idea of humanity, under its ultimate and most comprehensive form. Without any loss or change of character in the first view, his life is carried over in this last view continually into the per- sons of his people. He lives in Himself, and yet lives in them really and truly at the same time." As we participate in Adam's whole nature, soul and body, so the people of Christ par- ticipate in his whole nature, body, soul, and divinity. These are one indivisible life ; and that one theanthropic life is communi- cated to believers and constitutes them Christians. In this is in- cluded all their participation in the righteousness, merit, and glory of their Redeemer.1
Behind and under these three scientific principles there is another without which the three mentioned amount to nothing ; namely, the unity of God and man. Man in his highest form ; the ideal or perfect man ; He in whom the idea of humanity is fully realized, is God. What does it amount to, if we admit that " organic law " constitutes identity, as in the case of man ; or that personality includes the idea of " one indivisible life ; " that in man there is not one life of the body and another of the soul, that these are only different manifestations of one and the same life ; that the soul can no more be without the body than the body without the soul ; and that in Christ there is not one life of the divinity and another of his humanity ? Suppose we deny what the Church in all ages has affirmed, that there are two evepyctat in Christ, what does this amount to ? Or what does it avail to admit the realistic doctrine of a generic life ; if that life (one and indivisible) be merely human, Adamic ? How can it redeem us ? It is only on the assumption that the human and the divine are one, that this unity, fully realized in Christ, constitutes the " one indivisible life "which passes over to us ; that it has any redeeming power ; and that it exalts man from his degradation, and brings him back to conscious as well as real unity with God.
This theory as presented by Schleiermacher, its author in mod- ern times, was undeniably pantheistic ; as held by many of his disciples, it is, in their apprehension, theistic. In either form the leading idea of the identity of God and man is retained.2 Christ is the ideal man. In Him the idea of humanity is fully realized ; and therefore He is God. The manifestation of God in the form of man, belongs to the divine nature. The incarnation is entirely
1 See Mystical Presence, section first of the Scientific Statement.
2 See this clearly presented in Dr. Ullmann's paper on " The Distinctive Character of Christianity," in the Studien und Kritiken for January, 1845, translated by Dr. Nevin and prefixed as a Preliminary Essay to his work on The Mystical Presence.
206 PART IE. Ch. XVII. — JUSTIFICATION.
independent of the fall of man ; or, admitting that the failure of the race to reach its true ideal in the first instance was the oc- casion of a new, special, and supernatural intervention, yet the whole end of that intervention was to realize the original idea of humanity as God made flesh.
The watchword of this whole system is, in the language of Dr. Ullmann, " The life of Christ is Christianity ; " i. e., the one indivisible life of Christ ; the life of God in the form of humanity. And that life as communicated to men brings them to this real, substantial life union with God. " What," asks Dr. Ullmann, " is that in the personality of Christ by which He is constituted a perfect Saviour in the way of atonement and redemption ? We reply generally, his own substantial nature, at once human and divine ; his life filled with all the attributes of God, and repre- senting at the same time the highest conception of nature and man ; complete and self-sufficient in its own fulness, and yet by this fulness itself the free principle of a new corresponding life- process, in the way of self-communication, for the human world. This life itself, however, has again its central heart, to which es- pecially we must look for the peculiar being of Christ. Here the whole theology of the present time, in all its different tendencies, may be said to have but one voice. That which constitutes the special being of Christ, makes Him to be what He is and gives Him thus his highest significance for the world, is the absolute unity of the divine and human in his nature. Deity and man- hood in Him come fully together and are made one. This is the last ground of Christianity. Here above all we are to look for its distinctive character." He goes on to show that on this point all are agreed. God and man are one. The difference is between the pantheistic and the Christian view which acknowledges a personal God and a positive revelation. " For the whole ap- prehension of Christianity, we may say, not only that much, but that all depends on the question, which of these views shall be adopted ; whether this central fact shall be regarded as a general 1 unity of the divine and human ' realizing itself in the conscious- ness of the race as such, or be conceived of as a concrete ' union of God and man,' that actualizes itself from a definite point and only under certain moral conditions." a That is, whether God is incarnate in the race or in the Church. According to the latter view, the life of Christ, his human life, " filled with all the attri- butes of God," passes over to his people, by a process of natural
1 See Nevin's Mystical Presence, pp. 27, 28, 29.