and that they should protest against confounding justification with sanctification. Osiander's cast of mind made him revolt at this, and carried him completely over to the Romish side, so far as the nature of justification is concerned. He said that the Protestant doctrine of justification is " colder than ice." It is as though a man should pay the ransom of a Turkish slave, and leave him and his children in bondage. Still more violent is his denunciation of the doctrine that Christ's righteousness, of which we partake through faith, consists of his obedience and sufferings. What good can they do us ? Christ obeyed and suffered centuries ago ; we cannot appropriate what He then did and make it our own. Imputing it to us does not alter the case. It does not make us better. Speculative as well as Biblical reasons, however, pre- vented Osiander from accepting the Romish solution of the dif- ficulty. What we are said to receive is " the righteousness of Christ," "the righteousness of God; " but sanctifying grace is never called the righteousness of God. If, therefore, that right- eousness by which the believer is constituted righteous, be neither the obedience of Christ, nor infused grace, what can it be other than the essential righteousness of God, the divine essence itself ? Calvin, who in his " Institutes " earnestly combats the theory of Osiander, says that he invented " monstrum nescio quod essentialis justitiae." " Dilucide exprimit, se non ea justitia contentum, quae nobis obedientia et sacrificio mortis Christi parta est, fingere nos substantialiter in Deo justos esse tarn essentia quam qualitate in-
fusa Substantialem mixtionem ingerit, qua Deus se in
nos transfundens, quasi partem sui faciat. Nam virtute Spiritus sancti fieri, ut coalescamus cum Christo, nobisque sit caput et nos ejus membra, fere pro nihilo ducit, nisi ejus essentia nobis misceatur." *
But what theory of the nature of God and of his relation to man did Osiander hold, which admitted of this doctrine of the infusion of the divine essence into the soul ? His views on this point were not clearly brought out, but the primary idea which underlies his speculation is the old doctrine of the oneness of God and man. Man is God in at least one form of his existence. He held that Christ is the image, the representative, the realized ideal of the Godhead, not as Logos or Son, but as Godman, the Theanthropos. As from its nature or from the nature of God this idea must be realized, this manifestation of God in his true idea must occur, and therefore the incarnation would have taken
i Tnstitutio, in. xi. 5, edit. Berlin, 1834, part ii. p. 8.
182 PART in. Ch. XVII. —JUSTIFICATION.
place had man never sinned. The fall of Adam only modified the circumstances attending the incarnation, determining that it should involve suffering and death. But the incarnation itself, the appearance of God in fashion as a man arose from a law of the divine nature. Adam was created not after the image of God as such, but after the image of Christ ; in some sort, a God- man. The afiinity of this theory with the modern pantheistic speculations is apparent. Baur, therefore, is doubtless right when he says, at the close of his apologetic notice of Osiander's doctrine, that his idea of the relation between the divine and hu- man "is that which at last found its adequate scientific expression by Schleiermacher and Hegel, that Christ as Redeemer is the per- fected creation of human nature ; or, that the divine nature is the truth of humanity, and human nature the reality, or existence- form (die Wirklichkeit) of the divine nature." 1
Stancarm. Stancarus, a contemporary and opponent of Osiander, went to the extreme of asserting that the righteousness of Christ was the work of his human nature exclusively. This doctrine was how- ever repudiated by the Romanists as well as by Protestants. If it was Christ's human nature as such (and not the divine person) who obeyed, then the human nature in Christ was a distinct sub- sistence, and thus the unity of his person is destroyed. Besides, if it was not a divine person in his human nature who obeyed and suffered, then we have but a human Saviour, and a righteous- ness of no higher than a human value. We know from Scrip- ture that it was the Lord of glory who was crucified, the Son of God who, being born of a woman, was made under the law.
Pi8cator. The first conspicuous departure from the Protestant doctrine of justification among the Reformed, was on the part of Piscator, whose denial of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ to the believer, excited for some years a good deal of discussion, but it passed away without leaving any distinct trace in the theology of the Reformation. Baur, indeed, assigns to it more importance, as he regards it as the first step in the downfall of the whole doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ, over which he rejoices. Piscator was a native of Strasburg, and a member of
1 Baur, Die Christliche Lehre von der yersdhnung, n. i. 1, Tubingen, 1838, p. 330,