insisted that the humanity of Christ was individual and personal.
14. Abelard (d. 1142) was essentially Sabellian in his doctrine of the Trinity, and insisted that, being unchangeable, God could not have become some- thing which He was not eternally. He rejected such expressions as ' God is man,' ' Man became God.' He affirmed 'God did not become anything in and through the Incarnation.' He preferred to say in eflect, ' in the man Jesus, God worked ' ; that ' in Jesus the wisdom of God revealed itself, in order to lead men to salvation by doctrine and example' (Theologia Christiana, iv. 13). This thought he is never weary of iterating and en- forcing, that whatever our Lord did in the flesh was for our instruction by way of example. This includes His walk. His death, and His resurrection. He regarded Incarnation in the proper sense of the term as unthinkable and impossible, because of his conception of the omnipresence and the unchange- ableness of God.
15. Peter Lombard (d. 1160), in his Sentences, which became the text-book of mediaeval schol- asticism and thus exerted a moulding influence upon later scholastic thought, asked and sought to answer nearly every conceivable question re- specting Christ. His great master was John of Damascus ; but he was Avell acquainted with Augus- tinian thought, and no doubt with the works of Anselm and Abelard. He was also somewhat familiar with Neo - Platonic modes of thought without being overmastered by them. He sees no reason why Father or Holy Spirit might not have become incarnate, but finds especial appro- priateness in the fact that He who created the world should deliver it, that He who proceeded from another rather than He who is self -existent should be sent on the mission of redemption. It would have been less fitting for Him who is Father in heaven to become Son in the sphere of revelation. The human nature that the Son as- sumed comprised body and soul, the substance of humanity. This humanity, M'hich was impersonal, was free from any stain of sin ; yet, because He so willed, the liability to punishment which clung to humanity in general remained. Though as re- gards His flesh He descended from Adam and Abraham, He did not sin in Adam, there being no concupiscence in His conception. The question then arises, whether the Personality or the nature of the Son assumed humanity. As he felt the neces- sity of maintaining that the Son, as distinguished from the Father and the Spirit, became incarnate, and as nature is what the Persons of the Godhead have in common, while personality connotes the distinctions in the Godhead, he could only answer that the Personality and not the nature of the Son assumed humanity (against Augustine). But he seems to have held that in and through the Son the Divine nature as such united itself with, and appropriated to itself, humanity. Yet, in agree- ment with John of Damascus and the Antiocliene theologians of the 4th cent., he thought it advis- able to avoid the expression ' the Divine nature became flesh.' In further discussing the signifi- cance of the Incarnation, he rejects the Eutychian and the Nestorian views of the union of Divine and human in the Person of Christ. He denies that out of the two natures was formed a single compound nature. The Word of God, on the con- trary, was simply clothed with body and soul as witii a garment, in order that He might appear in a form accommodated to liuman vision. Ihus he virtually denied the reality of the union, and re- duced to a mere theophany the Incarnation of the Son. The humanity being regarded as a non- essential, accidental feature of the Son of God, its end and aim was solely that of manifestation, and
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CHRIST IN THE MIDDLE AGES
God might for this purpose have used some other means for helping man than that of Incarnation. He regarded Christ's mediatorial work as accom- plished by His humanity alone, the Divine nature remaining apart by itself. We are reconciled with the Son as with the Father and the Spirit. The entire Trinity blots out our sins through the mediation of the humanity of Christ. The work of atonement is accomplished chiefly, if not exclusively, by Christ in His humanity setting forth by His sufferings the fact of God's recon- ciliation, and by thus awakening in men love for God and a desire to follow Christ's example of love to God and self-sacrifice for men. In some passages he seems virtually to denj^ that God be- came objectively a man in Christ, and to maintain that the humanity of God was a purely subjective conception of the human mind. Moreover, recon- ciliation Avas not really effected by Christ, but God intended tliat His life and death should be re- garded as propitiatory. His denial of personality to the humanity of Christ necessitated his denial of the growth of Christ in grace and wisdom. Peter Lombard's denial that God became anything through the Incarnation which He was not before, involves the doctrine more fully wrought out by his successors and known in the history of doc- trines as Nihilianism. This conclusion had already been reached by Abelard (see above) ; but the general orthodoxy of Peter Lombard gave it in- creased importance.