RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Christologv
limited consciousness of the man Jesus; but thij difficulty attaches to every theory which holds fast] to the strict divinity of our Lord
7. Conclusion: In reviewing these various theories we can readily accept the elements of truth which they variously express. Christ is the ideal man realized, the head of the redeemed race, the perfect model for universal imitation. So far, even the Humanitarian theory is correct; only it does not go far enough, and it becomes a serious error when it denies the higher truth beyond. For Christ is also the eternal Son of God, who in
infinite love renounced his glory and 1. Ele- majesty, and lowered himself to a Tmth in All ^^^'^^^ entering into all its wants, Theories, trials, and temptations, yet without
sin, and humbled himself, even to the death on the cross, in order to emancipate men from the guilt and power of sin, and to reconcile them to God. He is the one undivided God-man, who, as man, calls out all our sympathies and trust, and, as God, is the object of true worship. In this respect we accept fully the faith of the Church in all ages, and consider the divinity of our Lord as the corner-stone of Christianity. We hold, with Ritschl and Paine, to the moral nature of the God-manhood of Christ, but without sacrificing his eternal divinity. We would go as far with the Kenosis theory as the unchangeable nature of God permits, and as the imbounded love of God demands. We dissent from the dyophysitic and dualistic psychology of Chalcedon, and hold' to the inseparable personal unity of the life, and at the same time to the genuine growth of Christ, without asserting, with the Kenoticists, a growth of the divine Logos, who is unchangeable in his nature; but we substitute for this impossible idea a gradual communication of the divinity to the God-man.
This is, in substance, the Christ of the Catholic creeds and the Protestant confessions of faith.
He is a mystery indeed to our intellectual and philosophical comprehension, but a mystery made manifest as the most glorious fact in history — the blessed mystery of godliness, the inexhaustible theme of meditation and praise for all generations. How the whole fulness of uncreated divinity can be poured out into a human being passes our imderstanding, but not more, perhaps, than the familiar fact that an immaterial and immortal soul made in God's image, and capable of endless perfectibility, inhabits and interpenetrates a material and mortal body. And deeper and grander than both mysteries is the infinite love of God which lies back of them in the very depths of eternity, and which prompted the incarnation and the death of his only-begotten Son for the salvation of a sinful worid. Yet this love of God in Christ, whose " breadth and length and height and depth passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii. IS, 19), is more certain and constant than the Hght of the sun in heaven and the voice of conscience in man.
2. The Mystery of Christ.
It has been thought best not to discuss in this article the bearing of the denial of the virgin-birth
of our Lord upon the problems of christology. Origen and other early Fathers, whose names have a prominent place in the development of christology, emphasized the virgin-birth as an integral element of Christ's divinity. The purely human origin of Christ from a human father and mother . favors strongly, if it does not necessiof This^ tsite, the view that Christ was only a Article. precludes the view that he was
either preexistent or essentially divine. Nor has it seemed necessary to take into consideration the view of the contemporary school of historical critics, Pfleiderer, Wernle, and others, who make a sharp distinction between Paul's theology and the much simpler claims Christ made for himself, and who regard Paul as the inventor of the deity of Christ and other doctrines which the Church has always held. This article assumes the integrity of the four Gospels, and that the Pauline epistles interpreted but did not originate the doctrines concerning Christ's person.
(Philip ScHAFFf) D. S. Schaff. XI. Additional Note : Certain questions which have come up in the recent dogmatic consideration of the person of Christ require an additional statement. That this problem engaged the early attention of the church is evident by the birthstories of Matthew and Luke, the stories of the bap- 4-^ tism, the Logos-doctrine of the Fourth
I. Preex- Gospel and the Epistle to the Heistence. brews, and Paul's conception of preexistence. In addition to the orthodox theory of the Logos , or the second person of the Trinity, who assumed human nature in Jesus Christ, and the speculations of those who have advocated the several Kenotic theories (see Kenosis), various attempts have been made to do justice to the New Testament teaching concerning preexistence. (1) The preexistence is ideal. According to a form of expression common in the time of Jesus, things of exceeding worth, as the ark of the covenant, the temple, Jerusalem, are conceived as already existing in heaven with God before they are manifested on earth. Thus the transcendent ground of the person of Christ was within God's eternal knowledge, so that in the divine idea and purpose of redemption Jesus had eternal existence (cf. Harnack. Dogma, vol. i.. Appendix I.). Or, the meaning of preexistence is that Christ in human form is the revelation of the eternal cosmic principle through which in creation and redemption God is disclosing himself (W A. Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, pp. 179-180, 347, New York, 1906). (2) The " heavenly man " preexisting in the image of God (I Cor. XV. 47, cf. Col. i. 15-17; II Cor. viii. 9) does not assume human nature, but becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ. This interpretation, originating in Paul's antithesis of flesh and spirit, found a congenial soil in the religious ideas of the time — a logical deduction backward drawn from belief in the risen Christ (cf. O. Pfleiderer, Paulinism, part I., chap, iii., London). Or, the " heavenly man " had a preexistent life, and this hfe was divine not in the absolute sense, but as conferred upon him by God, thus identical in principle with the glorified life (C. H. von Weizsacker, Apostolic Age, book II.,
Christolog-y Christopher, Saint