(d) Ground of possibility.—The possibility of the union of deity and humanity in one person is grounded in the original creation of man in the divine image. Man's kinship to God, in other words, his possession of a rational and spiritual nature, is the condition of incarnation. Brute-life is incapable of union with God. But human nature is capable of the divine, in the sense not only that it lives, moves, and has its being in God, but that God may unite himself indissolubly to it and endue it with divine powers, while yet it remains all the more truly human. Since the moral image of God in human nature has been lost by sin, Christ, the perfect image of God after which man was originally made, restores that lost image by uniting himself to humanity and filling it with his divine life and love.
2 Pet. 1:4—“partakers of the divine nature.” Creation and providence do not furnish the last limit of God's indwelling. Beyond these, there is the spiritual union between the believer and Christ, and even beyond this, there is the unity of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:283 (Syst. Doct., 3:180)—“Humanity in Christ is related to divinity, as woman to man in marriage. It is receptive, but it is exalted by receiving. Christ is the offspring of the [marriage] covenant between God and Israel.” [pg 694] Ib., 2:403-411 (Syst. Doct., 3:301-308)—“The question is: How can Christ be both Creator and creature? The Logos, as such, stands over against the creature as a distinct object. How can he become, and be, that which exists only as object of his activity and inworking? Can the cause become its own effect? The problem is solved, only by remembering that the divine and human, though distinct from each other, are not to be thought of as foreign to each other and mutually exclusive. The very thing that distinguishes them binds them together. Their essential distinction is that God has aseity, while man has simply dependence. ‘Deep calleth unto deep’ (Ps. 42:7)—the deep of the divine riches, and the deep of human poverty, call to each other. ‘From me a cry,—from him reply.’ God's infinite resources and man's infinite need, God's measureless supply and man's boundless receptivity, attract each other, until they unite in him in whom dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The mutual attraction is of an ethical sort, but the divine love has ‘first loved’ (1 John 4:19).
“The new second creation is therefore not merely, like the first creation, one that distinguishes from God,—it is one that unites with God. Nature is distinct from God, yet God moves and works in nature. Much more does human nature find its only true reality, or realization, in union with God. God's uniting act does not violate or unmake it, but rather first causes it to be what, in God's idea, it was meant to be.”Incarnation is therefore the very fulfilment of the idea of humanity. The supernatural assumption of humanity is the most natural of all things. Man is not a mere tangent to God, but an empty vessel to be filled from the infinite fountain. Natura humana in Christo capax divinæ. See Talbot, in Bap. Quar., 1868:129; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 270.
God could not have become an angel, or a tree, or a stone. But he could become man, because man was made in his image. God in man, as Phillips Brooks held, is the absolutely natural. Channing said that “all minds are of one family.” E. B. Andrews: “Divinity and humanity are not contradictory predicates. If this had been properly understood, there would have been no Unitarian movement. Man is in a true sense divine. This is also true of Christ. But he is infinitely further along in the divine nature than we are. If we say his divinity is a new kind, then the new kind arises out of the degree.” “Were not the eye itself a sun, No light for it could ever shine: By nothing godlike could the soul be won, Were not the soul itself divine.”
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:165—“A smaller circle may represent a larger in respect of its circularity; but a circle, small or large, cannot be the image of a square.” ... 2:101—“God would not be God without union with man, and man would not be man without union with God. Immanent in the spirits he has made, he shares their pains and sorrows.... Showing the infinite element in man, Christ attracts us toward his own moral excellence.” Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 190—“Incarnation is the indwelling of God in his children, of which the type and pattern is seen in him who is at once the manifestation of God to man, and the revelation to men of what humanity is to be when God's work in the world is done—perfect God and perfect man, because God perfectly dwelling in a perfect man.”
We have quoted these latter utterances, not because we regard them as admitting the full truth with regard to the union of the divine and human in Christ; but because they recognize the essential likeness of the human to the divine, and so help our understanding of the union between the two. We go further than the writers quoted, in maintaining not merely an indwelling of God in Christ, but an organic and essential union. Christ moreover is not the God-man by virtue of his possessing a larger measure of the divine than we, but rather by being the original source of all life, both human and divine. We hold to his deity as well as to his divinity, as some of these authors apparently do not. See Heb. 7:15, 16—“another priest, who hath been made ... after the power of an endless life”; John 1:4—“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”
(e) No double personality.—This possession of two natures does not involve a double personality in the God-man, for the reason that the Logos takes into union with himself, not an individual man with already developed personality, but human nature which has had no separate existence before its union with the divine. Christ's human nature is impersonal, in the sense that it attains self-consciousness, and self-determination only in the personality of the God-man. Here it is important to mark the distinction between nature and person. Nature is substance possessed in [pg 695] common; the persons of the Trinity have one nature; there is a common nature of mankind. Person is nature separately subsisting, with powers of consciousness and will. Since the human nature of Christ has not and never had a separate subsistence, it is impersonal, and in the God-man the Logos furnishes the principle of personality. It is equally important to observe that self-consciousness and self-determination do not belong to nature as such, but only to personality. For this reason, Christ has not two consciousnesses and two wills, but a single consciousness and a single will. This consciousness and will, moreover, is never simply human, but is always theanthropic—an activity of the one personality which unites in itself the human and the divine (Mark 13:32; Luke 22:42).
The human father and the human mother are distinct persons, and they each give something of their own peculiar nature to their child; yet the result is, not two persons in the child, but only one person, with one consciousness and one will. So the Fatherhood of God and the motherhood of Mary produced not a double personality in Christ, but a single personality. Dorner illustrates the union of human and divine in Jesus by the Holy Spirit in the Christian,—nothing foreign, nothing distinguishable from the human life into which it enters; and by the moral sense, which is the very presence and power of God in the human soul,—yet conscience does not break up the unity of the life; see C. C. Everett, Essays, 32. These illustrations help us to understand the interpenetration of the human by the divine in Jesus; but they are defective in suggesting that his relation to God was different from ours not in kind but only in degree. Only Jesus could say: “Before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58); “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
The theory of two consciousnesses and two wills, first elaborated by John of Damascus, was an unwarranted addition to the orthodox doctrine propounded at Chalcedon. Although the view of John of Damascus was sanctioned by the Council of Constantinople (681), “this Council has never been regarded by the Greek Church as œcumenical, and its composition and spirit deprive its decisions of all value as indicating the true sense of Scripture”; see Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 90. Nature has consciousness and will, only as it is manifested in person. The one person has a single consciousness and will, which embraces within its scope at all times a human nature, and sometimes a divine. Notice that we do not say Christ's human nature had no will, but only that it had none before its union with the divine nature, and none separately from the one will which was made up of the human and the divine united; versus Current Discussions in Theology, 5:283.
Sartorius uses the illustration of two concentric circles: the one ego of personality in Christ is at the same time the centre of both circles, the human nature and the divine. Or, still better, illustrate by a smaller vessel of air inverted and sunk, sometimes below its centre, sometimes above, in a far larger vessel of water. See Mark 13:32—“of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son”; Luke 22:42—“Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” To say that, although in his capacity as man he was ignorant, yet at that same moment in his capacity as God he was omniscient, is to accuse Christ of unveracity. Whenever Christ spoke, it was not one of the natures that spoke, but the person in whom both natures were united.