Son of God with our nature constitutes Him one person. And aa in man the personaHty is in the soul and not in the body, so the personaHty of Clirist is in the divine nature. Both of these poiurs are abundantly evident from Scripture. The forme'r, or the unity of Christ's person, has already been proved ; and the latter is })roved by the fact that the Logos, or Son, was from all eternity a distinct person in the Godhead. It was a divine person, not merely a divine nature, that assumed humanity, or became incarnate. Hence it follows that the human nature of Christ, separately con- sidered, is impersonal. To this, indeed, it is objected that intelli- gence and will constitute personality, and as these belong to Christ's human nature personality cannot be denied to it. A per- son, however, is a suppositum mtelligens, but the human nature of Christ is not a suppositum or subsistence. To personality both rational substance and distinct subsistence are essential. The latter the human nature of Christ never possessed. The Son of God did not unite Himself with a human person, but with a human nature. The proof of this is that Christ is but one person. The possibility of such a union cannot rationally be denied. Realists believe that generic humanity, although intelligent and voluntary, is impersonal, existing personally only in individual men. Although realism may not be a correct philosophy, the fact of its wide and long continued prevalence may be taken as a pi^oof that it does not involve any palpable contradiction. Human natui'e, therefore, although endowed with intelligence and will, may be, and in fact is, in the person of Christ impersonal. That it is so is the plain doctrine of Scripture, for the Son of God, a divine person, assumed a perfect human nature, and, nevertheless, remains one person.
The facts, therefore, revealed in Scripture concerning Christ constrain us to believe, (1.) That in his person two natures, the divine and the human, are inseparably united ; and the word nature in this connection means substance. (2.) That these two natures or substances are not mixed or confounded so as to form a third, which is neither the one nor the other. Each nature retains all its own properties unchanged ; so that in Chi'ist there is a finite intelligence and infinite intelligence, a finite will or energy, and an infinite will. (3.) That no property of the divine nature is trans- ferred to the human, and much less is any property of the human transferred to the divine. Humanity in Christ is not deified, nor is the divinity reduced to the limitations of humanity. (4.) The union of the natures is not mere contact or occupancy of the same portion of space. It is not an mdwelling, or a simple control of
892 PART III. Ch. llf. — the person OF CHRIST.
the divine nature over the operations of the human, but a personal union ; such a union that its result is that Christ is one person with two distinct natures forever ; at once God and man.
§ 4. Consequences of the Hypostatical Union.
Communion of Attributes. The first and most obvious of these consequences is, the Koiviavia iStw/xdrwi', or communion of attributes. By this is not meant that the one nature participates in the attributes of the other, but simply that the person is the koivwvos, or partaker of the attributes of both natures ; so that whatever may be affirmed of either nature may be affirmed of the person. As of a man can be affirmed whatever is true of his body and whatever is true of his soul, so of Clirist may be affirmed whatever is true of his human nature and whatever is true of his divinity ; as we can say of a man that he is mortal and immortal ; that he is a creature of the dust and the child of God : so we may say of Christ that He is finite and infinite ; tiiat He is io-norant and omniscient ; that He is less than God and equal with God ; that He existed from eternity and that He was born in time ; that He created all things and that He was a man of sorrows. It is on this principle, that what is true of eitlier nature is true of the person, that a multitude of passages of Scripture are to be explained. These passages are of different kinds.
1. Those in which the predicate belongs to the whole person. This is the most numerous class. Thus when Christ is called our Redeemer, our Lord, our King, Prophet, or Priest, our Shepherd, etc., all these things are true of Him not as the Logos, or Son, nor as the man Christ Jesus, but as the Otav^pwTros, the God-man. And in like manner, when He is said to have been humbled, to have given Himself for us, to be the head of the Church, to be our life, and to be our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemp- tion, this is true of Christ as a person. The same may be said with regard to those passages in which He is said to be exalted above all principalities and powers ; to sit at the right hand of God ; and to come to judge the world.
2. There are many passages in which the person is the subject, but the predicate is true only of the divine nature, or of the Logos. As when our Lord said, " Before Abraham was I am ; " " The glory which I had with thee before the foundation of the world ; " or when it is said, " Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the world, and the heavens are the work of thine hands."