while on earth ; and the same with the unchangeable bliss of the livine life. Nor was it only eternal self-consciousness which the Son laid aside, but He also ' went out from the Father.' We are not to understand that the indwelling of the Father, Son, and Spirit in each other had been dissolved, but that the Father's giving the Son to have life in Himself, as the Father has, was suspended. Having laid aside his self-consciousness and activity. He lost with this the capacity of receiving into Himself the stream of life from the Father, and sending it forth again ; in other words. He Avas no longer omnipotent. Equally lost, or laid aside, was his omnipres- ence, which must not, at all events, be considered as universally diffused, but as dependent on the self-conscious will." ^
Remarks.
1. The first remark to be made on this theory in all its forms is that it is a departure from the faith of the Church. This objection turns up first on every occasion, because that is its proper place. If the Bible be the only infallible rule of faith and practice ; and if the Bible be a plain book, and if the Spirit guides the people of God (not the external church, or body of mere professing Chris- tians) into the knowledge of the truth, then the presumption is invincible that what all true Christians believe to be the sense of Scripture is its sense. The whole Christian world has believed, and still does believe, that Christ was a true man ; that He had a real body and a human soul. The Council of Chalcedon in formu- lating this article of the common faith, declared that Christ was, and is, God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever ; that according to the one nature He is consubstantial (6/i.oovcrtos) with us, and according to the other He is consubstantial with the Father. There is no dispute as to the sense in which the Council used the word nature, because it has an established meaning in theology, and because it is explained by the use of the Latin word consubstantial, and the Greek word 6/xooro-tos. Nor is it questioned that the decisions of that Council have been accepted by the whole Church. This doctrine of two natures in Christ the new theory rejects. This, as we have seen, Dorner expressly asserts. We have seen, also, that Ebrard says, that the idea of two natures in the sense of two substances (Stiicke, concrete existences) is out of the question. The Logos did not assume human nature, but hu- man attributes ; He appeared in the fashion of a man. Gess, in his luminous book, teaches over and over, that it was the substance
1 The Scripture Doctrine of the Perwn of Christ, pp. 343, 344.
438 PART m. Ch. m. — the person of CHRIST.
of the Logos that was the human soul of Christ. He speaks of his " Logos-nature ; " of the " Logos being the life, or life-principle " of his humanity. He says, in so many words,- that the soul of Jesus was " not like that of other men, a soul created by God and for God, but the Logos in the form of human existence." It is consonant, he says, " to the nature of Christ's soul, as being the Logos existing in human form, that God should take possession of it in a peculiar manner." This idea is the very essence of the doctrine. For if the Logos "emptied" Himself, if He laid aside his omnipresence and omnipotence, and became a human soul, what need or what possibility remains of another newly created soul?
This is not Apollinarianism ; for Apollinaris taught that the Logos supplied the place of a rational soul in the person of Christ. He did not become such a soul, but, retaining in actu as well as in potentia, the fulness of the divine perfections, took its place. Nor is it exactly Eutychianism. For Eutyches said that there were two natures before the union, and only one after it. The two were so united as to become one. This the theory before us de- nies, and affirms that from the beginning the Logos was the sole rational element in the constitution of the person of our Lord. It agrees, however, with both these ancient and Church-rejected errors in their essential principles. It agrees with the Apollinari- ans in saying that the Logos was the rational element in Christ ; and it agrees with the Eutychians in saying that Christ had but one nature.
The doctrine is in still more obvious contradiction to the decis- ions of the Council of Constantinople on the Monothelite contro- versy. That Council decided that as there were two natures in Christ, there were of necessity two wills. The new theory in assert- ing the oneness of Christ's nature, denies that He had two wills. The acts, emotions, and sufferings of his earthly life, were the acts, emotions, and sufferings of the Logos. So far as Christian interest in the doctrine is concerned, it was to get at this conclusion the theory was adopted if not devised. It was to explain how that more than human value belongs to the sufferings of Christ, and more than human efficacy to his life, that so many Christian men n^ere led to embrace the new doctrine. The Church doctrine, however, does not consider either the sufferings or the life of Christ as those of a mere man. He was a divine person, God manifest in the flesh; and his sufferings and life were those of that person. 1 The Scripture Doctrine of the Perion of Chrut, p. 378.