^ M. C. Albright, The Common Heritage, 1]3. ^ Luther.
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descension, for He came to lift us into participation with Himself. But we can adore the man Christ Jesus, and the Father whom He reveals, as we could not have adored a God shrouded from us in His own perfections.
Save through the flesh Thou wouldst not come to me — The flesh, wherein Thy strength my weakness found, A weight to bow Thy Godhead to the ground, And lift to heaven a lost humanity.^
4. Christ was not only truly man, with body, soul, and spirit, in each of which He suffered, by hunger and weariness and pain, by grief and anger, by desolation : He also was and is perfectly man, and He was and is representatively man.
(1) Christ was and is perfectly man. — For us humanity is broken up into fragments by sex, by race, by time, by circum- stance. From the beginning its endowments were not unequally divided between man and woman, whose differences are essential to the true idea of the whole. And we can see that countless nations and ages have not yet exhausted the manifold capacities of manhood and womanhood under the varied disciplines and inspirations of life. Again and again even in our own experience some new flash of courage or wisdom or patience or tenderness goes to brighten the picture of man's completed and real self. But in Christ there are no broken or imperfect lights. In Him everything which is shown to us of right and good and lovely in the history of the whole world is gathered up once for all. Nothing limits His humanity, but the limits proper to humanity itself. Whatever there is in man of strength, of justice, of wisdom: whatever there is in woman of sensibility, of purity, of insight, is in Christ without the conditions which hinder among us the development of contrasted virtues in one person. Christ belongs peculiarly to no one people, to no one time. And con- versely, if there be aught that is noble in the achievements or in the aspirations of any people or of any time, it finds a place in His sympathy, and strength from His example.
(2) Christ was and is also representatively man. — Seeing that He unites in Himself all that is truly manly and truly womanly, stripped of the accidental forms which belong to some one country,
1 John Bannister Tabb.
ST. JOHN I. 14 45
or to some one period, every one therefore can find in Him for his own work union with the eternal. He is, in the language of Sb. Paul, "the last Adam," "a life-giving spirit." Tor Him, consciously or unconsciously, all men were looking : to Him all history tended : in Him a higher life had its beginning and its pledge. " Ye shall see," He said Himself in answer to the first confession of faith, " the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man." And for us the promise has found accomplishment. In Him we are enabled to perceive that the broken unity of earth and heaven has been restored ; in Him we are enabled to recognize that the earlier intercourse between the seen and the unseen worlds has been brought to an absolute fulfilment. Christ the Son of man has bestowed on all men the gifts which belonged to Him as the Son of God.
Hi. Why did He become flesh?
The purpose of the Incarnation has been abundantly discussed in the history of Christendom, from the Alexandrine Fathers onward. Anselm, in his " Cur Deus Homo," asks and answers the question by saying that God became incarnate to provide a remedy for human sin ; and two great mediaeval schools, the Thomists and Scotists, took opposite sides on this point. The controversy is not even yet over ; some maintain that God would have become incarnate whether man had sinned or not, and others assert that human sin is the predisposing cause of the humiliation of Deity. Perhaps a reconciliation might be effected between both extremes if it were recognized that moral evil is here by the good purpose of God, and hence that one main and necessary object of the Incarnation must, in the foreknowledge of God, have been the salvation of men from their sins and sorrows. It is not to the purpose to discuss whether Christ would have been born into the world had man never sinned, for in creating man God must have foreknown that he would sin. On the other hand, however, we may say that it was fitting that in the fulness of time God should send forth His Son, so that men might recognize and obey the very Self of God. God being what He is, it is clear that as soon as humanity was able to receive a revelation so complete as the fact of the Incarnation
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provides, such a revelation was just what we might expect. Had there been no Christ of history men to-day would have been wistfully longing for just such an expression of God as Christ brought into the world. We may therefore say that God became man for three reasons: (1) in order that He might realize Himself ; (2) in order that He might give to the world a fuller revelation of God; and (3) in order that He might make atonement for sin.