By the impersonality of Christ's human nature, we mean only that it had no personality before Christ took it, no personality before its union with the divine. It was a human nature whose consciousness and will were developed only in union with the personality of the Logos. The Fathers therefore rejected the word ἀνυποστασία, and substituted the word ἐνυποστασία,—they favored not unpersonality but inpersonality. In still plainer terms, the Logos did not take into union with himself an already developed human person, such as James, Peter, or John, but human nature before it had become personal or was capable of receiving a name. It reached its personality only in union with his own divine nature. Therefore we see in Christ not two persons—a human person and a divine person—but one person, and that person possessed of a human nature as well as of a divine. For proof of this, see pages 683-700, also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:289-308.
Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 136—“We count it no defect in our bodies that they have no personal subsistence apart from ourselves, and that, if separated from ourselves, they are nothing. They share in a true personal life because we, whose bodies they are, are persons. What happens to them happens to us.” In a similar manner the personality of the Logos furnished the organizing principle of Jesus' two-fold nature. As he looked backward he could see himself dwelling in eternity with God, so far as his divine nature was concerned. But as respects his humanity he could remember that it was not eternal,—it had had its beginnings in time. Yet this humanity had never had a separate personal existence,—its personality had been developed only in connection with the divine nature. Göschel, quoted in Dorner's Person of Christ, 5:170—“Christ is humanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without however attaining realization in an individual; for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times.”
Emma Marie Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893: 873-881—“Christ is not only the goal of the race which is to be conformed to him, but [pg 680]he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe.”Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159—“Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God.”The incarnation was no detached event,—it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word “whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2).
(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication,—so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.
In Is. 9:6, Christ is called “Everlasting Father.” In Is. 53:10, it is said that “he shall see his seed.”In Rev. 22:16, he calls himself “the root” as well as “the offspring of David.” See also John 5.21—“the Son also giveth life to whom he will”; 15:1—“I am the true vine”—whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures. John 17:2—“thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life”; 1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”—here “spirit” = not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but “the ego of his total divine-human personality.”
Eph. 5:23—“Christ also is the head of the church” = the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his “little children”(John 13:33); when he leaves them they are “orphans” (14:18 marg.). “He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother” (20:17—“my brethren”; cf. Heb. 2:11—“brethren”, and 13—“Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me”; see Westcott, Com. on John 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. Hence John 12:24—“if it die, it beareth much fruit”; Mat. 10:37 and Luke 14:26—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” = none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race. Cf. 1 Tim. 2:15—“she shall be saved through the child-bearing”—which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451 sq. (Syst. Doct., 3:349 sq.).
Lightfoot on Col. 1:18—“who is the beginning, the fruits from the dead”—“Here ἀρχή = 1. priority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); 2. originating power, not only principium principiatum, but also principium principians. As he is first with respect to the universe, so he becomes first with respect to the church; cf. Heb. 7:15, 16—‘another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life’.” Paul teaches that “the head of every man is Christ” (1 Cor. 11:3), and that “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks on Eph. 1:10, that God's purpose is “to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—to bring all things to a head (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name of the Son of God, in a preëminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.
Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflects himto us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yet heappears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while [pg 681]Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25; 2 Cor. 3:18; 1 Cor. 13:12).
Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evolution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.
Simon, Reconciliation, 308—“Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature—even as Paul teaches, θεῖον γένος (Acts 17:29).... At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs.” The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ, “the light that lighteth every man” (John 1:9), is present and is working within us.