32. Mackintosh. The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ
International Theological Library. By H. R. Mackintosh, D.Phil., D.D. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons. 1912. 1 rof. Mackintosh tells us in his Preface that he has designed his book
P "chiefly as a student's manual," and (that it may serve that end) that he has wished to make it "cover with a fair measure of completeness, the whole field of Christology." This seems to promise us a plain, objective, comprehensive treatise. But we are afraid these qualities are scarcely those which most strikingly characterize it. The language in which it is written is overloaded, burdened with superfluous qualificatives, and, though often brilliant, often also not very exact. The presentation is individualistic to its finger-tips. And comprehensiveness of treatment is sought chiefly by prefixing to the constructive discussion—the author calls it, significantly,
"the reconstructive statement"—an equally long survey of the "history of Christological doctrine." Under this heading we class together the first two
Books, which are entitled respectively "Christology in the New Testament" and "History of Christological Doctrine," because, though formally distinguished, their subject-matters are dealt with much after the same fashion. They together occupy two hundred and eighty-four pages, leaving for the "reconstructive statement" the remaining two hundred and fifty pages.
Perhaps we ought to give some illustration of the looseness of the language of which we have complained. We begin with the simplest forms.
On p. 43 our attention is directed to 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."
It is then very correctly remarked that no such division of opinion is traceable in the New Testament, but it is surprisingly added (italics his):
"Both estimates were held by all Christians." What is intended is clear enough and very true: but what is actually said is, strictly taken, nonsense— for no one could possibly have combined the beliefs that Jesus was both
"but a prophet" and that He was God. The fatally pleonastic "but" wrecks the precision of the statement. Similarly we read on p. 108 of "St. John's usage of the title 'Son of Man,' " whereas the fact of course is that John never uses that title, but only quotes Christ as using it; on p. 118, in an exposition of the Prologue to John, that it declares of the Logos that "He was from the beginning," when what it really declares of course is that in the beginning He already was, which is something very different; on p. 125, that the apostolic habit of praying to Christ may be regarded "as the practical 'deifying' of Jesus," whereas the truth is that Jesus was not held to be God because He was prayed to but was prayed to because He was held to be God; on p. 129, that it was possible for the first Christians "to accentuate either Christ's Divine unity with, or His personal distinction from, the
Father," where the adjective "Divine" is quite without meaning; on p. 228, that according to Thomas Aquinas the two natures of our Lord "are not so much united, as brought into a common relation to the Logos," which after some reflection may no doubt be made to yield its meaning, but is a very awkward way of expressing it; on p. 266, that according to Thomasius the Logos by His exinanition "became capable of forming the centre of a single personal Life," as if He had not formed the center of a single personal life from all eternity; on p. 318, that the "influence" of Jesus has in every age
"continued to reconcile men with God," an expression which we would be loath to believe fairly embodied Prof. Mackintosh's conception of the work of Christ; on p. 323, that the Greek idea of salvation naturally led to defining our Lord's Person "in terms of substance, not spirit," an instance of an inveterate habit of false antithesis; on p. 386, with respect to the attribution of "an impersonal humanity" to our Lord, that "we are rightly told that the truth against which the phrase is designed to safeguard is this, that the humanity of our Lord had no independent personality," where, however, the disturbing "against" is probably a printer's error 22; on p. 397, with reference to Mark 13:32, that if Jesus "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"—certainly as fine a specimen of non sequitur as could easily be turned up anywhere. We have purposely chosen these instances from statements of no great intrinsic importance: they illustrate better on that account a fault of style.
But the fault illustrated invades the most important statements also, in which overstatement, incomplete antithesis, disturbing adverbial and adjectival qualificatives abound. Take such a sentence as this, for example:
"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" (p. 371). What is a "formal juxtaposition of abstract natures"? Had Prof. Mackintosh said simply
"juxtaposition of natures," his meaning would have been clear, though question might still be raised of the justice of the use of this expression to describe the orthodox doctrine of the Person of Christ. But what a "formal" juxtaposition of natures is, and how "abstract" natures can be juxtaposed, whether formally or any other way, we must profess our inability to imagine. We are equally puzzled to divine what it means to say that the unity of God and man in the Person of the exalted Jesus "results from experiences of reciprocal possession and coalescence." Where
"reciprocal possession and coalescence" are experienced, one would think unity already given—not requiring yet to be constituted. And when we remember that in Prof. Mackintosh's view, as we shall see, there never existed in Jesus Christ—certainly not prior to His exaltation—any two factors (God and man) to experience "reciprocal possession and coalescence," we shall begin to realize how loose and unmeaning the expression is. Take another example. We read (p. 270): "If we hold with conviction that Jesus is one in whom God Himself enters humanity" (this is itself a fatally ambiguous expression) "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." The false disjunction is flagrant. God may enter the human race by assuming into personal union with Himself a human nature without any modification taking place in any of His divine attributes (this in point of fact is precisely what did take place); and yet manifest ordinarily, in His life "in the flesh" only those of His divine qualities which are compatible with the real human life which by virtue of His assumed human nature He willed to live.
Perhaps, however, a longer passage will give us a better insight into Prof. Mackintosh's methods of sentence building. We will take one from
pp. 455–456. "It is, of course, true," we read, "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." Here there is a quite clear declaration that Christ in common with the creatures was the object of the divine foreknowledge (and therefore has not existed eternally), and with it an intimation that He differs from the creatures in being something more than the object of the divine foreknowledge. The statement, therefore, at once follows that this something more is that He—and by immediate inference, not they—is the object also of the divine will. But in accordance with Prof.
Mackintosh's usual manner, he cannot make this statement simply.
Qualifying clauses are introduced, and qualifying clauses of such a character as confuse the antithesis and indeed go far towards abolishing it.
What we actually read is: "The filial connection is so close that we must also think Christ as eternally related, and related as an eternal fact, to the will of God—as the timeless object of His producing and sustaining love." What the disturbing intercalated phrase "and related as an eternal fact" means and what its function in the antithesis is, are not immediately clear. Any fact, eternally contemplated as such in the thought of God and eternally decreed as such in the will of God, might be appropriately designated, perhaps, on that account "an eternal fact," that is, a fact which has from all eternity been certain to occur. But this does not seem to exhaust the meaning of the phrase as here used. It seems to be intended to designate Christ, as distinguished from the creatures, a fact which has existed eternally not merely in the thought of God, nor merely in the will of God, but also in actuality. But thus the antithesis is confused. The main declaration of the sentence is that Christ differs from the creatures in being the object not merely of the eternal divine thought but also of the eternal divine will. The
assertion that He differs from them further in, unlike them, existing eternally in actuality is inserted in the midst of this declaration without preparation for it and in such a manner as to confuse the consecution of thought. Things are not bettered by the addition of the explanatory clause
—"as the timeless objects of His producing and sustaining love"—although the qualification "timeless" here attached to "object" confirms the explanation of the phrase "an eternal fact" as a declaration of the eternal actual existence of Christ. For the eternal Christ which was formerly said to be the eternal object of the divine thought, and has just been said to be the eternal object also of the divine will, and that so as to exist coeternally with this will, is now said, not merely to be also the "timeless object" of the divine love, but also to owe His existence and His persistence in being alike to that love. What would appear to be meant is that the love of God eternally produces and sustains in being as its timeless object Him whom we know as Christ in accordance with the eternal will and, behind that, the eternal thought of God. So far have we traveled from the simple antithesis which differentiates the temporal Christ from the creature as the object not merely of the thought but also of the will of God; and we begin to suspect that that fundamental antithesis was never intended to be drawn at all, and that Prof. Mackintosh did not have it in his mind to deny that creatures are eternally the object of the divine will as well as of the divine thought (which nevertheless his words do emphatically deny), but only wished to deny to them the eternal actual existence which he affirms for Christ. Be that as it may, having now ascribed Christ to the love of God as His producing and sustaining cause, Prof. Mackintosh passes at once away from this idea again and reverts to the mere "thought and will of God." He proceeds: "The thought and will of God cannot be conceived save as imparting reality to Christ." This can scarcely mean that God cannot be conceived as a thinking and willing being save as bringing into being the man Christ, as a
phenomenon in time and space. It appears to be Prof. Mackintosh's mode of stating the old argument that a duality in the Godhead is given in the very idea of a self-conscious and loving God, an argument to which, we may remark in passing, he does not seem elsewhere to accord quite conclusive force. If so, we perceive how completely he has passed in the course of a few sentences from the phenomenal Christ with which the paragraph began to the noumenal Christ. The concluding sentence carries on this new line of thought. "Or, to put it otherwise," we read, "the Father revealed in the Son cannot be thought as fully real in abstraction from the Son in whom alone we apprehend Him." The change of terms here from "Christ" to "Son" is no doubt the sign that now the phenomenal Christ has been definitely left in the background, although to Prof. Mackintosh,
"Son" is not always elsewhere—at least primarily—the designation of the preincarnate person. We appear to have arrived nevertheless at the thesis that God, if He is to "be thought as fully real," must be thought of as dual
—Father and Son. We apprehend Him only in the Son in whom He is revealed; and in abstraction from the Son we cannot think of Him as real.
Even here, however, we are haunted with a doubt whether a new idea is not intended to be subtly suggested—the Ritschlian principle that we know
God only through Christ. On the whole, nevertheless, we seem by searching to have found out the author's thought. But we have had to search for it.
The intelligent reading of a book written after this fashion is not an easy task. We are not always sure it is a rewarding one. Logical consecution not having always presided over its composition, it does not easily yield its meaning to logical analysis. We are tempted again and again to take it "in the vague" and to depend for the ascertainment of its meaning on the general impression it leaves on the mind—much, for example, as we take the illusive writings of, say, Maeterlinck. The thought seems to be so
congested in Prof. Mackintosh's pregnant sentences that it refuses to flow out liquidly to the reader.
And even when we reach the thought our difficulties are not all over.
Prof. Mackintosh says many good things well and strongly. We have noted numerous passages where truths of importance, often truths disputed in circles with which Prof. Mackintosh manifests a certain sympathy, are stated with clearness and force. And the drift of the whole discussion is on the side of the angels. But the points of view from which Prof. Mackintosh approaches his task and the presuppositions with which he endeavors to accomplish it, gravely compromise his results, or rather, if we are to speak quite frankly, render it from the first impossible that he should succeed in reaching a satisfying solution of the problems which it offers. Even when he is endeavoring to state facts which are generally allowed, it is impossible for him, with his presuppositions, to state them so as to be generally acceptable. This is perhaps sufficiently illustrated by the very first affirmation he makes. The authors of the New Testament, he tells us (p. 2),
"are eventually" (not a very well chosen adverb here, one would think) "one in their view of Christ." "Two certainties are shared in common by all New
Testament writers: First, that the life and consciousness of Jesus was in form completely 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." This is Prof. Mackintosh's substitute for saying that throughout the New Testament our Lord is looked upon and presented as both God and man. It is a very poor substitute: it fails indeed to make it clear that the New Testament recognizes Him as either God or man, and in its positive statements it stands in no relation whatever to New Testament teaching. Nothing could be more untrue than to say that "the life and consciousness of Jesus" are represented in the New Testament as "in form
completely human." It would be nearer the truth to say that the whole New Testament is written to show that neither the life nor the consciousness of Jesus was even in form completely human. John expressly tells us this of himself: and, as Prof. Mackintosh recognizes (p. 5, note), even Mark draws Jesus "as He appeared to contemporaries, living out the truth of Divine Sonship" (italics ours). Not forgetting, Prof. Mackintosh adds, it is true, "the human limitations of this Divine personality," but as he supports this only by a passage (6:5) which, as he subsequently himself explains (p. 14), does not in the least support it, we may be justified in leaving the qualification out of account. How can it be said of one who is reported; as declaring, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was I am" (John 8:58), that His consciousness is represented as "completely human"? Nay, how can Prof. Mackintosh tell us in one breath that the consciousness of Jesus is represented throughout the whole New
Testament as "in form completely human," and almost in the next breath (p. 29) remark on "the unconditioned character of His self-consciousness" as depicted even in the Synoptic Gospels as a rock on which low views of His Person even in the days of His flesh inevitably make shipwreck? Is an "unconditioned self-consciousness" "in form completely human"? We cannot withhold the expression of our sympathy for Prof. Mackintosh in the difficulties he experiences in attempting to impose his a priori schematization of the Person of our Lord on a New Testament text obviously so impatient of it. Neither is it the New Testament view that the "historic life" of Jesus Christ, that is to say, we suppose, the life He lived in what the Epistle to the Hebrews calls the days of His flesh, "is one with the life of God Himself." They represent it rather as a life in a true sense alien to the life of God, a life altogether unnatural to Christ as God, a life of humiliation, characterized by obedience, whereas it belongs to God to reign
(Phil. 2:7 f.). Nor is the matter helped by the insertion more suo of the
qualifying clause, "apprehended as instinct with the powers of redemption." This is not a New Testament phrase and it represents a point of view which is not a New Testament point of view. Jesus Christ according to His own testimony came into the world on a ministry of mercy and redeems men by giving His life as a ransom for their sins. It is redolent of a totally different conception to say that His life on earth "was instinct with the powers of redemption"; and if His life on earth were apprehended as thus "instinct with the powers of redemption," this would not justify us in pronouncing it on that account "one with the life of God," and in point of fact the majority of those who so apprehend it do not therefore consider it
"one with the life of God." To find "God personally present for our salvation from sin and death" in Christ is not to find Christ God, and those who have made this and like phrases their shibboleths do not in point of fact find Christ God. If this were all that could be said for the New
Testament conception of Jesus on His divine side, then nothing is said which might not be said of any good man in and through whom God works for the salvation of sinful men. That it is not all that must be said
Prof. Mackintosh knows very well, and tells us in detail in his subsequent treatment of the conception of Christ presented in the several portions of the New Testament. It is all the more to be regretted that he permits his a priori schematization of the Person of the Lord to confine his statement here of the common New Testament doctrine to such a doubtful minification. Obviously we shall not find our way a step in Prof.
Mackintosh's book unless we keep clearly in mind the presuppositions of his speculative doctrine of the Person of Christ. Those presuppositions color all his thought and all his expressions, and make the book merely a historico-speculative presentation and defense of his particular "reconstruction."
We shall confine ourselves in what follows to some remarks on three of the fundamental presuppositions which Prof. Mackintosh brings with him to his attempt to expound the doctrine of the Person of Christ, and which condition or rather determine his entire conception of that doctrine. These concern his ontology of spiritual being—if "ontology" is the right word to use in connection with his conception of the nature of spirit; his point of view with reference to the Christian doctrine of the Two Natures of our
Lord; and his opinions with reference to Kenosis.
Prof. Mackintosh gives his adherence to a very explicit, and we may add somewhat extreme, voluntarism in his conception of the nature of spirit
(cf. pp. 113–114, 166, 188, 221, 304, 334, 416, 421, 422, 424, 500). "There is in the universe," he declares (p. 114), "nothing more real than will, the living energy of spirit; nothing more concrete and actual, whether it be in God or man." Again, "To the modern mind will is the very core and essence of personality" (p. 188). And more explicitly still, "The ultimate and central reality of things is Will" (p. 417). Prof. Mackintosh does not mean by these declarations merely to assert the primacy of the will among the constitutive attributes of personality. He means to replace the conception of "substance" by the conception of "will" in representing to himself the being of spirit. When he comes to form a conception of the Person of Christ, therefore, he has no divine "nature" and no human (spiritual)
"nature" by the union of which in one person he can think of it as constituted. He has nothing on which to fix his thought but the Divine
Will and a human will. He has no other formula for a divine-human Christ, then, except the affirmation of the identity of Christ in will with God.
"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" (p. 422). "Let men perceive that in Christ there stands before them One who in spiritual
being—that is, in will and character—is identical" (italics his) "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" (p. 424). Does the deity of Christ consist then merely in the identity of His will with God's? Prof. Mackintosh would deprecate the qualification "merely": identity of will with God is identity with God, for God is just Will. "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 thread of cosmic relations passes and constituting the inmost essence of the Divine life, then indeed the oneness of Christ with God"—on the hypothesis that it is a oneness of will
—"is after all only relative" (pp. 113 f.). But if will is not "something less and lower than ultimate reality" (p. 113)—then, "if we are inspired by Christian faith to affirm that Jesus Christ is identical with God in will—a Will manifested in His achievement—we have reached a point beyond which no advance is possible; for in ethical terms, the highest terms available, we have affirmed His ontological unity with God in a sense generically different from that which is predicable of man as man" (p. 304).
We may "speak," indeed, "loosely of making our wills one with God's" (p.
417), and we certainly do not mean that thereby we become really one with God. But this is not all we mean when we speak of Christ's will being one with God's: we do not mean this "partially, or intermittently, or by way of metaphor; it is one identically" (p. 417); we mean that "the self-conscious active principle of the Son's life" (we interrupt the quotation to ask if this change in terminology is not significant) "subsisted in perfect and identical union with the Father" (p. 417). There can be no doubt, then, that Prof.
Mackintosh wishes, under his new point of view, to teach the real deity of Christ, as identity in Will with God. "In every conceivable sense in which this is a true estimate of His Person, it also is a metaphysical estimate," he
remarks (p. 304), in defense of himself against the reproach that he is teaching a merely (he would object again to the term "merely") ethical view of Christ's deity. It is another question, however, whether the constructon he offers us really gives us a divine Christ. He himself is constrained to add, immediately after the last quotation we have made from p. 417: "This of course does not carry us once more beyond the moral relations of love and trust; that were to deethicise 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 constituted) Christ is one with God." This is a blind saying. If we do not get beyond the moral relations of love and trust in asserting Christ to be one with God, it seems an abuse of language to speak of this union as "essential." And in any case to speak of Christ's unity with God as a unity not in "substance" (we pass the gratuitous characterization of this "substance" as "some ineffable substance" as only another instance of Prof. Mackintosh's mannerism) but only in "Will," has its dangers. We do not affirm that a doctrine of real incarnation is impossible if spiritual being be defined as just will; but undoubtedly this ontology presents grave difficulties to thought in construing the idea of incarnation, and Prof. Mackintosh does not appear to us to have overcome these difficulties. With all his manifestly good intentions he may prove to have given us a Christ who is rather ethically like
God than a Christ who is God.
That Prof. Mackintosh has not succeeded in speaking always in the terms of his ontology is not surprising. To conceive will without a subject of which it is the will is not easy: to speak of it otherwise than as someone's will is impossible. This difficulty is not to be covered up by contrasting the rival ontologies as "metaphysical" and "ethical" or even as "quantitative"
and "qualitative" conceptions of God. When we are asked to think of God rather as "Purpose" than as "Infinite Thing or Quantity" (p. 500), or "to put aside the category 'substance' and construe the facts freshly in terms of personality" (p. 334), or to "place the reality of God" rather in His "will and character" than in an "inscrutable and unethical substance" (p. 421), or not to assume "that substance as a category is higher and more adequate than Subject" (p. 416), it is a poor reader who does not fully understand that there is only an attempt being made to "rush" his judgment by calling names. The question is not whether God is to be conceived as a Thing or a Person, Substance or Subject, but whether He is to be conceived as Person or mere Attribute, as Subject or mere Activity. When Prof. Mackintosh equates "Subject" with "intelligent conscious Will," and this in turn with "personality, or self-consciousness," he is only hastily gathering fig-leaves to conceal the nakedness of the idea of bare Will, which he affirms that God is.
How can there be Will save as the will of some Subject, self-consciousness without a self to be conscious of itself; and what is an "intelligent conscious
Will" except a short way of saying an intelligent, conscious, voluntary Agent? No doubt Person is the highest of all categories, and Purpose is the constitutive quality of Person; but we confound all thought if we wish to make this Purpose the Person rather than the Person's. To evaporate God into His activities or functions is simply to abolish God and can end in nothing but Ritschlian phenomenalism. Some of Prof. Mackintosh's historical judgments may illustrate further the difficulties into which his voluntarist ontology may bring him. Expounding Origen's Christology he mentions that father's ascription to the Son of homoousia with the Father and then adds (p. 166): "It is quite in harmony with this homoousia 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." 33
Again, speaking of Athanasius (p. 188), he remarks: "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." A point of view which obliterates the distinction between Arian and Athanasian is certainly a powerful solvent. It is perilous to attempt to construct the doctrine of the Trinity held by any thinker from fragmentary remarks. But it is difficult to understand what sort of a doctrine of the Trinity can be built up on Prof. Mackintosh's postulates, and we have read his final chapter, which is entitled "Christ and the Divine Triunity," without receiving full enlightenment. The one thing he seems to be sure of (cf. also pp. 452–454) is that the eternal distinctions in the Godhead are not, in any very intelligible sense at least, distinct persons.
If the distinct Persons of the doctrine of the Trinity present a difficulty to Prof. Mackintosh's thought which he seems scarcely to know what to do with, the Two Natures of the doctrine of the Person of Christ present to it an impossibility which he knows very well what to do with, and against which he therefore turns his direct polemic (cf. pp. 14, 29, 46, 73, 85, 127,
155–157, 164, 214, 228, 236–237, 293–299, 371). To one who, as Prof.
Mackintosh does, acknowledges Christ to be truly God, there would seem no escape from recognizing two natures in the constitution of His person
—that is, of course, unless the extremest docetism is embraced and His bodily nature is treated as an illusion. Prof. Mackintosh enunciates, it is true, with apparent approval the proposition, "All that is Divine in Christ is human, and all that is human, Divine" (p. 214); but he will scarcely extend this to our Lord's body. We must suppose his vigorous denial of two natures to Christ to refer therefore only to the spiritual side of His person.
Even here, no doubt, he admits that at least an appearance of duality has always been recognized and must be recognized. "He was always viewed as both things—heavenly Divine Spirit, and true man who had suffered and died," he tells us (p. 127). He even writes (p. 85): "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." But he insists that this duality concerns merely "two aspects" (italics his) "of a single concrete life" (p. 295); and he fulminates loudly against and cheerfully caricatures what he calls the false "hypostatization" (it is not precisely the term we should have expected) of these aspects into "distinctly functioning substantialities which may be logically estimated or adjusted to each other, or combined in unspiritual modes" (p. 295). Thus, he insists, "an incredible dualism" is introduced into our conception of the Person of Christ, which substitutes for "that perfect unity which is felt in every impression of Him" (p. 294) a "formal juxtaposition of abstract natures" (p. 371) that "leaves a profoundly disappointing impression of unethical mystery and even, in a sense, duplicity" (p. 294): "no longer one," our Lord is thus "divided against Himself." Moreover, he insists, an impossible impersonal "human nature" is thus assumed to lie back of the personality "enjoying some kind of real being apart from the unifying or focal Ego" (p. 295). This is of course mere caricature. The doctrine of the Two Natures does not suppose that there ever existed or ever could exist an impersonal human nature, and never dreamed of attributing any kind of reality to any human nature apart from "the unifying Ego." To say that the denial that the human nature assumed into personal union with Himself by the Logos possessed an independent personality, reduces it "in itself" "to unconscious and impersonal elements"
(p. 207, cf. pp. 386–387) is only to play with words. No one ever imagined a "human nature" which was or could be "unconscious and impersonal."
The conjunction of a human nature with a divine nature in one conscious and personal subject no doubt presents an insoluble problem to thought.
But this is just the mystery of incarnation, without which there is no incarnation; for when we say incarnation we say Two Natures—or can there really be an incarnation without a somewhat which becomes incarnate and a somewhat in which it becomes incarnate? And it is really indisputable (despite Prof. Mackintosh's caveats) that the Two Natures are everywhere presupposed in the New Testament, which simply cannot be interpreted in its allusions to our Lord without their aid, and in which there are passages like Phil. 2:6, where they are frankly mentioned. The successful explanation of how Christ could be both "of the Israelites as concerning the flesh," and "God over all" (Rom. 9:5), and yet not of two natures, is a task we do not envy any man who undertakes it. It does not help to this explanation, of course, to declare Christ's humanity only modified deity—the preëxistent Son of God transformed into a man—so that the "Two Natures" are after all but one nature, for that finds the source of His humanity in the bosom of God, whereas Paul finds it in the Israelitish race, or more specifically in the seed of David (Rom. 1:3). We might no doubt take a roundabout way and explain that the Son of God became incarnate only through the mediation of the whole line of our
Lord's Israelitish ancestors. It would be hard in that case to be sure to vindicate for Jesus Christ a more express deity than belonged in common with Him to each of the long line through which Luke, let us say, traces
Him back to end at last in the words, "which was the Son of God." But if that difficulty were only got over we might explain the rest by serving ourselves with a rather odd formula of which Prof. Mackintosh seems fond
(e.g. p. 365, cf. p. 469) and say that thus the incarnation was with Him "immediate, though by no means unmediated." On the whole, however, we think it easier, and in every way more satisfactory, just to follow the New
Testament teaching and accept the doctrine of the Two Natures.
Prof. Mackintosh prefers, however, to explain our Lord's humanity as modified deity, and thus comes forward as a belated champion of the Kenotic theories (for references, see Index, sub voc. "Kenosis"). He finds what he calls "the profoundest motive operating in the Kenotic theories"— it certainly is the nerve of their appeal to the devout mind—in what he speaks of as "the wondrous nature and subduing magnitude of the Divine sacrifice" (p. 265): "they wished to throw into strong relief the exceeding greatness of the step downwards taken by the Son of God when for our sakes, though rich, He became poor." In this, however, they possess no advantage over the common doctrine. And in the very act of emphasizing this motive Prof. Mackintosh himself seems to allow that the fundamental motive of the Kenotic theories was rather "to signalise the reality and integrity of our Lord's manhood," and elsewhere he more justly explains that "it was precisely the wish to read the divinity of Christ through His true humanity which inspired the Kenotic theories of His person" (p. 421).
In point of fact the Kenotic theories owe their origin to a determination to see in Jesus Christ "in the days of His flesh," phenomenally at least, nothing more than a human being; and it is therefore that Albrecht Ritschl described them as merely verschämter Socinianismus. It is from this point of view that Prof. Mackintosh takes his start, insisting that Jesus was not merely purely man but a man of His time whose life on earth (we emphasize the telling words) was "a distinctively human phenomenon, moving always within the lines of an authentically human mind and will"
(p. 400) and indeed, as Dr. Sanday expresses it, "presenting all the outward appearance of the life of any other contemporary Galilean" (p. 398). So obvious does Prof. Mackintosh consider this that he even affirms that "were it conceivable that we were forced to choose … between the conviction that Jesus preserved 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 renounce His deity" (p. 395). Certainly on this ground the Kenotic argument is conclusive, if Jesus is nevertheless held to be God and the doctrine of the Two Natures is discarded. If Jesus is God and nothing but God, and yet on earth was man and nothing but man, why then, of course, it must be that God has been metamorphosed into man; it is a truism that "no human life of God is possible without a prior selfadjustment of deity" (p. 470). This is the whole of the argument which is presented with much elaboration (cf. especially pp. 469–470). The difficulties with it are naturally, that Jesus is not represented in the New
Testament—the sole source of our knowledge of His person—as in His essential being God and nothing but God; nor is His life on earth there presented as, in Prof. Mackintosh's sense, "unequivocally human" (p. 469); and the conception of a metamorphosis of God into a man which is assumed is as Albrecht Ritschl declared it to be ("Justification and Reconciliation," E. T. 1900, pp. 409–411) "pure mythology." The particular manner in which this metamorphosis was accomplished in Prof.
Mackintosh's opinion was not as supposed by Thomasius, by the abandonment by the Son of some of His attributes, explained for the purpose to be merely "relative" (such as His omnipotence, His omniscience, His omnipresence), while others, designated "immanent" or "essential" (such as His holiness and His love) were retained; but by the "transposition" or "modification" (both terms are used) of all His attributes (p. 477). The Son, it is explained, continues, as incarnate, to possess "all the qualities of Godhead" (the italics are Prof. Mackintosh's), only now "in the form of concentrated potency rather than of full actuality, δυνάμει rather than ἐνεργείᾳ." No explanation is suggested of how, when
God thus ceases to be God, He yet remains God—for does not the very idea of God involve not only the conception of immutability, against the emphasis of which Prof. Mackintosh vainly inveighs as if it were rather
immobility, but also the conception embodied in the Scholastic phrase of "actus purus"? One who is only potentially God is certainly not acually
God, as indeed Prof. Mackintosh naively confesses when he writes the sentence, "What Christ is by potency, with a potentiality based on His personal uniqueness, God is actually for ever" (p. 479). God to be God must be all He can be actually, and He must be all this "actually for ever."
When He ceases to be actually what God is, He ceases of course to be God.
How far Prof. Mackintosh is prepared to press his idea of the reduction of God in Christ is revealed to us startlingly by a phrase let fall on p. 470: "We are faced by a Divine self-reduction which entailed obedience, temptation, and death"; and that this is not a chance inadvertence we may learn from its virtual repetition ten pages later: "Prayer and death are the seals of His oneness with us" (p. 480). It must be carefully observed that what is said here is not that the Divine Subject, by assuming into personal union with Himself a human nature, became a sharer in the obedience, temptation, and death, which belong to humanity; but that God Himself, not by a "fictitious" communicatio idiomatum but in His own Being, obeyed, was tempted, died. God Himself not merely acquired knowledge slowly and by effort, felt temptation and learned obedience by that which He suffered, but endured the last indignity of death! One would question whether Prof.
Mackintosh really means what he says, did he not with such persistence insist that the Infinite became just finite in Christ, or as he himself expresses it, "descended into the sphere of finitude" (p. 481). "Only one limit to God's presence in Him remained," he tells us (pp. 414 f.)—"the limit of finitude"; so clear is he that Jesus Christ is just a finite being. And yet He is just God! We must confess that Prof. Mackintosh permits to himself language in all such matters which dazes us. He tells us that "it belongs to deity, not indeed to be immutable, but to be eternal" (p. 423), and we mark the statement as giving us at least one stable feature of deity by which we
can recognize it when we see it. But we soon read of the "Eternal passing into time," and thereby losing knowledge in the eternal form and requiring to retain it, if He retains it at all, as "discursive and progressive" (p. 477, cf. p. 470); and soon afterwards we meet with the declaration that time and eternity are not essentially disparate. If "God and man are not definable as opposites" so also "time is susceptible of eternity" (p. 503)—a declaration the meaning of which we confess is dark to us.
The oddest thing about Prof. Mackintosh's Kenoticism, however, is that he seems to think he has a Biblical basis for it. He does not depend, indeed, "on two or three isolated passages in St. Paul" (p. 469), and it is well he does not, as not even two or three passages suggesting or even allowing it can be discovered. He seems to think that Jesus is dramatized in the Gospel narratives as living an exclusively human life, "moving always" (note the "always" again) "within the lines of an experience humanly normal in constitution, even if abnormal in its sinless quality" (pp. 469 f.). Were this so, it would be very remarkable; for certainly the evangelists did not intend so to depict Him. John assuredly not; and just as assuredly not the Synoptists, as Prof. Mackintosh indeed appears to recognize (p. 5, note 1).
And surely it were remarkable that that long line of acute and diligent scholars who for a century and more have been engaged in "the quest of the historical Jesus" have not up to to-day found it out. Then were their long quest over. What a poor showing Prof. Schmiedel, for example, makes, with his meager list of nine "pillar-passages," presenting, as he tells us, an unmistakably human Jesus, and presenting this human Jesus, as he tells us again, in definite contradiction to the whole drift of the narrative—if the whole narrative really presents us with nothing but a normally human
Jesus! Will Prof. Mackintosh, by a stroke, stultify the whole long, laborious struggle of the Liberal critics—"from Reimarus to Wrede"—to discover a merely human Jesus beneath the narrative of the Gospels? If there is one
thing that is certain, it is that the Gospels know nothing, in any of their parts, of a normally human Jesus: their whole effort is to place before us in vivid dramatization a distinctively superhuman Jesus.
We are neither insensible nor unappreciative of the elements of value in Prof. Mackintosh's work. We heartily recognize that its fundamental note is adoration of the divine Saviour. But it must be frankly recognized that its theoretical construction of the doctrine of the Person of Christ is quite impossible. It ought by now to be clearly understood that no resting place can be found in a half-way house between Socinianism and orthodoxy. We cannot have a Christ purely divine in essence and purely human in manifestation. And what on this ground can be made of the exalted Christ?
Does He remain after His ascension to heaven the purely human being He was on earth? Or does He, on ascending where He was before, recover the pure deity from which He was reduced that He might enter humanity? In the one case we have no divine Christ, in the other no human Jesus, to-day: and the Christian heart can consent to give up neither. Prof. Mackintosh takes the latter of the alternatives, and greatly magnifies the place of the Resurrection "as a 'crisis' in the constitution of Christ's person" (pp. 370–
371). The exalted Lord in heaven has become as our Saviour indistinguishable from the Father. Is He still man? Prof. Mackintosh wishes us to believe that He is—how, since His humanity belonged to, nay was,
His humiliation, he does not, he cannot explain. "There is now," he says, "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" (p. 371). This is rhetoric. In cold fact, the exalted
Lord, having laid aside the modifications of deity by virtue of which He entered into the sphere of finite life, has necessarily laid aside His humanity
(which was only this modified deity), and that He was once man can be to
Him only a memory. Ritschl pointed out that on the Kenotic postulates "Christ, at least in His earthly existence, has no Godhead at all." It requires to be pointed out now that in the form which Prof. Mackintosh gives these postulates, He has in His exalted state no manhood at all—except always
His body! Of course Prof. Mackintosh does not wish this result. He strives manfully to escape or at least to gloss it. It is unavoidable. And it is because such results as these are unavoidable on his postulates that we think that these postulates are as unacceptable to truly Christian feeling as they are repugnant to right reason and in contradiction to the whole drift of revelation.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, xi. 1913, pp. 141–156.
2. 2 We have not observed many printer's errors: p. 150, line 2, "second" for "third"; p. 216, "Julius of Halicarnassus" for "Julian."
3. 3 The remark is borrowed from Loofs, as a footnote advises us. Loofs ("Leitfaden zum Studium der Dogmengeschichte," ed. 3, 1893, p. 124) writes: "This is not contradicted by the description of the Logos as υἱὸς ἐκ τοῦ θελήματος τοῦ πατρὸς γεννηθείς (citat Justinianus L. XXI, p. 482, note
3), for in the purely spiritual realm ἐκ τοῦ θελήματος and ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας are no contrasts."