27. Sanday. Personality in Christ and in Ourselves
By William Sanday, D.D., LL.D., Litt.D. New York: Oxford University Press, American Branch. 1911. 1 r. Sanday's "Christologies Ancient and Modern," published last
D year, was reviewed in this journal for January, 1911, pp. 166–174.
His purpose in that book was, he tells us, to suggest a "tentative modern Christology." The "modernness" of the Christology he suggested consists in two things. First, it deserts the historical Christology of the Two Natures and proposes to us a Christ who is, phenomenally at least, of only a single nature, and that nature purely human. Secondly, it seeks to explain what is divine in Christ by pointing to the "subliminal self" which underlies the conscious self of every man, and explaining that even in common men this
"subliminal self" is invaded by divine influences—or rather washed into by the divine—and may well be supposed in Christ's case to have been so invaded in a unique measure. Thus, as was pointed out in our review of the book, the divine-human Christ of the New Testament, and of historical
Christianity deriving from the New Testament, was reduced to a purely human Christ, in whom God dwelt, though in a fuller measure, just as He dwells in all men.
In the pamphlet now before us, Dr. Sanday gives us a supplement, or perhaps we may rather say a complement, to the "Christologies Ancient and Modern." As the title of the pamphlet advises us, its interest lies in the philosophical basis which that volume proposed to us rather than in the Christological structure erected on it. The pamphlet consists of two lectures delivered in November, 1910, in which an effort is made to ascertain precisely what personality is in man, with a view to preparing the way for Dr. Sanday's doctrine of the subliminal self as the locus of divine influences; and a "retrospect" in which he passes in review such of the criticisms of the "Christologies Ancient and Modern" as he considers especially worthy of remark, chiefly or wholly, again, with reference to the philosophical side of that work. As will be seen, the Christology suggested in that work passes largely out of sight in this supplementary material. This we think a pity. Partly because we do not find Dr. Sanday's further remarks on the philosophical basis of his new Christology very helpful; and partly because the purpose of the book was, after all, to suggest a new Christology, and the Christology suggested ought to hold, and in our own case, we frankly admit, does hold the place of chief interest.
It must be confessed that the few allusions to Christology which are found in the pamphlet are distinctly discouraging. In reading the book, one could not help hoping that, in the enthusiasm of propounding a new theory of the Person of Christ, Dr. Sanday might have failed to observe all its implications, and especially its reduction of Christ to merely a divinely endowed man. But our startled eyes can scarcely miss taking up from the pamphlet phrases and even paragraphs which, though few, seem only too clearly to intimate that Dr. Sanday's conception of the Incarnation is fatally
inadequate, that the Incarnation is reduced in his thought of it to mere inhabitation, and that, indeed, to all appearance it is confused with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Already at the opening of the first lecture we hear the Incarnation spoken of as "the meeting of Human and Divine" (p. 4), in a context which suggests that its specific character is not fully allowed for. But it is towards the end of the second lecture that the most disturbing phraseology occurs.
It is not merely that inexact language is employed. Such a phrase as "His incarnate nature" (p. 47), for example, as Dr. Sanday uses it, is distinctly untheological. In strict speech it can mean nothing but our Lord's Divine
Nature: which is the one Nature in His Person of which incarnation can be affirmed. But Dr. Sanday does not mean by it His Divine Nature, in distinction from His Human Nature; but apparently uses the phrase to speak of our Lord's total Being as some sort of composite. What clear sense can be attached to the term "incarnate" in the phrase does not appear. If our Lord has but a single nature and that nature is human, to qualify this nature by the epithet "incarnate" seems merely a very loose and misleading way of saying that Christ's human nature is in some way more divine than that of other men. "Incarnate" has sunk to be little more than an honorific epithet, notifying us that in Christ we are dealing with a particularly divinitized man.
A couple of pages further on Dr. Sanday cites Paul's great words:
"Nevertheless I live, yet not I; but Christ liveth in me"; and pronounces them the enunciation of an ideal which "never has been, and never will be, completely realized." Paul, however, is not here proclaiming an ideal but describing an experience; and an experience cannot but be realized. Not only Paul, but every Christian, in point of fact, realizes this experience; and no one is a Christian at all of whom it cannot be affirmed, each no doubt in his own measure; for it is only another way of saying that the Spirit of
Christ dwells in us and takes the guidance of our lives, and "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." But Dr. Sanday comments on it as follows: "If we could conceive of it as realized we should say, not that there were two Gods, but that there were two Incarnations" (p. 49). This comment is not perfectly clear to us; we do not understand what the import of the negative clause is. But it seems certainly to imply this much: that in Dr. Sanday's mind a perfect indwelling would be an incarnation— the ideal of Paul carried to its complete realization is what Dr. Sanday understands by Incarnation. "Incarnation" is, therefore, in its mode an indwelling.
On the immediately preceding page (p. 48) he tells us this explicitly.
There is only one God, he tells us, and only one Divine; and the Holy Spirit who dwells in us is the same Holy Spirit who dwelt in Christ. What is the difference, then, between Christ and us? "The difference," he tells us, "was not in the essence, nor yet in the mode or sphere, of the indwelling, but in the relation of the indwelling to the Person" (italics his). The "Divine influences" working alike in Him and in us "do not hold and possess" our person, "as the Deity within Him held and possessed the Person of the incarnate Christ" (italics again his). Then, does the fact that the Holy Spirit
(Dr. Sanday explicitly mentions the Holy Spirit as the indwelling agent), dwelling alike in us and in Him, "held and possessed" His Person
—"meaning the whole Person—each several organ and faculty—but especially the central core of Personality, the inner, controlling, and commanding Person"—as He does not "hold and possess" ours, constitute our Lord "the incarnate Christ"? "Incarnation," we perceive, is reduced explicitly to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit: Christ is just the man in whom the Holy Spirit dwells without measure. Needless to say, here is a complete evacuation of the meaning of the term "incarnate"; and equally needless to say, here is a complete evacuation of the conception of
incarnation. Christ is merely a man in whom the Holy Spirit dwells in greater measure than He dwells in other men. He is not God and man; He is not even God in man; He is man with God dwelling in Him—as, but more completely, God dwells in all men.
Now, of course, the Scriptures teach that the Holy Spirit does dwell in Jesus Christ, and they teach that the Holy Spirit that dwells in Him is the same Holy Spirit that dwells in us, and that He dwells in Him after the same fashion in which He dwells in us, only beyond measure in Him, while
He dwells in us each according to his measure. But the Scriptures do not confound this indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the human nature of Christ with the Incarnation. This indwelling is, according to the Scriptures, additional to the Incarnation, and fits the human nature which is assumed into personal union with the divine in the Incarnation for its great companionship. The substitution of this indwelling of the Spirit in Jesus
Christ for the Incarnation is just the elimination of the Incarnation altogether: Christ's Divine Nature is cut away from Him and His Spiritindwelt Human Nature is presented to us as the whole Christ. How this differs in essence from Socinianism and Ebionism, it would certainly be interesting to learn.
If we may be permitted conjecturally to penetrate behind what lies on the face of Dr. Sanday's pages and attempt to discover the origin of the error which has led to these conclusions, we should be inclined to find it in a conception of the incarnating act as the entrance of God into a man, or a human nature, so that God, so to speak, clothed Himself in human nature.
Such is not the conception of Scripture. According to Scripture God the Son did not at the incarnation enter into a man, but took a human nature up into personal union with Himself. Accordingly "assumption" is the theological term to describe the act; and it would be truer to speak of the human nature of Christ as existing in God than of God as existing in it.
Jesus Christ is primarily not a man in whom God dwells, but God who has assumed into personal union with Himself a human nature as an organ through which He acts. Even historically, the term Incarnation does not mean the insertion of Deity into flesh, or humanity. Incarnari, incarnatus, incarnation are just the Latin equivalents of σαρκόομαι, σαρκωθείς, σάρκωσις (cf. Irenæus, "Adv. Haer.," I. x. 1, III. xix. 1) and mean just "to be made flesh," "made flesh," "making flesh." The impression which has grown up among us that reads the sense of the insertion into flesh into them, is just a "disease of language," and is perhaps responsible for more bad thinking on the Incarnation than we realize.
This pamphlet has been incorporated into a new edition of the "Christologies Ancient and Modern" (1911).
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, ix. 1911, pp. 686–689.