Section V

the god-Man. ¹

Christ, from the beginning of His life in His human nature, was one with God, and indeed in the oneness [Einzigkeit] of the Son. His oneness in God consisted in this—that His life formed the pure realized centre of all God’s counsels, the innermost secret of all His thoughts and ways in the world’s history, and that it possessed the infinitely pure and rich nobleness which naturally belonged to the heart of the world. The holy child was the bud in which the world was to open into a divine flower—into a heaven of pure ideal relations which embraced the infinite contents of life in the oneness of an absolutely new form, in the delicacy of a perfected harmony or bloom of all life. But the oneness of the Son of God was in Him the movement of an infinitely pure and delicate impulse of development, in which His nature from the first preserved its identity with the Spirit of God,—the perfect harmony in the reciprocal action between His corporeal and spiritual nature, and between His soul and the world. His life’s impulse was the impulse of eternal love breaking forth from its development. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself,’ 2Co 5:19. The eternal self-consciousness of God came forth in the development of the consciousness of Christ into the midst of the world, and in this manner became a manifestation of His being.

This manifestation needed first of all to be completed in the human consciousness of Jesus; but its completion coincided with the complete development of His inner life. The starting-point of this unfolding was the refined living joy of a perfectly consecrated, well-organized nature, kept down by the adverse impression of a darkened, deeply disordered world of sinners, opposing the glory of such a life. Its progress from the indistinct feeling of pure life to the highest living certainty was a wonderful presage; it was the beautiful dawn of the new world, the life-poetry of an unfolding consciousness, which in its all-comprehensive, quiet life passed through all the sights and feelings of the longing, imaginative youth of the world. We have been made acquainted with one aspect of this beautiful dawn in the history of Jesus when twelve years old. Through this blessed longing the terrors of the kingdom of darkness must have been acting their part in strange nocturnal sights and shades of horror-such presentiments as Abraham, the father of the faithful, had in glancing at the future of his people and spiritual descendants (Gen 15:12). But the objective world of God presented itself to this longing as a pure, divine administration, which increased in lustre from the darkest night (Aethernacht) to the clearest noon-day.

As long as this richest individual development was burdened with any of the uncertainty which attaches to a period of growth, Christ could not come forth and manifest Himself to the people of Israel as the Messiah. Nor could this development be completed by one-sided human evidence, but only by a wonderful transaction in which the testimony of the Father in the voice which blessed Him coincided with the testimony of His inner life, and the testimony of the ancient Theocracy, which was represented by the Baptist, with the voice of His heart, and finally the testimony of heaven and earth with that of His previous history. This singular harmony of His religious, theocratic, and physical spheres with the expression of His inner life was the most special significance of the miracle at His baptism. He was now made manifest in the world as the God-man from whom it had to expect its salvation.

His own word unveils to us the form of the inner life of Jesus. He walked in the presence of God, and bore within Himself the fulness of the Godhead. The pure reality of the world identified Him with the divine administration; He knew Himself to be surrounded, conditioned, penetrated, and determined by God’s Spirit. He was therefore in heaven (Joh 3:13), in the bosom of the Father (Joh 1:18), and simply conditioned by the will of the Father (Joh 5:30). In the looks with which the Father beheld Him—in the design with which He upheld Him-in the fatherly love which begat, saluted, and sent Him, He felt His own oneness, His eternity and divinity. In this consciousness He regarded His own life as a pure manifestation of the Father (Joh 14:9-10), as a glorification of His being (Joh 17:4). It was His life-conviction that the very Being of God was manifested through Him in the midst of the world. He thus expressed His divine consciousness—He came from the Father, and He went to the Father. His going to the Father was an eternal act of His consciousness. He was perfectly conscious of the infinitely delicate distinctness of His life, His unique individuality. He felt the singularity of His life which placed Him in the presence of God’s love, as the pure image of the Father. He exhibited the determination of God which lay in His divine consciousness, in perfect, free self-determination. His will might appear as distinct from the will of God, but only in order to be merged in it with freedom. In His feelings, He could feel Himself forsaken by God in His objective administration, but only in order to surrender and sacrifice Himself to Him. In His acting, He could feel Himself excited by the immeasurable activity of the Father throughout the universe to work Himself, but only to work the works of the Father in and with Him (Joh 5:17). It was therefore His human consciousness, that He was ever going again to the Father as the pure, perfected Man.

In this relation the divine consciousness in Christ stands to His human consciousness. The two forms of this consciousness, therefore, in accordance with their nature, make up one living unity. Whoever has not found God, has not found Himself; and whoever has not come to Himself, has not come to God. God becomes one with man, and man with God, in the life of the Spirit. Where spirit appears, there freedom appears. Spiritual personality recognizes its destiny, which is from God, and determines itself in the most living free experience and firm hold of this destiny. Those who fancy that with the beginning of the spiritual life, God vanishes in the power of their self-consciousness, are ignorant of spirit, and not less so are those who wish to see their life vanish in God. The Spirit glorifies man in God, and God in man. But Christ had the Spirit in its infinite fulness; and for that reason God was the eternally glorious object of contemplation to His inner life, and he was conscious of the eternal peerlessness and singleness of His life in God. Thus His divine consciousness was one with His individual consciousness, and in this living unity the one is precisely distinguished from the other by the Spirit. He lived in an eternal, infinitely intimate, reciprocal action with the Father. This reciprocal action was a perfect, ever pure, and beautiful rhythm. In this rhythm of His life, as it is sustained by His unique nature and destiny, He appears as the God-man.

The blessedness and power of this life never allowed the Lord to withdraw from the consciousness of eternity. Sin from the first must have been detestable as gloom to His brightness,—as nihility to His power of being,—as the dissonant and deformed to the harmony of His life,—as estrangement from God to His fulness of God. The God-man, according to the power of His freedom, could not consent to sin.

And yet it lay in the nature of His being, that He must be more tempted by sin than any other man. Sin as sin was repelled by the divine power of His self-determination; while sin as the old human life continually troubled and agitated, yea, tortured to death, the human delicacy of His nature. Who could be so sensitive as He to the temptations which lay in the sympathy and antipathy of a whole disordered world, whose head and heart He was destined to be? Who could be more susceptible in his individual feelings than He to the attraction of the sympathy of the world, which, with an unceasing syren-song, wished to draw Him down into the depths of its old life? Who could experience as He did the repulsion of the world’s antipathy to the transition from the kingdom of the darkened life of nature to the blessed kingdom of the Spirit? In Him there was the most delicate sense of honour—the concentrated noble-mindedness of all humanity, infinitely sensitive, confronting all the shocks of worldly contumely—the most excitable and tender life-feeling confronting all the sharp pangs of death—the highest capability of suffering belonging to the strongest, and therefore most thoughtful love, confronting the thousandfold forms of human hatred. In one word, we may say that Christ alone could and must feel the entire temptation of the world; and He alone, who perfectly understood and experienced it in the full clearness of His pure feeling and spirit, could completely overcome it. Those that think man becomes acquainted with temptation only in proportion as he is defiled by it, lay down a canon by which man throughout eternity would have, like another Sisyphus, to roll the load of sinfulness in his vain struggles after righteousness. Their moral world is from the first only a modest hell for those who are silently condemned. But every victory of an honest conscience over temptation refutes their system. Christ has converted into historical truth the possibility of the sinless development of humanity, which in Adam, as ideal, formed the paradise of humanity, and thus has founded the new heavens of the world’s reconciliation.

The power of Christ’s life to resist temptation lay in His ideal nature. But by His historical nature, by His connection with humanity, He was necessitated to encounter all the temptations of humanity; and His victory over temptation was effected by realizing His ideal life in His historical life. The victory lay simply in this realization. For when He, the Chief of Humanity, came armed on the field of conflict, in order to rescue it from the corruption into which it had fallen, then the whole depth of this corruption must unfold itself and confront Him. The demoniac background which supported this world of confusion was forced to disclose itself simultaneously when the heavenly basis of the ideal human world was laid in the incarnation of God. This was a consequence of the antagonistic historical reciprocal action between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. In opposition to the God-man, when, as Redeemer of the world, He was manifested by His baptism in the Jordan, the Demon-enemy of man, the Tempter, now made his appearance.

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Notes

The correct view of the relation between the divine and human natures of Christ is still obscured by various false assumptions. The first of these is the notion that the divine life was limited by the human, and in consequence could only partially (which as divine is in that case not at all) enter into human life. On the contrary, it has been pointed out in the first part of our work, that the essence of human individuality is to be looked for not in its finiteness, but in its definiteness. But this definiteness can be no hindrance to God in His manifestation, since it is a result of His determination. With this false assumption another is connected, that the incarnation of the Son of God is considered in itself a humiliation of His being, while His humiliation only appears in His entering into a life-communion with historical humanity. The μορφὴ Θεοῦ which is attributed to Christ in Philip. 2:6, is to be regarded probably as the definiteness of the divine nature, in which Christ has the eternal ideality of His being.² To this essential ‘form of God’ attributed to Christ, the ‘being equal with God’ τὸ εἶναι ἶσα Θεῷ, corresponds. We can take this plural ἶσα as altogether definite, and then it will mark the various forms through which the Logos passed before He became man; since first of all He was the principle of the creation of the world, then the principle of humanity, and next of the Theocracy, till last of all He became the life-principle of Jesus. The expression, ‘He thought it not robbery to be equal with God’ (οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο), does not mean He did not eagerly retain this equality with God, but divested Himself of it; rather, the ἶσα εἶναι Θεῷ remained His, even when He became man. But His divine consciousness was not the consciousness of a possession unlawfully gained by force; or, more exactly, it was no act of outrage, as when a robber or a warrior violently seizes his booty. The feeling of His divine dignity was no ecstasy. It was perfectly matured human life; and so also divine in tranquillity, love, and condescension. His divine life-feeling was the ripest, most tranquil enjoyment of His inner being, no spirit-robbery. So little was He disposed to attain His glory by robbery, that He rather robbed Himself when He assumed the form of a servant, and was made like the sinful race of men, even to the death of the cross. This self-robbery can only relate to the manifestation of life. He robbed Himself when He concealed the divine glory of His consciousness in the sinner’s garb of man, in the servant’s garb of the Jews, in the criminal’s garb of the crucified, and therefore with infinite humility in a threefold dress of the deepest humiliation.³

Another false assumption confounds the identity which is presented in the spirit-life with the monotony of a physical unity, and consequently allows man to vanish into God, or God into man. In both cases spirit is naturalized, that is, denied.

As a third assumption, we may specify the hypothesis of the latest moral philosophy, which makes Evil a necessary point of transition in the moral development of the spirit. Perhaps this assumption is taken from the use of cow-pox, which is destined to put a stop to the ravages of small-pox, and has been transplanted into the doctrine of spiritual freedom. At all events, it is only at home in the physical department of life.

1) [For an estimate of the author's Christology, reference must be made to the last volume of Dorner on the Person of Christ. And see also his own vindication of himself from the charges of Krummacher, in the Note appended to sec. ix,— ED.]

2) [‘The Godhead itself, so far as it is exhibited in the brightest manifestations of the grace and majesty of God.’ Witsius, De Oratione, cap. i.—ED.]

3) [This interpretation does not seem to bring out the opposition expressed by ἀλλά with as much distinctness as the ordinary view, which refers μορφὴ Θεοῦ to the pre-incarnate, and μορφὴ δούλου to the incarnate state of Christ. Besides the commentaries, some useful hints on this important passage will be found in Pearson On the Creed, p. 179 (ed. 1835), and Moses Stuart’s Letters to Rev. W. B. Channing, p. 81 (ed, 1829). The doctrinal significance of the κένωσις is fully treated in Dorner, IL. iii, 250-259 ; and its discussion is further pursued by Liebner, in the Jahrb, für D. Theol. 1858, p.349. Dorner and Hasse have also papers on the subject in the same year.—ED.]