As to the still more difficult question, How can the Son as the second person of the Trinity retain his divine perfections (as Ebrard holds that He does), and yet, as revealed on earth, lay them aside? " The one is world-ruling and omniscient, and the other is not," he says we must understand the problem. It is not that two natures become one nature. " Two natures as two things (Stiicken) are out of the question." The Logos is not one nature, and tlie incarnate Son of God, Jesus, another ; but the incarnate Son pos- sesses the properties of both natures. The question only is. How can the incarnate Logos, since He has not the one nature, the divine, in the form of God (in der Ewigkeitsform), be one with the world-governing Logos who is in the form of God ? This question, which is equivalent to asking, How the same individual mind can be finite and infinite at the same time, he answers by saying, first, that the continuity of existence does not depend upon continuity of consciousness. A man in a swoon or in a state of magnetic sleep, is the same person, although his consciousness be suspended or abnormal. That is true, but the question is, How the same mind can be conscious and unconscious at the same time, How the same individual Logos can be a feeble infant and at the same time the intelligently active world-governing God. Secondly, he admits that the above answer does not fully meet the case, and therefore adds that the whole difficulty disappears when we remem- ber (dass die Ewigkeit nicht eine der Zeit parallellaufende Linie ist), that Eternity and Time are not parallel lines. But, thirdly, seeing that this is not enough, he says that the Eternal Logos overlooks his human form of existence with one glance (mit einem Schlage), whereas the incarnate Logos does not, but with true human consciousness, looks forward and backward. All this avails nothing. The contradiction remains. The theory assumes that the same individual mind can be conscious and unconscious, finite and infinite, ignorant and omniscient, at the same time.^
Gess admits the contradiction involved in the doctrine as pre- sented by Ebrard, and therefore adopts the common form of the theory. He holds that the Eternal Son at the incarnation laid aside the Godhead and became a man. The substance of the Logos remained ; but that substance was in the form of an infant, and had nothing beyond an infant's knowledge or power. In the
1 ChristUche Dogmatik. Von Johannes Heinrich August Ebrard, Doctor and ord. Pro- feseor der ref. Tbeologie zu Erlangea. Konigsberg, 1852, to), u. §§ 391-394, pp. U2-149.
436 PART m. Ch. m. — the person of CHRIST,
Trinity, the Father is God of Himself; the Son is God by the com- munication of the divine Hfe from the Father. During the earthly career of the Logos the communication of the divine life was sus- pended. The Logos reduced to the limitations of manhood, re- ceived from the Father such communications of supernatural power as He needed. When He ascended and sat down at the right hand of God, He received the divine life in all its fulness as He had possessed it before He came into the world. " The same sub- stance," he says, "slumbered in the womb of the Virgin, without self-consciousness, which thirty-four years after yielded itself a. sacrifice, without blemish and spot, to the Father, having previously revealed to mankind the truth, which it had perfectly compre- hended. At the time of this slumber there already existed in this substance that indestructible life by virtue of which it had accom- plished our redemption (Heb. vii. 16), as well as the power to know the Father as no other knows Him (Matt. xi. 27), but it was unconscious life. Moreover, the same substance which now slumbered in unconsciousness, had before existed with the Father as the Logos, by whom the Father had created, governed, and preserved the world, but it was no longer aware of this." ^ On the opposite page, it is said, that it is the self-conscious will of a man that calls all his powers into action. " When this sinks into slumber, all the powers of the soul fall asleep. It was the sub- stance of the Logos which in itself had the power to call the world into existence, to uphold and enlighten it ; but when the Logos sank into the slumber of unconsciousness, his eternal holiness, his omniscience, his omnipresence, and all his really divine attributes were gone ; it being the self-conscious will of the Logos through which all the divine powers abiding in Him had been called into action. They were gone, i. e., suspended, — existing still, but only potentially. Further, a man when he awakes from sleep is at once in full possession of all his powers and faculties ; but when con- sciousness burst upon Jesus it was not that of the eternal Logos, but a really human self-consciousness, which develops by degrees
and preserves its identity only through constant changes
It was this human form of self-conscious existence which the Logos chose in his act of self-divestiture. Hence it plainly appears that omniscience, which sees and knows all things at once, and from one central point, and the unchangeable merging of the will into the Father's, or divine holiness, are not to be attributed to Jesus
1 The Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ Translated from the German, by J A. Reubelt, D. D., p. 342.