Commentary on Romans; Systematic Theology

Ebrard puts the doctrine in a somewhat different form. He molds that the Logos reduced Himself to the dimensions of a man; but at the same time retained and exercised his divine perfections as the second person of the Trinity. In answer to the question, How human and divine attributes can be united in the same person, he says the solution of the difficulty is to be found in the original constitution and destiny of humanity. Man was designed for this supreme dominion, perfect holiness, and boundless knowledge. "The glorification of God as Son in time is identical with the acme of the normal development of man." It is held by many, not by all of the advocates of this theory, that the incarnation would have taken place had men never sinned. It entered into the divine purpose in reference to man that he should thus attain oneness with Himself.

As to the still more difficult question, How can the Son as the second person of the Trinity retain his divine perfections (as Ebrard holds that He does), and yet, as revealed on earth, lay them aside? "The one is world-ruling and omniscient, and the other is not," he says we must understand the problem. It is not that two natures become one nature. "Two natures as two things (Stücken) are out of the question." The Logos is not one nature, and the incarnate Son of God, Jesus, another; but the incarnate Son possesses the properties of both natures. The question only is, How can the incarnate Logos, since He has not the one nature, the divine, in the form of God (in der Ewigkeitsform), be one with the world-governing Logos who is in the form of God? This question, which is equivalent to asking, How the same individual mind can be finite and infinite at the same time, he answers by saying, first, that the continuity of existence does not depend upon continuity of consciousness. A man in a swoon or in a state of magnetic sleep, is the same person, although his consciousness be suspended or abnormal. That is true, but the question is, How the same mind can be conscious and unconscious at the same time, How th same individual Logos can be a feeble infant and at the same time the intelligently active world-governing God. Secondly, he admits that the above answer does not fully meet the case, and therefore adds that the whole difficulty disappears when we remember (dass die Ewigkeit nicht eine der Zeit parallellaufende Linie ist), that Eternity and Time are not parallel lines. But, thirdly, seeing that this is not enough, he says that the Eternal Logos overlooks his human form of existence with one glance (mit einem Schlage), whereas the incarnate Logos does not, but with true human consciousness, looks forward and backward. All this avails nothing. The contradiction remains. The theory assumes that the same individual mind can be conscious and unconscious, finite and infinite, ignorant and omniscient, at the same time.¹

Gess admits the contradiction involved in the doctrine as presented by Ebrard, and therefore adopts the common form of the theory. He holds that the Eternal Son at the incarnation laid aside the Godhead and became a man. The substance of the Logos remained; but that substance was in the form of an infant, and had nothing beyond an infant's knowledge or power. In the Trinity, the Father is God of Himself; the Son is God by the communication of the divine life from the Father. During the earthly career of the Logos the communication of the divine life was suspended. The Logos reduced to the limitations of manhood, received from the Father such communications of supernatural power as He needed. When He ascended and sat down at the right hand of God, He received the divine life in all its fulness as He had possessed it before He came into the world. "The same substance," he says, "slumbered in the womb of the Virgin, without self-consciousness, which thirty-four years after yielded itself a sacrifice, without blemish and spot, to the Father, having previously revealed to mankind the truth, which it had perfectly comprehended. At the time of this slumber there already existed in this substance that indestructible life by virtue of which it had a accomplished our redemption (Heb. vii. 16), as well as the power to know the Father as no other knows Him (Matt. xi. 27), but it was unconscious life. Moreover, the same substance which now slumbered in unconsciousness, had before existed with the Father as the Logos, by whom the Father had created, governed, and preserved the world, but it was no longer aware of this."² On the opposite page, it is said, that it is the self-conscious will of a man that calls all his powers into action. "When this sinks into slumber, all the powers of the soul fall asleep. It was the substance of the Logos which in itself had the power to call the world into existence, to uphold and enlighten it; but when the Logos sank into the slumber of unconsciousness, his eternal holiness, his omniscience, his omnipresence, and all his really divine attributes were gone; it being the self-conscious will of the Logos through which all the divine powers abiding in Him had been called into action. They were gone, i.e., suspended, — existing still, but only potentially. Further, a man when he awakes from sleep is at once in full possession of all his powers and faculties; but when consciousness burst upon Jesus it was not that of the eternal Logos, but a really human self-consciousness, which develops by degrees and preserves its identity only through constant changes..... It was this human form of self-conscious existence which the Logos chose in his act of self-divestiture. Hence it plainly appears that omniscience, which sees and knows all things at once, and from one central point, and the unchangeable merging of the will into the Father's, or divine holiness, are not to be attributed to Jesus while on earth; and the same with the unchangeable bliss of the divine life. Nor was it only eternal self-consciousness which the Son laid aside, but He also went out from the Father.' We are not to understand that the indwelling of the Father, Son, and Spirit in each other had been dissolved, but that the Father's giving the Son to have life in Himself, as the Father has, was suspended. Having laid aside his self-consciousness and activity, He lost with this the capacity of receiving into Himself the stream of life from the Father, and sending it forth again; in other words, He was no longer omnipotent. Equally lost, or laid aside, was his omnipresence, which must not, at all events, be considered as universally diffused, but as dependent on the self-conscious will."³

1. The first remark to be made on this theory in all its forms is that it is a departure from the faith of the Church. This objection turns up first on every occasion, because that is its proper place. If the Bible be the only infallible rule of faith and practice; and if the Bible be a plain book, and if the Spirit guides the people of God (not the external church, or body of mere professing Christians) into the knowledge of the truth, then the presumption is invincible that what all true Christians believe to be the sense of Scripture is its sense. The whole Christian world has believed, and still does believe, that Christ was a true man; that He had a real body and a human soul. The Council of Chalcedon in formulating this article of the common faith, declared that Christ was, and is, God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever; that according to the one nature He is consubstantial (homoousios) within us, and according to the other He is consubstantial with the Father. There is no dispute as to the sense in which the Council used the word nature, because it has an established meaning in theology, and because it is explained by the use of the Latin word consubstantial, and the Greek word homoousios. Nor is it questioned that the decisions of that Council have been accepted by the whole Church. This doctrine of two natures in Christ the new theory rejects. This, as we have seen, Dorner expressly asserts. We have seen, also, that Ebrard says, that the idea of two natures in the sense of two substances (Stücke, concrete existences) is out of the question. The Logos did not assume human nature, but human attributes; He appeared in the fashion of a man. Gess, in his luminous book, teaches over and over, that it was the substance of the Logos that was the human soul of Christ. He speaks of his "Logos-nature;" of the "Logos being the life, or life-principle" of his humanity. He says, in so many words,⁴ that the soul of Jesus was "not like that of other men, a soul created by God and for God, but the Logos in the form of human existence." It is consonant, he says, "to the nature of Christ's soul, as being the Logos existing in human form, that God should take possession of it in a peculiar manner." This idea is the very essence of the doctrine. For if the Logos "emptied" Himself, if He laid aside his omnipresence and omnipotence, and became a human soul, what need or what possibility remains of another newly created soul?

This is not Apollinarianism; for Apollinaris taught that the Logos supplied the place of a rational soul in the person of Christ. He did not become such a soul, but, retaining in actu as well as in potentia, the fulness of the divine perfections, took its place. Nor is it exactly Eutychianism. For Eutyches said that there were two natures before the union, and only one after it. The two were so united as to become one. This the theory before us denies, and affirms that from the beginning the Logos was the sole rational element in the constitution of the person of our Lord. It agrees, however, with both these ancient and Church-rejected errors in their essential principles. It agrees with the Apollinarians in saying that the Logos was the rational element in Christ; and it agrees with the Eutychians in saying that Christ had but one nature.

The doctrine is in still more obvious contradiction to the decisions of the Council of Constantinople on the Monothelite controversy. That Council decided that as there were two natures in Christ, there were of necessity two wills. The new theory in asserting the oneness of Christ's nature, denies that He had two wills. The acts, emotions, and sufferings of his earthly life, were the acts, emotions, and sufferings of the Logos. So far as Christian interest in the doctrine is concerned, it was to get at this conclusion the theory was adopted if not devised. It was to explain how that more than human value belongs to the sufferings of Christ, and more than human efficacy to his life, that so many Christian men were led to embrace the new doctrine. The Church doctrine. however, does not consider either the sufferings or the life of Christ as those of a mere man. He was a divine person, God manifest in the flesh; and his sufferings and life were those of that person. Christians can say, and always have said, with an intelligent and cordial faith, that God purchased the Church with his blood. It was because the person who died was possessed of an Eternal Spirit that his blood cleanses from all sin.

2. The arguments from Scripture in support of the theory are for the most part founded on the neglect of the principle so often referred to, that anything can be predicated of the person of Christ that can be predicated either of his human or of his divine nature. That the one person is said to be born and to suffer and die, no more proves that the Logos as such was born and suffered and died, than saying of a man that he is sick or wounded proves that his soul is diseased or injured. The same remark, of course, applies to the exaltation and dominion of the risen Redeemer. It is the one person who is the object of the worship of all created intelligences, and to whom their obedience is due; but this does not prove that Christ's human nature is possessed of divine attributes. Indeed, according to the modern doctrine of Kenosis, He has no human nature, as already proved.

3. The theory in question is inconsistent with the clear doctrine both of revealed and natural religion concerning the nature of God. He is a Spirit infinite, eternal, and immutable. Any theory, therefore, which assumes that God lays aside his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, and becomes as feeble, ignorant, and circumscribed as an infant, contradicts the first principle of all religion, and, if it be pardonable to say so, shocks the common sense of men.

4. Instead of removing any difficulties attending the doctrine of the incarnation, it greatly increases them. According to Dorner's view we are called upon to believe that a human soul receives gradually increasing measures of the divine fulness, until at last it becomes infinite. This is equivalent to saying that it ceases to exist. It is only on the assumption that Dorner, when he says that the essential nature of God is love, and that the communication of the Godhead is the communication of the fulness of the divine love, means that God is purely ethical, an attribute, but not a substance, that we can attach any definite meaning to his doctrine. According to Ebrard we are required to believe that the one divine and infinite substance of the Logos was finite and infinite; conscious and unconscious; omnipresent, and confined within narrow limits in space; and that it was active in the exercise of omnipotence, and as feeble as an infant at one and the same time. According to the more common view of the subject, we are called upon to believe that the infinite God, in the person of his Son, can become ignorant and feeble, and then omniscient and almighty; that He can cease to be God, and then again become God. Gess says that God is not omnipotent unless He has power over Himself, power, that is, to cease to be God. If this be true of the Son it must be true of the Father and of the Spirit; that is, it must be true that the Triune Jehovah can annihilate Himself. And, then, what follows?

5. This doctrine destroys the humanity of Christ. He is not and never was a man. He never had a human soul or a human heart. It was the substance of the Logos invested with a human body that was born of the Virgin, and not a human soul. A being without a human soul is not a man. The Saviour which this theory offers us is the Infinite God with a spiritual body. In thus exalting the humanity of Christ to infinitude it is dissipated and lost.

The prevalent Christology among a numerous and distinguished class of modern theologians, though not professedly pantheistic, is nevertheless founded on the assumption of the essential oneness of God and man. This class includes the school of Schleiermacher in all its modifications not only in Germany, but also in England and America. Schleiermacher is regarded as the most interesting as well as the most influential theologian of modern times. He was not and could not be self-consistent, as he attempted the reconciliation of contradictory doctrines. There are three things in his antecedents and circumstances necessary to be considered, in order to any just appreciation of the man or of his system. First, he passed the early part of his life among the Moravians, and imbibed something of their spirit, and especially of their reverence for Christ, who to the Moravians is almost the exclusive object of worship. This reverence for Christ, Schleiermacher retained all his life. In one of the discourses pronounced on the occasion of his death, it was said, "He gave up everything that he might save Christ." His philosophy, his historical criticism, everything, he was willing to make bend to the great aim of preserving to himself that cherished object of reverence and love.⁵ Secondly, his academic culture led him to adopt a philosophical system whose principles and tendencies were decidedly pantheistic. And, thirdly, he succumbed to the attacks which rationalistic criticism had made against faith in the Bible. He could not receive it as a supernatural revelation from God. He did not regard it as containing doctrines which we are bound to believe on the authority of the sacred writers. Deprived, therefore, of the historical Christ, or at least deprived of the ordinary historical basis for faith in Christ, he determined to construct a Christology and a whole system of Christian theology from within; to weave it out of the materials furnished by his own religious consciousness. He said to the Rationalists that they might expunge what they pleased from the evangelical records; they might demolish the whole edifice of Church theology, he had a Christ and a Christianity in his own bosom. In the prosecution of the novel and difficult task of constructing a system of Christian theology out of the facts of Christian experience, he designed to secure for it a position unassailable by philosophy. Philosophy being a matter of knowledge, and religion a matter of feeling, the two belonged to distinct spheres, and therefore there need be no collision between them.

He assumed, (1.) That religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was not a doctrine or system of doctrine; not a cultus, or a discipline; but a life, an inward spiritual power or force. (2.) That the true Christian is conscious of being the recipient of this new life. (3.) That he knows that it did not originate in himself, nor in the Church to which he belongs, because humanity neither in the individual nor in any of its organizations is capable of producing what is specifically new and higher and better than itself. (4.) This necessitates the assumption of a source, or author of this life, outside of the race of ordinary men or of humanity in its regular development. (5.) Hence he assumed the actual historical existence of a new, sinless, and absolutely perfect man by a new creative act. (6.) That man was Christ, from whom every Christian is conscious that he derives the new life of which he is the subject. (7.) Christ is the Urbild, or Ideal Man, in whom the idea of humanity is fully realized. (8.) He is nevertheless divine, or God in fashion as a man, because man is the modus existendi of God on the earth. In ordinary men, even in Adam, God, so to speak, was and is imperfectly developed. The God-consciousness, or God within, is overborne by our world-consciousness, or our consciousness as determined by things seen and temporal. (9.) In Christ this was not the case. In Him, without struggle or opposition, the God-consciousness, or God within, controlled his whole inward and outward life. (10.) Christ's preëminence over other men consisted in his absolute sinlessness and freedom from error. Of Him it is to be said, not simply potest non peccare, but non potest peccare. He could not be tempted for temptation supposes the possibility of sin, and the possibility of sin supposes less than perfection. (11.) The redeeming work and worth of Christ consists not in what He taught or in what He did, but in what He was. What He taught and what He did may be explained in different ways, or even explained away, but what He was, remains, and is the one all important fact. (12.) As He was thus perfect, thus the ideal and miraculously produced man, He is the source of life to others. He awakens the dormant God-consciousness in men, and gives it ascendency over the sensibility, or sensuous element of our nature, so that believers come to be, in the same sense, although ever in a less degree, what Christ was, God manifest in the flesh. This being the work of Christ, and this redeeming process being due to what He was, his resurrection, ascension, session at the right hand of God, etc., etc., may all be dispensed with. They may be admitted on historical grounds, good men having testified to them as facts, but they have no religious import or power. (13.) The new life of which Christ is the author, which in this country is commonly denominated "his human divine life," is the animating and constituting principle of the Church, and it is by union with the Church that this life passes over to individual believers.

This is a meagre outline of Schleiermacher's Christology. His doctrine concerning Christ is so implicated with his peculiar views on anthropology, on theology, and on the relation of God to the world, that it can neither be fully presented nor properly appreciated except as an integral part of his whole system.

Gladly as Schleiermacher's theory was embraced as a refuge by those who had been constrained to give up Christianity as a doctrine, and great as have been its popularity and influence, it was assailed from very different quarters and judged from many different standpoints. Here it can only be viewed from the position of Christian theology. It should be remembered that as the idealist does not feel and act according to his theory, so the inward life of a theologian may not be determined by his speculative doctrines. This does not render error less objectionable or less dangerous. It is nevertheless a fact, and enables us to condemn a system without wounding our charity for its author. Schleiermacher, however, was an exceptional case. As a general rule, a man's faith is the expression of his inward life.

1. The first objection to Schleiermacher's theory is that it is not and does not pretend to be Biblical. It is not founded upon the objective teachings of the Word of God. It assumes, indeed, that the religious experience of the Apostles and early Christians was substantially the same, and therefore involved the same truths, as the experience of Christians of the present day. Schleiermacher even admits that their experience was so pure and distinctly marked as to have the authority of a standard by which other believers are to judge of their own. But he denies that the interpretation which they gave of their experience has normal authority for us, that is, he says that we are not bound to believe what the Apostles believed. His appeals to the Scriptures in support of his peculiar doctrines are extremely rare, and merely incidental. He professes to build up a system independent of the Bible, founded on what Christians now find in the contents of their own consciousness.

2. The system is not what it purports to be. Schleiermacher professed to discard speculation from the province of religion. He undertook to construct a theory of Christianity with which philosophy should have nothing to do, and therefore one against which it could have no right to object. In point of fact his system is a matter of speculation from beginning to end. It could never have existed except as the product of a mind imbued with the principles of German philosophy. It has no coherence, no force, and indeed no meaning, unless you take for granted the correctness of his views of the nature of God, of the nature of man, and of the relation of God to the world. This objection was urged against his system by all parties in Germany. The supernaturalists, who believed in the Bible, charged him with substituting the conclusions of his own philosophy for the dictates of Christian consciousness. And the philosophers said he was true neither to his philosophy nor to his religion. He changed from one ground to the other just as it suited his purpose. On this subject Strauss⁶ says that Schleiermacher first betrayed philosophy to theology, and then theology to philosophy; and that this half-and-halfness is characteristic of his whole position. Although this was said in a spirit of unkindness, it is nevertheless true. His speculative opinions, i.e., the conclusions at which he arrives by the way of speculation, are the basis of his whole system; and therefore those who adopt it receive it on this authority of reason, and not on that of revelation. It is a philosophical theory and nothing more. This will become apparent as we proceed.

3. A third objection is that the system is essentially pantheistic. This is, indeed, an ambiguous term. It is here used, however, in its ordinary and proper sense. It is not meant that Schleiermacher held that the universe is God, or God the universe, but that he denied any proper dualism between God and the world, and between God and man. He held such views of God as were inconsistent with Theism in the true and accepted meaning of the word. That is, he did not admit the existence of a personal, extramundane God. This is a charge brought against his system from the beginning, even by avowed pantheists themselves. They say that while denying the existence of a personal God he nevertheless teaches doctrines inconsistent with that denial, i.e., with what they regard as the true view of the relation of the infinite to the finite. Theists brought the same objection. Dr. Braniss⁷ says, "Die Annahme eines persönlichen Gottes ist in diesem System unmöglich," i.e., "The admission of a personal God is, in this system, impossible."⁸ This he proves, among other ways, by a reference to what Schleiermacher teaches of the attributes of God, which with him are not predicates of a subject; they tell us nothing as to what God is, they are only forms or states of our own consciousness, as determined by our relation to the system of things in their causal relation. Strauss, from another standpoint, says that Schleiermacher could never reconcile himself to the acknowledgment of a personal, extra-mundane God. Christ was the only God he had; and this, alas! was little more than an ideal God; one who had been; but whether He still is, he leaves undetermined, at least theoretically. Baur presents the inconsistency of Schleiermacher in different points of view. In one place he says that he swung to and fro between the idealism of Kant and Fichte, and the pantheism of Spinoza and Schelling, which he regarded only as the different poles of the same system (derselben Weltanschauung).⁹ Again he says that the essential element of Schleiermacher's doctrine of God is the same immanence of God in the world that Spinoza taught.¹⁰ He endorses the criticism of Strauss, that all the main positions of the first part of Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre are intelligible only when translated into the formulas of Spinoza, whence they were derived; and adds that he made no greater difference between God and the world than Spinoza made between the natura naturans and the natura naturata.¹¹ A Schleiermacher wrote at the time when the dispute between the Rationalists and Supernaturalists was at its height. The one referred all events to natural causes; the other contended for the possibility of miracles and of a supernatural revelation. Both parties being Theists, the Rationalists had no ground to stand on. For if the existence of an extramundane, personal God, the creator of the world, be admitted, it is utterly unreasonable to deny that He may intervene with his immediate agency in the sequence of events. Schleiermacher cut the knot by denying the difference between the natural and supernatural. There is really no extramundane God, no other sphere of divine activity than the world, and no other law of his action than necessity.¹²

4. Schleiermacher's system ignores the doctrine of the Trinity. With him God in the world, is the Father; God in Christ, the Son; God in the Church, the Spirit. All personal preëxistence of Christ is thus necessarily excluded. The Scriptures and the Church teach that the eternal Son of God, who was with the Father from eternity; who made the worlds; who could say, "Before Abraham was I am," became man, being born of a woman, yet without sin. This Schleiermacher denies. There was no Son of God, before the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. Then only, Christ began to be as a distinct person; He had no preëxistence beyond that which is common to all men.

5. This system makes Christ a mere man. He is constantly represented as the Ideal man, Urbild, a perfect man. In Him the idea of humanity is said to be fully realized. His life is said to be one; and that one a true human life. There was in Him but one nature, and that nature human. Now it matters little that with these representations Christ is said to be divine, and his life a divine life; for this is said on the ground that the divine is human, and the human divine. God and man are one. The difference between Christ and other men is simply one of degree. He is perfect, we are imperfect. He is, as Baur said, simply primus inter pares. Christ is the Urbild or archetypal man. But "the actuality of the archetypal does not go beyond our nature."¹³ Even in the modified form in which his doctrine has been adopted in this country, this feature of the system has been retained. Dr. Nevin in his "Mystical Presence" is abundant in his assertion of the simple humanity of Christ. He says He had not one life of the body and another of the soul; nor one life of his humanity and another of his divinity. It is one life throughout, and it "is in all respects a true human life."¹⁴ "Christ is the archetypal man in whom the true idea of humanity is brought to view." He "is the ideal man." Our nature is said to be complete only in Him. This also is the staple of the "Mercersburg Review" in all its articles relating either to Anthropology or Soteriology. It is everywhere assumed that God and man are one; that divinity is the completed development of humanity. "The glorification of Christ was the full advancement of our human nature itself to the power of a divine life." There is nothing in Christ which does not belong to humanity. Steudel therefore says of the Christology of Schleiermacher that it makes Christ only "a finished man." Knapp says, that he deifies the human and renders human the divine.¹⁵ Dorner says, "He believed the perfect being of God to be in Christ; and for this reason regarded Him as the complete man. And so, vice versa, because He is the complete man, the consciousness of God has become a being of God in Him."¹⁶ That is, because He is a perfect man, He is God. And Strauss says, that according to Schleiermacher the creation of man imperfect in Adam was completed in Christ; and as Christ did not assume a true body and a reasonable soul, but generic humanity, human nature as a generic life is raised to the power of divinity, not in Him only but also in the Church. The incarnation of God is not a unique manifestation in the flesh, in the person of Christ, appearing on earth for thirty-three years and then transferred to heaven. This, it is said, would have been only "a sublime avatar, fantastically paraded thus long before men," without any further effect. On the contrary, it is the introduction of the life of God into humanity rendering it divine. It is natural that those who thus deify themselves, should look upon those who regard themselves as "worms of the dust," as very poor creatures.¹⁷ The objection, however, to this system now in hand is not so much that it deifies man, as that it makes Christ nothing more than an ideal man. It is therefore utterly at variance with the teachings of Scripture, the faith of the Church, and the intimate convictions of the people of God.