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Page 25
Historical scholars have difficulty in tracing any of these accounts but
the first directly to Jesus Himself; but they come from the earliest
period of the Church, and they have satisfied many generations of
thoughtful Christians as explanations of the uniqueness of the Person of
their Lord. Some of them do not seem to be as helpful to modern
believers, and are even said to render Him less intelligible. We must
beware on the one hand of insisting too strongly that a believer in
Jesus Christ shall hold a particular view of His origin; the diversity
in the New Testament presentations of Christ would not be there, if all
its writers considered all four of these statements necessary in every
man's conception of his Lord. And on the other hand, we must point out
that it is a tribute to Jesus' greatness that so many circumstances were
appealed to to account for Him, and that all of them have spiritual
value. All four insist that Jesus' origin is in God, and that in Jesus
we find the Divine in the human. All four--a spiritual endowment, a
spiritual heredity, a spiritual birth, the incarnation of God in
Man--may well seem congruous with the Jesus of our experience, even if
we are not intellectually satisfied with the particular modes in which
these affirmations have been made in the past. The question of Jesus'
origin is not of primary importance; He Himself judged nothing by its
antecedents, but by its results--"By their fruits ye shall know them."
No man, today, should be hindered from believing in Christ, because he
does not find a particular statement in connection with His origin
credible. Christ is here in our world, however He entered it, and can be
tested for what He _is_. To know Him is not to know how He came to be,
but what He can do for us. "To know Christ," Melancthon well said, "is
to know His benefits."
The third question, How are we to conceive of the union of Deity and
humanity in Him? is a problem which exercised the Fourth, Fifth and
Sixth Centuries of the Christian Church to the exclusion of almost all
others. The theologians of those times worked out (and fought out) the
theory of the union of two "natures" in one "Person," which remains the
official statement of the Church's interpretation of Christ in Greek,
Roman and Protestant creeds. But the philosophy which dealt in "natures"
and "persons" is no longer the mode of thought of educated people; and
while we may admire the mental skill of these earlier theologians, and
may recognize that an Athanasius and his orthodox allies were contending
for a vital element in Christian experience, their formulations do not
satisfy our minds.
In the last century some divines advanced a modification of this ancient
theory, naming it the Kenotic or Self-emptying Theory, from the Greek
word used by St. Paul in the phrase, "He _emptied_ Himself." The eternal
Son of God is represented as laying aside whatever attributes of
Deity--omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, etc.--could not be
manifested in an entirely human life. The Jesus of history _reveals_ so
much of God as man can contain, but _is_ Himself more. But we know of no
personality which can lay aside memory, knowledge, etc. The theory
begins with a conception of Deity apart from Jesus, and then proceeds to
treat Him as partially disclosing this Deity in His human life; but the
Christian has his experience of the Divine through Jesus, and his
reflection must start with Deity as revealed in Him.
Still later in the century, Albrecht Ritschl gave another interpretation
of Christ's Person. He began with the completely human Figure of
history, and pointed out that it is through Him we experience communion
with God, so that to His followers Jesus is divine; His humanity is the
medium through which God reveals Himself to us. This affirmation of His
Deity is an estimate, made by believers, of Jesus' worth to them; they
cannot prove it to any who are without a sense of Christ's value as
their Saviour. Any further explanation of how the human and the Divine
are joined in Jesus, he deemed beyond the sphere of religious knowledge.
Our modern thought of God as immanent in His world and in men enables
us, perhaps more easily than some of our predecessors, to fit the figure
of Christ into our minds. The discovery of the Divine in the human does
not surprise us. We think of God as everywhere manifesting Himself, but
His presence is limited by the medium in which it is recognized. He
reveals as much of Himself through nature as nature can disclose; as
much through any man as he can contain; as much through the complete Man
as He is capable of manifesting. Nor does this Self-revelation of God in
Jesus do away for us with Jesus' own attainment of His character.
Immanent Deity does not submerge the human personality. Jesus was no
merely passive medium through which God worked, but an active Will who
by constant co�peration with the Father "was perfected." If there was an
"emptying," there was also a "filling," so that we see in Him the
fulness of God. How He alone of all mankind came so to receive the
Self-giving Father remains for us, as for our predecessors, the ultimate
riddle, a riddle akin to that which makes each of us "indescribably
himself." And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better
explanations to substitute for those of the First Century; the mystery
of our Lord's singular personality remains unsolved.
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