THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
which was capable of containing the Godhead only in a limited measure.
The question now arises whether the Lutheran theology supplied the defects of the earlier teaching on the Incarnation. Luther's own teaching has so many sides that great care is needed to avoid misrepresenting him. Certain points may be brought out safely, however. (1) Lu- 10. Lu- ther adhered with equal firmness, durther's ing his whole public career, to the true
Christol- divinity and the true humanity of the ogy. one historic person of Christ. (2) He was never inclined to bring the two into relation by anything like the theory of Thomasius, and as early as 1518 gave an exegesis of Phil. ii. 7, which would cut all Scriptural ground from under such a theory. (3) Phrases reminding us of Dorner's view are indeed present in Luther's earlier work; but it is impossible to explain his Christology by insistence on these. (4) He rather shaped his Christology from the first, and especially after the Lord's Supper controversy, along the lines of a doctrine of the two natures understood in an anti-Xestorian sense; and it is indisputable that his view of the suffering of the Son of God and of the communication of the divine attributes (including omnipresence) to Christ according to his humanity was a scholastic development of the communicatio idiomatum as taught in the early Church (see Ubiquity). (5) But in spite of all Luther's polemics against the alloisis of Zwingli, it may fairly be asked whether he always regarded the communication of the divine attributes as real and actual. A number of logical difficulties in the way of this might be collected from his works, and sober thought must be convinced that the root of his doctrine was not in the teaching as to the two natures into which his historical position forced it to grow. (6) It is rather the ultimate datum of his Christology, that the historic person of Jesus was and is the God of revelation. The essential feature of his Christology is really this understanding of the revealing condescension of God, this harking back to " simple-modalistic " ideas. In connection with the notion of the dynamic indwelling of God in the man Jesus, this understanding of the historic personality of Jesus might have led to a new construction of Christology — if theologians had not been bound to the old tradition which constructed from above downward and to the scheme of the natures.
But since they wTere, the Lutheran development could lead to nothing but a scholastic working out of the idea of the communicatio idiomatum as extended by Luther beyond the traditional content of the term. Schools differed in the manner of this working out; but they agreed in denying any real kenosis of the Logos. Chemnitz and Brenz are at one not only in saying that in the Incarnation the Word retained the fulness of his God-
ii. Early head, but that this fulness was im- Post- parted to the humanity of Christ at
Lutheran the Incarnation. The only place where
Doctrine, real kenotic ideas are found in the
Lutheran theology of this period is
among the Philippists; but even here they occur in
nothing like the modern sense. When they speak
of the Son of God " hiding " his majesty in our flesh and blood, or of an " exaltation according to both natures," they are merely Crypto-Calvinists. It is against them that the condemnation of the Formula of Concord is pronounced: " We reject the opinion that to Christ according to his divine nature all power in heaven and in earth was restored at his resurrection and ascension, as though he had laid aside and stripped himself of that power, even according to his divinity, while he was in the state of humiliation." The condemnation goes further than was necessary at the time, for neither Philippists nor Calvinists taught a " transmutation of the divine nature "; the important point is that it goes far enough to reach the modern kenotics.
For the Giessen-Tiibingen controversy see Christology, IX.
The official or ecclesiastical theology of all ages, then, has rejected the idea of kenosis as now held. Just as in the early Church it appeared only in inferior undercurrents and with the " heretical " Apollinarists, so it was in the period
12. Sum- from the sixteenth to the eighteenth mary. century. Echoes of kenotic thought appear especially in Schwenckfeld, and an indubitable kenosis theory in Menno Simons; but in anything like official Protestant theology they occur first in the reckless speculation of Zinzendorf — although here there is no consistently worked out theory, and the kenotic ideas are crossed by regard paid to the official doctrine, including the communicatio idiomatum. But if not the mental ancestors, at least the forerunners of the modern kenotics are (with the nameless persons condemned by Hilary and Cyril and with the Apollinarists) Menno Simons and Zinzendorf . The kenosis theory is an attempt, made at the cost of breaking with certain undeniably ecclesiastical traditions, to save what has been characteristic of the official Christology of 1,700 years — a doctrine of the Incarnation constructed from above downward. Were it tenable in itself, modern theology would have no ground to reproach it with not being traditional. But its weaknesses, nay, its impossibilities, have been frequently indicated, and there is not space here to go into them again. It might be pointed out that the theory proceeds from views of the Trinity which are not far from an intolerable tritheism. If the Logos can become man in such a manner that " outside of the human form assumed by him, he has not reserved to himself a special existence, a special consciousness, a special sphere of operation or possession of power " (Thomasius, ii. 201), little is left of the principle of the Athanasian Creed, " not three Gods, but One God." The justification of the theory, so far as it has one, lies in the recognition, on the negative side, of the insufficiency of the old Christology, and on the positive in the necessity of leaving room for a real, true human life of Jesus. But all theories men can make of the Incarnation of God are temerarious at best; and the most temerarious of all, because it assumes to describe the inmost secrets of the Word as he becomes man, is the modern doctrine of kenosis. (F Loofs.)