Matt. 11:27—“no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” Here it seems to be intimated that the mystery of the nature of the Son is even greater than that of the Father. Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:408—The Person of Christ is in some respects more baffling to reason than the Trinity. Yet there is a profane neglect, as well as a profane curiosity: Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery ... which is Christ in you, the hope of glory”; 2:2, 3—“the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”; 1 Tim. 3:16—“great is the mystery of godliness; He who was manifested in the flesh”—here the Vulgate, the Latin Fathers, and Buttmann make μυστήριον the antecedent of ὅς, the relative taking the natural gender of its antecedent, and μυστήριον referring to Christ; Heb. 2:11—“both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one [not father, but race, or substance]” (cf. Acts 17:26—“he made of one every nation of men”)—an allusion to the solidarity of the race and Christ's participation in all that belongs to us.
John 17:3—“this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him who thou didst send, even Jesus Christ”; 20:27—“Reach hither thy finger, and see my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and put it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing”; Luke 24:39—“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; Phil. 3:8, 10—“I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord ... that I may know him”; 1 John 1:1—“that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life.”
Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 254, 255—“Ranke said that Alexander was one of the few men in whom biography is identical with universal history. The words apply far better to Christ.” Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 267—“Religion being merely the personality of God, Christianity the personality of Christ.” Pascal: “Jesus Christ is the centre of everything and the object of everything, and he who does not know him knows nothing of the order of nature and nothing of himself.” Goethe in his last years wrote: “Humanity cannot take a retrograde step, and we may say that the Christian religion, now that it has once appeared, can never again disappear; now that it has once found a divine embodiment, cannot again be dissolved.” H. B. Smith, that man of clear and devout thought, put his whole doctrine into one sentence: “Let us come to Jesus,—the person of Christ is the centre of theology.” Dean Stanley never tired of [pg 692]quoting as his own Confession of Faith the words of John Bunyan: “Blest Cross—blest Sepulchre—blest rather he—The man who there was put to shame for me!”And Charles Wesley wrote on Catholic Love: “Weary of all this wordy strife, These motions, forms, and modes and names, To thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life, Whose love my simple heart inflames—Divinely taught, at last I fly, With thee and thine to live and die.”
“We have two great lakes, named Erie and Ontario, and these are connected by the Niagara River through which Erie pours its waters into Ontario. The whole Christian Church throughout the ages has been called the overflow of Jesus Christ, who is infinitely greater than it. Let Lake Erie be the symbol of Christ, the pre-existent Logos, the Eternal Word, God revealed in the universe. Let Niagara River be a picture to us of this same Christ now confined to the narrow channel of His manifestation in the flesh, but within those limits showing the same eastward current and downward gravitation which men perceived so imperfectly before. The tremendous cataract, with its waters plunging into the abyss and shaking the very earth, is the suffering and death of the Son of God, which for the first time makes palpable to human hearts the forces of righteousness and love operative in the Divine nature from the beginning. The law of universal life has been made manifest; now it is seen that justice and judgment are the foundations of God's throne; that God's righteousness everywhere and always makes penalty to follow sin; that the love which creates and upholds sinners must itself be numbered with the transgressors, and must bear their iniquities. Niagara has demonstrated the gravitation of Lake Erie. And not in vain. For from Niagara there widens out another peaceful lake. Ontario is the offspring and likeness of Erie. So redeemed humanity is the overflow of Jesus Christ, but only of Jesus Christ after He has passed through the measureless self-abandonment of His earthly life and of His tragic death on Calvary. As the waters of Lake Ontario are ever fed by Niagara, so the Church draws its life from the cross. And Christ's purpose is, not that we should repeat Calvary, for that we can never do, but that we should reflect in ourselves the same onward movement and gravitation towards self-sacrifice which He has revealed as characterizing the very life of God” (A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress, London, July 12, 1905).
(b) The chief problems.—These problems are the following: 1. one personality and two natures; 2. human nature without personality; 3. relation of the Logos to the humanity during the earthly life of Christ; 4. relation of the humanity to the Logos during the heavenly life of Christ. We may throw light on 1, by the figure of two concentric circles; on 2, by remembering that two earthly parents unite in producing a single child; on 3, by the illustration of latent memory, which contains so much more than present recollection; on 4, by the thought that body is the manifestation of spirit, and that Christ in his heavenly state is not confined to place.
Luther said that we should need “new tongues” before we could properly set forth this doctrine,—particularly a new language with regard to the nature of man. The further elucidation of the problems mentioned above will immediately occupy our attention. Our investigation should not be prejudiced by the fact that the divine element in Jesus Christ manifests itself within human limitations. This is the condition of all revelation. John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the father”; Col. 2:9—“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” = up to the measure of human capacity to receive and to express the divine. Heb. 2:11 and Acts 17:26 both attribute to man a consubstantiality with Christ, and Christ is the manifested God. It is a law of hydrostatics that the smallest column of water will balance the largest. Lake Erie will be no higher than the water in the tube connected therewith. So the person of Christ reached the level of God, though limited in extent and environment. He was God manifest in the flesh.
Robert Browning, Death in the Desert: “I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee to be wise”; Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ: “That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my Universe that feels and knows.” “That face,” said Browning to Mrs. Orr, as he finished reading the poem, “is the face of Christ. That is how I feel him.” This is his [pg 693]answer to those victims of nineteenth century scepticism for whom incarnate Love has disappeared from the universe, carrying with it the belief in God. He thus attests the continued presence of God in Christ, both in nature and humanity. On Browning as a Christian Poet, see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447; S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 181-226.
(c) Reason for mystery.—The union of the two natures in Christ's person is necessarily inscrutable, because there are no analogies to it in our experience. Attempts to illustrate it on the one hand from the union and yet the distinctness of soul and body, of iron and heat, and on the other hand from the union and yet the distinctness of Christ and the believer, of the divine Son and the Father, are one-sided and become utterly misleading, if they are regarded as furnishing a rationale of the union and not simply a means of repelling objection. The first two illustrations mentioned above lack the essential element of two natures to make them complete: soul and body are not two natures, but one, nor are iron and heat two substances. The last two illustrations mentioned above lack the element of single personality: Christ and the believer are two persons, not one, even as the Son and the Father are not one person, but two.
The two illustrations most commonly employed are the union of soul and body, and the union of the believer with Christ. Each of these illustrates one side of the great doctrine, but each must be complemented by the other. The former, taken by itself, would be Eutychian; the latter, taken by itself, would be Nestorian. Like the doctrine of the Trinity, the Person of Christ is an absolutely unique fact, for which we can find no complete analogies. But neither do we know how soul and body are united. See Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Hypostasis; Sartorius, Person and Work of Christ, 27-65; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 39-77; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 281-334.
A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 218, 230—“Many people are Unitarians, not because of the difficulties of the Trinity, but because of the difficulties of the Person of Christ.... The union of the two natures is not mechanical, as between oxygen and nitrogen in our air; nor chemical, as between oxygen and hydrogen in water; nor organic, as between our hearts and our brains; but personal. The best illustration is the union of body and soul in our own persons,—how perfectly joined they are in the great orator! Yet here are not two natures, but one human nature. We need therefore to add the illustration of the union between the believer and Christ.” And here too we must confess the imperfection of the analogy, for Christ and the believer are two persons, and not one. The person of the God-man is unique and without adequate parallel. But this constitutes its dignity and glory.