(d) It is destructive of the whole Scriptural scheme of salvation, in that it renders impossible any experience of human nature on the part of the divine,—for when God becomes man he ceases to be God; in that it renders impossible any sufficient atonement on the part of human nature,—for mere humanity, even though its essence be a contracted and dormant deity, is not capable of a suffering which shall have infinite value; in that it renders impossible any proper union of the human race with God in the person of Jesus Christ,—for where true deity and true humanity are both absent, there can be no union between the two.
See Dorner, Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 1:390—“Upon this theory only an exhibitory atonement can be maintained. There is no real humanity that, in the strength of divinity, can bring a sacrifice to God. Not substitution, therefore, but obedience, on this view, reconciles us to God. Even if it is said that God's Spirit is the real soul in all men, this will not help the matter; for we should then have to make an essential distinction between the indwelling of the Spirit in the unregenerate, the regenerate, and Christ, respectively. But in that case we lose the likeness between Christ's nature and our own,—Christ's being preëxistent, and ours not. Without this pantheistic doctrine, Christ's unlikeness to us is yet greater; for he is really a wandering God, clothed in a human body, and cannot properly be called a human soul. We have then no middle-point between the body and the Godhead; and in the state of exaltation, we have no manhood at all,—only the infinite Logos, in a glorified body as his garment.”
Isaac Watts's theory of a preëxistent humanity in like manner implies that humanity is originally in deity; it does not proceed from a human stock, but from a divine; between the human and the divine there is no proper distinction; hence there can be no proper redeeming of humanity; see Bib. Sac., 1875:421. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 226—“If Christ does not take a human πνεῦμα, he cannot be a high-priest who feels with us in all our infirmities, having been tempted like us.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 138—“The conversion of the Godhead into flesh would have only added one more man to the number of men—a sinless one, perhaps, among sinners—but it would have effected no union of God and men.” On the theory in general, see Hovey, God with Us, 62-69; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:430-440; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:386-408; Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 356-359; Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 187, 230; Schaff, Christ and Christianity, 115-119.
B. Theory of a gradual incarnation.—Dorner and Rothe hold that the union between the divine and the human natures is not completed by the incarnating act.
The advocates of this view maintain that the union between the two natures is accomplished by a gradual communication of the fulness of the divine Logos to the man Christ Jesus. This communication is mediated by the human consciousness of Jesus. Before the human consciousness begins, the personality of the Logos is not yet divine-human. The personal [pg 689] union completes itself only gradually, as the human consciousness is sufficiently developed to appropriate the divine.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:660 (Syst. Doct., 4:125)—“In order that Christ might show his high-priestly love by suffering and death, the different sides of his personality yet stood to one another in relative separableness. The divine-human union in him, accordingly, was before his death not yet completely actualized, although its completion was from the beginning divinely assured.” 2:431 (Syst. Doct., 3:328)—“In spite of this becoming, inside of the Unio, the Logos is from the beginning united with Jesus in the deepest foundation of his being, and Jesus' life has ever been a divine-human one, in that a present receptivity for the Godhead has never remained without its satisfaction.... Even the unconscious humanity of the babe turns receptively to the Logos, as the plant turns toward the light. The initial union makes Christ already the God-man, but not in such a way as to prevent a subsequent becoming; for surely he did become omniscient and incapable of death, as he was not at the beginning.”
2:464 sq. (Syst. Doct., 3:363 sq.)—“The actual life of God, as the Logos, reaches beyond the beginnings of the divine-human life. For if the Unio is to complete itself by growth, the relation of impartation and reception must continue. In his personal consciousness, there was a distinction between duty and being. The will had to take up practically, and turn into action, each new revelation or perception of God's will on the part of intellect or conscience. He had to maintain, with his will, each revelation of his nature and work. In his twelfth year, he says: ‘I must be about my Father's business.’ To Satan's temptation: ‘Art thou God's Son?’ he must reply with an affirmation that suppresses all doubt, though he will not prove it by miracle. This moral growth, as it was the will of the Father, was his task. He hears from his Father, and obeys. In him, imperfect knowledge was never the same with false conception. In us, ignorance has error for its obverse side. But this was never the case with him, though he grew in knowledge unto the end.” Dorner's view of the Person of Christ may be found in his Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 5:248-261; Glaubenslehre, 2:347-474 (Syst. Doct., 3:243-373).
A summary of his views is also given in Princeton Rev., 1873:71-87—Dorner illustrates the relation between the humanity and the deity of Christ by the relation between God and man, in conscience, and in the witness of the Spirit. “So far as the human element was immature or incomplete, so far the Logos was not present. Knowledge advanced to unity with the Logos, and the human will afterwards confirmed the best and highest knowledge. A resignation of both the Logos and the human nature to the union is involved in the incarnation. The growth continues until the idea, and the reality, of divine humanity perfectly coincide. The assumption of unity was gradual, in the life of Christ. His exaltation began with the perfection of this development.”Rothe's statement of the theory can be found in his Dogmatik, 2:49-182; and in Bib. Sac., 27:386.
It is objectionable for the following reasons:
(a) The Scripture plainly teaches that that which was born of Mary was as completely Son of God as Son of man (Luke 1:35); and that in the incarnating act, and not at his resurrection, Jesus Christ became the God-man (Phil. 2:7). But this theory virtually teaches the birth of a man who subsequently and gradually became the God-man, by consciously appropriating the Logos to whom he sustained ethical relations—relations with regard to which the Scripture is entirely silent. Its radical error is that of mistaking an incomplete consciousness of the union for an incomplete union.