he hated the Romish doctrine of transubstantiation, and was bit- terly opposed to all the subtleties of scholasticism. Yet as he un- derstood our Lord's words, " This is my body," literally, he adopted all the subtleties, inconsistencies, and, we may say, impossibilities, involved in the doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ's body. Body includes the idea of form as well as of substance. A man's body is not the water, ammonia, and lime of which it is composed. It is certainly a strong objection to any doctrine that it owes its existence mainly to the desire to support a false interpretation of Scripture.
Lutlicrans, indeed, deny that their doctrine concerning the per^ son of Christ is thus subordinate to their views of the Lord's Sup- per. Even Dorner, in one place, seems to take the same ground. Elsewhere, however, he fully admits the fact. Thus when speak- ing of Luther, he says that he " did not develop his deep and full Christological intuitions in a connected doctrinal form. His con- troversy with the Swiss, on the contrary, had led him, as we have shown, to the adoption of single divergent principles, vviiich aided in reducing Christology to the rank of a follower in the train of another doctrine, instead of conceding to it an independent life and sphere of its own." ^ And on the next page he says, " Even the champions of peace between the evangelical parties put their Christology in a position of dependence on the doctrine of the Eucharist, which almost involved the entire loss of the grand fea- tures of Luther's doctrine."
3. It is to be objected to the Lutheran doctrine, not only that it undertakes to explain what is an inscrutable mystery, and that the explanation derives its character from Luther's views of the Eucharist, but also that the explanation itself is uttei-ly unsatis- factory. In the first place, it is one sided. It insists on a com- munication of natures and a communion of attributes. Lutherans maintain that God became man as truly, and in tlie same sense that man became God. Yet they deny that the divine nature received anything from the human, or that God was in any way subject to the limitations of humanity. Nevertheless, such limitation appears to be involved in the Lutheran doctrine of Christ's humiliation. The idea is that after the incarnation the Logos is not extra car- nem, that all his activity is with and through the activity of his humanity ; and yet it is affirmed that the humanity did not exer- cise, while on earth, except occasionally, its divine perfections. This seems of necessity to involve the admission that the Logos did not exercise those perfections during the period of the humilia- 1 Porner's History of the Doctrine on the Person of Christ, div. ii. vol. ii. p. 172.
416 PART m. Ch. m. — the person of CHRIST.
tion. That is, while Christ was on earth, the knowledge and power of the Logos were measured and circumscribed by the knowledge and power of the human soul of Christ. This is the modern doctrine of /ceVcoo-t? which Luther rejected. He refused, says Dorner, " to purchase an actual growth of the divine-human vital unity at the price of a depotentiation or self-emptying of the Logos." 1
In the second place, the doctnne in question is destitute of any Scriptural support. Almost all the arguments derived from the Scriptures, urged by Lutherans, are founded on passages in which the person of Christ is denominated from his human nature when divine attributes or prerogatives are ascribed to Him ; whence it is inferred that those attributes and prerogatives belong to his humanity. Thus because it is said, " The Son of Man is in heaven," it is inferred that the human nature, i. e., the soul and body of Christ, were in heaven while He was on earth. But they do not carry out the principle, and argue that because Christ is denominated from his divine nature when the limitations of human- ity are ascribed to Him, that therefore his divine nature is limited. But if his being called God when He is said to have purchased the Church wMth his blood, does not prove that the divine nature suffered death, neither does his being called the Son of Man when He is said to be in heaven, prove the ubiquity of his humanity. Still less force is due to the argument from passages in which the Theanthropos is the subject to which divine perfections and pre- rogatives are ascribed. That our Lord said, " All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth," no more proves that his hum-an nature is almighty, than his sa^nng, " Before Abraham was I am," proves that his humanity is eternal. If saying that man is a rational creature does not imply that his bod}' thinks, saying that Jesus Christ is God, does not imply that his human nature is divine. If the personal union between the soul and body in man, does not imply that the attributes of the soul are communicated to the body, then the personal union of the two natures in Christ does not imply that the divine attributes are communicated to his humanity.
In the third place, the Lutheran doctrine destroys the integrity of the human nature of Christ. A body which fills immensity is not a human body. A soul which is omniscient, omnipresent, and almighty, is not a human soul. The Christ of the Bible and of the human heart is lost if this doctrine be true.
In the fourth place, the Lutheran doctrine is contrary to the 1 Dorner's History of tke Doctrine on the Person of Christ, div. ii. vol. ii. p. 97.