Beyschlag interprets the passage differently : ' Jesus thinks of Himself as pre-existent, not because He knows Himself to be a second God, and remembered a former life in heaven, but be- cause He recognized Himself in Daniel's image as the bearer of the kingdom of heaven, and because this Son of Man, as well as the kingdom which He brings to earth, must spring from heaven. That the ideal man existed from eternity in God is the truth which He grasped, and to which He gave concrete intellectual form ' {NTTheol. i. 253).
Another important passage is Mt 18-" ' Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' The genuine- ness of this passage has been denied, not because it is lacking in any Greek MSS, but for a priori reasons. Starting from a humanitarian conception of Christ, some hold it to be improbable, if not im- possible, that He should, as is here affirmed, foresee the development of His Church, legislate for its management, and promise His spiritual presence, wherever the memljers of the Church were as- sembled, however few in niuuber thej' might be. Our purpose is not critical, but exegetical. If we assume the genuineness of the words above cited, they seem to show tliat Christ's Mes.sianic con- .sciousness included the ability to fulfil such OT predictions as Jl 2^ ' Ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel ' ; Zeph 3^^ ' The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty.' As He was con- scious of His identity as Son of Man before His advent, so He is confident that such powers as He has heretofore possessed will be continued to Him in the days which He foresees shall intervene, before the Son of Man shall come in His glorj'. Whatever the community of disciples shall bind or loose, make binding or leave optional, shall receive Divine ratification, because the presence of the Christ will be with them guiding and con- trolling them.
If we have followed this interpretation — and surely, unless St. John and St. Paul have mis- understood and misinterpreted Jesus Christ, there is nothing improbable in the interpretation — we are quite prepared to expect that the Lord Jesus after His resurrection should say to His disciples, ' Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the Avorld ' (Mt 28^). This passage is also regarded by Wendt and others as a product of the develop- ing Catholicism and Christology of the Church ; but it is surely a blunder to ascribe so much to develop- ing Christology, unless there were some germinal utterances of Jesus which the Church proceeded to develop. The eagerness of the primitive Chris- tians to disseminate the gospel most probably rests on a command of the Master, and the readine.ss with which they assume the presence of Christ with them ^^■herever they are, implies as its background some such promise and declaration as that before us. Christ's Messianic consciousness could hardly fail to include the conceptions involved in Is 42^ 49® as well as Jl 2-'. If Jesus could appropriate to Himself the statements of Is BP- - (cf. Lk 4i»'-), it follows most naturally — and this is preciselj"^ what the Gospels pre.suppose — that He applied to Himself all the OT predictions of the Messiah, and was conscious that He possessed the properties and at- tributes which the OT assigns to Him who was to come — King, Servant, Prophet, and Messiah in one. It is perfectly in accordance with this conception that Jesus, in contemplating the spread of His Kingdom in ' all nations,' ' to the ends of the earth,' should say, ' Lo, I am with you alway.'
In the Reformation period there was bitter controversy as to the ubiquity of Christ's body. It arose chiefly from Luther's interpretation of the words of Jesus at the Supper, ' This is my body ' (Mt 2626). Luther was persuaded that the word ' is ' denotes real and essential existence. In vain did Zwingli point out to him that Jesus also said, ' I am the door' ; ' I am the true vine." Luther was immovable in his belief that the consecrated bread is in some sense the body of Christ. He had repudiated the Romanist dogma that the particles of the bread are transmuted into substantial particles of the veritable flesh and blood of Christ, and therefore it remained to him to con- tend that the body and blood of Christ are ' in, with, and under' the bread and the wine. In order to show that this is com- patible with Christ's ascension, Luther fell back on the Scholastic distinction as to the three ways in which a body can be in a place, localiter, definitive, and repletive. Locally, when the contents exactl.v fill the vessel. Definitively, when that which fills has the power of occupying a larger or a smaller space. Repletively (or, to use Luther's word, illocally), when a thing is everywhere, and yet measured or contained by no place.
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Luther maintained tlie ubiquity of the body of Christ illocally. Then, in order to explain how we may witliout self-contradiction ascribe omnipresence to bodi), he adopted the theory known to theologians as communicatin idiomatum. In other words, he maintained that the Deity of Christ imparted all its essential attril)utes to Christ's humanity. And in this way Christ's hodii received tlie attributes of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. The body of Christ is present everywhere, especi- ally in the consecrated bread, and thus can be literally mandu- cated by those who partake of the Lord's Supper. (For further extreme and unreasonable positions of Luther's followers, one should consult Bruce, IlumUiation of Christ, Lecture iii.).