26. Sanday. Christologies Ancient and Modern
By William Sanday, D.D., LL.D., Litt.D. Oxford University Press, American Branch. 1910. 1 ublicity is one of the striking characteristics of our times. Our Village
P Improvement Societies, demanding the removal of all fences, are but a symbol of a universal temper. Perhaps Dr. Sanday is the first scholar, however, who has deliberately elected to do his studying in the public view.
He has, as it were, knocked down the walls of his study, and, taking his seat in the open, invited all that pass by to observe him writing his great book on the Life of Christ. It is pleasant to be taken thus into a great scholar's confidence; and we have all profited by the series of charmingly written volumes in which Dr. Sanday has laid before us the processes of his preliminary studies for his great task. The volume now before us, he tells us, is probably the last of these, and it does not yield in interest to either of its predecessors. We confess, however, to a certain decrease in the interest with which we look forward to the work to which they lead up, as we have read
one after the other of these preliminary studies. They pass in review a great mass of modern research, and whatever they touch upon they illuminate. It would be difficult to find a more sympathetic survey of the recent literature of Gospel criticism or a more useful guide to the intricacies of modern constructions of the person of Christ. But it is possible for width of sympathy itself to become a snare; there are other qualities than breadth of importance to a teacher of fundamental religious truth; and it is not strange that the term "latitudinarianism" has even acquired an evil connotation. As we have reread, one after the other, Dr. Sanday's preliminary studies, while our admiration of the extent of his learning and the clearness of his comprehension of the currents of recent thought has steadily grown, misgivings have grown with it of the firmness of his grasp on the fundamental problems which must underlie and give its body to a Life of Christ which would do justice to the deposit of faith. It was distinctly not reassuring to observe the nature of the hospitality which he accorded in the earliest of these volumes to certain very wiredrawn hypotheses as to the personality of the author of the Fourth Gospel. It was not more reassuring to observe the nature of the commendation which he gave in the second of them to Albert Schweitzer's brilliant, in some respects surely epochmaking, but sadly negative history of what Schweitzer's translators call, not unfairly from their point of view, "the quest of the historical Jesus." Nor does reassurance come with the present volume, with the feebleness of its hold upon the Biblical and Historical Christologies, its readiness to fly for refuge to doubtful modern speculations as supplying the key to the mystery of our Lord's person, its determination to have a Jesus who in all His earthly manifestations was, phenomenally, "strictly human." If the outline given on pp. 179 ff. of what Dr. Sanday calls "the working of our Lord's consciousness," in which is briefly traced His career from the cradle to the grave, is to furnish, as seems likely, the schematization of the coming Life of
Christ, the mold which is to determine the lines of its structure, then, we may as well say frankly at once, we shall have no interest in the new Life of Christ whatever. For then it will be nothing but one more of those
"reduced" Lives of Christ, of which the world has already too many, the writers of which, deserting the testimony of the sources, have as Renan puts it "imputed themselves to their victim," and, creating a Jesus after their own image, permitted Him to function only within the limits of their own consciousness. It will be a matter of sincere regret if, after the warnings of even a Wrede and a Schweitzer, Dr. Sanday should only again
"psychologize" the Life of Christ.
The title of the present volume—"Christologies Ancient and Modern"—might lead one to expect to find it a historical sketch of Christological thought in the Church, or perhaps a critical discussion of the chief Christological theories which have been current in the Church. It is not quite either of these. Its leading motive is rather the suggestion of a new Christological theory, the Christological theory which is to underlie the forthcoming Life of Christ. Even so, however, the general drift of ancient Christological thought up to Chalcedon, and the chief forms of German Christological construction of the last century are lightly sketched, to form a background against which the new suggestion may be thrown out. These sketches are drawn, of course, by the hand of a master, although only leading principles are brought out, with no attempt to enter into details. In these circumstances probably we ought not to scrutinize with too much care the occasional details which are rapidly alluded to.
Otherwise we might question the description of Tertullian's Trinity, without qualification, as "what is called an 'economic Trinity' " (p. 26), and we should certainly demur to the rendering of his οἰκονομίας sacramentum by "the mystery of the divine appointment" (p. 25). Dr. Sanday himself at a later point uses the term "economy" in Tertullian's sense, when (p. 45) he
speaks of projecting "our ideas of Personality into the internal economy of the Godhead"—which, by the way, is precisely what Tertullian was in the act of doing, when he wrote the passage which Dr. Sanday quotes. The language which is used in speaking of the Chalcedonian formula (pp. 52–
55) again does not seem to us to retain perfect exactness. The Chalcedonian fathers would seem to have done all they could to save themselves from the charge of conceiving the Two Natures as "separable and separate," when they solemnly declared that they were united ἀδιαιρέτως, Leo's "agit utraque natura quod proprium est cum alterius communicatione" would seem to preclude the supposition that these two natures were conceived as "operating distinctly"; and the emphatic "without confusion, without conversion" of the decree, would certainly appear to render it impossible to describe it as allowing "by a system of mutual give-and-take" "for the transference of the attributes from one nature to the other"—which is a characteristic feature not of the Chalcedonian but of the Old-Lutheran
Christology. Nor do we think it happy (p. 104) to take over Paul's words in 2 Cor. 5:19 in the form, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself," without remark, as a fair expression of the Ritschlian view of Christ's person. We suppose it to be unquestionable that these words, as they stand in Paul's epistle, have a Soteriological rather than Christological content, and should be read, "God was, in Christ, reconciling the world with Himself," or to put its full point upon it, "It was God who was reconciling the world with Himself in Christ"; and it is hardly desirable to perpetuate a perversion of an apostolical phrase by making it in its perverted use the vehicle of a special Christological hypothesis. Small incidental matters of this kind, however, are scarcely more worth adverting to than the incapacity the American publishers show (pp. 27, 40, 51, 121) to print a Greek phrase correctly, a matter which must be especially
mortifying to Dr. Sanday and his British publishers alike, to whom such things are unwonted.
The center of interest in the volume lies not in its historical but in its constructive aspect, in "the tentative modern Christology" which it outlines. This is dominated by a gently expressed but perfectly firm refusal of the doctrine of the Two Natures on the one side, and a fixed determination, on the other, to have a Jesus who, phenomenally at least, shall be "strictly human." It will go without saying, of course, that if there be not Two Natures in the person of Christ, then there can be but one; and He must be conceived, therefore, either as a purely divine Nature as Person, or as a purely human Nature as Person. In the former case we shall be landed inevitably, of course, in some form of Docetism; in the latter as inevitably in some form of Humanitarianism. Dr. Sanday, as is his gracious wont, speaks kindly of the Docetists, and seeks and finds the element of truth which they saw and endeavored to conserve. But he does not cast in his lot with them. Neither (very properly) will he consort with the Kenotists who think to have in a one-natured Jesus both God and man, on the theory that a shriveled God is a man, and that Jesus, who was nothing but a man, may be thought to have been God before He shrunk into human limits—thus losing really both Natures in the attempt to make one two. There is nothing left for Dr. Sanday, therefore, but a pure
Humanitarianism. His historical sense, however, and his Christian heart will not permit him to think of Christ "merely as man." He feels compelled to recognize deity in Him as well as humanity. But not deity alongside of the humanity. Why not, rather, he suggests, deity underlying and sustaining the humanity—as deity underlies and sustains all humanity? Then we may think of Christ as "strictly human"; but, as man differs from man in the richness and fullness with which the divine that underlies his being surges up in him and enters into his consciousness, and Jesus stands in this
incomparably above all other men, we may think of Him as incomparably the divine man. Thus Dr. Sanday would cut the knot of the Christological problem. Obviously, what he gives us is at best only a new Nestorianism, a Nestorianism stated in terms of modern speculation; Jesus Christ is a man in whom God dwells in a fullness in which He does not dwell in other men.
At worst, what he gives us is a devout Humanitarianism, a Humanitarianism stated in terms of mystical contemplation: the doctrine of the Incarnation gives place to a theory of Divine Immanence, and Jesus
Christ is just the God-filled man.
The basis of Dr. Sanday's suggested Christology, we perceive, is a mystical doctrine of human nature. Support for this mystical doctrine of human nature he seeks, we must now note, in recent speculations as to the subliminal self. Nobody doubts, or has ever doubted, that mental processes take place below the threshold of consciousness. And nobody doubts that God operates on the human soul, as we say, "beneath consciousness." The peculiarity of Mr. Myers' doctrine of the "subliminal consciousness"—as it is misleadingly called, for how can we speak of unconscious consciousness?
—to which Dr. Sanday attaches himself, is that this "subliminal consciousness" is supposed to be not merely the larger but the nobler part of the self. "The wonderful thing is," writes Dr. Sanday (p. 145), "that while the unconscious and subconscious processes are (generally speaking) similar in kind to the conscious, they surpass them in degree. They are subtler, intenser, further-reaching, more penetrating. It is something more than a metaphor when we describe the suband unconscious states as more
'profound.' It is in these states, or through them, that miracles are wrought …" Our subconscious states and operations are not subnormal, or even normal, but supernormal. Nay, they are even divine; for beneath our subliminal selves lies the ocean of the Infinite, and, as we are open at the bottom, the tides of the Infinite wash in. If we pass down deep enough into
our subliminal being, then, we shall find God; or, if the tides of the Infinite wash in high enough, they will emerge in our consciousness. Dr. Sanday pictures our human consciousness "as a kind of 'narrow neck' through which everything which comes up from the deeps of human nature has to pass" (p. 176). This "narrow-necked vessel," he tells us, has an opening at the bottom. "Through it there are incomings and outgoings, which stretch away into infinity and in fact proceed from, and are, God Himself" (p. 178, italics ours). "That," he adds most naturally, "is the ultimate and most important point … Whatever there may be of divine in man, it is in these deep dim regions that it has its abiding-place and home." Accordingly he refuses to follow Sir Oliver Lodge when that scholar speaks of this "larger and dominant entity" and greater self which is "still behind the veil," as "not anything divine but greater than humanity." "I should not like to put upon it this limitation," says Dr. Sanday (p. 193). Dr. Sanday apparently supposes that the conception of human nature thus enunciated will homologate with the Biblical doctrines of divine influence, of the indwelling Spirit, of the framing of Christ in us. It will not. Its affiliations are rather with pantheizing Mysticism, if we ought not to say outright, with Pantheism—that is if, as we suppose, the distinction of Pantheism from Mysticism lies in its postulating as an ontological fact what Mysticism proposes as an attainment of effort.
On the basis of this mystical view of humanity, Dr. Sanday suggests that we may frame our conception of the Person of Christ. With Him, too, as with us, whatever there is of divine must be looked for in the subliminal regions. As "the proper seat or locus of all divine indwelling, or divine action upon the human soul, is the subliminal consciousness," so "the same, or the corresponding, subliminal consciousness is the proper seat or locus of the Deity of the Incarnate Christ" (p. 159). It is safe to transfer the analogy of our human selves to Him so far at least as to understand that
whatever there was of divine in Him it was in "these deep dim regions" that it had "its abiding-place and home" (p. 178) and in coming up into consciousness "must needs pass through a strictly human medium" (p.
165). "We have seen," writes Dr. Sanday (pp. 165 f.), "what difficulties are involved in the attempt to draw as it were a vertical line between the human nature and the divine nature of Christ, and to say that certain actions of His fall on one side of this line and certain other actions on the other. But these difficulties disappear if, instead of drawing a vertical line, we draw rather a horizontal line 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. That which was divine in Christ was not nakedly exposed to the public gaze; neither was it so entirely withdrawn from outward view as to be wholly sunk and submerged in the darkness of the unconscious; but there was a sort of Jacob's ladder by which the divine sources stored up below found an outlet, as it were, to the upper air and the common theatre in which the life of mankind is enacted." The precise meaning of this is perhaps not altogether clear. What it seems to say is that the difference between our Lord and us lies fundamentally here—that the Infinite washes into His subliminal self more constantly and more freely than into ours; and so, though His life, "so far as it was visible, was a strictly human life," yet "this human life was, in its deepest roots, directly continuous with the life of God Himself" (pp. 167 f.). "If St. Paul could quote and endorse the words of a pagan poet claiming for the children of men that they are also God's offspring," Dr. Sanday goes on to expound; "and if they are this notwithstanding that they are confined in the body as creatures of perishable clay; if in spite of these limitations it may still be said of them that in God they 'live and move and have their being,' might not the same be said in a yet more searching and essential
sense of Him who was Son in a more transcendent and ineffable mode of being than they?" Dr. Sanday assures us that there is ample room left here for the Homoousion, "whatever the Homoousion means." We suppose he means that we may understand, if we will, that the whole of that "selfdetermination of the Godhead" which we call "the Son" may have invaded the subliminal recesses of the being of Jesus, as the Infinite washes in varying measures into all of us. But even so, does the man Christ Jesus differ from us, into the subliminal being of all of whom the Infinite washes in varying measures, otherwise than in degree? And how does this conception of Jesus separate itself essentially from that, say, of Ernest Renan who writes as follows ("Vie de Jésus," ed. 3, 1863, p. 75)? "The men who have most highly understood God … have felt the divine in themselves. In the first rank of this great family of true sons of God, Jesus must be placed. Jesus had no visions; God does not speak to Him from without; God is in Him;
He feels Himself with God, and He draws out of His own heart what He says of His Father. He lives in the bosom of God and enjoys constant intercourse with Him; He does not see Him but He hears Him … He believes Himself in immediate relation with God, He believes Himself
God's Son. The highest consciousness of God which has ever existed among men, was that of Jesus." Surely this is as eloquently said as that: does it not also present as lofty a conception of Jesus' relation to the Divine
Being?
We are not endeavoring to convey the impression that Dr. Sanday's attitude towards our Lord's Person is the same as Renan's. He tells us expressly that it is not. It would be monstrous to doubt Dr. Sanday's complete loyalty of heart to the true deity of Christ, which he constantly asserts in the face of all gainsayers. But it is quite another question whether the mode of conceiving the Person of our Lord which he tentatively puts forward for our consideration conserves the true deity of Christ. We cannot
think it does. Dr. Sanday very properly discriminates contemporary Christian thought into two main types which he calls "full Christianity" and "reduced Christianity," each of which has a Christology of its own.
The Christology which he has worked out here in outline only, distinctly belongs to the type which he calls "reduced Christianity." How could it help doing so when it is insisted that the humanity of our Lord must be taken in such real earnest that His life "so far as it was visible" must be conceived as "a strictly human life" and His consciousness (Dr. Sanday says
His "human consciousness" but in the circumstances the adjective seems decidedly otiose) as "entirely human," and yet the application to Him of the Chalcedonian conception of the Two Natures is firmly declined? No adherent of the doctrine of the Two Natures will fall a whit behind Dr.
Sanday in the seriousness with which he takes the humanity of our Lord: the true and perfect humanity of the Lord is as real and as precious a part of the doctrine of the Two Natures as is His true and perfect deity. To the adherent of the doctrine of Two Natures as truly as to Dr. Sanday "the human consciousness of the Lord" is "entirely human." But to him "the human consciousness of the Lord" is not the entirety of His consciousness, and he will not say that "whatever there was of divine in Him, on its way to outward expression whether in speech or act" (why not say "in thought" too?) "passed through, and could not but pass through, the restricting and restraining medium of human consciousness" (p. 167). For the adherent of the doctrine of the Two Natures is determined to take the deity of the Lord in real earnest also; and this is not taking the deity of the Lord in real earnest but is subjecting it to the yoke of the humanity. When Dr. Sanday says, therefore, "If whatever we have of divine must needs pass through a strictly human medium, the same law would hold good even for Him" (p.
165), the adherent of the doctrine of the Two Natures draws back. This could be only if our Lord were not only human as we are, but divine also
only as we are. We may indeed say this of His human nature, in which the Spirit dwells as He dwells in us, only without measure while He dwells in each of us according to his measure. But we must not leave Christ's divine nature (which we have not) wholly out of account! He is not merely the most perfectly God-indwelt man who ever was—though He is that. He is
God as well. And He is God first and man only second. Why should He who is God and the Living God, infinitely full of the incomparable activities which we call divine, on assuming a human nature into personal union with Himself forthwith become incapable of life-expression save through "the restricting and restraining medium of human consciousness"?
If we begin with the categories of purely human activities and proceed by confining the activities of our Lord to these, whatever else we include or exclude in our conception of Christ, we exclude the idea of God manifest in the flesh. The adherent of the Two Natures has this advantage over all such constructions of the Person of Christ as this which Dr. Sanday proposes— that in doing justice to the humanity of Christ (and none can surpass him in the earnestness with which he takes the humanity of Christ), he does justice also to His deity.
The doctrine of the Two Natures, it must be confessed, is not very much in favor in the circles of modern scientific theology. Dr. Sanday, though himself turning away from it, finds himself impelled by his mere sense of justice to say a good word for it as not, after all, so black as it is painted. There are many causes which concur to produce this widespread indifference or rejection of it. Among them there should not be permitted to fall out of sight this very potent one—the change in men's attitude to the Bible. For the doctrine of the Two Natures is a synthesis of the entire body of Biblical data on the Person of Christ, and a synthesis which has been worked out in the crucible of life, not in that of mere intellectual inquiry.
Work so done is done for all time. The principle of the Chalcedonian
formulation does full justice to the entire body of the Biblical data: but men are no longer seeking to do full justice to the entire body of the Biblical data. The Bible has fallen to pieces in their hands, and they are impatient of an effort to synthetize all its points of view, as an artificial attempt to induce a fictitious unity in a variegated array of unrelated notions. What each successive investigator is endeavoring to accomplish is to penetrate behind the superincumbent mass of Biblical ideas to discover, if he may, not the common truth which binds them all together and finds trustworthy if partial expression in each, but the lost truth which has been covered up and hidden under them all and can be recovered only by tearing them away and laying bare the forgotten reality beneath. The Bible having been lost, the Christ of the Bible has naturally been lost also; and each thinker is left very much to his own imagination to picture how it were fitting that God should become man. Meanwhile it is certain that we know absolutely nothing of the facts of Christ's life or its manifestations except what the New Testament writers tell us, and on many grounds their account of it and of its rationale is far more apt to be true to the reality than any we can invent for ourselves to-day. If we are searching for the real Jesus we shall find Him nowhere else than in the New Testament writings, and we can have few better proofs that we have found Him than is furnished by this fact—that all the representations of the New Testament writings are capable of so simple and so complete a synthesis as is provided in the doctrine of the Two Natures. In it all the Biblical data are brought together in a harmonious unity in which each finds recognition and from which each receives its complete exposition. The key which unlocks so complicated a lock can scarcely fail to be the true key: and when the key is once in our hands we may turn the argument around and from the details of the key authenticate the wards of the lock into which it fits. That all the data of the New Testament synthetize in the doctrine of the Two Natures
authenticates these data as component elements of the Great Reality, because it were inconceivable that so large a body of varying and sometimes apparently opposite data could synthetize in so simple a unifying conception were they not each a fragment of a real whole.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, ix. 1911, pp. 166–174.