ARTICLE II.

THE DIVINE AND HUMAN NATURES IN CHRIST.

BY REV. EDWARD A. LAWRENCE, D.D., LATE PROFESSOR IN EAST WINDSOR

THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION.

THE fundamental idea of Christianity is a deed, rather than a doctrine or a law. As a moral force it had its beginning in the faith of Abel. As a historic fact it began in that marvellous birth at Bethlehem, in which God revealed himself to men in man's nature. Any adequate philosophy of Christianity must, therefore, take into account this central fact. It must be able to construe it in all its modes and tenses; its logical and chronological relations; its vital forces, simple and compound, ethical and psychological. But who can thus compass this most stupendous work of God? Who can ascend to its sublime heights, or sound the depths of its wisdom and love?

When we propound the doctrine of man we have a single idea, an identical and finite organism, and in a department where consciousness helps us and experience gives us light. Even when God is our theme the subject, though illimitable, is homogeneous and a unit. But when we come to study the person of Christ our Lord, we pass from the simple to the complex, from the difficult elements of the problem to its more difficult solution. Ideas, not only distinct, but metaphysically opposite, the infinite and the finite, the absolute and the relative, require to be conciliated in the most wonderful of all unities and agencies.

Just here comes the real "conflict of the ages." Upon this battle-field the contest between faith and false philosophy, reason and revelation, has been sharpest. More and more the opposing forces are drawn towards this centre, where all

1 Concio ad Clerum; delivered at the Commencement of Yale College, July 26, 1864, on the text John i. 1-14.

for the church is to be won or lost. The deniers of miracle and of mystery array themselves more and more defiantly against this greatest of miracles and profoundest of mysteries. Never, perhaps, has the thinking world been more attracted to the founder of Christianity, as the problem of history as well as theology, than in the present age. Germany, that vast mental kaleidoscope, where beliefs and disbeliefs revolve and sparkle with the fascinations of genius; where the philosophies, atheistic and pantheistic, have been employed in coroners' inquests and reputed post-mortem examinations of the Christian religion, and in digging its grave; where the schools, serious and sardonic, have been intent on pulling down the kingdom of heaven, the land of Luther, notwithstanding these adverse things, has yet, during the last halfcentury, produced a Christological literature rich in hermeneutical and historical research beyond that of almost any other age or nation.

But, in entering on my subject, I have the fullest conviction that, while the light elicited by these discussions is shining more directly than ever upon him whom we call Saviour and Lord, philosophy cannot interpret for us either him or his mission. Science cannot do it. The life of Christ must explain for us the mystery of his person; and only the peculiarity of his person is able to account for the peculiar facts of his life. He himself is the key to himself, and to the whole evangelic history, of which he is the central and controlling figure. Christ in the Bible, Christ in the church, is "the light he gives for us to see him by."

The complex idea of the God-man is made up of the sepa rate ideas of God and man. These two factors bespeak, therefore, our careful examination. No essential element of either can be left out of the inquiry without disturbing the process, and no foreign one can be brought into it without prejudicing the result.

I. My first inquiry relates to the Divine Nature in Christ. Let me in the outset free my subject from the incubus of a certain philosophic pre-supposition, that a conception of the

Infinite by the finite is impossible. It is an objection to this assumption, that it forecloses all inquiry, and at the startingpoint gives speculative Atheism as the foregone conclusion. It banishes from the province of thought an idea, which, though it may be vague, is yet more positive than any other, and which has determined, and is determining more than all others, the great problems of philosophy and of faith, the idea of the Infinite. By what force does that which is inconceivable rule thus absolutely, and mould our intellectual and religious processes? If God cannot be thought, how can he be revealed or known? And if he cannot be known, how can it be true that this is "eternal life to know God and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent? We are brought by this supposition to the wail of universal orphanage that sweeps over Atheism and Pantheism as really as over the Christian faith. For if we cannot conceive of the Infinite to affirm his existence, we cannot to deny it, or to affirm that everything is God. If the idea of personality," as the Pantheist asserts, "loses all significance beyond the province of the finite," so, for the same reason, does the idea of being or thing. Does the infinite baffle us here? It baffles us everywhere.

We cannot, it is true, comprehend the Absolute, but we can apprehend him. Incomprehensible and inconceivable are not synonomous. I cannot grasp Mont Blanc in my palms; but I can look on its towering summit from the distance. From its sunny vale and the surrounding peaks I can survey its rugged acclivities and drink in all its grand and glittering beauties. In like manner the infinite-divine is cognizable to the finite-human. For to know the Infinite is not to limit or measure him, but to distinguish him from all that is capable of limitation or measurement.

The significance of the term "Logos," or "the Word," must be sought in the drift of the Christian scriptures, of which the first verse of John's Gospel is an epitome: "In the beginning was the Word." But what is the beginning ('Ev ȧpx?) here referred to? Was it the opening of the old dispensation or of the new ? The commencement of the

material cosmos, or of the spiritual creations? It was neither. The Word was in the beginning of all these, and before them, and hence prior to all beginnings. He constituted no part of the creation, for he was its author: "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made."

Every idea of pre-existence in regard to the divine in Christ which is not absolutely beginningless is shut out by this preliminary statement. It announ es the absolute eternity of the Word, and thus distinguishes him from all finite beings by an impassable abyss. He who was before all things and all time, must be "without beginning of days or end of years," the alpha and omega, the first and the last.

In the next clause of the same verse the apostle lifts the veil again from the divine nature, and shows this eternal word to be a distinction within that nature: "And the Word was with God." This distinction further on in the revelation opens into the personality of the Son of God, and gives to Christology the doctrine of the eternal sonship.

This idea of the Logos is older than Philo and Plato, of whom certain critics suppose the apostle borrowed it. Foregleams of the personal distinction in the Godhead appear in the creative fiat: "Let us make man in our image"; also in the theophanies of the Old Testament, as the germ of the incarnation in the New. It is more than the distinction of attribute and subject, of essence and ray. It lies deeper than any mere mode of manifestation or economy. It is a property of the divine nature, a mode of being, and a theologic ground of the incarnation and of all the economies. This Word was not a son by creation, as Adam was, nor ethically, by regeneration or adoption, as believers are; but he was the Son of the Highest by an immutable distinction in the divine nature the only begotten, "whose goings forth have been of old," and to whom he saith: "Thy throne, 0 God, is for ever and ever."

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In the correlative idea of Father, this inner distinction is brought out with equal explicitness. There is a veritable

and eternal fatherhood in the Divine, and a true sonship, of which all human paternities are only an image. Finite fathers and sons become such by a law of reproduction and selfdistribution. But the infinite Father was always Father, was never sonless, nor the Son fatherless. The divine nature does not admit of reproduction and distribution, as does the human, or of becoming anything or otherwise than it was in eternity.

One sentence more lays open the full content of the term "Logos," as the Divine in Christ: "And the Word was God."

I will not stop to answer those who transpose the subject and the predicate, and read, "God was the Word"; or, because the predicate in the original is without the article, read," And the Word was a God," - secondary and created. The laws of the language, New Testament and classic, are too unyielding for the purpose of such exegetes, and are now too well understood to require on this occasion a defensive exposition. For eighteen centuries the proem of this Gospel has served for the church the double purpose of a beacon, giving out its steady, guiding light in the darkness through which it has taken its way, and a breakwater, against which the waves of antitrinitarian error have been dashing in vain. The Word, which, as the Son of God, was in the beginning, and was eternally present with God, is also God: "This is the true God and eternal life." The Deity of the Word, implied in the statement of his eternity and personality, is affirmed in this culminating revelation, thus establishing, against heathenism and Judaism, the two fundamental Christian ideas of the Divine Being- unity of nature and personal distinction.

I take this distinction to be personal, because God has revealed it in forms of language and of action most unequivocally personal and concrete. The terms "Father" and "Son," sender and sent, knowing and known, loving and being loved, indicate interpersonal relations. So also do the pronouns employed in unfolding the distinction. All the modes of presenting it, and all the allusions to it, are strictly personal: