Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)

by Augustus Hopkins Strong

In Luke 1:35—“the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”—and Phil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of servant, being made in the likeness of men”—we have evidence that Christ was both Son of God and Son of man from the very beginning of his earthly life. But, according to Dorner, before there was any human consciousness, the personality of Jesus Christ was not divine-human.

(b) Since consciousness and will belong to personality, as distinguished from nature, the hypothesis of a mutual, conscious, and voluntary appropriation [pg 690] of divinity by humanity and of humanity by divinity, during the earthly life of Christ, is but a more subtle form of the Nestorian doctrine of a double personality. It follows, moreover, that as these two personalities do not become absolutely one until the resurrection, the death of the man Jesus Christ, to whom the Logos has not yet fully united himself, cannot possess an infinite atoning efficacy.

Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:68-70, objects to Dorner's view, that it “leads us to a man who is in intimate communion with God,—a man of God, but not a man who is God.” He maintains, against Dorner, that “the union between the divine and human in Christ exists before the consciousness of it.” 193-195—Dorner's view “makes each element, the divine and the human, long for the other, and reach its truth and reality only in the other. This, so far as the divine is concerned, is very like pantheism. Two willing personalities are presupposed, with ethical relation to each other,—two persons, at least at the first. Says Dorner: ‘So long as the manhood is yet unconscious, the person of the Logos is not yet the central ego of this man. At the beginning, the Logos does not impart himself, so far as he is person or self-consciousness. He keeps apart by himself, just in proportion as the manhood fails in power of perception.’ At the beginning, then, this man is not yet the God-man; the Logos only works in him, and on him. ‘The unio personalis grows and completes itself,—becomes ever more all-sided and complete. Till the resurrection, there is a relative separability still.’ Thus Dorner. But the Scripture knows nothing of an ethical relation of the divine, to the human in Christ's person. It knows only of one divine-human subject.”See also Thomasius, 2:80-92.

(c) While this theory asserts a final complete union of God and man in Jesus Christ, it renders this union far more difficult to reason, by involving the merging of two persons in one, rather than the union of two natures in one person. We have seen, moreover, that the Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine of a double personality during the earthly life of Christ. The God-man never says: “I and the Logos are one”; “he that hath seen me hath seen the Logos”; “the Logos is greater than I”; “I go to the Logos.” In the absence of all Scripture evidence in favor of this theory, we must regard the rational and dogmatic arguments against it as conclusive.

Liebner, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 3:349-366, urges, against Dorner, that there is no sign in Scripture of such communion between the two natures of Christ as exists between the three persons of the Trinity. Philippi also objects to Dorner's view: (1) that it implies a pantheistic identity of essence in both God and man; (2) that it makes the resurrection, not the birth, the time when the Word became flesh; (3) that it does not explain how two personalities can become one; see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 4:364-380. Philippi quotes Dorner as saying: “The unity of essence of God and man is the great discovery of this age.” But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist. Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 3:5, 23, 69, 115—“Protestant philosophy has brought about the recognition of the essential connection and unity of the human and the divine.... To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive but connected magnitudes, having an inward relation to each other and reciprocally confirming each other, by which view both separation and identification are set aside.... And now the common task of carrying on the union of faculties and qualities to a union of essence was devolved on both. The difference between them is that only God has aseity.... Were we to set our face against every view which represents the divine and human as intimately and essentially related, we should be wilfully throwing away the gains of centuries, and returning to a soil where a Christology is an absolute impossibility.”

See also Dorner, System, 1:123—“Faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks a union. Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself or to its own representations and thoughts. That would be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consent with a monism which recognizes only God or the world (with the ego). The duality (not the dualism, which [pg 691]is opposed to such monism, but which has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity) is in fact a condition of true and vital unity.” The unity is the foundation of religion; the difference is the foundation of morality. Morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle. Man's moral endeavor is the working of God within him. God can be revealed only in the perfect character and life of Jesus Christ. See Jones, Robert Browning, 146.

Stalker, Imago Christi: “Christ was not half a God and half a man, but he was perfectly God and perfectly man.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 95—“The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeed alwaysGod, and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character.” He knew that he was something more than he was as incarnate. His miracles showed what humanity might become. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 14—“The divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. Whatever of divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human.” See also Biedermann, Dogmatik, 351-353; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:428-430.

3. The real nature of this Union.

(a) Its great importance.—While the Scriptures represent the person of Christ as the crowning mystery of the Christian scheme (Matt 11:27; Col. 1:27; 2:2; 1 Tim. 3:16), they also incite us to its study (John 17:3; 20:27; Luke 24:39; Phil. 3:8, 10). This is the more needful, since Christ is not only the central point of Christianity, but is Christianity itself—the embodied reconciliation and union between man and God. The following remarks are offered, not as fully explaining, but only as in some respects relieving, the difficulties of the subject.