(j) Infinite and finite in Christ.—Our investigation of the Scripture teaching with regard to the Person of Christ leads us to three important conclusions: 1. that deity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, in him are not mutually exclusive; 2. that the humanity in Christ differs from his deity not merely in degree but also in kind; and 3. that this difference in kind is the difference between the infinite original and the finite derivative, so that Christ is the source of life, both physical and spiritual, for all men.
Our doctrine excludes the view that Christ is only quantitatively different from other men in whom God's Spirit dwells. He is qualitatively different, in that he is the source of life, and they the recipients. Not only is it true that the fulness of the Godhead is in him alone,—it is also true that he is himself God, self-revealing and self-communicating, as men are not. Yet we cannot hold with E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 176-178, that Christ's humanity was of one species with his deity, but not of one substance. We know of but one underlying substance and ground of being. This one substance is self-limiting, and so self-manifesting, in Jesus Christ. The determining element is not the human but the divine. The infinite Source has a finite manifestation; but in the finite we see the Infinite; 2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself”; John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” We can therefore agree with the following writers who regard all men as partakers of the life of God, while yet we deny that Christ is only a man, distinguished from his fellows by having a larger share in that life than they have.
J. M. Whiton: “How is the divine spirit which is manifest in the life of the man Christ Jesus to be distinguished, qua divine, from the same divine spirit as manifested in the life of humanity? I answer, that in him, the person Christ, dwelleth the fulnessof the Godhead bodily. I emphasize fulness, and say: The God-head is alike in the race and in its spiritual head, but the fulness is in the head alone—a fulness of course not [pg 700]absolute, since circumscribed by a human organism, but a fulness to the limits of the organism. Essential deity cannot be ascribed to the human Christ, except as in common with the race created in the image of God. Life is one, and all life is divine.”... Gloria Patri, 88, 23—“Every incarnation of life is pro tanto and in its measure an incarnation of God ... and God's way is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ.... The Homoousios of the Nicene Creed was a great victory of the truth. But the Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew. The Unitarian Dr. Hedge praised them because they got at the truth, the logical conclusion of which was to come so long after, that God and man are of one substance.” So Momerie, Inspiration, holds man's nature to be the same in kind with God's. See criticism of this view in Watts, New Apologetic, 133, 134. Homoiousios he regards as involving homoousios; the divine nature capable of fission or segmentation, broken off in portions, and distributed among finite moral agents; the divine nature undergoing perpetual curtailment; every man therefore to some extent inspired, and evil as truly an inspiration of God as is good. Watts seems to us to lack the proper conception of the infinite as the ground of the finite, and so not excluding it.
Lyman Abbott affirms that Christ is, “not God and man, but God in man.” Christ differs from other men only as the flower differs from the bulb. As the true man, he is genuinely divine. Deity and humanity are not two distinct natures, but one nature. The ethico-spiritual nature which is finite in man is identical with the nature which is infinite in God. Christ's distinction from other men is therefore in the degree in which he shared this nature and possessed a unique fulness of life—“anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38). Phillips Brooks: “To this humanity of man as a part of God—to this I cling; for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.... Man is, in virtue of his essential humanity, partaker of the life of the essential Word.... Into every soul, just so far as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats his life and gives his help.” Phillips Brooks believes in the redemptive indwelling of God in man, so that salvation is of man, for man, and by man. He does not scruple to say to every man: “You are a part of God.”
While we shrink from the expressions which seem to imply a partition of the divine nature, we are compelled to recognize a truth which these writers are laboring to express, the truth namely of the essential oneness of all life, and of God in Christ as the source and giver of it. “Jesus quotes approvingly the words of Psalm 82:6—‘I said, Ye are Gods.’ Microscopic, indeed, but divine are we—sparks from the flame of deity. God is the Creator, but it is through Christ as the mediating and as the final Cause. ‘And we through him’ (1 Cor. 8:6)—we exist for him, for the realization of a divine humanity in solidarity with him. Christ is at once the end and the instrumental cause of the whole process.” Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, speaks of “the essentially human in God, and the essentially divine in man.” The Son, or Word of God, “when manifested in the forms of a finite personality, is the essential Christ, revealing that in God which is essentially and eternally human.”
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:196—“The whole of humanity is the object of the divine love; it is an Immanuel and son of God; its whole history is a continual incarnation of God; as indeed it is said in Scripture that we are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and have our being in God. But what lies potentially in the human consciousness of God is not on that account also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning.” Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 175-180, on Stoic monism and Platonic dualism, tells us that the Stoics believed in a personal λόγος and an impersonal ὕλη, both of them modes of a single substance. Some regarded God as a mode of matter, natura naturata: “Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris” (Lucan, Phars., 9:579); others conceived of him as the natura naturans,—this became the governing conception.... The products are all divine, but not equally divine.... Nearest of all to the pure essence of God is the human soul: it is an emanation or outflow from him, a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of the parent tree, a colony in which some members of the parent state have settled. Plato followed Anaxagoras in holding that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it. God is outside the world. He shapes it as a carpenter shapes wood. On the general subject of the union of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Christologie; Barrows, in Bib. Sac., 10:765; 26:83; also, Bib. Sac., 17:535; John Owen, Person of Christ, in Works, 1:223; Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book v. chap. 51-56: Boyce, in Bap. Quar., 1870:385; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:403 sq.; Hovey, God with Us, 61-88; Plumptre, Christ and Christendom, appendix; E. H. Johnson, The Idea of Law in Christology, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1889:599-625.