Much more is this true of the personality of Christ. Knowledge of Christ is boundlessly progressive ; what more is to be known of Him than the Church at present apprehends, depends on those conditions
belonging to the whole personal life which make any knowledge of Him possible. In short, the problem of the Person of Christ is presented by that faith, which is already knowledge, to that knowing power, which is simply faith itself, as it grows in apprehension of Christ. Christ is not divided ; and there is no division in the faculty which apprehends Him, though the stages of its exercise and its acquisition advance end- le.ssly from less to more. It follow.s that Cliris- tology, which is simply the relleiii^e expres- sion of the knowledge of Christ -aiiaal in actual experience, must not subject tlie fulness of its material to any form of thought borrowed from an alien sphere ; or if, in the exigencies of a defen- sive statement, it uses loan-words derived from philosophy, it must never for a moment ^imagine that these exjjlain or exhaust the living retuity with which it is dealing. These words float, like derelicts, on the ocean of the Church's thought, and many a promising speculation has struck thereon and foundered. Especially ought modem Christology to be on its guard against that dualistic mode of thought, with the terminology which it em- ploys, which is the drimnosa hwreditas bequeathed to theology by (1 reek Philosophy, the shadow of which fell upon Kant, and has not departed from the new Kantiaiis of recent times. The task of Christoliigy at the present <la}- is to restate and to defend twn n'rtainiies of (liristian experience.
(1) 'I'll Clirisiian i\|iei ic nee, educated and in- formed by Siripture .-ual by the Spirit of truth, Christ is hnuicn as God. Tlie problem of the re- lation of the Divine Christ to the Divine Father is thus necessarily raised, and will not be evaded. If, however, the conception of absolute Godhead be modelled upon the forms of Greek dualism, the mystery becomes an insoluble problem, con- founding tliought and troubling faith. Within a Godhead conceived as abstract unity there is no room for the Divine Christ. The best that thought can do is to place the Son outside God, though as near to Him as possible. But this is straightway to deprive faith of its object, and to imperil the fact of reconciliation. The Church, accordingly, would have none of the Arian honorific titles applied to Christ on the presupposition that He was less than God, and would be content with nothing less than the.consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. The term o/ioowios, borrowed not without reluctance from philosophy, was probably ine\'ital)le, ami served sufficiently to utter the Church's faith-knoM-ledge of the true Divinity of its Lord. The danger lay in supposing that omia, or the category of substance, is adequate to express the infinite wealth of the Divine Personality, or, worse still, in directing men's minds to conceive of God as Substance rather than as Personality. From the baleful effects of this point of view, theology has not yet shaken itself free. The only category which can apply to the mystery of the relation of the Father to the Son is that of organic union, whose highest illustration is in the domain of personal life. There are deep and livinjy re- lations which subsist between persons even within the human family. If one person not only may, but miist live in another person in order to be a person, and if between these two there is such com- munity of life that each finds his life in the other, and these two are not so much two as one, we may lind ourselves on the verge of a greater mystery and a far deeper unity : the abiding of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, and these two, along with the Spirit of both, forming the One God of redemption and of creation. By stich a path as this must Christology move to a fuller grasp of the truth, which the Nicene Creed asserted, but did not adequately or finally set forth.
812
INCARNATIOJf
INCARNATION
(2) To Christian experience, maintained in fel- lowship with the living Christ, He is known as man. Faith apprehends Him as incarnate, i.e. as a Divine Being, who became man, entered into the sphere and conditions of human life, and passed through a complete human experience. Humanity, therefore, reaches its consummation in His Person ; and human beings, divided though they may be from one another, find no impassable barriers between themselves and Christ. Christian experi- ence, accordingly, is vitally concerned with the earthly life of Christ, as recorded in the Gospels. Docetism and Ebionism are both false to the conviction of faith. Between the Divinity and the humanity of Jesus Christ, faith finds no abstract opposition. Christ is kno^^^l as at once DiWne and human.
As soon, however, as faith seeks to make clear to itself its convictions, and to state and defend them in view of inquiry or attack, certain ques- tions regarding the human-Divine life of the Lord inevitably arise.
(a) The problem of the origin of this life pre- sented itself very early to the minds of those who had learned to see in Jesus Christ the Son of God. He is man, yet He is related to God as no other man can be. Is it possible that He could have come into the world, as other men do, as a child of a human father and mother? The answer to be found in two of the Gospels is that He did not ; that the Holy Ghost came upon His mother, and the power of the Most High overshadowed her ; that her Son had no human father. The truth of the narrative of the supernatural birth is chal- lenged, in many quarters, on critical and on meta- physical grounds. In view of these objections, it ought to be freely admitted that the Incarnation viight have taken place under normal human con- ditions. We are not in a position to determine n priori what course Infinite Power and Love shall take. It is impossible, therefore, to place the mode of the Incarnation, through a \'irgin-birth, on the same footing of religious or theological im- portance as the great fact of the Incarnation itself. If, however, from a study of the data pre- sented in the NT, i.e. from a consideration of the character of Christ, of His claims and self-witness, as well as of the testimony of His disciples, ajjart /ro»i the narratives of His infancy, we have arrived at the conviction of His unequalled and supreme greatness ; and if we t/ien return to a study of these narratives, we cannot fail to find in them an ethical purity and a spiritual fitness which com- mand our glad acceptance. Their value for Chris- tian thought lies in their providing a physical fact, correspondent to the conviction which a study of the person of Christ has wrought in us, viz. "that He is not the product of a natural evolution from humanity, but is a Divine Being who has entered into the conditions and exjieriences of human nature.