Philippians 2:5-8

EXCURSUS ON CHRIST'S HUMILIATION

Philippians 2:5-8.

In this passage St. Paul speaks more definitely than in any other of the mystery of the Divine and human in Christ Jesus, and of the relation between the two natures in our Lord's life on earth. Consequently his language has formed a ground of much discussion to all those who have desired to look more deeply into that mystery. It should be noted, before we..speak of those opinions which have been put forward as essays towards the exposition of the wondrous self-abasement of the Son of God, that the apostle in these verses speaks of Him who so emptied Himself as being through all times Christ Jesus. St. Paul employs in the whole passage the conjoint names, which indicate that their possessor was always God and man. The Divine person existed from all eternity, but in St. Paul's language he is ever Christ Jesus; and whether he wear the form of God or the form of a servant neither adds to nor detracts from the truth of His divinity. He possessed it always, but did not deem it a glory which should be clutched tenaciously, when man's salvation could be wrought He therefore laid aside its exercise, not its essence, while He lived as a man, and for the work of redemption. His mighty acts, by which at intervals He caused the Godhead to shine forth through the environments of the flesh, were but a little part of His earthly life. He was for the most part seen and known as the servant of God. He held meanwhile, but consented not to use, His Divine powers and rights. This was His emptying of Himself so far as the apostle speaks.

And for a time the language of St. Paul sufficed for the needs of the Christian church; but after men began to speculate on, and to attempt to describe in their own words, the nature of the personal union, two erroneous tendencies manifested themselves. Some have in their definition so blended the Divine and the human, that the latter has almost, or altogether, disappeared; while others have kept the severance so strongly marked between the two, that in Christ they have made God to appear as no more than an ally or companion of a chosen member of the human family.

It is not very probable that theology will ever advance much nearer than it has done to an expression of the nature of Christ's act of condescension, but to notice briefly the various forms of opinion on the subject cannot be without interest, and may warn against error, if it brings us no clearer light of truth.

Before the time of Apollinaris, who was bishop of Laodicea after the middle of the fourth century, there can hardly be said to have been any controversy relating strictly to the union of the two natures. Those heretical teachers who lived before the date of the Nicene Council, as a rule, denied either one or the other nature to Christ altogether.

The Gnostics, who taught that the body of Christ was in some way unreal, gave Him no true alliance with the flesh, but denied the manhood of the Saviour. After them, those teachers, of whom Praxeas is the representative, dwelling unduly on such words of Christ as ‘I and my Father are one,' impugned the distinct personality of our Lord's Godhead, and taught that He was a manifestation of the Father under a human form. On the other hand, some, like Theodotus, and after him Paul of Samosata, taught that the Lord was only man. Nobler indeed than any other man, but not Divine. The Logos dwelt in Him more abundantly than in any beside, and through His moral excellence He won a Divine dignity. And it was against Arius, who denied the eternal existence and true divinity of Christ, that the Nicene Fathers (A.D. 325) formulated the first creed, in which, of course, their desire was to maintain the integrity of His Godhead; but while they did this in the expression ‘of one substance with the Father,' they also asserted the truly human nature in the phrases ‘who was incarnate,' and ‘who was made man.'

After the Nicene Council, filled with an earnest desire to maintain the divinity of Christ, to which need by the exigencies of the time the attention of the orthodox was then mainly directed, Apollinaris was led, in his attempts at definition, to give up the integrity of His manhood. He taught that the human and Divine in the Logos were united from all eternity, but that at the Incarnation the Christ took only on Him the body and animal soul of humanity, bringing from heaven that which corresponds to the human spirit. Thus was Christ not completely man, and therefore never could have redeemed our nature, as was fully set forth by the opponents of Apollinaris, and by the Council of Constantinople (A.D. 382), in which his teaching was condemned.

An error in an opposite direction was soon after broached by Nestorius, and those who thought with him. Disliking the term ‘mother of God,' which was then applied to the Virgin Mary, they held that she might with more propriety be called ‘mother of Christ.' But with this distinction they also taught that she only gave birth to a man in whom the union of the Logos with humanity had its commencement, and that the union was only completed when Christ was baptized. Thus the human nature was made to be merely the tabernacle of the Logos, and there was no personal union between the two natures.

As Nestorianism denied the true personal union, Eutychianism, about the same date, made, after the incarnation, but one nature to be in Christ, and is the type of all the doctrines known as Monophysite and Monothelite, which have flourished most among the speculative and mystical thinkers of the Eastern church. The prevalence of Eutychianism led to an appeal being made on this theological question to Leo, bishop of Rome, and his famous ‘Letter to Flavian' brought men back from their subtleties of definition, for a time at least, to the true teaching of Scripture: ‘Christ, complete as to His Godhead, complete as to His manhood, very God and very man.' By the decision of the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), both Nestorianism and Eutychianism were condemned. The former was revived in some degree at a later time in the West by the Adoptionists, who taught that there was difference in the sense in which Christ was Son of God in His Divine and in His human nature; that as man, Christ could only be called a Son by ‘adoption.'

These are the representative errors on this doctrine which arose before the beginning of the ninth century, and after that date there is not much to be noticed in the discussions of the Schoolmen which differs, on the question of the union of the two natures, from what had been brought forward by those who went before them; though the mysticism of the fourteenth century indulged in most fanciful speculations, which made men forget the purpose of the incarnation, and that for man's salvation it must be followed by the crucifixion and the resurrection. The teaching of the Mystics was, that as the Son is eternally brought forth by God in Himself, and given to man through His birth of the Virgin, so in all Christians there is constantly an incarnation proceeding. The Son is born in them. Thus the mystic teaching makes no distinction between the incarnate Son Himself and the devout believer who is spiritually united to Him.

In the stirring times which accompanied and succeeded the Reformation, there was a substantial accord among all the Reformed communions in the confession of the whole and undivided personality of Jesus Christ, though between the Lutheran and Reformed continental churches there was some difference in teaching in respect of His humiliation. The former taught that Christ existed as God-man from all eternity. The Logos at the incarnation assumed the human nature, and before the God-man could take on Him the form of a servant He must empty Himself of (or another expression was, veil) His Divine form. The humbled state began with the conception and ended with the burial.

The Reformed held that the Incarnation was the humiliation, and that the absolute Logos was existent in a developing life and consciousness as the Logos made man. It will be seen that the Lutheran opinion had a leaning toward the old Eutychian form of error, in dwelling too much on the Divine; the Reformed might be pushed on to Nestorianism, from its tendency to mark off too distinctly the human in Christ.

It was not long after the Reformation, however, that Socinianism appeared, and either in its original form or in some kindred shape, Arianism first, Humanitarianism afterwards, spread itself from Italy and Poland over Holland, Germany, and England. What Socinus taught was that Jesus was merely a man, but free from original sin. At His baptism the Divine power descended upon Him, and enabled Him to do the works recorded of Him. Yet His death was only a martyrdom for truth's sake, and in no sense a propitiation. At His resurrection He received a sort of delegated Divine power, and therefore may be reverenced and addressed in prayer as a representative of the power of God. But even this teaching admits far too much of the supernatural to satisfy the rationalistic spirit which arose after it and out of it.

Every contradiction must be removed from the idea of the historical Redeemer, and so the descent began. The union between God and man was impossible, all true divinity was denied to Christ, and in the Deism of England as well as in the theology of Germany Jesus became nothing but a man.

Through modern philosophical opinions (of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) concerning the Ideal Christ, the doctrine of the Person of Christ has been rescued from the infidel theories of the Rationalists, and by Schleiermacher the ideal theory has been brought into some connection with theology. His doctrine, however, only maintains that Jesus was born without sin, or the possibility thereof. The humanity of Jesus passively receives the power of God; but he denies any personal union of the human and Divine nature; and the indwelling of God in Jesus is the realization of the idea which man's consciousness has of its own possible sinlessness.

These philosophic teachings have in very recent times exerted great influence upon the divines of the Lutheran church, and have impelled them to undertake to set forth a true conception of the union between the Divine and human natures in Christ. And speculations upon the Question of the state of humiliation of the Godhead have gained much prominence of late years. According to' one view, the Logos is represented as limiting Himself in the incarnation, surrendering then His eternal self-conscious being, and thus being found in our nature, He gradually expanded again into one Divine-human existence, the development progressing until the ascension. The Holy Ghost is supposed to be the energy whereby the gradual restoration of the Logos to Himself is conducted in proportion as His human faculties expanded.

Others teach a modification of this theory. They do not consider that the Logos underwent a self-depotentiation, but that he was limited in his self-bestowment on the man, according to the gradual ability of the human nature to receive the Divine.

But such theories make the Divine-human person to be not the result of the incarnation, but as following upon the final development of the manhood, till which time the human consciousness could not fully grasp or be grasped by the Divine which was to be united with it. The Logos thus put a limit on His self-communication till the human susceptibility had obtained more complete development.

The first named of these views represents the Logos as suppressing or renouncing all that could not yet find room in humanity; while the second teaches that the union of the two natures was not completely accomplished till there grew to be a human consciousness in Jesus able to be appropriated, and also itself able to appropriate.

Both are attempts to throw light upon the language used by the apostle in this chapter, but in the attempts we are presented with greater difficulties than lie in St. Paul's words. For, taking the first exposition, it is hard to see how the Logos can, without detriment to His essential qualities, strip Himself of self-consciousness; or, when so stripped, of what advantage the Logos deprived of personality could be to humanity-The second theory disturbs our conception of God, and seems to suspend for a time the existence of the Trinity, and so far from making our appreciation of the union between the Divine and human more complete, makes either the Divine to convert itself into human, or the two to exist side by side, without any union at all.

In striving to escape from the difficulty of the double consciousness of our Lord in one indivisible Person, these theories raise up difficulties far more in number, and as great in their importance; and the history of these and kindred speculations is an evidence that for us the doctrine is not to be divested of its mystery, and that we tread then on safest ground when we use such words concerning it as are supplied to us by Revelation.