3. Person and Natures

3. Person and Natures

3. Person and Natures

1. As a result of the meaning of these different names, what can already be established provisionally concerning the person of the Mediator and His natures?

a)   That He is truly God. We found that included:

1.   in His name Jesus;

2.   in the name Lord and the absolute sovereignty expressed by that;

3.   in the name “Son of God,” insofar as that also has an official meaning and is synonymous with Messiah.

b)   That He is truly man. This is implied:

1.   in the official name Christ, since at least equipping for an office can only take place in His human nature;

2.   in the name “Son of Man.”

c)   That in these two natures He is anointed to three offices, as is clear from the name Christ.

d)   That for exercising His work as Mediator, He had to pass through a state of humiliation as well as a state of exaltation, as is to be derived from the names “Servant of the Lord,” “Son of David.”

2. How may one derive the deity of our Lord from the requirements for His work as Mediator?

a)   At every point of his existence, every man (human person) is claimed by the demands of God’s law such that there remains no area where he would have no need of those demands for himself and would be able to be at the disposal of others. God claims him entirely, and if he gives himself entirely to God, then the measure of his own righteousness is only just full and so never overflows it.

Through the covenant of works, guilt was personally imputed to all human persons. Consequently, whoever is born as a merely human person has personally imputed guilt and cannot pay for the guilt of others. It was otherwise for Adam. With the establishment of the covenant of works, there was no personal guilt for those who were included in it, and God was therefore free, through a gracious determination, to let Adam’s deed and situation be determinative for the status of all. This does not at all mean, however, that Adam earned more (quantitatively) than he needed for himself. The latter is the case only with Christ. This can never happen with man, and therefore Rome’s doctrine of opera supererogationis [works of supererogation], with everything connected to it, must be rejected.

b)   When we consider the same issue from a different side, we can formulate it as follows: Not only is no one in a position as mere man to act as a substitute for other men, but neither is anyone sui juris (“by his own right”) in the sense that he can freely give himself as surety. Since, in the final analysis, every man is not his own but God’s possession, he cannot give himself. But it is precisely in this free giving up of self, in this giving away of self, by one who was completely sui juris, and as eternal God possessed Himself perfectly—it is just in this that the value of the suretyship of the Mediator lies. Scripture teaches everywhere that the Father gave the Son, but that same Scripture also teaches that the Son gave Himself. And because this voluntary character is noteworthy throughout the work of the Mediator in its entirety, this characteristic must no less be sought and presupposed in the initial origin of that work. This may be assumed only if the Mediator Himself is the independent God, the eternal source of all right.

c)   Considered apart from the natural relationship of man as man to God, a merely human person cannot be excluded from the covenant of works. This was established with all human persons. If Christ had been a human person, He would have fallen under that covenant. Now one could ask whether, by possessing a (nonpersonal) human nature, He is not already placed beyond the pale of the covenant of works, so that there would be no need of deity—in other words, whether a (nonpersonal) human nature could not in itself be our Mediator. This question must be answered in the negative. God cannot deal in justice with an abstract nature. There must always be a person underlying nature, a suppositum [subject] upon whom justice terminates and from whom it originates. So here, too, we reach this result: The Mediator cannot be a human person (otherwise he would fall under the covenant of works), and at the same time must be a person (otherwise he could not act for us in justice). Therefore, He must be a divine person.

d)   The covenant of grace is so ordered that the Mediator who makes reconciliation is at the same time also the Mediator of the application of the accomplished salvation and that all those who share in the covenant must be placed in a direct relationship to Him. They do not draw near only to God the Father in Christ, or to the triune God in Christ the Mediator, but also to Christ Himself. Their faith, their love must embrace Him; they are subject to Him in body and soul. He is their “Lord” who has absolute sovereignty over them. In everything His word is the final decision, from which no higher appeal is possible. He must make disposition of the Spirit, who Himself is God, must send the Spirit into the hearts of His members, regenerate them with omnipotence, unite them to Himself, sanctify, and glorify them. It is completely impossible that all these predications could be attributed to one who is a mere man. No man can place himself in this way between God and the sinner and presume from the latter the service that is due only to the former. The Arian heresy, even in its most developed form (Socinianism), has therefore always seen itself compelled to have Christ elevated, after His ascension, to the status of deity. It did not wish to ascribe to Him original, preexistent deity; He had to be created or born as an ordinary man. But still it did see that His position as Mediator, in the state of exaltation, is elevated far above the limits of the purely human. Therefore, recourse was taken to an apotheosis, to a divinization of the man Christ. He was said to be clothed with divine power and majesty by the Father.

We, on the other hand, conclude from this entirely unique, more than human place that Christ occupies in His exaltation, back to His more than human origin, His eternal deity. After all, everything that exists is one or the other: God or creature. Scripture does not recognize intermediate stages. Even a creature made to be God could not be a mediator nor assume that relationship with the redeemed in which the Mediator must stand to them.

e)   Likewise, the covenant of grace is so constructed and arranged that the honor for the salvation of men resides not with man but with God. The triune God—as the one who elects, as Savior, as applier of salvation—is here the one who does everything and secures the covenant in every respect. Man may not ascribe to himself anything of the glory of the covenant of grace. In it, all things must be from God, through God, to God. The entire Triune Being must be revealed in it; the Trinity must be reflected most clearly in its economy.

Now with all this it is incomprehensible that the Mediator who occupies such a prominent place in the covenant of grace would be a mere man. The beautiful order in the work of grace would then be disturbed. No longer would a triune God reveal Himself in it, but it would be a work shared between God and man. When the faith of the sinner is directed to Christ and he is justified before God through faith, the significance of that is that by faith he acknowledges and becomes conscious how all salvation is located in God. Faith is the subjective side of monergistic divine grace. Therefore, a faith that is directed to a man is a contradictio in adjecto [contradiction in terms]. The object of saving faith cannot be a man, but must be God.

f)    Christ’s work as Mediator must possess an infinite value, since that work must extend to the satisfaction of the eternal wrath of God. A mere man can never endure this wrath, as is already apparent from the eternal punishment of those who are lost. We would have to remain under that wrath eternally simply because our human nature is not able to endure its intensity. What we thus lack for bearing this wrath in its intensiveness must (for the lost) be paid for extensively; they bear the infinite wrath of God through their endless punishment. Christ, however, did not have to be swallowed up in this death. He had to come through it victoriously; it had to become evident that death could not hold Him. For His humanity, that would have been impossible. His deity could cause the bearing of the burden of the endless wrath by His humanity without this humanity succumbing or being destroyed.

One must also note that it was the person of the Son of God who suffered in this humanity, and that thereby an infinite value was placed on His merits. Indeed, the value of the merits was determined by two things: (1) by their inherent properties; (2) by the person to whom they belonged. The humanity of the Mediator had its existence in the person of the Son of God. All the suffering and all the active obedience, although accomplished in His humanity, was nevertheless divine suffering and divine obedience—that is, of infinite value. Therefore, we find that, in agreement with the two points mentioned above, His deity was necessary for two reasons: (1) to support His humanity in bearing the infinite wrath of God; (2) to put an infinite value on the merits of the Mediator. With that said, then, yet a third reason may be appreciated: (3) only a divine person is able to bring about righteousness for so many.

3. Can a similar derivation of the humanity of the Mediator be given [from the requirements for His work as Mediator; see question 2]?

This follows directly:

a)   From the necessity that a real satisfaction be made by the Mediator. This presupposes the duration of a certain phase, the transition from one state into another, the experiencing of certain transient conditions, entry into time, and participation in history. Of God Himself one cannot say that He has a history, for He is the eternal One, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. Everything in Him is an unchanging presence. Salvation or satisfaction, on the other hand, is not an eternal process but something temporal, occurring in the human sphere. Even though it originates with God and has reference to God, it must still take place in what is finite and created. Every other conception rests on a pantheistic view. Because we hold satisfaction to be a single historical fact and not a transition in the eternal development process of the Absolute, for that reason we have need of the genuine humanity of the Lord—and as a basis for that, an incarnation taking place at a particular point in space and time. Not an apparent incarnation but only a genuine humanity distinguished from deity can avail here. The Mediator must be God, and still He must have a history. With these givens, the only way one can escape pantheism in Christology is by establishing that Christ, along with His true deity and unmixed with it, also possesses genuine humanity, from which all the mutability mentioned above can be predicated.

b)   From the necessity that payment for guilt must also take place through the same nature in which sin against God was committed. It is true that guilt is reckoned to persons, and no legal relationships may be conceived of vis-à-vis a totally abstract nature. Thus it must be granted that it is not the human nature of Christ that makes satisfaction, but the person of the Son of God. But while it is the person on whom the obligation rests, He can have this obligation only to the extent that He is joined to the nature. The possession of the nature is conditio sine qua non, for the nature (as the inclusion of attributes common to all) first places the person in that particular relationship to others on whom these obligations are incumbent.

Our guiding principle must therefore read: The nature without the person is not subject to the duties, but the person without the nature cannot be subject to them. Adam, for example, represented the whole human race. This representation did not, in the first place, rest on the fact that he had the same nature as all other people. It rested on all human persons being personally reckoned in him through the covenant of works. That is, the nature without the person would not have been subject to the obligations. On the other hand, it is equally certain that the personal Adam could not have represented us if he had not possessed the same human nature with us. An angel would have been a person as well as Adam, and thus, as far as being a person is concerned, would have been able to become our representative Head equally well. But that angel did not possess our human nature, and therefore could not have represented us as covenant Head. That is, the person without the nature cannot be subject to the obligations.

If we transfer this to Christ, then it follows immediately how He, although our Surety as divine person, nevertheless at the same time had to share in human nature if He was to be our Surety and Mediator. A human nature without a person was not able to save us any more than a divine person without a human nature.

c)   From the necessity that the Mediator would reveal God to men in a complete, immediate manner. If He had possessed only the divine nature, He would have remained above the sphere of humanity, and a means would have been necessary to do this revealing apart from Him. He would then have had to make use continually of subordinate office bearers—who would have carried out the work of revelation for Him—or portray His priestly activity and His kingly glory, as He did before His incarnation in the days of the old covenant. Now, in contrast, through His incarnation this need has passed away. In Christ, and through His human nature, God speaks to us directly so that we can hear Him with our human ears. The person who speaks in Him is the person of the Son of God, who does not have a derived knowledge of the secrets of the divine counsel, but who is initiated into those secrets from eternity and thus speaks the things of God because He is from God, God “revealed in the flesh,” “the great mystery of godliness” [1 Tim 3:16].

d)   Since Christ as Head of the covenant must form one body with believers and precede them in their glorification, from this it also follows that He must possess a human nature. Joined to this human nature through the Holy Spirit, and through this human nature to the person of the Son of God, all the redeemed constitute that mysterious body that was determined in election. Christ is also allied with the angels; He would also have been in a certain relationship with humanity if it had not fallen into sin. But that bond would not have been as close as it is now, since the Son of God as Mediator has taken on human nature. It is not a divine life in the strictly metaphysical sense of the word or a divine-human substance that is to be shared with the redeemed, for that would lead to a mingling of God and man, between whom the ontological separation may never be eliminated. A pure human life—which, however much a product of God’s supernatural power of grace, still remains a pure human life—had to pass from Christ to the members of His body. For this reason, too, it was therefore necessary that Christ possess this pure humanity. This demand flows no less from the significance as an exemplar that Christ’s exaltation has for believers. If, after satisfying God’s righteousness, He had put off His human nature, then believers would no longer be able to look to Him as the firstfruits of those who had died [1 Cor 15:20], as the supreme leader and finisher of faith, who is now seated at the right of the throne of God (Heb 12:2). Conversely, in the state of exaltation Christ is also, through the memory of the weakness and the suffering that He bore in His human life, a merciful and compassionate high priest (Heb 4:15).

4. Can one prove from Scripture that the Mediator is truly God?

The proof for the deity of the Son was presented in detail earlier. Since the Son is primarily revealed as Mediator, and through His role as Mediator His eternal sonship has also come to greater clarity, most of the proofs produced can also be used to prove the deity of the Son as Mediator. Virtually everywhere it is the Mediator who speaks and who ascribes to Himself (that is, His divine person) omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, who permits Himself to be named with divine names, to receive divine honor, and to be attributed divine works.

5. How can one demonstrate from Scripture the true humanity of the Mediator?

a)   By showing that Christ possessed everything that belongs to true humanity, namely:

1.   A human body: Hebrews 2:14, “So He likewise partook of the same” (namely, of flesh and blood); Luke 24:39, “See my hands and my feet, for it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.” ’

2.   A human soul as the principle of willing, feeling, thinking life: Matthew 26:38, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death”; John 12:27, “Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say?”

3.   A human spirit, namely, the soul insofar as it is the principle of the enlivening force and of the animation of the body: John 19:30, “And bowing His head He gave up His spirit.”

b)   By showing that things are said about Christ that are completely irreconcilable with deity and consequently can have their truth only in His human nature. All affects belonging to human nature are attributed to Him, so that He was sorrowful even unto death (Matt 26:38); He was hungry (Matt 4:2) and thirsty (John 19:28); He was tired and sat down by the well (John 4:8); He fell asleep (Matt 8:24); by looking on people He was filled with love and compassion for them (Matt 9:36); He was afraid (Heb 5:7); He wept [John 11:35]; He rejoiced in spirit (Luke 10:21); He had need for prayer (Matt 14:23).

c)   By demonstrating that in the Mediator, as He was revealed in the flesh, a true, human development took place. However deep the mystery of the unity of His humanity and His divine person may be, this is certain: This unity did nothing to diminish the true humanity of the Lord and instead of impeding or disturbing human development has rather sustained and guided it. His deity did not communicate more knowledge and power to His humanity than was in accord with its age, and just by reckoning with this the Gospel narratives differ from embellished and distorted tradition. Of Jesus it is testified that He increased and grew and became strong in spirit; that He questioned others; and that He increased in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man (Luke 2:40, 46, 49, 52). It is impossible to attribute all these things to His deity, for with deity all development is excluded. One must consider, however, that this development in the human nature of the Lord did not happen in a natural manner, inasmuch as the human nature in Him was not personal but was borne through the person of the Son of God. What for others is grounded in the natural law of development that governs all that is created, and what for man is independent development of a personal life, for the Mediator was inseparably tied to the divine person, so that development cannot count as a second, independent principle in addition to that tie.

d)   In Christ there was present not merely a human soul (or spirit) in general but a complete soul, insofar as it concerns the capacity that every human soul possesses. In Him there was a knowing, a willing, an emotional life. He knew, and that in a human manner—that is, according to His humanity He was not omniscient (Mark 13:32). He had a will, which He knew to distinguish from the Father’s will (so also from His divine will) when He prayed, “not my will, but yours be done.” (For the emotional life in the human nature of the Mediator, see above.)

e)   He expressly calls Himself a man (John 8:40, “A man who has told you the truth”). It is testified about Him that He became flesh—that is, He assumed a human nature in its entirety as it is in contrast to God, that He died, that He stands as second man alongside of Adam, is of the lineage of David, etc. (cf. 1 John 4:2).

6. What problems arise from this data of Scripture that Christ is truly God and also truly man?

The following two:

a)   How in this case the divine and the human can remain distinguished as is demanded by the difference throughout Scripture between creature and Creator.

b)   How, nevertheless, their coexisting in the Mediator can be circumscribed so that there are not two persons, two mediators.

7. How has one sought to solve that problem?

The church has come to firm conceptions in this matter only through a continuing struggle against heretical misunderstanding and distortion of the data of Scripture. Repeatedly, where error emerged, with rejection of the error there was the incentive to establish the truth positively. It is therefore impossible to understand orthodox church doctrine on this point well if one is not knowledgeable of the various heresies that, one after the other, have beset this part of Christian truth. Church doctrine holds to the middle between extremes, because here it is also true that there is no effective heresy that does not derive its strength for exercising influence from an element of the truth, which it attempts to develop one-sidedly and elevate at the cost of all other truths. Especially in a doctrine like this, where the middle way is so narrow and one is continually in danger of slipping to the right or to the left, it is not sufficient to know the truth positively. In order to proceed safely, one must also be acquainted with error. It is therefore necessary that we here provide a brief sketch of the course of the development this dogma has passed through, in contrast with its heretical distortion.

8. In how many ways has one fallen into error regarding the doctrine of the Mediator?

In two ways:

a)   By trying to dismiss the problem simply by denying the data that create it. Christ is truly God and truly man. Therein lies the problem. For those who deny one of these two propositions, the problem disappears immediately—how deity and humanity are to be kept from merging and how they are to be united. Or one may not deny deity or humanity completely but deny some part of it, in order to bring deity and humanity closer together and to reach an apparent unity between both in the Mediator.

b)   By accepting the scriptural data for the dogma unconditionally but then bringing deity and humanity into relationship in such a way that either the first problem is not solved (deity and humanity do not remain at scriptural distance) or the second has no solution (no genuine unity between deity and humanity results).

9. How, according to this scheme, can you arrange the various heretical opinions about the Mediator?

a)   Into those that:

1.   Deny the deity of the Mediator—Ebionitism, in older and newer forms, the Alogi.

2.   Deny the humanity of the Mediator—Gnosticism, particularly Docetism, Modalists (Sabellians).

3.   Deny the complete deity of the Mediator—Arianism.

4.   Deny the complete humanity of the Mediator—Apollinarism.

b)   Into those that:

1.   Keep the deity and the humanity so separated that no unity obtains—Nestorianism.

2.   Commingle the deity and the humanity, (a) by creating a third entity from their joining—monophysitism; (b) by letting the one devolve into the other—the doctrine of kenosis in its modern forms.

10. What was the conception of the Ebionites concerning the person of the Mediator?

The Ebionites (at least the more strict line designated with this name) regarded Christ as the natural son of Joseph and Mary, as a ψιλὸς ἄνθρωπος, “a mere man,” who was gifted with the Holy Spirit at His baptism and thereby became Christ (Messiah). Ebionitism expresses the one-sidedly developed, specifically Jewish element of truth that God is one and cannot be two or three. The Old Testament also taught that, but it had also indicated that this one God is not an abstract unity and how within this divine being there is room for distinction. Ebionitism lost sight of the latter and therefore dropped the deity of the Lord. Its basic error was a deistic conception of the relationship of God to the world. And wherever in modern times Ebionitism is revived, it flows from a similar deism, as with the Socianians. The less-strict line of Ebionites (also called Nazarenes) maintained the supernatural birth of the humanity of Christ but likewise denied His deity.

11. What particular view did the gnostics have about the Mediator?

Gnosticism is the opposite of Ebionitism. The later is Jewish the former is pagan. The one holds that God and the world are sharply divided, while the other brings them together as closely as possible. The heretical in Gnosticism is evident in two points:

a)   Christ was made into an aeon, an emanation of the divine, as everything in the final analysis is reduced to aeons. In other words, His deity is maintained, but it was conceived of in pantheistic terms. It was not the true, absolute deity that Scripture attributes to Christ, for according to Gnosticism, He did not remain within the essence of God, but He emanated from it in order to enter into creatureliness.

b)   The humanity of Christ was made into a semblance, for according to the pantheistic scheme a distinction is not made between human spirit and deity, and since the human body as material is per se evil, it may not be ascribed to Christ in reality. This is gnostic Docetism (from δοκεῖν, “appear”), which can be developed in various forms. The most elaborated system is that of Valentinus, according to whom Christ did not inhabit a fleshly body (except in appearance) but only a physical body, which was not formed from Mary but only brought forth through her as through a channel. At His baptism, the higher, spiritual Christ was united with this lower Christ. Against Gnosticism, see Colossians 2:9; 1 John 4:2–3.

12. What were the opinions of the Alogi concerning Christ?

The doctrine of the self-contained preexistence of Christ had the beginning of its dogmatic development through Irenaeus and Tertullian. Therefore, the two heretical lines mentioned above (represented by Ebionitism and Gnosticism) necessarily came into renewed opposition to this development since they saw God’s unity threatened. This opposition manifested itself in the deistic heresy of the Alogi and in the more or less pantheistically colored Modalists (Sabellians). Alogism attempted to maintain the unity by denying the deity of Christ, Sabellianism by denial of His personal existence. So here again we find orthodox doctrine moving between two extremes.

The Alogi (around 170 AD) did not deny the supernatural birth of Christ but regarded Him as a man who did not have a real existence before this birth and was distinguished from other men in that He was sinless; that a ray of the Logos (that is, the mind of God) dwelt in Him; or that He possessed the Holy Spirit to an extraordinary degree. They are called Alogi because they rejected the Fourth Gospel (and Revelation) as well as the logos concept, while in their name a wordplay is also present: alogi, that is, “without logos,” “lacking reason.”

13. What was the heresy of the Modalists or Sabellians?

They did recognize that in Christ there was something essentially divine, but they conceived of this as a manifestation mode of the absolutely one divine personality that had appeared as Father and Spirit in other modes. There was something docetic present in this conception, inasmuch as the soul of Christ was replaced by deity, and His body can only be called a temporary theophany. The Modalists are also called Monarchians, since they stood for the unity of God.

14. What is the value of Origen with respect to the development of christological dogma?

His construction of the doctrine of generation and his subordinationism has been discussed earlier (doctrine of the Trinity). Over against the extremes just discussed, he endeavored by the one or the other of his views to maintain both the unity of the Divine Being as well as the deity of a personally existing eternal Son. Here it should be noted how Origen was the first to accentuate with clarity how the humanity assumed by the Logos consisted not only of a material body, but that an anima rationalis (a rational soul) also belonged to it. Previously, there had been much doubt about this point. Most were constrained by the concept that Christ’s deity had dwelt in the body (sarx) as His soul. Even in Tertullian one can find such a concept. Unhappily, this better idea of Origen was so closely related to his doctrine of preexistence that it did not spread outside the circle of his own school. According to Origen, the human soul of Christ, too, is preexistent. So it was that Origen did not advance the development of the doctrine on this point much further.

15. What form did the dogma take in the Arian heresy?

Earlier we discussed Arianism in detail. Since according to it the deity of Christ is only a half deity, and He belongs within the sphere of time or among beings created in time, the first of the problems mentioned above disappears. God and man were so strongly separated by Arianism that they thought Christ had to be denied deity, and through this idea the second problem also disappeared. If that of Christ which preexisted—the Logos created before all things—is already something creaturely, then, given that, it becomes entirely superfluous to assume a human soul. Arianism therefore says that the preexistent Logos only assumed a body in the incarnation and denies the existence of a human soul in the incarnated Logos. This denial is extremely significant since it shows how much the Arian was serious about the creatureliness of the Logos. Basically, Arianism was a modified Alogism. It finds its principal content in the fact that Christ is a creature, and thus adheres to the essentially Jewish concept of the abstract unity of God. It is Judaistic. And still it teaches that this creature became flesh, attained to the status of deity through moral development, and must be worshiped. That, as well as the concept that the Logos is the instrument of creation, since the Father could not create directly, is pagan-pantheistic. The Logos becomes a kind of lower God. Thus in Arianism both poles of heretical Christology, which thus far had been opposed to each other, were united.

16. Who through his heretical opinions has helped the orthodox doctrine to develop further?

Apollinaris of Laodicea. In the Arian controversy, the full deity of Christ was now established beyond question. Now, however, whoever despaired of the possibility of reaching a unity between full deity and full humanity obviously had to question the completeness of the human nature. Apollinaris did this, proceeding from the thesis that a complete human nature besides the divine nature results in two Sons of God—one by nature and eternal, another through incarnation and adoption. This cannot be true. Therefore, in Christ only His living flesh derives from humanity. The higher principle in man—the nous [mind, intellect], according to Aristotelian philosophy—was lacking, for His deity filled that place.

So, since the full humanity of Christ was attacked successively from two sides, first through Arius and now through Apollinaris, the church saw itself compelled to express its faith in this matter emphatically. If Christ only assumed a living body, then He also only redeemed our living body, and our higher spiritual capacities do not share in redemption. If Christ did not possess a human nous and everything that is said about Him in the Gospels must be attributed to His deity, then this did not remain the unchangeable, blessed deity but was subject to suffering. So the deity is also impaired. In addition to this, the teaching of Apollinaris cohered with the philosophical conception of the indwelling of the divine Logos in every human nous. Semipantheistically, the higher principle in man was regarded as a piece of the divine Logos. If now the complete divine Logos already lives in Christ (so Apollinaris reasoned), why would we still suppose a part of the Logos in Him? In this aspect, Apollinarism pointed back more to Gnostic speculations. The church rightly condemned this in 381 (Synod of Constantinople).

17. What point had the church now reached?

At the solution to the problem of how this divine nature and human nature, both complete, could exist together in the one person, Christ.

18. Is the same antithesis occurring earlier to be observed in the two heresies that sought to solve this problem in the wrong way?

Yes, the Jewish-deistic and the pagan-pantheistic error again were in opposition to each other—the first represented by Nestorianism, the latter by monophysitism.

19. Give the main elements in Nestorian Christology.

The Nestorians think of the unity of the human and divine natures of Christ according to their own interpretation of a moral unity between God and man. God lives in every saint, not essentially, but through an agreement of will and inclination. Thus there is a unity in the sense of unanimity. Now, Nestorius did acknowledge that the unity between God and man in Christ was something else than what takes place in every believer, but still there is a likeness between the two in his interpretation. Out of grace and good will (κατὰ χάριν and κατʼ εὐδοκίαν), God has united Himself with the man Jesus; and with Him this union was complete, while with everyone else it was incomplete. This union (συνάφεια) was not immediately complete; it kept pace with the development of the moral nature of humanity. In the end it was complete, and through the exaltation of His human nature it has now become possible to pray to Christ, who consists of two natures (persons), as to one subject, for deity and humanity are completely in harmony—what the former wills, the latter also wills. There is no other unity between the natures than those of names, honor, and worship. Closely connected with this is the conception one must form of the saving work of the Mediator. Emphasis is placed on free will and moral development in Christ. Through that, He was united with God. It took place according to His humanity. Therefore, He can accomplish salvation for us in no other way than by enabling us for a similar moral development. Therein lies the Judaistic-deistic aspect of this position.

20. What trend is the opposite of this?

Over against the Antiochian-Nestorian line, the Alexandrian school maintained that deity and humanity in Christ were naturally one and not just morally—that is, there must be a deeper unity between the two natures than a moral agreement. This deeper unity had to be natural (ἕνωσις φυσική), but not of that sort that the natures were intermingled. Up to and including Cyril, the Alexandrians remained within the bounds of orthodoxy. Cyril himself insisted on the unity, because otherwise our human nature is not redeemed and God has not suffered for us in humanity. He sought it, however, completely in agreement with what was later established as orthodox church doctrine, in the person of the Son of God. He therefore taught that in Christ there was not an individual (personal) man, but an (impersonal) human nature, although he also maintains that there was nothing lacking in Christ’s human nature, since it had its existence in the person of the Son of God. With this, in fact, the correct way was found to the solution of the problem, insofar as it could be found.

One cannot accuse Cyril of monophysitism. However, Cyril had also already made the statement, “Before the incarnation two natures existed, after the incarnation only one.” By this he meant that before the incarnation the human nature that Christ assumed had existed separately, while subsequently it found its existence in the person of the Son of God and thus existed individually, no longer as an abstract nature, so that one could only speak of one nature. The Alexandrians, however, were Platonic Realists who believed in the real existence of the natures. In this statement of Cyril, we now have the beginning of the monophysite heresy that was then further developed consistently in Eutyches into the assertion that there was only one nature in Christ. This meant more than it had meant for Cyril, even though it sounded similar. It included that, through its union with deity, the human nature had not only lost its abstract character (Cyril had also taught this), but that in addition it had been changed, so that now a sort of in-between entity had originated.

Under the influence of the West by the Roman bishop Leo, this Eutychianism was condemned by the Synod of Chalcedon in 451, and the famous Creed of Chalcedon was accepted. The Greek church in its entirety had in principle already fallen into monophysitism. That it did not also do so officially resulted, under God’s leading, from the timely intervention of Western orthodoxy. Already for a long time salvation had been understood by the Greeks as a deification of human nature in general. Just for that reason, one could not continue to accept a unity of the natures in the person but wanted a unity in the natures themselves. It could not be a personal but had to be a metaphysical unity. The God-man was not there in order to bring God and man, initially separated judicially, together again judicially (personal unity), but in order through the incarnation of God to effect the deification of man (metaphysical unity). This pagan-pantheistic error was halted, to its credit, by the more biblical, less philosophical view of the Western church. If this had not happened, Christianity would have completely degenerated into pantheism.

21. How does the Creed of Chalcedon read?

“Following the Holy Fathers, we teach that, with one accord, all must confess the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, as One, perfect in deity and perfect in humanity; truly God and truly man, consisting of a rational soul and a body; of one substance with the Father according to deity, of one substance with us according to humanity; like us in everything, sin excepted; begotten before time of the Father according to deity, at the end of times, for us and our salvation, born of Mary the Virgin, the Mother of God; according to humanity, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Firstborn, to be understood in two natures (ἐκ δύο φύσεως; another reading, ἐν δύο φύσεσιν), inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably, so that the distinction in natures is in no respect removed by the unity, but rather the property of each nature remains preserved, yet concurring in one person and hypostasis, not divided into two persons but one and the same Son and Firstborn, who is God the Logos and the Lord Jesus Christ; as from the beginning the prophets and Jesus Christ Himself have taught us and the confession of faith of the Fathers has handed down to us.”

With this creed, ecclesiastical doctrinal development was closed. It is the basis on which the whole orthodox Christian church has stood since that time, no matter how otherwise divided it also is; Greek, Roman, Protestant churches agree with each other in this Christology.

Only on one point does the creed leave its meaning in the dark. It does not say explicitly that the human nature assumed by the Logos does not have a personal existence in itself. This remained reserved for later dogmatic development to address.

22. On which points has John of Damascus further developed the dogma?

He established that the human nature of Christ (a) is not the abstract nature of man in the sense of the Realists, in which all men are said to share, (b) is also not an individual humanity that in itself possesses personal existence, but (c) is an impersonal human nature, assumed by the Logos in the unity of the person from the first moment of its existence, so that it never has existed on its own.

At the same time, John of Damascus taught a mutual penetration of the two natures (περιχώρησις) from which followed a mutual communication of attributes (ἀντίδοσις). On this point, conflict later ignited between Lutherans and Reformed.

23. Have all Christian churches continued to maintain this position (of Chalcedon) or has deviation also still manifested itself later?

Deviation has also manifested itself later, with the following parties:

a)   The Ebionite heresy was revived by Socinianism, which recognizes only a human nature in Christ and wishes to speak of deity only in the sense of transmitted competence for office. Socinian soteriology, as we will see, completely accords with this Socinian Christology.

b)   The Lutheran Church took a step back from Chalcedon in the direction of Eutychianism, without, however, formally abandoning the standpoint of the Chalcedon Creed and without letting this conception work itself out consistently soteriology.

c)   Modern Christology of the speculative Vermittelungs [mediating] theologians has in principle abandoned the standpoint of Chalcedon (deity and humanity complete and at the same time side by side) and in various forms accepted a changing of deity into humanity and a changing back of humanity into deity. This is the doctrine of kenosis.

d)   While (a) errs on the Jewish-deistic side and (b) and (c) incline toward the heathen-pantheistic side, here and there has appeared sporadically as a private opinion the position that Christ’s humanity did not first originate in time, but preexisted eternally in heaven—thus a renewal of Origen’s Christology as far as the humanity is concerned. One finds this opinion in Swedenborg and Isaac Watts.

We turn now to a discussion of the Reformed doctrine, in order after that to come back to these errors.

24. Give the most important positions that we must maintain concerning the Mediator after His incarnation.

a)   In the Mediator there is only one person, one subject, although there are two natures. The problem that we meet here is therefore the reverse of what confronted us in the doctrine of the Trinity. There it concerned the possibility of one nature, the Divine Being consisting in three persons. Here, on the other hand, the question is how two natures can exist in one person. It may be recalled that the standard theological definition of a person reads: substantia individua intelligens incommunicabilis non sustertata in alia natura neque paro alterius: “an indivisible, rational, incommunicable substance, not sustained by another nature and not a part of another.” This, however, is not entirely applicable to the divine persons in the Trinity, since “not sustained by another nature” is not correct here. So, for the Trinity one has to be satisfied with a simple definition: “A person is through the divine substance in a specific hypostasis and through this specific mode of being distinguished from that substance and from the remaining persons.” A divine person is not entirely the same as a human person.

While this is true, on the other hand it must be no less maintained that there must be similarity in a formal sense between a divine and a human person. As we shall see, this already follows from the fact that in the covenant the divine person of the Mediator represents the persons of the elect legally. This relationship of legal representation that exists between the Mediator and His members cannot exist between two entirely dissimilar entities. The similarity that exists between divine and human personality must be found in the fact that neither is upheld by another person. This is true of both. Even though the person of the Son of God is a mode of existence of the being of God and so in a certain sense is upheld through the being, through the divine nature, still this divine nature is, qua talis [as such], not personal but only comes to personhood in the three hypostases. However, there is not another person who upholds the person of the Son, in whom He subsists, in whom He exists hypostatically. It is true that from eternity the Son is generated by the Father and so has His mode of existence continually from the Father, but this still says nothing other than that as hypostasis He exists in the Father. For man, too, a son receives his personal existence from the father through generation, but the persons of father and son remain separate, and one cannot say that the one exists in the other. If that were the case, then the one who exists in the other, just because of that, would cease to exist as a person. We thus have these two cases: (1) In the being of God common to the three persons, the person of the Son exists eternally from the person of the Father, but not in the person of the Father; He is and remains a separate hypostasis. (2) In the creation of a new being by God, for man the child exists as a person through generation from the parents, but not in the parents; it is and remains a separate personality.

Divine and human personalities have in common that they do not exist in another person. They are different in the following respects: (1) A divine person can have in common with the other divine persons the same, undivided being; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one and the same—God triune. A human person cannot in this way have in common the same being with other human persons. With man, being comes into existence repeatedly from God’s creating hand. When we say that all men have one and the same nature, this is not at all meant in the same sense as in the Trinity. For man, it means similarity; for God, identity. All men have the same nature insofar as they alike possess the sum of essential attributes. For example, all have a sinful or all have a pure nature. Among God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, there is only one and therefore the same nature. (2) A divine person has His existence from the other person or from the other persons not only temporally, with a beginning, but also eternally, without cessation. That, therefore, with the similarity, is the difference: In the Divine Being, the bond of origination remains unceasing; for man, it does not endure.

This one person, this one subject in Christ, is vested with all the legal relationships that are due the Mediator. He, the person of the Mediator, has been established from eternity as Surety, for although having not yet assumed human nature, He—the same person who later became flesh, suffered and died—was then already present. To Him, the person, the guilt of the elect was imputed, not to the human nature that He possessed in the abstract. He, the person, who as a divine person was not subject to any law, placed Himself freely under the demand of the law and earned eternal life. He, the person, was exalted after He had fulfilled all righteousness. Everywhere a legal relationship is involved, we have to do with the person of the Mediator, the Son of God. For carrying out His functions as Mediator, both natures are certainly necessary, as has been shown abundantly above, but the legal capacity could only be provided for through the existence of these natures in the person.

25. Is this one subject, this one person in the Mediator, a divine or a human person?

b)   This person is divine, and not human or divine-human. In order to be immediately convinced of this, one may take the following into consideration. In the Logos, a divine person, who is immutable, is present from eternity. If now there can be but one person in the Mediator, and the divine person cannot be eradicated or changed, then it is self-evident that this one person is the divine person of the Logos. One can only maintain the immutability of God if one holds to the deity of the person in the Mediator. The choice lies between two persons or one divine person.

26. What follows from this for the human nature of the Mediator?

c)   That it may not at the same time be called a human person. After all, if it were a human person, then along with the divine person there would be a second person in Christ, and we would have two mediators instead of one. Nestorianism would be introduced. Between two persons no other unity is possible except a moral unity, as Nestorianism conceived of it, or a mystical unity, such as takes place between Christ and the members of His body. However, in any case, that does not produce a unity of subject. Personality is that which is deepest and most independent in man that cannot be combined with anything else. Were there now in Christ’s human nature this personal feature, then it never would have been able to be joined with the deity of the Lord as one subject—such as was absolutely necessary for the execution of the work of the Mediator. This is one of the reasons why personality may not be ascribed to the human nature of the Mediator.

27. Is it permissible, then, to say that the human nature of the Mediator was impersonal?

No, for doing that would create the appearance that something were lacking in the human nature of the Lord, and in a questionable manner one would incline toward Docetism, as if in Christ there were only an apparent humanity and not true humanity. Subsequently, the best teachers in the church have always avoided the expression “impersonal human nature” and rather have taught that the humanity of the Mediator has its personal existence in the person of the Son of God, whereby it is not an abstraction but is provided with personality. This is not to be so conceived of as if the person of the Son of God provides the impersonal humanity with a human person, for then that would be a lapse again into Nestorianism. It means, rather, that the person of the Son of God serves as person for the humanity as well as the deity, that He lends personality to both; or, expressed still more accurately, that as a divine person, by assuming human nature into the unity of the person, He also elevates this human nature above the terrain of impersonality. By and since the incarnation, there is in the Mediator a human nature that—not of itself personally—has its personal existence in the person of the Son of God. In a certain sense, the person of the Mediator, the Logos, is twofold (not a composite) since He fills two functions, namely: He serves as person both for the deity and for the humanity.

It is the merit of John of Damascus that he so clearly enunciated this “impersonation” of the human nature by the divine person, if we may so designate it. He formulated his conception as follows: The human nature of the Mediator was not properly or inherently personal (ἰδιοσύστατος), nor impersonal (ἀνυπόστατος), but rather in-personal (ἐνυπόστατος).

It must, therefore, be called inexact when Charles Hodge, in Systematic Theology volume 2, page 391, says, “Human nature therefore … is in the person of Christ impersonal.” This should read, “does not possess a human personality.” In Junius, Thesis 27:16, it is formulated quite correctly. Here it is seen in which manner each of the two natures is involved in this union: The divine assumes, the human is assumed—not so that from these two a sort of third is forged together, but the human nature, at the outset ἀνυπόστατος, was assumed by the Logos into the unity of the person, and thus made ἐνυπόστατος.

28. May one infer from this that the human nature of Christ is imperfect, since personality is lacking in it?

This objection has in fact been introduced against church doctrine on this point, and even been called a refined Apollinarism. (Dorner’s great work on the person of Christ is the best that has been written historically about this dogma, although the author himself believes in the error of kenosis.) The purport of this complaint is that, as Apollinaris had the divine nature take the place of the higher spiritual capacity—the nous—in Christ, so we let the divine person replace human personality. Against this charge, however, the following should be observed.

a)   It makes a great difference whether one denies the nous, the higher spiritual faculty, of human nature in order to put deity in its place, or whether one replaces human personality with the hypostasis of the Son of God. That higher moral life—to which mind, will, and higher emotional life belong—really constitutes what is essential in man, so that whoever removes that takes away the core of the humanity—of the human nature—from Christ. The same cannot be said of the person. No matter how important it may be, it does not belong in the same sense to the essence of the nature as the higher spiritual faculty but is rather to be viewed as the individual enfolding that the nature has received in every single human being. A connection is made with modern philosophy when one places such great emphasis on the personality and then, proceeding from that, lodges the charge of Apollinarism against the church doctrine.

b)   In spite of the difference that exists between divine and human personality and what is mentioned above, one cannot prove that there is such a formal difference by which the divine person is not able to elevate the human nature to a state of perfection or wholeness. The question that arises here is this: Does a hypostasis have qualities apart from the nature that subsists in it? That is, is a divine person, as such, distinguished essentially from a human person? Or is personality a more neutral entity, so that a human nature, even a complete human nature, is involved even if the place of the personality in it is occupied by a divine person—that is, by a person in whom deity subsists from eternity?

It will be extremely difficult to answer these questions decisively. But as long as they are not answered decisively or cannot permit a decisive answer, then neither can one assert decisively that, according to our conception, the humanity of the Mediator is incomplete in an Apollinarian fashion. There is an essential difference between divine spirit (mind–will–affections) and human spirit (mind–will–affections). In His mind, God is omniscient and all-wise; man is limited in knowledge and wisdom. In His will, God is omnipotent and absolute holiness; man is limited in power and possesses only derived holiness. In His emotion, God is eternally blissful; man enjoys only an effect of this bliss. To say that the deity in Christ takes the place of the nous in fact makes His humanity incomplete. But everyone sees at once that, between a divine person and a human person, such contradictions as those mentioned here cannot be determined in the same manner.

c)   Many find it impossible to conceive of the human nature of the Mediator without a human personality, since they identify personality with self-consciousness and free will. It is undeniable (as the church has learned to confess in the struggle against the monothelites, and as Scripture assures us) that in Christ there is twofold consciousness, twofold will, twofold emotion—on the one hand a divine consciousness, on the other a human consciousness; a divine will and a human will; divine emotion and human emotion. Now, if for someone consciousness, or even self-consciousness, coincides with personality, then he will have to ascribe personality, along with consciousness, to human nature.

Against that we should note that it is wrong to identify these two. It is true that personality is inconceivable without self-consciousness. However, in no way does the reverse follow from that: that there cannot be self-consciousness without personality. And one is least of all entitled to the conclusion that in a certain (say, human) nature there can be no self-consciousness without personality existing in the same nature. Personality lies much deeper than self-consciousness; the latter is the mode of disclosing the former, a mode of disclosure that can be interrupted temporarily, for example, during sleep, without the personality thereby ceasing to exist. Hodge says correctly, “It follows that the human nature of Christ, separately considered, is impersonal. To this, indeed, it is objected that intelligence and will constitute personality, and as these belong to Christ’s human nature personality cannot be denied to it. A person, however, is a suppositum intelligens [rational subject], but the human nature of Christ is not a suppositum or subsistence” (Systematic Theology, 2:391).

29. Can one also show from Scripture that there was only one subject, one person in Christ, and that this was the divine person, the Logos?

The proof for this from Scripture may be provided in the following way:

a)   The strongest proof is found in the absence of any traces of a twofold personality in all that is communicated to us about the Mediator. Also, it is revealed to us about God that He is one God, as it is revealed to us that Christ must be called one Mediator (cf. 1 Tim 2:5). Notwithstanding the existence of this strong presumption for the oneness of God, we and the church have seen it necessary to accept a trinity of persons in this one Divine Being, since repeatedly the one person is properly distinguished from the other and introduced as speaking to the other.

Now, if two persons existed in the Mediator, we would expect something similar. There would have to be traces that the deity had spoken to the humanity, and the humanity to the deity, using “Thou” and “Thee,” as occurs between Father and Son. Nothing of this nature can be found in the New Testament. This must have its reason, and the reason can be none other than that human personality is not present in the Mediator.

b)   A positive proof is present in the fact that the Mediator always speaks of Himself as one and the same person, regardless of whether what is said about Him refers to His divine or to His human existence. It is the same, identical subject that speaks in both relationships, both when it is said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death” [Matt 26:38], and when it is stated, “Before Abraham was, I am” [John 8:38]. Oneness of persons and duality of natures, therefore, is also the result here.

c)   That the person in Christ is the divine person, the Logos, appears most clearly in those places in Scripture that deal expressly with the incarnation, as, for example, John 1:1–4; 1 John 1:1–3; Philippians 2:6–11; Hebrews 2:14. It is most noteworthy that in all these passages Scripture does not proceed from two natures in the Mediator—in order then, given this coordination, to obtain by their fusion a tertium quid—but always chooses its point of departure in eternity, in the person of the Son of God. Modern Christology takes the opposite path. In all its constructions of the God-man it starts from the two natures as coordinated and has the two mingled or the one devolve into the other. So, John first speaks of the Word that was with God, indeed was God; Paul, of Him who was in the form of God, and who was rich, in order then to come to speak of the humanity of the Mediator. And it is no less noteworthy that Scripture, where it speaks of the union of the divine Person with the human nature, always conceives of this as an action of the former, where the Logos was not passive but active. He became flesh (σὰρξ ἐγένετο); He took on the seed of Abraham; He humiliated himself; He became poor, etc. Thirdly, it may not be overlooked that the humanity of the Mediator is never spoken of in personal terms but in terms of nature. It is not a man that He assumed but flesh; He was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh [Rom 8:3]. “Flesh” [here] means specifically complete human nature, including soul and body, but without personality needing to be included.

30. Why was it necessary that the Mediator be only one person or, expressed differently, that in Him human nature (in itself) did not possess personality?

For the following reasons:

a)   Because already in the Logos there was a divine person who could not change, and so His humanity had to be impersonal or there would have been two subjects in existence.

b)   Because all human persons are included in the covenant of works. If Christ had been a human person, then He would also have possessed original sin and could not have been our Surety. He was, however, a divine person, who as such could not be reckoned in Adam, and so also could not have been born through ordinary generation from Adam (through the will of man).

c)   In Christ as Mediator, His human nature, as by a miraculous grace, must be most closely united with God. This must occur for more than one purpose—both so that in the Mediator as the Head of His body the covenant of grace is realized not only juridically but also really, and as well so that revelation through the Mediator is a direct revelation of God in the flesh. When the humanity of Christ speaks, then in it speaks the person who is God, because the subject is one.

d)   His deity must be united with His human nature such that it could add infinite value to His merits. A union other than personal union could not suffice here, since only this union is a judicial union.

e)   Only because the divine person is the subject in Christ does His mediatorial work obtain the stability required by an eternal, immutable covenant of grace. Without doubt, the human nature in Christ was in itself weak and mutable. We now know, however, that this human nature in itself is an abstraction that did not exist for a moment without personal subsistence in the Logos. Thus the person of the Logos with its personality provides His human nature with the steadfastness and immutability by which the covenant of grace is distinguished from the first covenant, the covenant of works. The oneness and the deity of the person are of importance for the affirmation that Christ could not sin.

31. What follows for the Mediator from this personal unity between human nature and the Logos?

a)   That Christ the Mediator may no longer be prayed to and worshiped exclusively as God, apart from His humanity. As the Word become flesh, He is the object of our worship. His human nature is personally united with Him; it is taken into His hypostasis; one may no longer separate it from His deity. Just as the Triune Being of God exists only as triune being, and we do not worship an abstract Godhead but the triune God, even so the Logos may not be venerated in His abstract deity but in His concrete personality, which is both God and man. Even before His incarnation, it was only possible to believe in Him as the one who would become flesh.

And still something else is related to this. For us, Christ can only be the object of worship as the God-man, as possessing human nature in the unity of the person and as He is the Mediator as the God-man. It immediately follows, then, that worship of Christ must be directed to Him as Mediator. That is, He may not become the one who is final in our worshiping, on whom it terminates and in whom, as it were, it remains at rest. Rather, one goes through Christ as Mediator to the Father. Whoever speaks to the Son speaks to Him as Mediator, and as Mediator He directs all worship over to the Father. The latter in fact represents the Trinity, so that in Him we, in turn, worship the Son. But one prays directly only to the Son as Mediator, since the humanity assumed in the unity of His person can no longer be separated from His person. It is for that reason that all revelation of the covenant of grace under the old dispensation had to point forward; that [which was] presented was not the Logos qua talis [as such], as Head of the covenant who had secured it from eternity, but always the Logos who over the course of the centuries was to come and was to become flesh.

To the question of how Christ is to be worshiped, the answer therefore must be: as Mediator who is both man and God. To the question of why or on what basis He is to be worshiped, the answer must be: on the ground that He is the person of the Logos, the divine person. In other words, one must distinguish between the object of worship and the ground for worship. It goes without saying that the creaturely as such, apart from personal existence in the Son of God, can never be the object or ground of worship. But a nature in the abstract cannot be worshiped. For that a person is necessary, and this person is in the Mediator a divine person.

b)   That in Christ the Mediator there occurs the unique appearance of one and the same person who at the same time exists in two completely different natures. According to His deity, the person of the Mediator is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; but according to His humanity the very same person of the Mediator is limited in knowledge and power and circumscribed by space. The deity has not ceased to be deity and is not in the least altered or changed by the incarnation, except insofar as it through the person has entered into a new relationship. Nor is the true humanity elevated on the supposition of the eternity of the person, except insofar as it has entered into a new and entirely unique relationship. The two spheres in which the person of the Mediator moves lie next to each other; or rather, the one lies above the other. But they do not merge together. Their unity lies solely in the person.

c)   The person works through, in, and behind the fully human nature of the Mediator. The unity of the person is not merely verbal but answers to a reality. The human nature, though it has self-consciousness and will and feeling, does not operate of itself but is at every moment the instrument of the person who bears it. It does have substance but no subsistence in itself. The much-used image of the relationship between soul and body in man can serve here. Of the body, too, it must be said that it has substance but no subsistence in itself. It is not a mere accident of the soul (this would be Idealism) but is ontologically and substantially distinguished from it. At the same time, it cannot operate of itself but finds its operating principle in the spirit, which uses it as an organ.

All this may be transferred to the relationship between the divine person and the human nature in the Mediator. It is the Logos who makes use of the human nature existing in Him as its organ. And this is so not merely through indwelling, as, for example, the same Logos in the days of the old covenant made use of a creaturely form in order in it to reveal Himself at the moment. The early Fathers denied that the divine person was present in human nature like a captain in His ship. Such a local indwelling can be thought of only in material things and would therefore be applicable only to the body of the Mediator, and would lead to the Arian conception. On the other hand, it is completely impossible to think of such an indwelling for the soul, for it makes no sense to say that the divine person dwells in the human soul, if this has a different meaning than the mystical sense in which the indwelling is true of all believers. In a completely different, secret manner, the Logos is the person for the human nature, the starting point for all its thoughts and emotions. Here for us lies the mystery in the doctrine of the Mediator as God-man. We cannot explain how human understanding, human will, and human feeling were joined to and united with the person of the Son of God.

We can say only this: (1) The person, who was God, was conscious of the human nature belonging personally to His person, so that He appropriated it as a part of His self-existence. The Logos knew every moment (if His eternity permits us to speak in such a way): It is my human nature that suffers and dies. (2) The consciousness of the human nature was a consciousness of not having independence (subsistence) in itself. The human nature knew that it possessed its personality in the person of the Son of God. The person of the Son of God was not positioned over against the human nature as alien any more than the human nature with its consciousness was positioned over against the divine person as alien. When the human nature spoke, it was conscious of speaking as the Son of God. “Before Abraham was, I am” [John 8:58], says the human mouth of the Lord and thinks the human soul of the Lord, which shows how a consciousness of divine “I-ness” was present in the human soul. By this is not at all asserted or meant that the entire content of Christ’s divine consciousness was also present in His human consciousness, for that would obviously erase the border between the divine and human and mingle the two natures. Only at this one point must there have been commonality or, speaking more precisely, identity of consciousness, because there was identity of the person. The consciousness of personality was one and the same for Christ’s divine nature and for His human nature.

This, as it occurs to us, is as far as we may and must go in the explanation of this mystery. And the final step that we take here is already a step toward that which Scripture inclines us but whereby it still does not lead us directly. All other and further explanations of this great mystery (1 Tim 3:16), however, are to be seen as inadvisable and even dangerous. Still, such explanations are not lacking. Here we mention only the Cartesian speculation, which one can find in Reformed theologians such as Wittich, Burman, and Braun, that the unity of natures was located in the mutual penetration and communication of thoughts that are possible between the two since they both (according to Cartesianism) consist essentially of thinking. Mastricht and Maresius have rightly written against such speculation. Without doubt, a communication of thoughts from the divine to the human nature takes place, but there can of course be no question of a reverse sharing by the human to the divine nature; nor does the personal unity of the natures lie in the former.

All erroneous conceptions regarding the uniqueness of this unity are carefully rejected by theologians. They are accustomed, for example, to deny that the union consists (1) in a unity of being, as is the case with the persons of the holy Trinity (συνουσιωδῶς), because in the Mediator there are two essences, two substances; (2) in a unity of essence and power, as the Logos with His divine nature and power is present in all things (οὐσιωδῶς καὶ δραστικῶς); (3) in a unity of support or only by the presence of grace (παραστατικῶς); (4) in a unity of nature, as form and matter are united (φυσικῶς); (5) in a unity of relationship, as a friend is to his friend (σχετικῶς); (6) in a mystical unity, as exists between Christ and believers (μυστικῶς); 7) in a sacramental unity, as is present in the Lord’s Supper.

Not one of all these modes of union matches that which is within Christ, for the latter is a hypostatic union (ὑποστατικῶς), as the result of which the human nature is borne by the divine person. Here, however, it must still be carefully noted that this is not that general divine capacity with which, by providentia generalis [general providence], the Son sustains all things, but a special sustaining that can be compared to nothing else. In general providence the subjects remain separate, He who bears from the one who is borne; here there is properly unity of subject. Many call humanity the human organ (ἀνθρώπινον ὄργανον) of the person.

32. What must be noted about the analogy of this personal union with the unity between soul and body in man?

That in fact at many points it casts much light on this truth that in the abstract is so difficult for our human understanding to comprehend. Already at a very early point, this analogy was pointed to for clarification. One may compare the confession of faith of Athanasius. Calvin still found this analogy useful (Institutes, 2.14.1).

Later there was more objection against it, and on a basis that hardly appears satisfactory. One raised against it that human personality comes into being only through the joining of body and soul, since both body and soul are essential parts of man. One must admit, however, that the personality of man is located in the soul, as Christ’s is located in His deity, and therefore that in that respect the analogy is entirely fitting. It is true that, for man, specifically human nature (not the person) only exists through the joining of soul and body, but one can likewise say that Christ’s specifically mediatorial nature (not His person) only comes into existence through the incarnation; thus there is also similarity here. Only this much remains of the objection: that the person of the Mediator existed as perfect and was unimpaired before and apart from the incarnation, thus that the latter does not belong to the idea of the Logos, as is taught by modern theology, and that, on the other hand, a human soul, although personal, is a fragment that does not correspond to its idea if we think of it apart from the body. The Logos had His perfect divine nature from eternity, in which He subsisted; the souls of those who have died have a violated, incomplete human nature as long as they are not reunited with their bodies. Therefore, one must not appeal to the analogy for help to clarify the relationship of the Logos ἀσαρκος to the σάρξ assumed by Him, but only to bring clarity to the Logos ἔνσαρκος in the σάρξ.

The points on which the analogy can shed light are the following:

a)   There are two substances: matter and spirit, divine and human substance. It makes no difference that with the humanity of the Mediator the human substance consists of both matter and spirit, for here these two must combine into one unity and be placed on one line, since they, as creaturely substance, come to stand in contrast to the deity of the Mediator as uncreated substance.

b)   In man there exists a union between soul and body, spirit and matter, which is very close and yet does not lead to the merging of the two. Spirit does not become matter, and matter does not become spirit; each maintains its specific qualities. This union between the two substances is not a mere indwelling, as if the soul merely resides in the body as in a tabernacle, but a personal union. All of this can be applied to the unity between the divine person and the human nature in the Mediator.

c)   With man, the principle of unity, the subject, the person, does not come about by a fusion of both natures. Soul and body do not each provide a part, but that subject resides in the one substance of the soul, which has assumed the body, or at least from the first moment of life on has entered into the body as the principle of unity. In the body, there may be a kind of organic unity apart from the soul; the true unity of life, that of feeling, enters only through the soul. All of this can be transferred without difficulty. The subject, the person, is in Christ a divine person; in His human nature there is a unity similar to that in the body of man—a unity of feeling, will, and consciousness in general. But the higher unity, that of personality, is lacking in His humanity, or rather would have to be lacking if it remained by itself.

d)   As it is impossible for us to explain the operation of spirit on matter and of matter on spirit, it is likewise impossible to show how in particular the organic unity of soul and body, the former in the latter, causes life and sensation. In the same way, it is not only inexplicable in general how the infinite affects the finite, how the divine affects the human. But, most specifically, the highest of all mysteries is how the person of the Son of God could so appropriate human nature that He is said in truth to exist in this humanity while conversely this humanity has its hypostasis in Him.

e)   In man, a communication takes place of characteristics of both natures or substances to the person. Person A or B shares in all that can be said about his soul or his body. It is not his body that is sick or his soul that is depressed, but he is sick or dejected. The same is also true of the person of the Mediator. To His person belong all the predicates that are associated with the divine and human natures. There is, to use the terminology of the theologians, a κοινωνία ἰδιωμάτων, a communication of attributes, about which we will need to speak in more detail later.

f)    From this communication of attributes, it follows that the subject can sometimes be designated according to the one nature, while, however, the predicate with which this subject is associated belongs to the subject only according to the other nature. And so arise apparently absurd and contradictory statements in which subject and predicate seem to exclude each other. When one says in English, “Everybody knows,” then the person is designated according to the material nature as “body,” while, however, to this person a predicate is ascribed that is incompatible with the idea of “body,” namely the idea of “to know.” Conversely, in the statement, “Twenty souls perished,” the subject is designated according to the spiritual nature and a predicate associated with it that is only applicable to the material nature. Similar statements can be found in Scripture about Christ, as when it said that the Son of Man is in heaven and that they have crucified the Lord of glory [1 Cor 2:8], etc.

g)   As the body, by its organic unity with the soul, is elevated above the sphere of the natural and material in terms of its status, even though its substance always remains that of matter, so too the humanity of the Mediator is situated in a completely unique status through union with the Son of God, even though its substance always remains creaturely, which can never transition in essence into what is uncreated. Human nature, as Christ possesses it, shares in an honor that it possesses nowhere else, just as with us the body shares in the glory of the soul and serves as the organ of its disclosure.

These are all points of striking correspondence. Still, one has always rightly felt that the analogy was a faulty one and that it does not shed light on the one mysterious point that otherwise also evades us in our study. The question of how soul and body can be one contains a problem, but the problem is different from the question of how two consciences can be one subject. The body as matter, or also as an organic aggregate, does not already have that unity in itself, which would seem to make it unsuited to be taken up as an integrated part in another unity. It leaves room for the soul as a unity-forming principle. It is otherwise with the conscious human spirit, with the consciousness of the humanity of the Lord. This appears already to possess a unity in itself, for what is consciousness other than a summing-up of many perceptions into a unity? And now it is inexplicable for us how this unity can be present where nevertheless the deeper-lying unity of the person, which exists in a different consciousness, a divine consciousness, is joined with this unity. Two consciousnesses appear to exclude one another. Here the analogy does not provide us with the least explanation, and we must, as reminded above, acquiesce in the mystery, believing that what we cannot comprehend nevertheless in reality exists.

33. What then are the consequences for the Mediator of this personal union?

a)   A communicatio gratianum sive charismatum in naturam, a communication of the gifts of grace to the human nature.

b)   A communicatio proprietatum utrisque naturae cum persona, a communication of the attributes of both natures to the person.

c)   A communicatio operationum or a communcatio ἀποτελεσμάτων, a commonality of the works of redemption, according to which the actions of both natures are those of the person.

34. How many are the gifts of grace communicated to the human nature?

These are twofold:

a)   The gratia unionis cum persona τοῦ λόγου, the grace of union with the person of the Logos, to whom the honor adorationis, the honor of worship, is tied. This grace has already been discussed above. It is a “grace,” since human nature, even apart from all weaknesses and sin, qua talis, is so far below deity that it can be united with deity personally only by an extraordinary favor.

b)   The gratia habituales sive charismata [habitual graces or gifts]. Extraordinary gifts of knowledge, will, and power were communicated to the human nature, which it did not possess in itself. In and by that human nature, too, the Mediator has to carry out His offices. At the same time, however, it is established that the very same human nature had to be beset with all natural weaknesses (except sin), in which it shares with others. The latter is inseparable from the state of humiliation in which Christ had to suffer.

The question thus arises: How can the Mediator be in this state of humiliation and at the same time possess the gifts of grace that are necessary for exercising His offices? The answer to this must be that He did not possess a human nature that included in itself these capacities as its own natural possession, but these were communicated to it as gifts of office by the Holy Spirit. Also, this communication did not occur directly from the side of the person but by mediation of the Holy Spirit. If the former had been the case, then the humiliation of human nature would have ceased, for then the gifts would have become its own personally because it has its personal existence in the person of the Logos. What someone has of his own person is not lent but one’s own possession, and this possession cannot be viewed as a humiliation; indeed, it is incompatible with humiliation. Now, on the other hand, for fulfilling His offices, the Mediator receives these gifts from the Holy Spirit, who also was already at work in the office bearers in Israel. Although these capacities become habitus, “habits” of understanding and will, still they are communicated to Him from the outside (not directly from the person). They continue to possess the character of something communicated and are thereby compatible with humiliation. So, for example, the human nature of the Mediator was unable to carry out the highly weighty office of prophet. It was limited in its knowledge and its insight in its bestowed gifts, since it was our weak nature (always without sin). As in the old dispensation God endowed His weak and sinful prophets by communicating spiritual gifts for functioning in their office, so He also equipped the weak but sinless Christ by a communication of spiritual gifts for His official work, naturally with this difference: that Christ was the perfect prophet, the only one who has realized the full ideal of prophet, and that to Him therefore the Spirit was communicated without measure, that is, in an unprecedented fullness. Meanwhile, this fullness in no way eliminates:

1.   that there remains a measure of gifts of grace, as that is compatible with the finiteness and true creatureliness of the human nature of the Mediator—we must not think in terms of a Lutheran communication of divine attributes;

2.   that they were always granted gifts, which were not communicated directly by the person of the Logos but by the Holy Spirit;

3.   that their communication did not occur at one time but gradually and over the course of time, all according to what was necessary for the fulfilling of the activities of the Mediator. That is why a special anointing (equipping) of the Mediator took place at His public appearance, namely, in His baptism in the Jordan.

35. What can one add about these communicated gifts?

Usually three kinds are mentioned: gifts of holiness, gifts of wisdom, and gifts of power.

a)   Concerning the first, in the human nature of Christ, though it was pure from all indwelling sin, there was without doubt an extraordinary degree of spiritual grace. Without the influence of the Holy Spirit, there can nowhere be spiritual good, not even in the will of the human nature of the Mediator. Still, one must be on guard for two things:

1.   For the view that no spiritual good was found in the human nature of Christ, since He had to assume our weak and miserable human nature. The likeness with our sinful flesh does not extend so far that this absence of spiritual good may be attributed to it. Human nature is constituted such that it cannot be neutral, and so with the absence of spiritual good must immediately turn to evil. A nature without spiritual good would be a sinful nature, which may not be attributed to Christ. On the other hand, we may assume that in the humiliation of the Lord, through an extraordinary influence, the Holy Spirit drew out and developed the habits of grace that were resident in His human nature. That is why it is reported of the Mediator that He learned obedience and through the eternal Spirit offered Himself to God (Heb 5:8; 9:14).

2.   For the view that for Christ the impossibility of sinning rested on these gifts of grace of the Holy Spirit. Rather, it rested much more on the fact that in Christ’s human nature there was not a mutable human person but the person of the Son of God. Will or intellect or emotion in the human nature could not have sinned unless the underlying person had fallen from a state of moral rectitude. There can naturally be no thought of the latter for the Mediator, considering the deity of His person.

b)   Gifts of wisdom and knowledge are also communicated to the human nature as well, as appears from Luke 2:40, 52; 4:14, 18. In analogy with what took place with the prophets in general, the Mediator received His prophetic knowledge, as far as His human nature is concerned, from God and not from Himself. Still, a distinction must be maintained here. With Christ there was something that, apart from Him, was not found with any prophet—namely personal unity with the Logos, who reveals all things. While the Holy Spirit had to make the human nature of the Mediator receptive and to enable it in all respects to receive and transmit revelation to its recipients, the real work of revelation was reserved for the person of the Logos; compare Matthew 11:27, where the ability of Christ to reveal the Father is derived from His entirely unique position to know stemming from the fact that He alone knows the Father, with John 3:31, 34, where both qualifications are set beside each other.

c)   No less are the gifts of power bestowed on the human nature. The superhuman authority expressed from the words of Christ, the splendor of the deity, which now and then radiated through His humiliated humanity in displays of power, the authority with which He executes His offices—all this must be derived from this source.

Usually, one brings up the ability to perform miracles. With some reflection, however, it is clear that, taken strictly, this ability lies above the scope of the human nature, and that it would be the Eutychian error to consider these miracles as acts of His humanity. It was the subject of the Logos that performed the miracles, and it was divine power that was at work in them. To the extent, however, that the Logos thereby used the human nature as an organ to display these miracles, that nature was mediately active and in this respect a kind of communicate power can be ascribed to it. There naturally belonged to the human nature a sense of power to command the miracles, although it itself did not need to perform them. That the Mediator performed His miracles by the strength of His deity also appears from the fact that He never performed them in the name of God, but always in His own name. The apostles, on the other hand, in doing their miracles, speak in the name of Jesus Christ. And when, on a single occasion, the Lord prayed to the Father in performing a miraculous work and thanked Him after accomplishing it, then this must be explained by His position as Mediator. That is, He prayed to the Father, representing the Trinity, so that it would be clear to the crowd how He, as anointed and sent from the Father, thus as Mediator, had performed this deed (John 11:41, 42).

d)   In agreement with what was said above, the question may be answered whether the human nature of the Mediator exercised faith. On the basis of His full humanity, faith cannot be denied of Him insofar as it is an act of understanding, which also influences the will and the emotions insofar as it is an accepting as true upon the witness of God. To the deity of the Mediator belongs a scientia visionis, “a knowledge of sight,” that excludes all believing. But this knowledge does not belong to the human nature. With its creaturely limitations, it cannot see immediately into the world of the eternal thoughts of God and so remains receptive, even toward the knowledge communicated to it by the Logos. The essence of faith lies in this receiving, in this accepting as true of something into which we ourselves have no immediate insight (cf. Acts 2:26–27; with Psa 16; Matt 27:43). On the other hand, of the specific form that faith, as saving faith, takes within the sinner, nothing can be seen in the sinless Christ. This faith, which was in the Mediator, cannot be exercised outwardly without the influences of the Holy Spirit. The same thing is to be said about hope.

36. What should be noted about the communication of the attributes of both natures to the person?

a)   That we are dealing here with a communicatio realis, a real, and not a communicatio verbalis, a merely verbal, communication. The person really possesses both natures, and what belongs to these natures may accordingly also be attributed to the person. Were the unity between the person and the human nature a unity in appearance, then the communicatio idiomatum would also be an apparent communication. There is no other subject in the human nature to which its attributes can be ascribed than the subject of the Son of God. Thus, when one designates something that occurs with the human nature according its subject, one must say that it has occurred with God the Logos.

This explains why the Nestorians deviated from the sound position when they refused to call Mary θεότοκος. The birth certainly occurred according to the human and not according to the divine nature, but as its subject it is not permissible to indicate the latter other than by means of the Logos, in which it alone had its hypostasis. It must in fact be said: Mary gave birth to God (according to His human nature); that is to say, the subject, who is God, has undergone the process of being born by the Virgin Mary. When the Nestorians did not admit this but wished to speak of the χριστότοκος, their heresy is fully expressed in this contrast. For them, the Christ is something other than the Logos-God; the former is the abstraction of human and divine persons taken together. For us, the person of Christ is the same as the person of the Logos.

b)   With this communicatio idiomatum a distinction must be made between the abstract and the concrete. With the abstract are meant deity and humanity; with the concrete, God and man. Now, however, the rule holds that two abstracts cannot be combined in one pronouncement. One cannot say deity is humanity or humanity is deity, for this would result in a mixing of the natures. Neither can one say that deity is man or humanity is God. That is to say, the abstract of the one nature cannot be joined together with the concrete of the other in one pronouncement. One the other hand, two concretes can be joined with each other. For example: God is man, or man is God. And likewise, the attributes of both natures may be joined with the concrete regardless of whether this concrete is derived from the divine or the human nature.

c)   In this way, we obtain the following kinds of instances of this communicatio idiomatum [communication of attributes]:

1.   The predicate in the expressed pronouncement does not belong to one of the two natures in itself but to the person by virtue of His work as Mediator. This applies to every instance where Christ is called our Savior, Lord, and King. Here the subject can be derived from the human nature: Acts 3:13, “The God of Abraham … has glorified His child (servant) Jesus.” It can also be derived from the divine nature: 1 Corinthians 15:28, “Then the Son Himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected all things to Him.”

2.   The predicate in the expressed pronouncement is only applicable to the divine nature, but is attributed to the person, given that the person is designated according to the divine nature (Matt 11:27, “No one knows the Father except the Son”), or given that the person is designated according to the human nature (John 3:13, “The Son of Man, who is in heaven”). In the case of the latter, one can speak of a genus majestaticum of the communicatio. That is to say, something is said of the human nature that is only due it insofar as it can be used to indicate the person of the Mediator, in so doing conferring to it a great honor, for it is thereby recalled how it is personally united with the Logos.

3.   The predicate in the expressed pronouncement is only applicable to the human nature but is ascribed to the person, given that it is designated according to the divine nature (1 Cor 2:8, “And so they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”; Acts 20:28, “To shepherd the church of God, which He has purchased with His own blood”) or given that the person is designated according to the human nature (Matt 17:12, “So also the Son of Man will suffer at their hands”). In the first case, one can speak of a genus humilitativum of the communicatio. That is, something is said of the divine nature that only applies to it insofar as what is said can be used to designate the person of the Mediator who is also a man. And in doing so it is subjected to a certain humiliation, for therein is a reminder that it has been united with a weak, suffering humanity in the unity of the person.

4.   The expression “communication of attributes” is not only in itself erroneous, but is also an erroneous translation of the Latin term communicatio idiomatum. The attributes are not communicated as if initially only the humanity possessed them by itself and then conveyed them to the person. The human nature of the Mediator did not exist for an instant apart from the person of the Son, so that from the beginning on the person also possessed the attributes. Instead of “communication,” we may thus speak of “making common.”

Still, by the incarnation it occurred that the person of the Logos took on participation in the attributes of the human nature. He has become κοινωνός [sharer] of these attributes by accepting them. As in the eternal generation, the person of the Son did not first exist without the Divine Being or outside the Divine Being in order then to receive this being through communication of being, but from eternity was generated within the being and from out of the being in order to become κοινωνός of the being. Even so, the human nature of the Mediator does not first exist outside the person of the Son in order then to be communicated with its attributes to the person, but it originates in time in the closest union with the person, who thus becomes κοινωνός with it with its attributes. Communicare = communum facere [to make common]. Any other view of the communicatio is not Reformed, but Lutheran.

37. What is understood by the commonality of the works of redemption (communicatio ἀποτελεσμάτων) [communication of operations]?

What is meant is the concurrent working of both natures in the unity of the person in all acts of the Mediator. The doctrine of this commonality of the works of redemption is, as it were, the ripe fruit of the entire development of biblical Christology. The reason why Christ had to be God and man in one person was so that a salvation could be achieved that could truly benefit us. Thus what is called for is not the metaphysical union of man with God but the judicial reconciliation of man with God. What can save is not that mankind is furnished with divine attributes or, conversely, that deity becomes humanity, but only that deity and humanity work concurrently through the unity of the person in such a fashion as is necessary to satisfy all the demands of righteousness. Thus it is that this doctrine of the communicatio ἀποτελεσμάτων has become a specific Reformed doctrine. It is not what Christ is but what He, as κοινωνός of both natures, does that saves us. Our salvation is a salvation by deeds, not by modes of existence. As we will see, in the Lutheran view the emphasis falls at a different point, and this difference in viewpoint is a distinguishing characteristic of both positions.

The following is comprised in this communicatio ἀποτελεσμάτων [operations]:

a)   The operative cause of every work of salvation is the person of the Mediator. It is He who became Surety, became flesh, subjected Himself under the law, suffered, died, was buried, and rose. Everything originates with Him, and its merit traces back to Him. There is no particular point of departure outside of this divine person in His human nature, and nothing that occurs in it can remain at rest in it. What occurs must be reckoned to the person. The person is ὁ ἐνεργῶν, the one from whom energy originates.

b)   This person works by means of the two natures, which are therefore called ἐνεργητικαί, the two organs through which action is exercised.

c)   Each of the two natures only works in common with the other nature, so that, in truth, every act of salvation is an act of the whole Mediator. Nevertheless, each nature works in such a way that befits it as either divine or human nature. In the incarnation, it is the divine nature that assumes, the human nature that is assumed. In doing miracles, it is the eternal power of the Logos that alters the course of nature, but it is the tangible-visible and audible humanity that announces the miracle and commands the miracle. Nowhere does the one nature work without the coworking of the other. Thus, in every act of salvation there are two ἐνέργειαι or actions.

d)   Nevertheless, there is only one work or ἐνεργούμενον [thing worked], ἀποτέλεσμα θεανδρικόν [theandric operation], consisting in what belongs to the person as a consequence of His working by and in both natures. If, says Mastricht, we apply this schema to our redemption, then we obtain one redeemer (λυτρώτης), who, through the coaction of both natures as redeeming (λυτρωτικά) principles, with a twofold action (λύτρωσις), brings about one ransom (λύτρον).

38. How manifold is the union that has been assumed between the two natures in the Mediator?

a)   The unio immediata, the immediate union of the human nature with the Logos.

b)   The unio mediata, the mediate union of the two natures, which comes about through the Holy Spirit and communicates all the gifts of grace to the human nature, discussed above.

There are, however, objections to speaking of such a mediate union of the two natures. The impression thereby arises that unity in the Mediator may come about through an intermediate factor—in other words, as if it is not a personal union but a loose placement next to each other of two disparate parts. This can lead to Nestorianism, for it was specifically the Nestorians who thought of union as moral concord. On the contrary, one must say that the communication of gifts to the human nature had an entirely different purpose than to effect unity between the two natures. It served only for equipping the human nature for its office. On this point, however, there is here and there a lack of clarity among older theologians, as also is to be concluded from the fact that they wish to derive the gifts of grace directly from the personal union of the Logos with the human nature.

39. From what does the deviation of the Lutherans from this scriptural and old-orthodox [Reformed] teaching stem?

It is not at all to be viewed as something accidental but rather as an unavoidable consequence of the distinctive way of thinking of Luther himself. Luther had at heart something mystical in his nature, which, among other ways, manifested itself in his high esteem of German mysticism. According to this German mysticism, the purpose of all religion is the union of man with God, not in an ethical or judicial sense, but substantially, so that the difference between God and man disappears. Corresponding to this is a Christology that does not have its main concern in the unity of the person but in the communication of the deity to the humanity. Accordingly, we see that Luther judges it possible for human nature to contain the divine, that he views the one as being disposed toward the other. To express this, he even makes use of philosophical propositions (for example, the Aristotelian “materia appetit formam” [“matter seeks form”]); and later, realizing the deficiency of this, he says, “Christ must be spoken of with new tongues and in a new language.” Sometimes it even appears that Luther meant to deny the impersonality of the human nature in itself—like Calovius, for instance, who teaches the communication of personality, with that of other attributes, to the human nature.

There is no doubt that his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper influenced Luther’s Christology. If Christ, also according to His humanity, is present in and with bread and wine, wherever these are used, then in every instance a power must be communicated to the humanity that it ordinarily (outside of Christ) does not possess. The doctrine of the Lord’s Supper thus presupposes the communication of something by the deity to the humanity, and in fact in his conflict with the Swiss over the Lord’s Supper Luther made use of the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. Later he dropped this argument, not because he had a change of view, but probably because he judged the argumentation was less suited to convince. If Luther had only made his Christology clear prior to his view regarding the Lord’s Supper, and if an independent principle had not been at work in the former, then he could have been satisfied with attributing divine attributes to the humanity of the Mediator after His exaltation. However, he did not leave it at that but began with the root of the matter, that is, in the incarnation. The human nature first received divine attributes not through the exaltation but through union with the deity. This is a clear indication that an independent principle is certainly at the foundation of Luther’s Christology.

40. How did opinions divide after Luther’s death?

In spite of the communicatio idiomatum, Luther had still always tried to maintain a true humanity of the Mediator in which there could be growth and development. However, he had made no attempt to show how these two were compatible. After his death, Lutheranism divided into two factions:

a)   The Saxon faction, with Chemnitz as its head, adhered to Melanchthon, who never went along with the teaching of Luther on the communicatio and maintained that the finite was unable to contain the infinite (finitum non capax est infiniti).

b)   The Swabian faction, led by Brenz and Andreae, were strong on the communicatio idiomatum. The Logos communicated to the human nature what one called the majestas, the “majesty”—which is the epitome of all divine attributes, except for aseitas, self-existence, for this is not communicable. Already at the moment of its origin, the humanity possessed this majesty in its entirety and this being exalted to the right hand of the Father, so that the incarnation became an ascension. Already within Mary, the body of Christ was omnipresent. If He went anywhere, according to His humanity He was already at that place in advance. When He had risen from the grave, He was still with His body in that grave. While He hung on the cross, He was present in Athens and ruled the world omnipotently.

The conflict between the two factions was eliminated temporarily in the sense that the divine attributes in the human nature of Christ during the state of His humiliation were secret. Difference continued to exist, however, insofar as Chemnitz wished to know only of a secret possession (κτῆσις), but the Swabians thought it necessary to assume a secret use (χρῆσις) as well.

41. What is the Christology of the Formula of Concord?

That is best given by the following propositions:

a)   The unity in Christ is more than a unio personalis. There is a real unity of both natures through the communication of attributes.

b)   This communication of attributes rests on the principle humana natura capax divinae, “human nature is capable of containing the divine.”

c)   The proprietates essentiales [essential attributes] of both natures are possessed in common with each other, with the understanding that the substance of the natures remains unchanged and unmixed.

d)   Also, the attributes were not communicated in such a fashion as if, for example, the divine attributes could become proprietates naturales [natural attributes] for the human nature. As communicated, the idiomata [attributes] are for the other nature only modi perpetui, “permanent modes of existence,” and not idiomata in the strict sense of the word. Thus omniscience does not become an idioma [attribute] of the human nature, as it is of the divine nature, but only a permanent mode of existence.

e)   Christ did not first receive the divine majesty in His human nature in His exaltation but already by the personal union of the Logos with His humanity within Mary.

f)    In the state of His humiliation, Christ divested this majesty so that He could truly increase in age, wisdom, and grace with God and man [Luke 2:52].

g)   Nevertheless, in this state of humiliation He also made use of these communicated attributes as often as He thought it proper.

h)   After His resurrection, He was confirmed in the full use and complete revelation and display of His divine majesty and thus entered into His glory.

i)    Consequently, it must be said of Him that He, not only as God but also as man, knows all things, is able to do all things, and is present with every creature and exercises authority over all things.

j)    This attribute of omnipresence, which is communicated to the human nature, must not be understood as if the human nature would be extended locally over heaven and earth, for something like that cannot even be maintained of His deity.

42. What should be observed concerning these data?

a)   That, in a very circumspect manner, it is not specified what the divine attributes are that the humanity of Christ received. Four in particular are mentioned: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and all-encompassing sovereignty. About the others—for example, eternity—there is silence. Nothing need be said about why there is silence.

b)   That it is not indicated exactly in what the humiliation of the Mediator really consisted. He disposed of it, only used it at times; its use depended on His will. Later, He is confirmed in its full use and in its full manifestation. It appears in this that before the ascension there was only a secret possession and not a secret use, so that Chemnitz would have been more or less in the right against the Swabians. Still, the Formula of Concord is not so conceived and also need not necessarily be so understood. The conflict between the two positions was not decided and must in time break out anew.

43. Between which parties did the conflict break out anew?

Between the theologians of Tübingen (the Swabians) and the theologians of Giessen. The former wanted to allow only for a concealment of the use of divine attributes (κρύψις τῆς χρήσεως), while the latter thought that Christ disposed of their use (κένωσις τῆς χρήσεως). The Saxon Decision of 1624 sided mainly with the Giessen theologians, so that here, too, one arrived at the standpoint of Chemnitz, according to which in the state of humiliation the human nature possessed the divine attributes in secret but did not actually use them. Thus the human nature possessed omnipresence hypothetically—that is to say, if the Logos so desired, it could be omnipresent. Kenoticism, as the teaching of the Giessen theologians was called, spread among Lutherans in northern Germany.

44. What has the further development of Lutheran theology in the 17th century added to the completion of this doctrine?

In the main, there was no change. Only that now in the communicatio idiomatum a distinction was made into three classes, namely:

a)   The genus idiomaticum, to which belong all statements that derive from the consideration that both natures lend their predicates to the person.

b)   The genus apostelesmaticum, to which belong all statements that attribute all the works of salvation, in which both natures cooperate, to the person.

c)   The genus majestaticum, to which all statements belong that ascribe divine attributes to the humanity.

Of course, the Reformed acknowledge only the first two classes, not the third.

Only at one point was there a further stipulation in Lutheran theology. It began to teach explicitly that the so-called dormant attributes (eternity, etc.) of God were not communicated to the human nature, but only the so-called active attributes (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, etc.).

45. What is your critique of Lutheran Christology?

One can subject every doctrine to criticism in two ways. Scripture must of course be the standard for all criticism, but every doctrine admits to a twofold comparison with Scripture. First, one can inquire after the inner meaning, after the principle of the doctrine, and if this is discovered, pose the question how it accords with the basic truths that Scripture teaches throughout and makes prominent. Or, one can ask in concreto what Scripture teaches us in regard to the dispute in question when it expressly speaks of these things. The first approach, where it can be applied, gives us not only the fact of the erroneousness of the doctrine but also provides us directly with the reason.

a)   Applied here to Christology, it teaches us that the Lutheran conception is in conflict with the pervasive demand of Scripture to keep deity and humanity strictly separated and not permit a mingling of the natures with each other. The chasm between God and man concerning what is metaphysical and substantial is an absolute chasm. That God and man can be united in a judicial or ethical sense, or even by mystical action, does not narrow this gulf. The ethical separation between both is something abnormal; the ontological separation is what is normal and can never be missing.

It has been precisely the Reformed church and Reformed theology that has maintained this principle of the absolute difference between the Creator and the creature by everywhere beginning with God and standing for His honor and infinite transcendence. On the basis of Scripture, it has not been willing to grant that the impulse of the creature for bliss can or must be satisfied insofar as the communicatio idiomatum presupposes that God would communicate His divine attributes to humanity. That can be demanded only by a theology that does not choose its starting point in God and the honor of God but in man and his bliss. So there are two motives that have led to the Lutheran formulation of the doctrine: (1) the pantheistically inclined mysticism of which Luther retained something; (2) the predominantly soteriological character of Lutheran theology.

b)   According to Scripture, the emphasis in the first place must not be on the subjective change of human nature but on the objective justification of man before God and the satisfaction of the justice of God. Now on this point the Lutheran Reformation, insofar as it arrived at an awareness of its own character, proceeded clearly. Luther himself was the great champion raised up by God for the justice of God. If satisfaction is at the center of our doctrine of salvation, then the person of the Mediator will have to be such as is demanded by this satisfaction. Now, everyone immediately sees that for the locus on satisfaction, which belongs in the legal sphere, two natures mingled with each other are not necessary, but the unity of the person in two unmingled and intact natures. The emphasis should have fallen on the personal union and not, as now, on the communicatio idiomatum. In other words, Luther’s Christology does not fit with the central place that he assigns to the doctrine of satisfaction and of justification through faith. It stands to reason that this can only be explained by the unconscious co-action of another principle. This, specifically, was the mystical principle that laid emphasis on the subjective transformation and deification of human nature and thus required a Mediator in whom the attributes of the natures were communicated.

c)   One could ask, then, whether Lutheran theology has abandoned the unio personalis and replaced it with the communicatio idiomatum. To be fair, one must acknowledge that it did not do this. The Formula of Concord begins from the unio personalis. Still, the following should be kept in view:

1.   That here and there in Lutheran theologians one can find the notion that the personal union was not the basis for the communication of the attributes, but its consequence.

2.   That here and there the notion also surfaces that the divine nature, with its attributes, also communicated the attribute of personality to the humanity and that the unity of the person had thus arisen from these two natures.

3.   That thus the unio personalis has in fact moved more into the background and lost its practical value for Lutheran theology.

d)   The Lutheran doctrine contains a series of contradictions and impossibilities, of which the following are the most serious:

1.   On one hand, one maintains that the substances of the natures remain separate, and, on the other hand, that nonetheless the attributes of those natures are communicated. Here, then, the attributes are detached from the substances and tied to something else. It is indeed added that, for the other nature, they are not attributes but only a mode of existence. This, however, does not make the matter any more comprehensible or plausible. It is in conflict with reason that an attribute can exist other than as bonded with the substance to which it belongs.

2.   If human nature is to preserve its limitedness—that is, its true humanity—it cannot share in such transcendent divine attributes. It is forever bound to time and space, regardless of whether this limitation is of the same kind as that in which it occurs for us or perhaps allows for conceiving of another relationship to space and time. In any case, there must be a relationship. The concept of being human and the concept of being elevated above time and space exclude each other. Thus it is of no help to the Formula of Concord when it rejects the view that the omnipresence of the humanity of the Mediator is local. Any form of omnipresence—whether it be local or dynamic—is for humanity, as such, impossible.

3.   For the state of humiliation, Lutheran doctrine leads to more than one impossible conception. One need only reread what is said above about the opinion of the Swabians to see immediately that the state of humiliation becomes an illusion that amounts to sheer Docetism. What is one to think of a limitation that permits the thing that has to be limited to be everywhere at the same time? Further, there is the following objection: According to the Lutheran conception, humiliation is not an act of the person of the Logos as such but of the assumed human nature, consisting in this nature setting aside the use of the communicated divine attributes. What constitutes the humiliation is not that the Logos joins Himself with the weak human nature but that the humanity lays aside its divine majesty. The question, however, arises: When has this occurred? At the incarnation, everything was already humiliation; otherwise the state of exaltation would have been earlier (albeit then for a short time) than the state of humiliation. The only escape is that one posits the preexistence of the human nature of the Mediator in an exalted state before the incarnation and so makes His humanity eternal.

4.   The Lutheran viewpoint suffers from vacillation and inconsistency on the following points: To begin, it does not venture to make the communicatio idiomatum mutual. This, however, had been necessary according to its principles. If the Mediator could not be our Savior unless the divine nature with its attributes penetrates the human nature, one maintains with every right that the divine nature must assume the attributes of the human nature—in other words, discard its deity and enter into all human weakness and limitations. In doing that, it would have been necessary for the Lutherans to make a fourth class along with the three classes of the communicatio idiomatum mentioned above, namely a genus ταπεινοτικόν, a class of “statements of humiliation,” in which human attributes are attributed to the deity. Happily, Lutheran theology shrank back from doing this, but it was a faulty inconsistency.

Next, the Lutherans do not venture to have all divine attributes communicated to the human nature, but stay with three or four. The absurdity would have been much too apparent if, for instance, one wished to maintain for the humanity of the Mediator that it was eternal and still hold that it was assumed from the flesh and blood of the Virgin Mary. So here, too, one remains vacillating.

It is no less a vacillation if one thinks a distinction can be made between the possession and use of certain attributes. It becomes impossible to ever obtain a true humiliation. For some attributes, that may be possible. For example, one could speak of a hypothetical omnipresence and by that understand the potential, the dormant capacity of making oneself omnipresent. However, with an attribute like omniscience, this does not work. Whoever is only potentially omniscient is ipso facto not, and no one is able to say, with its use lacking, what remains of the possession of such an attribute.

e)   The Lutheran doctrine is lacking a scriptural foundation. In order to prove the doctrine, one appeals to statements in which divine predicates are attributed to the human nature (better: to the person designated according to the human nature). However, as was shown earlier, all that is to be explained from the unity of the person. And when the Lutherans do not accept this unity and think they have to insist on a literal explanation, then one may rightly ask them why they do not apply this same literal explanation when human things are predicated of the deity. This occurs just as often. The Lutheran principle is that after the incarnation, Logos non est extra carnem, et caro non est extra Logos. In other words, the Logos is not outside the flesh, and the flesh is not outside the Logos. Both are coextensive. If this is so, the Logos must be limited.

f)    Lutheran Christology is Eutychian and does not do justice to the true humanity of the Mediator. If one throws a drop of water into a sea of fire, where will it be? What remains of a humanity that is swallowed up in the infinite sea of deity?

46. What is characteristic of the Christology of the Modern (German) theologians?

To understand this Christology well, one should start with Schleiermacher—not that it agrees with his view of Christ but because it has received its characteristic direction and shape through him. According to Schleiermacher, all religion is a life. A Christian becomes conscious of having assimilated this life within himself. At the same time, he knows that it did not have its origin in himself or in the church. There must be a beginning point for this life outside the ordinary development of humanity. Historically, this beginning point is given in the sinless, absolutely perfect man Christ, who though a creative act must have become what He is. In Christ, the idea of humanity is fully realized. But the same ideal human Christ is as such also divine. This must be so understood that man is the modus existendi [mode of existing] of God on earth. God exists on earth in the form of a man. However, while with all other men this mode of existence is only deficient and a conflict takes place within them between consciousness of the world and consciousness of God, there was no such conflict within Christ. Consciousness of God completely ruled Christ’s internal and external life. Since this was the case, He could not sin. In this His unique nature also now lies the possibility that He is our Savior. He works on us not so much by what He does as by what He is. He awakens in man the dormant consciousness of God and so is the source of life for others. Through Him, all believers become, to a greater or lesser degree, God revealed in the flesh. This new life of Christ is the principle that forms and enlivens the church.

47. What should be noted in this system of Schleiermacher?

a)   That the whole is organized along pantheistic lines. God is not a person. His attributes are forms and conditions of our consciousness.

b)   That it has no place for the Trinity. What becomes man here is not the person of the Logos as distinct from the Father and the Holy Spirit; rather, abstract, primal deity comes to self-consciousness in man.

c)   That it does not allow for an essential difference between Christ and believers. He is perfectly what they are in principle and in part.

d)   That as essentially pantheistic, it does not allow for any personal relationships between God and man, and so cannot find the heart of the work of the Mediator in restoring violated judicial relationships. The work of redemption becomes an ethical or religious process that takes place within man.

e)   That in order to save the supernatural and unique character of Christianity, the appearance of Christ is still explained by a creative act, although no one can explain how such a creative act originates with an impersonal God. In all these respects, the Christology of Schleiermacher has set the tone for the following development.

48. What are the basic tenets of the more theistic Christology that has obviously developed under the influence of these principles of Schleiermacher?

Before we address this in detail, it should be noted that for these theologians a distinction is to be made between the conscious content and the hidden impetus of their teaching. The former is theistic; the latter stems from pantheism. They are themselves theists—that is, they explain God as a personal, conscious being, and nevertheless they teach things regarding the incarnation that only fit with a consistently thought-out pantheism.

The basic tenets of this Christology are:

a)   In Christ there is only one nature, whether immediately or at the end of a certain development that one attributes to Him.

b)   This is possible because the divine nature and the human nature are not so sharply contrasted with each other as one in the past considered it necessary to think. Rather, they are disposed to each other such that they can devolve into each other and can combine with each other.

c)   While all these theologians agree with the thesis that human nature can take the divine into itself (humana natura capax naturae divinae), they do not all allow that the opposite is true—namely, that the divine nature can change into the human nature. As a result, there are two lines. Those who affirm the latter stand over against those who deny it. The former are called kenoticists; their teaching is the doctrine of kenosis. The name is derived from Philippians 2:7, where Paul says of Christ, ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν, “He emptied Himself.” Many prominent theologians belong to these kenoticists: for example, Liebner, Hasse, Thomasius, Gess, Ebrard, Edmund de Pressensé, among others; among the exegetes, Meyer (on Philippians 2). Of those who deny the view in question (namely, that the divine nature can change into human nature), Dorner is the most prominent.

49. What distinguishes this modern kenosis-doctrine from what bore this name in the past?

Historically, the one word “kenosis” has acquired two meanings, which one must distinguish in order not to get confused. Orthodox Lutheran theology understands by kenosis that act of the Mediator by which, according to His human nature, He has set aside the use or open use of the divine attributes communicated to this nature. Here, for the state of humiliation, the human nature empties itself of something communicated.

The modern kenosis, in contrast, is an act of the Logos whereby He, according to His divine nature, divests Himself of the attributes of deity, so that He no longer possesses them, not even according to His deity, which rather has ceased to exist. Of course, the old Lutheran theology did not think of something like that, that the deity could change or lay aside its attributes. Its kenosis was different toto genere [of an entirely different kind] than what at present bears that name.

50. What is included in this recently fashioned kenosis doctrine?

It displays two forms:

a)   Some teach that the eternal Logos did not divest Himself of all, but only of the relative, divine attributes, and thereby was enabled to go through a process of divine-human development as a true man with one nature. This line has its representative in Thomasius.

b)   Others go further and teach that the Logos not only divested Himself of His divine mode of existence but also of His full divine being and became a human soul with all its limitations in order to develop Himself from this point into perfect deity. This line is represented by Gess.

51. Give a further description of the ideas of the first line (that of Thomasius).

Thomasius himself provides this description in the following words:

That He, the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, put Himself into the form of human limitation and thereby, within the limits of space and time, subjected Himself to the conditions of human development, to the confines of a historical existence, in order, without thereby ceasing to be God, to experience with us, in the fullest sense of the word, the life of our race in our nature. Only in this way does there come about a genuine entering into humanity, a becoming truly one with it, an incarnation of God. Only in this way do we obtain as the result the historical person of the Mediator, about whom we know that He is the God-man. As is self-evident, the transition into this state is for the eternal Son of God a self-limitation, a laying aside not of what is essential for the Godhead to be God but a laying aside of the divine modus existendi (mode of existence) for the human, creaturely mode of existence and eo ipso [of itself] a distancing from the divine glory that He had had from the beginning with the Father and had exercised toward the world, by ruling and governing it.

In order to comprehend this well, one must give attention to the distinction Thomasius makes between two kinds of divine attributes: There are immanent and relative attributes in God. To the former he reckons absolute power and holiness, absolute truth and love; to the relative attributes, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience. God cannot abandon those attributes of the first kind because He would thereby lose His essence. He can, however, abandon the second kind because they express His relationship to the world. And these are not necessary for Him, since the world itself cannot be said to be necessary for God.

In this way, in the Mediator there is not only one subject, one person—the Logos who set aside His omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience—but also only one consciousness, one mind, one will. In this one consciousness, this one will, this one mind, are absolute power, truth, holiness, and love, as they were previously in the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient Logos. And it is a free act of will by which the Logos sets aside these relative attributes. The emptying of the relative occurs by means of one of the immanent attributes, namely, by absolute power or freedom.

52. What must be noted against this kenosis as it is taught by Thomasius?

Its main error is a pantheistic distortion of the concept of God. If I attribute immanent and relative attributes to God, I thereby declare the former to be essential and the latter to be nonessential or accidental. God’s essence, then, consists in this: that He has love, possesses truth, and is power. In other words: As to His essence, He is not different from man, for man can possess all these attributes. Thus one can see that here God-humanness as one nature is only attained by placing God and man on the same line and by seeking the essence of God in what is common to Him and man. This, however, is the basic error of pantheism. In opposition to that error, we must maintain that even with respect to the communicable attributes, an irremovable difference remains between God and man. God is powerful, holy, and true, but in an entirely other sense than man is all these things. He is that absolutely, and man is that in dependence on God, and between these two modes of existence there is a gulf that is just as great as that between God’s eternity and the being of man in time. A God-man, as Thomasius construes Him, is only an apparent man, because He must be the one who is absolutely powerful, true, and holy—all of which are attributes that are incompatible with genuine humanity. Even in the most perfect, inalterable state, man still does not acquire this absoluteness.

Also, the basis on which Thomasius attempts to show the possibility of laying aside the relative attributes is inadequate. These attributes do not merely express a relationship to the world, so that one might infer their accidental character from the accidental existence of the world. This relationship to the world is only one side of their conception, and—insofar as the world is accidental—an accidental side. The heart of their conception lies much deeper than this relationship and exists entirely independent of it. In God’s eternity, omnipresence, and omnipotence lies much more than that He is not limited by the passing of time, by the space of the universe, and by the powers in the universe. Beyond that there is a positive element, and the Logos can in no way discard this positive element without eradicating His essence, something that is completely excluded by the concept of the immutability of God. Besides this, as we have seen, in God the metaphysical (Thomasius: the “relative”) attributes determine the so-called ethical attributes. God is eternal, infinite, true, holy, etc.—what, again, cannot be said of any creature.

On closer examination, then, it is evident how what must constitute the unity between divine and human nature in this system is different in God and man, and what would have to be put off or set aside to produce the unity demanded cannot be put off or set aside. It has been rightly noted that this kenotic Christology is gnostic and docetic; it neither retains true deity nor reaches true humanity. God in Christ is a God who has divested Himself of all His absolute divine attributes—a God rendered impotent. The man, Christ, is a man with absolute love and truth—in other words, not a man with a nature like ours.

53. Provide a description of the other form in which the doctrine of kenosis appears—that of Gess.

According to Gess, the person and the divine nature may be separated from each other, and the person of the Logos can distance Himself from the divine nature and exclude it from Himself, so that nothing remains but the formal point of personality, now in the possession of the human nature. Gess says, “The Jesus who lived on earth as a real man, who suffered and died, is the same person who, as the Logos of God, was with the Father from the beginning, was God, and through whom all things are created.” This, however, is to be so understood that in His incarnation the Son, by an act of self-emptying, extinguished His eternal self-consciousness in order to receive it back as a human self-consciousness. He became a truly human, entirely humanly developing soul. This transition is conceived of further as follows: One may view the reception of deity by the Logos within the Trinity not as a constitutive, eternally necessary act but as an act of will, from which it must immediately follow that the Logos, if He wills it, can close off this influx of deity, and in doing so can set aside His deity. His generation by the Father will still remain an eternal, necessary act (to deny this would lead directly to Arianism), but from the side of the Son His being generated is voluntary.

54. What is your criticism of this conception?

In it, the pantheistic trait of the kenosis emerges in its clearest [form]. Here God, while maintaining His personality, is changed into man. He has extinguished His consciousness, as if such a thing were possible in eternal, immutable deity. A god who has it within his freedom no longer to be god due already to this will can no longer be called god.

Also taught here is a connection between person and nature, or rather a lack of connection between the two, that cannot pass the test. A person cannot exist apart from his nature. When he abandons his nature, he thereby, ipso facto, ceases to exist. He cannot make the transition from one nature to another without eradicating himself. Thought through consistently, the theory of Gess cuts the continuity and the identity of the subject in Christ. There is one person in the divine nature before the incarnation and one person in the human nature after the incarnation, but those two cannot be one and the same person.

The entire construction of Gess also rests on a wrong conception of the Trinity. He speaks of the inflowing of deity into the person of the Logos, which He Himself can cause to cease. This is conceived of as if the Son existed apart from the Father and then received the divine essence from Him. From this it naturally follows that the Son can continue to exist even if it pleases Him to shut off this inflowing of deity by an act of self-emptying. In reality, it is entirely the opposite. Within the divine essence, the person of the Father is the cause of a second person’s existence, which then of Himself shares in the same indivisible divine essence. The person is generated, not the essence communicated. Thus if the Logos cuts off or lays aside what He has received from the Father, then the Logos can exist in no other way than that He casts aside His personal existence, ceases to exist as a person. So here too is the same result: The continuity is no longer the same subject as God the Logos.

55. How does the conception of Dorner differ from these systems properly called kenotic?

Dorner contends forcefully against kenosis and deems it impossible that God would change. Thus the Logos must remain absolute and unchanged. Nevertheless, Dorner, too, wishes to arrive at one nature and not to be content with two natures in one person. He also cannot agree with the impersonality of the human nature. The humanity must be complete, up to and including a human person. How then does Dorner combine these givens? By saying that in His communication of the humanity, the Logos limited Himself according to the measure of human nature as it developed normally, so that the complete God-man (= one nature) was not the beginning but the outcome of the Lord’s earthly life.

56. What objection is there to this Christology?

That at bottom it brings together the two errors of Nestorianism and Eutychianism. Its end result is a Christ with only one nature—therefore Eutychianism! Its starting point, on the other hand, is two persons: a divine Logos that must remain immutable and a human subject that must grow and develop—thus Nestorianism! When Dorner speaks of a successive communicating of the divine nature to the man according to the receptivity of the latter, then one does not rightly know how that is to be understood. If something of the Logos is transmitted to the man, then the Logos must gradually be shunted into the man, so from these two becomes one. So then the change in the deity, against which Dorner contends so vigorously, would nonetheless take place. If, on the other hand, it remains at a mere inflow of power or at an ethical working on the man Jesus by the Logos, then the unity is lost and we cannot see how it may be attained, even if the development of the humanity were to continue forever.

57. How does Dorner otherwise attempt to avoid this discrepancy to some degree?

He has attempted in his A System of Christian Doctrine to overcome the difficulty by a transformation of the doctrine of the Trinity. If the human person of Christ has to be maintained at any cost and nevertheless no discrepancy may arise, and further, if a self-emptying of the Logos is impossible, then nothing remains but to deny that before the incarnation the Logos was personally a subject. This is why Dorner speaks of the deity as existing in only one person, and along with this one person refers to points of ego. This makes this already-dense construction even much more unnatural and unacceptable and at the same makes the questionable pantheistic outlook of all these speculations to appear in a clearer light. God Himself is drawn along, as it were, into the process of development of the world. He does not in this way acquire His personality in an absolute sense, but acquires His absolute personality only through the incarnation—in other words, by appearing in conjunction with something created. The Trinity is changed; it becomes complete. A man is taken up into God, and by that the being of God was made even more complete than it was previously! One almost fears to utter such assertions.

Not only how much more balanced and more restrained, but also how much simpler, then, is the time-honored church dogma of the duality of natures in the unity of the person. Here, too, theology does not need to trade its old treasures for the results of modern wisdom.

58. Finally, how can you compare Reformed, Lutheran, and modern kenosis teaching with each other?

The problem was to so unite deity and humanity that no separation remained at any point. It is entirely understandable that we do not produce that problem. When, however, the old Lutheran Christology deifies Christ’s humanity, it causes separation between Him and us to exist. When kenosis theory humanizes the deity of the Logos, it leaves this separation between humanity and God undiminished. We, in contrast, bring deity and humanity immediately into contact with each other through the unity of the person, and in this person we do not permit a separation but allow for an impenetrable mystery.

59. Who in later times taught a preexistence of the humanity of the Mediator?

Among others, Swedenborg (1688–1772) and Isaac Watts.

60. What was the view of Swedenborg?

He rejected the orthodox church doctrine of the Trinity. There are not three persons in the being of God; there is only a triad of principle. This uni-personal God consists of being; His form is divine and human at the same time. In other words, He has a body from eternity. According to Swedenborg, this body is not the crude material body that we men possess, but a spiritual body. However, this makes no essential difference between God and man, for, besides a material body, the latter, too, has a more refined, spiritual body. Moreover, Jehovah-God (Christ), who already possessed this spiritual body from eternity, in time also assumes from the womb of Mary a material body, with the psychical life of the same. This material body, then, is later glorified and refined, so that it becomes one with the spiritual body.

61. What did Isaac Watts write in defense of the preexistence of Christ’s humanity?

He wrote three discourses on “The Glory of Christ as God-Man” (1746). His view was of an entirely different nature than that of Swedenborg since it did not intend to challenge the church doctrine of the Trinity. As grounds, he produced the following:

a)   That Christ appeared repeatedly in a visible form before His incarnation.

b)   Christ is called “the image of God.”

c)   Nowhere does Scripture speak of Christ having assumed a human soul in His incarnation, but always uses corporeal language.

d)   The covenant between God the Father and the Son is from all eternity. This requires that both parties are present. However, in the Trinity there is only one mind and one will, which therefore cannot make a covenant. The covenant can only be made between God and the human soul of Christ. Watts also understands generation to be the creation of the human soul, and at this point at least comes into conflict with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.

62. How is this view to be assessed?

There is an element of truth in it. That element consists in this: that due to the eternal counsel of peace, the humanity of the Mediator was eternally and ideally present. In other words, the Son of God assumed His suretyship not as the Logos in the abstract, but as the Logos who would become flesh in time. He did this as Logos incarnandus [to be incarnate], and His human nature was thereby taken into account as if it were really present.

The latter, however, was not the case. It was not necessary, as Watts judged, for establishing the covenant that the actual soul of Christ existed. The establishment of the covenant was a work of the person, and this person is in the Mediator, the Son of God, as such eternally present. On the other hand, Scripture teaches us that the humiliation of the Mediator consisted in His becoming man, in His “taking on the form of a servant” (Phil 2:7). According to the view of Watts, there was first an exalted humanity, then a humiliated humanity, and later again an exalted humanity. Incarnation comes to mean “taking on a body,” and no longer retains its accustomed meaning of “assuming a complete human nature.” The bond between the human nature of Christ and ours is thereby severed if He in no sense assumed its primary part from us but already possessed its exalted state from all eternity. Also, such a human soul, created from eternity or at least before the incarnation, has very much of the Arian Christ, especially when one ventures with Watts to connect the idea of generation with the creation of this soul. Further, it may be observed that modern exegesis attributes this teaching of Christ as a preexistent man particularly to Paul based on 1 Corinthians 15:45 and following verses, as well as on several other places.

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