to illustrate and explain the varied representations which meet us cursorily in its pages, representations which might easily be made to appear mutually contradictory were they not brought into harmony by their relation as natural component parts of this one unitary conception which underlies and gives consistency to them all. There can scarcely be imagined a better proof of the truth of a doctrine than its power completely to harmonize a multitude of statements which without it would present to our view only a mass of confused inconsistencies. A key which perfectly fits a lock of very complicated wards can scarcely fail to be the true key.

VIII. Formulation of the Doctrine.

Meanwhile the wards remain complicated. Even in the case of our own composite structure, of soul and body, familiar as we are with it from our daily experience, the mutual relations of elements so disparate in a single personality remain an unplumbed mystery, and give rise to paradoxical modes of speech which would be misleading, were not their source in our duplex nature well understood. We may read, in careful writers, of souls being left dead on battlefields, and of everybody's immortality. The mysteries of the relations in which the constituent elements in the more complex personality of our Lord stand to one another are immeasurably greater than in our simpler case. We can never hope to comprehend how the infinite God and a finite humanity can be united in a single person; and it is very easy to go fatally astray in attempting to explain the interactions in the unitary person of natures so diverse from one another. It is not surprising, therefore, that so soon as serious efforts began to be made to give systematic explanations of the Biblical facts as to our Lord's person, many onesided and incomplete statements were formulated which required correction and complementing before at length a mode of statement. was devised which did full justice to the Biblical data. It was accordingly only after more than a century of controversy, during which nearly every conceivable method of construing and misconstruing the Biblical facts had been proposed and tested, that a formula was framed which successfully guarded the essential data supplied by the Scriptures from destructive misconception. This formula, put together by the Council of Chalcedon, 451 AD, declares it to have always been the doctrine of the church, derived from the Scriptures and our Lord Himself, that our Lord Jesus Christ is "truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son,. Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures-inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; 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 subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and Only-begotten, God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ." There is nothing here but a careful statement in systematic form of the pure teaching of the Scriptures; and therefore this statement has stood ever since as the norm of thought and teaching as to the person of the Lord. As such, it has been incorporated, in one form or another, into the creeds of all the great branches of the church; it underlies and gives their form to all the allusions to Christ in the great mass of preaching and song which has accumulated during the centuries; and it has supplied the background of the devotions of the untold multitudes who through the Christian ages have been worshippers of Christ.

LITERATURE.

The appropriate sections in the treatises on the Biblical theology of the New Testament; also A. B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ, 2nd edition, Edinburgh, 1881; R. L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, London, 1896; H. C. Powell, The Principle of the Incarnation, London, 1896; Francis J. Hall, The Kenotic Theory, New York, 1898; C. A. Briggs, The Incarnation of the Lord, New York, 1902; G. S. Streatfeild, The Self-Interpretation of Jesus Christ, London, 1906; B. B. Warfield, The Lord of Glory, New York, 1907; James Denhey, Jesus and the Gospel, London, 1909; M. Lepin, Christ and the Gospel: or, Jesus the Messiah and Son of God, Philadelphia, 1910; James Stalker, The Christology of Jesus, New York, 1899; D. Somerville, Paul's Conception of Christ, Edinburgh, 1897; E.H. Gifford, The Incarnation: a Study of Philippians 2:5-11, London, 1897; S.N. Rostron, The Christology of Paul, London, 1912; E. Digges La Touche, The Person of Christ in Modern Thoughts, London, 1912.

(NOTE.--In this article the author has usually given his own translation of quotations from Scripture, and not that of any particular version.)

Benjamin B. Warfield