But in every stage of his divine-human development the Son's oneness of being and of will with the Father remained, and by this verjr fact he was in his human teaching and conduct the express image of the invisible God, the personal revealer of him who had sent him, the Son of God in the form of human existence. According to this view, the immanent relation of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost did not suffer any change by the laying asiile of the divine form of existence on the part of the Son, nor during the time of his existence in human form. Only according to this view also have the words of the incarnate Son of God their full force : " Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me ; if not, believe me for the very works' sake. The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself, but the Fa- ther that dwelleth in me, he docth the Avorks" (John xiv, 10, 11). If it be objected that the really human development of Jesus is inconsistent A\ath or excluded by the continuance of the eternal self-consciousness of the Logos in the incarnation, we answer that this infer- ence does not necessarily follow. There is nothing self- contradictory in the assumption that the incarnate Lo- gos had in his one Ego a consciousness of his twofold nature. Even if we cannot explain how the Logos was conscious of himself as the eternal Son of God, and yet had this self-consciousness only in a human form, yet the consciousness of his twofold nature was necessary for the mediatorial office of the incarnate Logos; he was to know himself accorduig to his absolute divinity and his human development; and if we suppose that of his di- vine self-consciousness onli/ so much as was necessary for his mediatoiial office passed over into his human self- consciousness, this double self-consciousness is in perfect agreement with his purely human life and with his mediatorial office. As to the divine attributes or powers that are connected with the divine self-consciousness, there is nothing self-contradictorj' in the supposition that the divine Ego of the Logos acted in concert with the powers of human nature, with human self-conscious- ness, and human volition, if we ado^it the cthoi-e-mentioned relative selj-limitutian of the divine knoivledge and will as necessary for the mediatorial office. But even if by this view of the personal oneness of the divine and the human in Christ the metaphysical difficulty should not be fidly removed, we would prefer confessing the unfathomable depth of this mystery to any philosophical solution of the problem which we could not fully reconcile with the plain teachings of the Word of God.
One of the latest and most striking presentations of this self-abnegation on the part of our Lord is that found in Henry Ward Beccher's Life of Jesus (i, 50), which we here transcribe, omitting its monothelitism and anthropopathy : " The divine Spirit came into the world in the person of Jesus, not bearing the attributes of Deity in their full disclosure and power. He came into the world to subject his spirit to that whole disci- pline and exjierience through which every man must pass. He veiled his royalty ; he folded back, as it were, within himself those ineffiible powers which belonged to him as a free spirit in heaven. He went into cap- tivity to himself, wrapping in weakness and forgetful- ness his divine energies while he was a babe. ' Being found in fashion as a man,' he was subject to that grad- ual imfolding of his buried powers which belongs to in- fancy and childhood. 'And the c\n\<\ greiu and iraxed strong in spirit.' He was subject to the restrictions which hold and hinder common men. He was to come back to himself little by little. Who shall say that God cannot put himself into finite conditions? Though a free spirit God cannot grow, yet as fettered in the flesh he may. Breaking out at times with amazing power in single directions, yet at other times feeling the mist of humanity resting upon his brows, he declares, ' Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.' This is just the experience which we should expect in a being whose problem of life was, not the dis-
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closure of the full power and glory of God's natural at- tributes, but tbe manifestation of the love of God, and of the extremities of self-renunciation to which the di- vine lieart would sulnnit, in the rearing up of his family of children from animalism and passion. The incessant looking for the signs of divine power and of intinite at- tributes in the earthly life of Jesus, whose mission it was to bring the divine Spirit within the conditions of feeble humanity, is as if one should search a dethroned king in exile for his crown and his sceptre. We are not to look fur a glorified, an enthroned .Jesus, but for God manifest in the jlesh ; and in this view the very limita- tions and seeming discrepancies in a divine Ufe become congruous parts of the whole sublime problem."
Most theologians, however, will see in this progres- sive development of Jesus rather the growth of the /nt- maii faculties as shone upon by the inward sun of divine life ; and in the alternate lights and shades of the Re- deemer's career, not so much the vicissitudes imposed upon the enshrined Deity by the earthly abode, as the mutual play of the divine and the human natures, now one and now the other specially manifesting itself. In- deed, the theory of a somewhat double consciousness, if we may so express it, or at least an occasional (and in early life a prolonged) withdrawal of the divine cogni- tions from the human intellect, and thus of the fuU di- vine energies from the human will, seems to be required in order to meet the varying aspects under whicli the comijound life of Jesus presents itself in the Gospels. Certainly the union of the divine Spirit with a mere human body is a heathen theophany, not a Christian incarnation. Indeed, the "Jksh'' which the Saviour as- sumed, in its Scripture sense, has reference to human vafnre as such, its mental and spiritual faculties not less than its physical. The problem, therefore, still is to adjust the God to the man. This, of course, can only be done by conceiving of the infinite as assuming finite relations, and this, in short, is the meaning of Kenosis. See HiMiLiATiox.