860
CHRIST m EEFORMATION THEOLOGY
freely used during the Middle Ages. It needs scarcely be said that the Evangelical and Catliar- istic parties utterly repudiated . the use of pic- tures of Christ and crucifixes as idolatrous. — See Christ in Art.
Literature. — Writings of the theologians whose opinions are presented : works on the History of Doctrines by Harnack (German and English), Baur, Seeberg, Thomasius (ed. Seeberg), and Loofs ; Bach, Dopniengesch. d. M.A., 1873-5 ; Schwane, Dogmeruiesch. d. mittleren Zeit, 1882 ; Reuter, Gesch. d. AufkUihmg im M.A.,1%75-7 ; Dorner, Entwickelungsrjesch. d. Lehre v. d. Person Christi, 1853 (also Eng. tr.) ; works on Church History by K. Miiller, Moller, Gieseler, Neander, Schaff, and Hase;'art. on 'Christologie,' ' Christusbilder,' and on theo- logians and systems concerned in PliE^, and in Hastings' Enci/clopcedia of Religion and Ethics; Gottschick, 'Studien zur Versohnungslehre d. M.A.' in Zeitschr. f. Kirchengesch. xxii., xxiii., and xxiv.; Dollinger, Beitrdge zur Sektengesch. d. M.A., 1890; Denifle, Archiv f. Lit.-u. Kirchengesch. d. M.A., 1885, and onward. ALBERT HeNRY NeWMAN.
CHRIST IN REFORMATION THEOLOGY.— It
is commonly said that the whole Christian Church lias taken its doctrine of the Person of Christ from the Eastern Church, and simply adopted the defini- tions formulated at the Councils of Nicsea, Con- stantinople, and Chalcedon ; and further, that at the Reformation the Reformers contented them- selves with brushing away the meaningless refine- ments of the Scholastic divines of the Middle Ages, and accepted without change the conclusions come to in the Councils of the undivided Church. Neither of these statements is strictly accurate. They have this basis of truth that botli East and West accepted the same forms of sound words, and professed the Creeds and verbal definitions sanctioned by the (Ecumenical Councils down to that of Chalcedon, but they do not take into a\;count the fact that verbal statements may cover a great deal of divergence in intellectual views — a divergence which in the present case was not merely in intellectual conception, but represented fundamentally distinct types of Christian piety.
The Western Church owed very little to the Eastern, and had a Christology of its own with a clearly marked history, from Tertullian to Augustine ; and its intellectual definitions corre- sponded to a definite type of Christian piety. Athanasius and Augustine alike dwell on the mystery lying in the union of the Divine and the human in the Person of Christ the God-man, and can express their thought in the same language ; but for Athanasius the mystery lies in the union of two natures, while for Augustine the mystery lies in the Person. ' My Saviour,' says Athanasius, ' must be the great God who made heaven and earth ; and He must unite the human and Divine natures which He possesses, in a union which for me is a mystery to be believed, but which my intelligence can never explain or penetrate.' The Greek type of piety fed itself on the mysterious union of natures ; the Incarnation was the central thought in Christianity, and salvation appeared to the Eastern Church as a species of diffusion of the Incarnation : men were saved when they were absorbed in the Divine. Augustine felt as strongly the need for a Saviour who was both God and man ; and, inheriting the theology tradition of the West, first established by Tertullian and confirmed by Ambrose of Milan, he found a clue to a statement of the Person of Christ in the NT phrases, ' the form of God,' and ' the form of a servant,' and held that these two forms coexisted in the unity of the Person (see above, p. 854"^). There was no mystery in the natures. They did not coalesce or blend or unite so far as the natures themselves were concerned. The Person possesses both these forms simultaneously ; the one and the same Person was at one and the same time in the form of God and in the form of a servant ; and in this unity of the Person lay the mystery. ' Filius
Dei semper, filius hominis ex tempore, tamen unus Christus ex unitate personae. In coelo erat quando in terra loquebatur. Sic erat filius hominis in coelo, quomodo filius Dei erat in terra ; filius Dei in terra in suscepta carne, filius hominis in coelo in unitate personse.' All believers feel this unity so very strongly that they instinctively create this unity of the Person for themselves. The unity exists in the heart of every Christian. The common Christian thought is that there is a Man in whom God dwells, and who is God. This is the mystery of the Person. 'Proprium illius hominis sacramentum est.'
It is evident that the piety which dwells on the mystery of the Person as ojjposed to the mystery of the union of the natures has its attention directed to the personal saving acts rather than to the passive condition of incarnation, and sees its salvation worked out for it in the life, death, and rising again of the Divine Person, rather than in the diffusion of the Incarnation. Thus two types of Christian piety correspond to the two diflering intellectual conceptions of where the mystery lies in the Person of Christ, and each can accept the same verbal definitions.
Luther and all the Reformers held the Western conception of the Person of Christ. For Luther and for Calvin tlie most venerated creed was the Western symbol which is called the Apostles' Ci'eed, which in its old Roman form can be traced back to tlie first half of the 2nd century. Luther and Calvin both placed it in their catechisms for children. Calvin declares that the whole of his Institutio is its exposition, and Luther always understood the Nicene and the Athanasian Creeds to be explanations of the Apostles' Creed. For Luther, as for Augustine, Jesus is a Man in whom God dwells, and who is God.