which belongs to humanity. I do not say more than 'leads us to think of Him,' because the full metaphysical reality may not admit of expression in human. words. But the tendency of what is said must be admitted. (4) Lastly, there is the argument from silence, coincident with these indications. Our Lord exhibits insight and foresight of prophetic quality. He exhibits towards all facts of physical nature the receptiveness of a perfect sonship, so that, for example, the laws of natural waste and growth are pointed out by Him with consummate accuracy in the parable of the sower. But He never enlarges our stock of natural knowledge, physical or historical, out of the divine omniscience. The recognition of these phenomena of our Lord's life leads us to the conclusion that up to the time of His death He lived and taught, He thought and was inspired and was tempted, as true and proper man, under the limitations of consciousness which alone make possible a really human experience. Of this part of our heritage we must not allow ourselves to be robbed, by being 'wise above that which is written.' At the same time it must be remembered that this idea of the meaning of the Incarnation is suggested by the Gospel narrative concurrently with the truth of our Lord's divinity, which is here not proved but assumed. The facts which continually suggest that He is more than man, that He is in a unique sense Son of God1, and those which suggest that He is living and speaking under conditions of human limitation, are indissolubly 1 Summarized in B. L. i. and iii. intermingled with one another. One impression is given by the Gospels, taken together, of a real entrance of the eternal Son of God into our manhood and into the limited conditions of consciousness necessary to a really human state. This view alone can interpret and hold together all the phenomena, and this view does hold them all together and does enable us to read the Gospels without doing violence to any element in the many-sided but consistent picture which they present. § 2. The language of St. Paul. This idea of the meaning of the Incarnation derived from the Gospels, while it has no single certain passage of the New Testament against it, is on the other hand at least strongly reinforced by the language already quoted of the Epistle to the Hebrews1, and also by St. Paul's language in two remarkable passages of his epistles. In a passage of the Epistle to the Philippians he is holding up our Lord in His incarnation as an example of humility, and this leads him to give, as we may say, a certain theory of it. He describes it as a self-emptying 2. Christ Jesus pre-existed, he declares, in the form 1 Hebr. v. 7, 8. 2 Phil. ii. 5-1 τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν δ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων, οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν, μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος· καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου, θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ. See Lightfoot in loc. of God. The word 'form' transferred from physical shape to spiritual type, describes-as St. Paul uses it, alone or in composition, with uniform accuracy—the permanent characteristics of a thing. Jesus Christ then, in His pre-existent state, was living in the permanent characteristics of the life of God. In such a life it was His right to remain. It belonged to Him. But He regarded not His prerogatives, as a man regards a prize he must clutch at. For love of us He abjured the prerogatives of equality with God. By an act of deliberate self-abnegation, He so emptied Himself as to assume the permanent characteristics of the human or servile life: He took the form of a servant. Not only so, but He was made in outward appearance like other men and was found in fashion as a man, that is, in the transitory quality of our mortality. The 'form,' the 'likeness,' the 'fashion' of manhood, He took them all. Thus, remaining in unchanged personality, He is exhibited as (to use Dr. Westcott's words1) 'laying aside the mode of divine existence (τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ) in order to assume the human. Again, St. Paul describes the Incarnation as a 'selfbeggary 2' The metaphor suggests a man of wealth 1 In the Speaker's Commentary, on St. John i. 14. The question has been asked, Does St. Paul imply that Jesus Christ abandoned the μoppǹeoû? I think all we can certainly say is that He is conceived to have emptied Himself of the divine mode of existence (μopph), so far as was involved in His really entering upon the human mode of existence (μoppń). St. Paul does not use his terms with the exactness of a professional logician or scholastic. On the subject, and on the passage generally, see Bruce, Humiliation of Christ (Clark, 1876) lect. I. 2 2 Cor. viii. 9 γινώσκετε γὰρ τὴν χάριν τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ [Χριστοῦ], ὅτι δι' ὑμᾶς ἐπτώχευσεν πλούσιος ὤν, ἵνα ὑμεῖς τῇ ἐκείνου πτωχεία πλουτήσητε. who deliberately abandons the prerogatives of possession to enter upon the experience of poverty, not because he thinks it a better state, but in order to help others up through real fellowship with their experience to a life of weal. 'Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he beggared himself, that ye through his poverty might become rich.' This is how St. Paul interprets our Lord's coming down from heaven, and it is manifest that it expresses something very much more than the mere addition of a manhood to His Godhead. In a certain aspect indeed the Incarnation is the folding round the Godhead of the veil of the humanity, to hide its glory, but it is much more than this. It is a ceasing to exercise, at least in a certain sphere, and so far as human thought can attain, some natural prerogatives of the divine existence; it is a coming to exist for love of us under conditions of being not natural to Godhead. For our sakes the Son of God abandoned His own divine prerogatives in God in order to win and merit, as man, by gradual and painful effort, a glory which, by right, might have been His all along, the glory which He had with the Father before the world was. And that glory in fact He received as the reward of His human obedience: because of the obedience of His mortal life God, says St. Paul, 'highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name-the divine name.' So that 'In him (i. e. in the exalted Christ) dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,' in him' are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden '.' 1 1 Phil. ii. 9; Col. ii. 3, 9. These phrases are used of Christ in glory. § 3. An absolute Kévwσis not affirmed in the The The view here expressed leaves a great deal unexplained, and specially the relation of the Incarnation to the eternal and cosmic functions of the Word. Word or Son in the Incarnation comes forth from the Father, comes down from heaven. The Father, on His side, is represented as 'sending' Him and 'giving Him up1.' There is no text, certain enough to be quoted-'the Son of Man which is in heaven' being, as has been mentioned, highly uncertain on critical grounds -which directly suggests that the incarnate Person during the period of His humiliation was still none the less in heaven, i. e. in the fulfilment of His divine functions. On the other hand the theology of St. John, St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews leads us to believe that the Word belongs to the eternal life of God, and is also the sustaining principle of all creation-'in whom all things consist,' who 'bears along all things by the utterance of his power 2.' In the first of these passages St. Paul is contemplating the Son of God as holding an eternal place in the life of God as His. image or self-expression, and a fundamental and permanent relation to all created things, not to men or to 1 St. John iii. 16 doкev, Rom. viii. 32 waρédwkev, St. John xx. 20, I John iv. 9 ἀπέσταλκεν. 2 Col. 1. 17 τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν, Hebr. i. 3 φέρων τὰ πάντα τῷ ῥήματι τῆς δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ. |