I. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS
ONE of the most portentous symptoms of the decay of vital sympathy with historical Christianity which is observable in present-day academic circles is the widespread tendency in recent Christological discussion to revolt from the doctrine of the Two Natures in the Person of Christ. The significance of this revolt becomes at once apparent, when we reflect that the doctrine of the Two Natures is only another way of stating the doctrine of the Incarnation; and the doctrine of the Incarnation is the hinge on which the Christian system turns. No Two Natures, no Incarnation; no Incarnation, no Christianity in any distinctive sense. Nevertheless, voices are raised all about us declaring the conception of two natures in Christ no longer admissible; and that very often with full appreciation of the significance of the declaration. Thus, for example, Johannes Weiss tells us that it is unthinkable that Godhood and manhood should be united in a single person walking upon the earth; that, while no doubt men of ancient time could conceive “that a man might really be an incarnate deity,” modern men feel much too strongly the impassable barrier which separates the divine and the human to entertain such a notion. And Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel pronounces it “simply impossible,” now that they have awakened to inquire “what is psychologically possible and impossible,” for men to submit any longer to a demand that does such violence at once to their intelligence and to their religious experience as the demand “that they should embrace the idea of a perfect God and a perfect Man as united in the one and indivisible person of a Saviour whom they are longing to revere.” Accordingly, since the divine and human nature cannot be united in Jesus, and since “Jesus was undoubtedly man,” he continues, we have simply to regard him as man and nothing more. Coming nearer home, William Adams Brown declares that men are no longer to be satisfied with “the old conception of Christ as a being of two natures, one divine and one human, dwelling in a mysterious union, incapable of description, within the confines of a single personality.” Such a conception, he thinks, fails to “do justice to the genuine humanity” of Jesus, who “shares our limitations”; and supposes “an impassable gulf between God and man” which requires “a miracle” to bridge it. The only “incarnation” which is real, he asserts, concerns not “a single instance,” but the eternal entrance of God “into humanity.”4 These are but examples of numerous deliverances which may differ from one another in the clearness with which they announce the consequences, but do not differ in the decisiveness with which they reject the doctrine of the Two Natures.
The violence of the revolution which is thus attempted is somewhat obscured by the bad habit, which is becoming common, of speaking of the doctrine of the Two Natures as in some sense the creation of the Chalcedonian fathers. Even Albert Schweitzer permits himself to write:
“When at Chalcedon the West overcame the East, its doctrine of the two natures dissolved the unity of the Person, and thereby cast off the last possibility of a return to the historical Jesus. The self-contradiction was elevated into a law.… This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence.”
By “the historical Jesus” is here meant the merely human Jesus; and it is quite true that the doctrine of the Two Natures interposes an insuperable obstacle to the recognition of such a Jesus as the real Jesus. There is a sense also in which it may be truly said that at Chalcedon the West impressed on the East its long-established doctrine of the Two Natures—a doctrine which had been fully formulated in the West from at least the time of Tertullian. But by this very token it is clear that the doctrine decreed at Chalcedon was nothing new; and if, as is often the case, the further suggestion is conveyed that what was new in it was the “Two Natures” itself, the perversion becomes monstrous.
It was no part of the task of the fathers at Chalcedon to invent a new doctrine, and the doctrine which they formulated had no single new element in it. Least of all was the doctrine of the Two Natures itself new. No one of the disputants in the long series of controversies which led up to Chalcedon, any more than in the equally long series of controversies which led down from it, cherished the least doubt of this doctrine—not even Arius, and certainly not Apollinaris, or Nestorius, or Eutyches, or any of the great Monophysite or Monothelite leaders, or any of their opponents. The doctrine of the Two Natures formed the common basis on which all alike stood; their differences concerned only the quality or integrity of the two natures united in the one person, or the character or effects of the union by which they were brought together. It was the adjustment of these points of difference alone with which the council was concerned, or rather, to speak more precisely, the authoritative determination of the range within which such attempted adjustments might be tolerated in a church calling itself Christian.