This half-ism is manifested also in what he says of the person of Christ, p. 158–167. He presents all the usual objections against the assumption of a two-fold nature in the Redeemer. He insists that it is God that appears under the limitations of humanity, and that of the divine nature is to be predicated the ignorance, subordination, and suffering ascribed to Christ. He commits himself fully to the Apollinarian view of Christ’s person. And then his heart or his conscience smites him. His unsteady head again reels, and he gives it all up. When categorically demanded, whether he renounces the divine and life-giving doctrine of God and man, in two distinct natures and one person, he falters, and says: “It may be imagined that I intend, in holding this view of the incarnation, or of the person of Christ, to deny that he had a human soul, or any thing human but a human body: I only deny that his human soul, or nature, is to be spoken of, or looked upon, as having a distinct subsistence.” P. 168. But this we all deny. Who ever heard of “two distinct subsistences” in Christ? If Dr. Bushnell has got no further than this, he has not got beyond his Catechism. For it is there taught there is but one subsistence, one suppositum intelligens, one person in Christ. He returns, however, to his εἰδωλον, to his Christ without a soul, a Christ who is no Christ, almost on the next page. We do not gain any thing, he says, “by supposing a distinct human soul in the person of Christ, connecting itself with what are called the humanities of Christ. Of what so great consequence to us are the humanities of a mere human soul.” P. 156. This saying and unsaying betrays a man who is not sure of his ground. People will never confide in a leader who does not confide in himself. Dr. Bushnell has undertaken a task for which he is entirely incompetent. He has not the learning, the knowledge of opinions or forms of doctrine; nor has he the philosophical culture, nor the constructive intellect, required to project a consistent and comprehensive theory on the great themes of God, the Incarnation, and Redemption. We say this with no disrespect. We would say it with tenfold readiness of ourselves. We have the advantage of our author, however, in having sense enough to know that our sphere is a much humbler one. Machiavelli was accustomed to say, there are three classes of men: one who see things in their own light; another who see them when they are shown; and a third who cannot see them even then. We invite Dr. Bushnell to resume his place with us, in the second class. By a just judgment of God, those who uncalled aspire to the first, lapse into the third.

The characteristic, to which we have referred, is not so strongly marked in the discourse on the Atonement. Here, alas! the writer has been able to emancipate himself more completely from the teachings of the nursery, the Bible, and the Spirit. Yet even here, there is that yearning after the old and scriptural, that desire to save something from the wreck of his former faith, which excites respectful commiseration. There are but three radical views of the Atonement, properly so called. The scriptural doctrine, which represents it as a real propitiation; the governmental view, which makes it a method of teaching symbolically the justice of God; the Socinian view, which regards it as designed to produce a subjective effect, to impress men with a sense of God’s love, &c. Dr. Bushnell spurns the first, rejects the second, and adopts the third. But then he finds that he has lost every thing worth retaining, and therefore endeavors to regain the first which he calls the “Altar view.” His “constructive logic” will not allow his holding it as truth, he therefore endeavors to hold it as “form.” He cannot retain it as doctrine, but he clings to it as “art.” He admits that it is the scriptural view; that the whole church has adhered to it as to the source of life, and that it is the only effective view. “Christ,” he says, “is a power for the moral renovation of the world, and as such is measured by what he expresses.” How is this renovation effected? Not by his offering himself as a propitiation for our sins, and thus reconciling us to God, and procuring for us the gift of the Holy Ghost, but “by his obedience, by the expense and pains-taking of his suffering life, by yielding up his own sacred person to die, he has produced in us a sense of the eternal sanctity of God’s law that was needful to prevent the growth of license or of indifference and insensibility to religious obligations, such as must be incurred, if the exactness and rigor of a law system were wholly dissipated by offers of pardon grounded in mere leniency.” This is really what Christ does. This is his atoning work. He produces a sense of the sanctity of the law in us. This is full out the Socinian view of the doctrine. But, says Dr. Bushnell, it has no power in this abstract form. “We must transfer this subjective state or impression, this ground of justification, and produce it outwardly, if possible, in some objective form; as if it had some effect on the law or on God. The Jew had done this before us, and we follow him; representing Christ as our sacrifice, sin-offering, atonement, sprinkling of blood. * * * These forms are the objective equivalents of our subjective impressions. Indeed, our impressions have their life and power in and under these forms. Neither let it be imagined that we only happen to seize upon these images of sacrifice, atonement, and blood, because they are at hand. They are prepared, as God’s form of art, for the representation of Christ and his work; and if we refuse to let him pass into this form, we have no mould of thought which can fitly represent him. And when he is thus represented, we are to understand that he is our sacrifice and atonement, that by his blood we have remission, not in any speculative sense, but as in art.” P. 254. The plain meaning of this is; that the actual thing done is the production of a certain subjective change, or impression in us. This impression cannot be produced in any way so effectively as by what Christ has done. As a work of art produces an impression more powerful than a formula; so Christ viewed as a sacrifice, as a ransom, as a propitiation, produces the impression of the sanctity of the law more powerfully than any didactic statement of its holiness could do. It is in this “artistic” form that the truth is effectively conveyed to the mind. This mode is admitted to be essential. Vicarious atonement, sacrifice, sin-offering, propitiation is declared to be “the DIVINE FORM of Christianity, in distinction from all others, and is, in that view, substantial to it, or consubstantial with it.” “It is obvious,” he adds, “that all the most earnest Christian feelings of the apostles are collected round this objective representation, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, for the sins of the world. They speak of it, not casually * * * but systematically, they live in it, their Christian feeling is measured by it, and shaped in the mould it offers.” P. 259. We do not consider this assertion of the absolute necessity of Christ’s being presented as a sacrifice, or this admission that his work is set forth as a vicarious atonement in the Scriptures, as a formal retraction or contradiction of the author’s speculative view of the real nature of the Redeemer’s work; but we do consider it sufficient to convince any rational man that that speculative view is an inanity, a lifeless notion, the bloodless progeny of a poetic imagination. Few persons will believe that the life and death of Christ was a liturgical service, a chant and a dirge, to move “the world’s mind;” a pageant with a moral.

These discourses, then, unless we are sadly deceived as to the amount of religious knowledge and principles in the public mind, must fail to produce any great impression. They lack the power of consistency. They say and unsay. They pull down, and fail to rebuild. What they give is in no proportion to what they take away. Besides this, their power is greatly impaired by the mixture of incongruous elements in their composition. Rationalism, Mysticism, and the new Philosophy are shaken together, but refuse to combine. The staple of the book is rationalistic, the other elements are adventitious. They have been too recently imbibed to be properly assimilated. Either of these elements by itself has an aspect more or less respectable. It is the combination that is grotesque. A mystic Rationalist is very much like a Quaker dragoon. As, however, we prefer faith without knowledge, to knowledge without faith, we think the mysticism an improvement. We rejoice to see that Dr. Bushnell, even at the expense of consistency and congruity, sometimes lapses into the passive mood of a recipient of truth through some other channel than the discursive understanding.

The new Philosophy, which gleams in lurid streaks through this volume, is still more out of place. We meet here and there with transcendental principles and expressions, which, even “the deepest chemistry of thought” (the solvent by which he proposes to make all creeds agree, page 82), must fail to bring into combination with the pervading Theism of the book. The presence of all these incongruous elements in these discourses is patent to every one who reads them. In our subsequent remarks we hope to make it sufficiently plain even to those who read only this review. Our present object is merely to indicate this characteristic as a source of weakness. Had Dr. Bushnell chosen to set forth a consistent exhibition of all that the mere understanding has to say against the doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement; or had he chosen to give us the musings of a poetical mystic; or had he even endeavored to reproduce the system of Hegel or Schleiermacher, we doubt not he would have made a book of considerable power. But the attempt to play so many incongruous parts at one time, in our poor judgment, has made the failure as complete as it was inevitable.

The extravagance of the book is another of its characteristics which must prevent its having much effect. Everything permanently influential is moderate. But Dr. Bushnell is extravagant even to a paradox. This disposition is specially manifested in the preliminary dissertation on language, and in the discourse on dogma. There is nothing either new or objectionable, in his general theory of language. The whole absurdity and evil lie in the extravagant length to which he carries his principles. It is true, for example, that there are two great departments of language, the physical and intellectual, or proper and figurative, the language of sensation and the language of thought. It is also true that the latter is to a great extent borrowed from the former. It is true, moreover, that the language of thought is in a measure symbolical and suggestive, and therefore, of necessity more or less inadequate. No words can possibly answer accurately to the multiplied, diversified and variously implicated states of mind to which they are applied. In all cases it is only an approximation. Something is always left unexpressed, and something erroneous always is, or may be, included in the terms employed. Dr. Bushnell, after parading these principles with great circumstance, presses them out to the most absurd conclusions. Because language is an imperfect vehicle of thought, no dependence can be placed upon it; there can be no such thing as a scientific theology; no definite doctrinal propositions; creeds and catechisms are not to be trusted; no author can be properly judged by his words, &c., &c. See pp. 72, 79, 82, 91, et seq., and the discourse on dogma passim. As creeds mean nothing or anything, he is willing to sign any number of them. He has never been able, he says, “to sympathise, at all, with the abundant protesting of the New England Unitarians against creeds. So far from suffering even the least consciousness of restraint or oppression under any creed, I have been the readier to accept as great a number as fell in my way; for when they are subjected to the deepest chemistry of thought, that which descends to the point of relationship between the form of the truth and its interior formless nature, they become, thereupon, so elastic, and run so freely into each other, that one seldom need have any difficulty in accepting as many as are offered him.” P. 82. This is shocking. It undermines all confidence, even in the ordinary transactions of life. There can, on this plan, be no treaties between nations, no binding contracts between individuals; for “the chemistry” which can make all creeds alike, will soon get what results it pleases out of any form of words that can be framed. This doctrine supposes there can be no revelation from God to men, except to the imagination and the feelings, none to the reason. It supposes that man, by the constitution of his nature is such a failure, that he cannot certainly communicate or receive thought. The fallacy of all Dr. Bushnell’s reasoning on this subject, is so transparent, that we can hardly give him credit for sincerity. Because, by words a man cannot express everything that is in his mind, the inference is that he can express nothing surely; because each particular word may be figurative and inadequate, it is argued that no number or combination of words, no variety of illustration, nor diversity in the mode of setting forth the same truth, can convey it certainly to other minds. He confounds, moreover, knowing everything that may be known of a given subject, with understanding any definite proposition respecting it. Because there is infinitely more in God than we can ever find out, therefore, the proposition, God is a Spirit, gives us no definite knowledge, and may as well be denied as affirmed! His own illustration on this point is the proposition, “Man thinks,” which, he says, has “a hundred different meanings.” Admitting that the subject “man,” in this proposition, may be viewed very variously, and that the nature and laws of the process of thought predicted of him, are very doubtful matters, this does not throw the smallest obscurity or ambiguity over the proposition itself. It conveys a definite notion, to every human being. It expresses clearly a certain amount of truth, a fact of consciousness, which, within certain limits, is understood by every human being exactly alike. Beyond those limits there may be indefinite diversity. But this does not render the proposition ambiguous. The man who should reverse the assertion, and say, “man does not think,” would be regarded as an idiot, though the greatest mental chemist of the age. This doctrine that language can convey no specific, definite truth to the understanding, which Dr. Bushnell uses to loosen the obligation of creeds, is all the sceptic needs, to destroy the authority of the Bible; and all the Jesuit requires to free himself from the trammels of common veracity. The practical difference between believing all creeds and believing none, is very small.

What our author says of logic is marked with the same extravagance. It is true that the understanding out of its legitimate sphere, is a perfectly untrustworthy guide. When it applies its categories to the infinite, or endeavors to subject the incomprehensible to its modes it must necessarily involve itself in contradictions. It is easy, therefore, to make any statement relating to the eternity, the immensity, or will of God, involve the appearance of inward conflict. From this Dr. Bushnell infers (i. e., when speaking as a mystic) that logic and the understanding are to be utterly discarded from the whole sphere of religion; that the revelations of God are not addressed to the reason, but to the æsthetic principles of our nature; and that a thing’s being absurd, is no proof that it is not true. Nay, the more absurd the better. He glories in the prospect of the harvest of contradictions and solecisms the critics are to gather from his book. He regards them as so many laurels plucked for the wreath which is to adorn his brows. That we may not be suspected of having caught a little of the Doctor’s extravagance, we beg the reader to turn to such passages as the following: “Probably the most contradictory book in the world is the gospel of John; and that for the very reason that it contains more and loftier truths than any other.” P. 57. “There is no book in the world that contains so many repugnances, or antagonistic forms of assertion, as the Bible. Therefore, if any man please to play off his constructive logic upon it, he can easily show it up as the absurdest book in the world.” P. 69. “I am perfectly well aware that my readers can run me into just what absurdity they please. Nothing is more easy. I suppose it might be almost as easy for me to do it as for them. Indeed, I seem to have the whole argument which a certain class of speculators must raise upon my Discourses, in order to be characteristic, fully before me. I see the words footing it along to their conclusions. I see the terrible syllogisms wheeling out their infantry on my fallacies and absurdities.” P. 106. He laughs at syllogisms as a ghost would at a musket. Syllogisms are well enough in their place; but the truth he teaches is perfectly consistent with absurdity, and therefore, cannot be hurt by being proved to be absurd. He says: “There may be solid, living, really consistent truth in the views I have offered, considering the Trinity and Atonement as addressed to feeling and imagination, when, considered as addressed to logic, there is only absurdity and confusion in them.” P. 108. The Incarnation and Trinity “offer God, not so much to the reason, or logical understanding, as to the imagination, and the perceptive or æsthetic apprehension of faith.” P. 102. They are to be accepted, he elsewhere says, and addressed “to feeling and imaginative reasons”—not “as metaphysical entities for the natural understanding.” P. 111.

It is among the first principles of the oracle of God, that regeneration and sanctification are not æsthetic effects produced through the imagination. They are moral and spiritual changes, wrought by the Holy Ghost, with and by the truth as revealed to the reason. The whole healthful power of the things of God over the feelings, depends upon their being true to the intellect. If we are affected by the revelation of God as a father, it is because he is a father, and not the picture of one. If we have peace through faith in the blood of Christ, it is because he is a propitiation for our sins in reality, and not in artistic form merely. The Bible is not a cunningly-devised fable—a work of fiction, addressed to the imagination. It would do little for the poor and the homeless, to entertain them with a picture of Elysium. It would not heal a leper or a cripple, to allow him to gaze on the Apollo; nor will it comfort or sanctify a convinced sinner, to set before him any sublime imaginings concerning God and atonement. The revelations of God are addressed to the whole soul, to the reason, to the imagination, to the heart, and to the conscience. But unless they are true to the reason, they are as powerless as a phantasm.

Dr. Bushnell makes no distinction between knowing and understanding. Because it is not necessary that the objects of faith should be understood (i. e., comprehended in their nature and relations), he infers that they need not be known. Because God is incomprehensible, our conceptions of him may be absurd and contradictory! This is as much as to say, that because there are depths and vastnesses in the stellar universe which science cannot penetrate; nebulæ which no telescope can resolve, therefore we may as rationally believe the cosmogony of the Hindus as the Méchanique Céleste. It is plain the poetic element in Dr. Bushnell’s constitution has so completely swallowed up the rational and moral, he can see only through the medium of the imagination. Through that medium all things are essentially the same. Different creeds present to his eye, “in fine frenzy rolling,” only the various patterns of a kaleidoscope. It may be well enough for him to amuse himself with that pretty toy; but it is a great mistake to publish what he sees as discoveries, as though a kaleidoscope were a telescope.

As one other illustration of our author’s spirit of exaggeration, we would refer to what he says of his responsibility for his opinions. No man will deny that we are all in a measure passive in the reception of any system of doctrine; that the circumstances of our birth and education, and the manifold influences of our peculiar studies and associations, and especially (as to all good) of the Spirit of God, determine, in a great measure, our whole intellectual and moral state. But under these ab extra influences, and mingling with them, is the mysterious operations of our spontaneous and voluntary nature, yielding or opposing, choosing, or rejecting, so that our faith becomes the most accurate image and criterion of our inner man. We are what we believe; our faith is the expression of our true moral character, and is the highest manifestation of our inward self. We are more responsible, therefore, for our faith than even for our acts; for the latter are apt to be impulsive, while the former is the steady index of the soul, pointing God-ward or earth-ward. Dr. Bushnell, however, pushes the admitted fact that outward and inward influences have so much power over men, to the extent of denying all responsibility for his opinions. “I seem,” he says, “with regard to the views presented, to have had only about the same agency in forming them, that I have in preparing the blood I circulate, and the anatomic frame I occupy. They are not my choice or invention, so much as a necessary growth, whose process I can hardly trace myself. And now, in giving them to the public, I seem only to have about the same kind of option left me that I have in the matter of appearing in corporal manifestation myself—about the same anxiety, I will add, concerning the unfavorable judgments to be encountered; for though a man’s opinions are of vastly greater moment than his looks, yet, if he is equally simple in them, as in his growth, and equally subject to his law, he is responsible only in the same degree, and ought not, in fact, to suffer any greater concern about their reception than about the judgment passed upon his person.” P. 98.

Hence the sublime confidence expressed on p. 116: “The truths here uttered are not mine. They live in their own majesty. * * * If they are rejected universally, then I leave them to time, as the body of Christ was left, believing that after three days they rise again.” We venture to predict that these days will turn out to be demiurgic.

All we have yet said respecting the characteristics of these Discourses might be true, and yet their general tendency be good. It is conceivable that a book may pull down rather than construct; that its materials may be incongruous, and its tone exaggerated, and yet its principles and results be in the main correct. This, we are sorry to say, is very far from being the case with regard to the volume now before us. Its principles and results are alike opposed to the settled faith of the Christian world. This we shall endeavor, as briefly as possible, to demonstrate.

We have already said that the spirit of this book is rationalistic. The Rationalism which we charge on Dr. Bushnell is not that of the Deists, which denies any higher source of truth than human reason. Nor is it that Rationalism which will receive nothing except on rational grounds; which admits the truths of revelation only because they can be proved from reason though not discovered by it. The charge is, that he unduly exalts the authority of reason as a judge of the contents of an admitted revelation. All men, do, of necessity, either expressly or by implication, admit that reason has a certain judicial authority in matters of faith. This arises from God’s being the author both of reason and revelation. And he has so constituted our nature, that it is impossible for us to believe contradictions. We may believe things which we cannot reconcile; but we cannot believe. any proposition which affirms and denies the same thing. Contradictions, however, are carefully to be distinguished both from things merely incomprehensible, and from those which are not made evident to us, and which, for the time being, we cannot believe. A contradiction is seen to be such, as soon as the terms in which it is expressed are understood. That a thing is and is not; that the whole is less than one of its parts; that sin is holiness; that one person is three persons, or two persons are one, are at once, and by all men, seen to be impossibilities. A contradiction cannot be true, what is incomprehensible may be. Its being incomprehensible may depend on our ignorance or weakness of intellect. What is incomprehensible to a child is often perfectly intelligible to a man. While, therefore, we cannot be required to believe contradictions, we are commanded to believe, at the peril of salvation, much that we cannot understand.

Men often confound these two classes of things, and reject, as contradictory what is merely incomprehensible. This, however, is rationalism; it is an abuse of the judicium contradictionis which belongs to reason. It is a still more common form of rationalism to reject doctrines because they are distasteful, or because they conflict with our opinions or prejudices. Of such rationalism the church is full. Men’s likes and dislikes are, after all, in a multitude of cases, their true rule of faith.

It is with both these forms of Rationalism we think Dr. Bushnell’s book is chargeable. With him the questions respecting the Trinity and Incarnation are not questions of scriptural interpretation. He scarcely, especially as to the former, deigns to ask, What does the Bible teach? The whole subject is submitted to “the constructive logic.” Can the church doctrine, on these points, be reduced under the categories of the understanding? This, with Dr. B., is the great question. Because he cannot see how there can be three persons in the same divine substance, he pronounces it to be impossible. He admits that the Scriptures appear to teach this doctrine; nay, that we are forced to conceive of God as triune, to answer our own inward necessities; but there stands Logic, saying, It cannot be so, and he believes Logic rather than God; not observing, alas! that Logic, in this case, is only Dr. Bushnell. It may, indeed, be asked, How are we to tell what is a contradiction? Or what right have we to call a man a Rationalist for rejecting a doctrine which appears to him to contradict reason? We answer: all real self-contradictions are self-evidently such. Of necessity, the responsibility in such cases is a personal one. If one man denies the existence of a personal God, another the responsibility of man, another divine providence, on the ground that these doctrines contradict reason, they act at their peril. It is nevertheless both the right and the duty of all Christians to denounce, as the manifestation of a rationalistic spirit, all rejection of the plain doctrines of the Scripture as self-contradictory and absurd. Such condemnation is involved in their continued faith in the Bible as a revelation of God.

If the church doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are rejected in this volume on the ground that they involve contradictions, the doctrine of atonement is no less evidently repudiated because the author does not like it. It offends his feelings, or, as he supposes, his “correct moral sentiments;” just as the scriptural doctrine of future punishment offends the moral sentiments of Universalists. His objections are not derived from Scripture. They are the cavils of the understanding or of offended feeling. When arguments of this sort are exhausted, he is perfectly bankrupt, and, as is too apt to be the case with bankrupts, he then turns dishonest. We hardly know where to look for a more uncandid representation of the church doctrine, than is to be found on pp. 196, 197. This is the more inexcusable, as Dr. B. himself admits that it is under those very forms of sin-offering and propitiation, the work of Christ is set forth in the Scriptures; and it is to those forms he attributes all its power. But it is a contradiction to say that Christ’s death under the form of a propitiation, can be effective as an expression of good, if his being an actual propitiation, is offensive. If the reality is horrible, the representation cannot be beauty. As well might the Gorgonian head be used to subdue the world to love.

But if Rationalism is Dr. Bushnell’s sword, Mysticism is his shield. So long as he is attacking, no man makes more of the “constructive logic;” but as soon as the logic is brought to bear against himself, he turns saint, and is wrapt in contemplation. He wonders people should expect a poem to prove any thing; or require any thing so beautiful as religion to be true. He is like one of those fighting priests of the middle ages, who, so long as there was any robbing to be done, were always in the saddle; but as soon as the day of reckoning came, pleaded loudly their benefit of clergy.

There are several kinds of Mysticism; and as Dr. B. recommends both Neander and Madame Guyon, who differ toto cœlo, it is difficult to say which he means to adopt; or whether, as is his wont, he means to believe them all. In the general, Mysticism is faith in an immediate, continued, supernatural, divine operation on the soul, effecting a real union with God, and attainable only by a passive waiting or inward abstraction and rest. The divine influence or operation, assumed in Mysticism, differs from the scriptural doctrine concerning the work of the Spirit, as the former is assumed to be a continued, immediate influence, instead of with and by the truth. The Scriptures do indeed teach that, in the moment of regeneration, the Spirit of God acts directly on the soul, but they do not inculcate any such continued direct operation as mysticism supposes. After regeneration, all the operations of the Spirit are in connexion with the word; and the effects of his influence are always rational—i. e., they involve an intellectual apprehension of the truth revealed in the Scriptures. The whole inward life, thus induced, is therefore dependent on the written word and conformed to it. It is no vague ecstacy of feeling, or spiritual inebriation, in which all vision is lost, of which the Spirit of truth is the author; but a form of life in which the illuminated intellect informs and controls the affections. Neither is Mysticism to be confounded with inspiration. The latter is an influence on the reason, revealing truth or guiding the intellectual operations of the mind. Mysticism makes the feelings the immediate subject of this divine impression, and the intellect to be rather indirectly influenced. The idea of an immediate operation of God on the soul is so prominent in Mysticism, that Luther calls the Pope the Great Mystic, because of his claim to perpetual inspiration, or supernatural guidance of the Spirit, independent of the word.¹

A second form of Mysticism is that which places religion entirely in the feelings, excited by the presence of God, and makes doctrine of very subordinate moment. It is not the intellect that is relied upon to receive truth as presented in the word, but a spiritual insight is assumed, a direct intuition of the things of God. This again is very different from the scriptural doctrine of divine illumination. The latter supposes the Spirit to open the eyes of the mind to see the things freely given to us by God in the word. It is only the scriptural discernment of the things of the Spirit revealed in the Scriptures, to which this illumination leads. But the intuitions of the mystic are above and apart from the word, and of higher authority. The letter kills him; the inward sense discerned by a holy instinct, gives him life. Besides the forms above mentioned, there is a philosophical Mysticism, which scientifically evolves doctrine out of feeling. Instead of making the objective in religion control the subjective, it does the reverse. It admits no doctrines but such as are supposed to be the intellectual expressions of Christian feeling. To this doubtless Neander, as a friend and pupil of Schleiermacher, the author of this theory, is more or less inclined. The term Mysticism is used in a still wider sense. The assertion, that religion is not a mere matter of the intellect, a mere philosophy, or that there is more in it than a correct creed and moral life, has been, and often is, called Mysticism. This, however, is merely a protest against Rationalism, or formal, traditionary, and lifeless orthodoxy. In this sense all evangelical Christians are mystics. This is a mere abuse of the term.

It is obvious that Mysticism, properly so called, in all its forms, makes little of doctrine. It has a source of knowledge higher than the Scriptures. The life of God in the soul is assumed to be as informing now as in the case of the apostles. The Scriptures, therefore, are not needed, and they are not regarded, as either the ground or rule of faith. The ordinary means of grace are of still less importance. The church is nothing. The spiritual life of the soul is not preserved by the ordinances of God, but by isolation and quietism. By this neglect of Scripture the door is opened for all sorts of vagaries to usurp the place of truth. And the kind of religion thus fostered is either a poetic sentimentalism or a refined sensualism, which becomes less and less refined the longer it is indulged. Dr. Bushnell must remember that he is not the first mystic by a great many thousands, and that this whole tendency, of which he has become the advocate and exemplar, has left its melancholy traces in the history of the church.

The position of our author, in reference to this subject, is to be learned, partly from his direct assertions, partly from the general spirit of his book, and partly from the fruits or results of the system, so far as they are here avowed. We can refer to little more than some of his most explicit declarations on the subject. On p. 92, he complains of “the theologic method of New England” as being essentially rationalistic. “The possibility of reasoning out religion, though denied in words, has been tacitly assumed. * * * It has not been held as a practical, positive, and earnest Christian truth, that there is a PERCEPTIVE POWER in spiritual life, an unction of the Holy One, which is itself a kind of inspiration—an immediate, experimental knowledge of God, by virtue of which, and partly in the degree of which, Christian theology is possible.”

In opposition to the rationalistic method, as he considers it, “The views of language, here offered,” he says, “lead to a different method. The Scriptures will be more studied than they have been, and in a different manner—not as a magazine of propositions and mere dialectic entities, but as inspirations and poetic forms of life; requiring, also, divine inbreathings and exaltations in us, that we may ascend into their meaning. Our opinions will be less catechetical and definite, using the word as our definers do, but they will be as much broader as they are more divine; as much truer, as they are more vital and closer to the plastic, undefinable mysteries of spiritual life. We shall seem to understand less and shall actually receive more. We shall delight in truth, more as a concrete, vital nature, incarnated in all fact and symbol round us—a vast, mysterious, incomprehensible power, which best we know, when most we love.” “A mystic,” he says, “is one who finds a secret meaning, both in words and things, back of their common and accepted meaning—some agency of LIFE or of LIVING THOUGHT, hid under the forms of words and institutions, and historical events.” He quotes Neander as saying that the apostle John “exhibits all the incidents of the outward history of Christ, only as a manifestation of his indwelling glory, by which this may be brought home to the heart. * * * John is the representative of the truth which lies at the basis of that tendency of the Christian spirit, which sets itself in opposition to a one-sided intellectualism, and ecclesiastical formality—and is distinguished by the name mysticism.” P. 95. “I make no disavowal,” adds our author, “that there is a mystic element, as there should be, in what I have represented as the source of language, and, also, in the views of Christian life and doctrine that follow.” On p. 347, he recommends to Christians ministers and students of theology “that they make a study, to some extent, of the mystic and quietistic writers.” Besides these distinct avowals, the main design of the book manifests the writer’s position. His great object is to prove that positive doctrines have no authority; that the revelations of God are addressed to the imagination, and not to the reason; that their truth lies in what they express. The work of Christ, he says, “Is more a poem than a treatise. It classes as a work of art more than as a work of science. It addresses the understanding, in great part, through the feeling or sensibility. In these it has its receptivities, by these it is perceived, or is perceivable.” P. 204. It is as a mystic he pours forth his whole tirade against theology, catechisms, and creeds. It is not by truth, but by merging all differences of doctrine, in æsthetic emotions, that religion is to be revived, and all Christians are to be united. It is not the philosophical mysticism of Neander, which makes havoc enough of the doctrines of the Bible, which this volume advocates; but a mere poetic sentimentalism. The author would provide a crucible in which all Christian truth is to be sublimated. To the mystic the Bible is a mere picture-book; and Christian ordinances absolutely nothing. We have accordingly in this volume a discourse on the “True reviving of Religion,” in which there is not one word said of the importance of doctrinal truth, or of the means of grace, or of the work of the Holy Spirit. Its whole drift is to show that doctrine, stigmatized as “dogma,” is human, and lifeless, and that immediate insight, “the perceptive power” of the inner life, is the true source of all those views of divine things, which are really operative, and that the great means of attaining those views, and of bringing the soul into union with God, is Quietism.

The main objection to this book, however, has not yet been stated. Some men have been as rationalistic, and others as mystical as Dr. Bushnell, who have nevertheless held fast the great doctrines of the gospel; whereas Dr. Bushnell discards them, and substitutes the phantoms of his own imagination in their place. This is plainly the case with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity. The course which the church has pursued in reference to this, and similar doctrines, is to make a careful collation of all the scriptural facts relating to the subject, and then to frame a statement of those facts, which shall avoid any contradiction, either of itself or of other revealed truths. Such statement is then the church doctrine as to that subject. The doctrine does not profess to be an explanation of the facts, nor a reconciliation of them, but simply a statement of them, free from contradiction, which is to be received on the authority of God. The essential facts contained in Scripture concerning the Trinity are: 1. There is but one God; one divine being, nature, or substance, 2. That to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, divine titles, attributes, works, and worship, are ascribed. 3. That the Father, Son, and Spirit, are so distinguished, the one from the other, that each is the source and the object of action; the Father loves and sends the Son; the Son loves and reveals the Father; the Spirit testifies of the Son and is sent by him. The personal pronouns, I, Thou, He, are used to express this distinction. The Father says Thou, to the Son; and the Son says Thou, to the Father. Both speaking of the Spirit, says He or Him. All this is done not casually, occasionally, or rhetorically, but uniformly, solemnly, and didactically. 4. The Father, Son, and Spirit are represented as doing, each a specific work, and all co-operating, outwardly and inwardly, in the redemption of man; and we are required to perform specific duties which terminate on each. We are to look to the Father as our Father, to the Son as our Redeemer, to the Spirit as our Paraclete. We are bound to acknowledge each; as we are baptized in the name of the Son and Spirit, as well as in the name of the Father. We believe in the Son, as we do in the Father, and honor the one as we do the other. Christianity, therefore, not merely as a system of doctrine, but as a practical religion, is founded on this doctrine. The God who is the object of all the exercise of Christian piety, is the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Such, by common consent, are the scriptural facts on this subject. The summation of these facts, in the form of doctrine, as given by the church, is: “There are three persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, and equal in power and glory.” This is the sum of the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, the common faith of the Christian world. It is scarcely more than a compendious statement of admitted facts. The word person is only a concise form of expressing the third class of facts above mentioned. It is not intended to explain them. It is intended simply as a denial that the Father, Son, and Spirit are mere modal distinctions, or different revelations of God; and to affirm that those terms indicate such distinctions, as that each is the agent and object of action, and can say I, and be properly addressed as Thou. The church has never taught that there are three consciousnesses, intelligences, and wills, in God. It has humbly refused to press its definition of person beyond the limits just indicated, and has preferred to leave the nature of these distinctions in that obscurity which must ever overhang the infinite God in the view of his finite creatures. As the Bible does most clearly teach the existence of this threefold personal distinction in the Godhead, the only question is, whether we will renounce its authority, or believe what it asserts. Dr. Bushnell does not attempt to show that the church doctrine on this subject is unscriptural. His only objection is, that he cannot understand it. He sums up his whole argument on the subject, by saying: “Such is the confusion produced by attempting to assert a real and metaphysical trinity of persons, in the divine nature. Whether the word is taken at its full import, or diminished away to the mere something called a distinction, there is produced only contrariety, confusion, practical negation, not light.” P. 135. This is all he has to say. If the word person has its proper sense, then the church doctrine asserts three consciousnesses, intelligences, and wills, in the divine nature. If it means merely a “distinction,” then Trinitarians do not differ from Unitarians. The former he asserts is the meaning of the word, and therefore, “any intermediate doctrine between the absolute unity of God and a social unity is impossible and incredible.” He shuts us up to Tritheism or Unitarianism—no threefold distinction in the divine nature can be admitted. There can be no doubt, therefore, either as to our author’s rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, or as to the purely rationalistic grounds of that rejection.

His own view of the subject is, that the terms Father, Son, and Spirit, refer to the threefold revelation of God. He says, speaking of “Schleiermacher’s critique of Sabellius,” translated and published in the Biblical Repository: “The general view of the Trinity in that article coincides, it will be observed, with the view which I have presented, though the reasonings are not in all points the same.” P. 111. With Schleiermacher the absolute God is unknown. It is only the manifested or revealed God of which we can speak. This revelation is threefold. First, the manifestation of the one God in the world; this is the Father. Second, the manifestation of the one God in Jesus Christ; this is the Son. Third, the revelation of the one God in the church; this is the Spirit. It is hardly necessary to quote particular passages to show how exactly Dr. Bushnell has adopted this system. In language almost Hegelian, he asks, page 129: What conception shall we form “of God as simply in Himself, and as yet unrevealed? Only that He is the Absolute being, the Infinite, the I am that I am, giving no sign that he is other than that he is.” “But there is in God, taken as the absolute Being, a capacity of self-expression, so to speak, which is peculiar—a generative power of form, a creative imagination, in which, or by the aid of which, He can produce Himself outwardly, or represent himself in the finite.” P. 145. In creating worlds, “He only represents, expresses, or outwardly produces himself.” This is the first revelation, or the Father. But, “as God has produced himself in all the other finite forms of being,” so he appears in the human. This is the second revelation, or the Son. Pp. 146, 147. “But in order to the full and complete apprehension of God, a third personality, the Holy Spirit, needs to appear. By the Logos in the creation, and then by the Logos in the Incarnation, assisted or set off by the Father as a relative personality, God’s character, feeling, and truth, are expressed. * * * But we want, also, to conceive of Him as in act within us, working in us under the conditions of time and progression, spiritual results of quickening, deliverance, and purification from evil. * * * Accordingly, the natural image, Spirit, that is, breath, is taken up and clothed with personality.” P. 171. This is the third revelation, or the Holy Spirit. This, true enough, is the Sabellianism of Schleiermacher—a threefold revelation of God in the world, in Christ, and in the church.

This is all very fine. But there is one thing that spoils it all. Dr. Bushnell holds the details of a system without holding its fundamental, formative principle. There is nothing in this book to intimate that he is really a Pantheist. On the contrary, there is everything against that assumption. Schleiermacher’s whole system, however, rests on the doctrine that there is but one substance in the universe, which substance is God; and especially that the divine and human natures are identical. It is well enough, therefore, for him to talk of God’s producing himself in the world; for according to his theory, in a very high sense, the world is God. It is well enough for him to say that, though Christ is God, he had but one nature, because, with him the human nature is divine, and a perfect man is God. What, therefore, in Schleiermacher is consistent and imposing, is in Dr. Bushnell simply absurd. The system of the one is a Doric temple, that of the other is a heap of stones.

We will not insult our readers with any argument to show that the Bible does not teach Sabellianism. If any one needs such proof, we refer him to those parts of this book in which Dr. Bushnell attempts to prove that the one divine person, incarnate in Christ, sent himself, obeyed himself, and worshipped himself. The perusal will doubtless excite the reader’s pity, but it will effectually convince him he must renounce faith in the Scriptures before he can be a Sabellian. There is another thing to be observed. Schleiermacher stands outside of the Bible. He professes to it no manner of allegiance as a rule of faith. He takes out of it what he likes, and combining it with his Pantheistical principles, constructs a massive system of Theosophical philosophy, which does not pretend to rest on the authority of an objective revelation. It is enough, therefore, to move one to wonder, or to indignation, to see that system, which its author puts forth as human, presented by professed believers in the Bible as scriptural and divine. Dr. Bushnell has chosen to enroll himself among the avowed opposers of the church doctrine of the Trinity. He fully endorses as conclusive the common Unitarian objections to that doctrine, and then presents one for which its author claims no divine authority, and which stands in undisguised opposition to the word of God. He must stretch his license as a poet a great way, if he can claim to be a Trinitarian, simply because he recognizes a threefold revelation of God. If this be enough to constitute a Trinitarian, the title may be claimed by all the Pantheists of ancient and modern times. They all have a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, of some sort. They all teach that the absolute Being (which they represent very much as Dr. Bushnell does, as nihil), of which nothing can be affirmed and nothing denied, is ever coming to self-consciousness in the world, and returning into himself. Dr. B. affirms with them an eternal creation (page 146), and gives us, for the living and ever-blessed Trinity, nothing but a lifeless God, a world, and humanity. This at least is substantially the system which he professes to adopt, and of which his book, in one aspect, is a feeble and distorted image. We say in one aspect, because it is only in one aspect. It is characteristic of these Discourses, as we remarked at the outset, that their elements are incongruous. They teach everything, and of course nothing. Pantheism is only one of the phases in which the manifold system of the author is presented. The book is really theistical, after all.

In rejecting the scriptural doctrine of the Trinity, our author of course discards the common doctrine of the Incarnation. That doctrine is arrived at precisely as the doctrine of the Trinity was framed. It is but a comprehensive statement of the facts asserted in the Scriptures concerning the Lord Jesus. The most essential of those facts are: 1. That all the titles, attributes and perfections of God are ascribed to him, and that we are required to render to him all those duties of love, confidence, reverence, and obedience, which are due to God alone. 2. That all the distinctive appellations, attributes, and acts, of a man, are ascribed to him. He is called the man Christ Jesus, and the Son of Man. He is said to have been born of a woman, to have hungered and thirsted, to have bled and died. He increased in wisdom, was ignorant of the day of judgment; he manifested all innocent human affections, and, in dying, committed his soul unto God. 3. He of whom all divine perfections, and all the attributes of our nature, are freely and constantly predicated, when speaking of himself, always says, I, Me, Mine. He is always addressed as Thou; he is always spoken of as He or Him. There is no where the slightest intimation or manifestation of a twofold personality in Christ. There is not a “divine soul” with a human soul inhabiting the same body—i. e., he was not two persons. There is but one subsistence, suppositum, or person. 4. This one person is often called a man when even divine acts or perfections are attributed to him. It is the Son of Man who is to awake the dead, to summon all nations, and to sit in judgment on all men. It is the Son of Man who was in heaven before his advent, and who, while on earth, was still in heaven, On the other hand, he is often called God when the things predicated of him are human. The Lord of Glory was crucified. He who was in the beginning with God, who was the true God and eternal life, was seen and handled. Again, the subject does not change though the predicates do. Thus in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, it is said of the Son: 1. That he is the brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of his substance. 2. That he upholds all things by the word of his power. 3. That by (the offering of) himself he made purification of sin. 4. That he is set down at the right hand of the majesty on high. Here the possession of a divine nature, the exercise of almighty power, dying as an offering for sin, and exaltation to the right hand of God, are all predicated of one and the same subject. In like manner, in the second chapter of the Philippians, it is said, He who was in the form of God, and entitled to equality with God, was found in fashion as man, humbled himself so as to become obedient unto death, and is exalted above all creatures in heaven and earth. Here equality with God, humanity, humiliation, and exaltation, are predicated of the same subject. Such representations are not peculiar to the New Testament. In all the Messianic predictions, he who is declared to be the mighty God and everlasting Father, is said to be born, and to have a government assigned him. On one page he is called Jehovah, whose glory fills the earth, and on the next a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.

In framing a comprehensive statement of these facts, it will not do to say, that Christ was a mere man, for this is inconsistent with the divine perfections and honor ascribed to him. It will not do to say that he is simply God, for that is inconsistent with his manifest humanity. It will not do to say that he is God and a man as two distinct substances, for he stands forth in the evangelical history as manifestly one person, as does Peter or John. The only thing that can be said is, that “The eternal Son of God became man by taking to himself a true body and a reasonable soul, and so was and continues to be God and man, in two distinct natures, and one person forever.” This is the substance of the Nicene and Athanasian creeds so far as they relate to the person of Christ. It will be observed how little this statement includes beyond the undeniable facts of the case. It asserts that there is in Christ a divine nature, because divine perfections, authority, and works of necessity suppose such a nature. It asserts that he has a human nature, because he is not only called a man, but all the attributes of our nature are ascribed to him. And it asserts that he is one person because he always so speaks of himself, and is so spoken of by the sacred writers. The church doctrine, therefore, on this subject, is clearly the doctrine of the Bible.

Before adverting for a moment to the objections which Dr. Bushnell urges to this view of the person of Christ, we remark on the unreasonableness of the demand which he makes, when attacking the church doctrine, that all obscurity should be banished from this subject. The union between the soul and body, with all the advantages of its lying within the domain of consciousness and the sphere of constant observation, is an impenetrable mystery. Dr. Bushnell can understand it as little as he can understand the relation between the divine and human natures of Christ. It is therefore glaringly unreasonable and rebellious against God, to reject what he has revealed on this subject because it is a mystery, and pre-eminently the great mystery of the gospel.

Our author objects that the doctrine of two natures in Christ “does an affront to the plain language of the Scripture. For the Scripture does not say that a certain human soul called Jesus born as such of Mary, obeyed and suffered, but it says in the boldest manner, that he who was in the form of God humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. A declaration the very point of which is, not that the man Jesus was a being under human limitations, but that he who was in the form of God, the real divinity, came into the finite, and was subject to human conditions.” P. 153. In answer to this objection we would remark, 1. That it is one of the plainest rules of interpretation that when any thing is predicated of a subject inconsistent with its known and admitted nature, such predicate cannot be referred directly to the subject. It must either be understood figuratively, or in reference, not to the subject itself, but to something intimately connected with it. If it is said of a man that he roars, or that he flies, or that he is shabby, these things are necessarily understood in a way consistent with the known and admitted nature of man. If it is said he is blind, or deaf, or lame, of necessity, again, this is understood of his body and not of his spirit. In like manner when it is said of God, that he sees, hears, has hands, eyes, or ears, or that he is angry, or that he is aggrieved, or that he enquires and searches out, all these declarations are universally understood in consistency with the known and admitted nature of the Supreme Being. By a like necessity, and with as little violence to any correct rule of interpretation, when any thing is affirmed of Christ that implies limitation, whether ignorance, obedience, or suffering, it must be understood, not of “the real divinity,” but of his limited nature. It is only, therefore, by violating a principle of interpretation universally recognized and admitted, that the objection under consideration can be sustained. 2. It was shown to be a constant usage of Scripture to predicate of Christ, whatever can be predicated of either of the natures united in his person. Of man may be affirmed any thing that is true either of his soul or of his body. He may be said to be mortal or immortal; to be a spirit created in the image of God, and to be a child of the dust. And still further, he is often designated as a spirit, when what is affirmed of him is true only of his animal nature. We speak of rational and immortal beings as given up to gluttony and drunkenness, without meaning to affirm that the immortal soul can eat and drink. Why then, when it is said of the blessed Saviour, that he suffered and obeyed, must it be understood of the “real divinity?” If Dr. Bushnell means to be consistent, he must not only assert that the deity suffers, but that God can be pierced with nails and spear. It was the Lord of Glory who was crucified. They shall look on me whom they have pierced, said the eternal Jehovah. Does our author mean to affirm that it was the “real divinity” that was nailed to the cross, and thrust through with a spear?

3. The principle of interpretation on which the objection is founded would prove that human nature is infinite and eternal. If because the Scriptures say that he who was in the form of God became obedient unto death, it follows that the “real divinity” died; then the assertion that the Son of Man was in heaven before his advent, and in heaven while on earth, proves that human nature has the attributes of eternity and omnipresence. The Bible tells us that the Son of God assumed our nature, or took part of flesh and blood, in order that he might be a merciful and faithful high-priest, able to sympathize in the infirmities of his people; but whence the necessity of his assuming flesh and blood, if the divine nature can suffer and obey? It is really to deny God to affirm of him what is absolutely incompatible with his divine perfections. It is a virtual denial of God, therefore, to affirm that the “real divinity,” is ignorant, obeys, and dies. Let the Bible be interpreted on the same principle on which the language of common life is understood, and there will be no more difficulty in comprehending the declaration that the Lord of Glory was crucified, than the assertion concerning man, Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return. Is the “Thou” in man, the interior person, dust? Dr. Bushnell must say, yes, and the affirmation would be as rational as his assertion that the divinity in Christ became subject to the “human conditions” of ignorance and sorrow.

Another objection is thus presented. The common doctrine “virtually denies any real unity between the human and the divine, and substitutes collocation or copartnership for unity.” “The whole work of Christ, as a subject, suffering Redeemer, is thrown upon the human side of his nature, and the divine side standing thus aloof incommunicably distant, has nothing in fact to do with the transaction, other than to be a spectator.” P. 155. There would be as much truth and reason in the assertion, that the spiritual, the rational, and immortal part of a dying martyr, was a mere spectator of the sufferings of his body. It is the martyr who suffers, though the immaterial spirit cannot be burnt or lacerated. With equal truth, it is the Lord of Glory who died upon the cross, and the Son of God who poured out his soul unto death, though we hold it blasphemy to say it was the divine nature as such, the “real divinity” in Christ, that was subject to the limitations and sorrows of humanity. Dr. Bushnell says a hypostatical union, i. e., such an union between the human and divine as to constitute one person, is mere collation. Is the union of soul and body in one person, mere collation? If it is a man who suffers when his body is injured, no less truly was it the Son of God who suffered, when his sacred body was lacerated by the scourge, or pierced with nails. The acts of Christ, for the sake of clearness, are referred to three classes. The purely divine, such as the creation of the world; the purely human, such as walking or sleeping; the theanthropical, such as his whole work as mediator, all he did and suffered for the redemption of the world. It was not the obedience or death of a man, by which our redemption was effected; but the obedience and sufferings of the Son of God. Christ, be it remembered, is not a human person invested with certain divine perfections and prerogatives. Nor was he a human person with whom a divine person dwelt in a manner analogous to God’s presence in his prophets or his people; or to the indwelling of demons in the case of the possessed. He was a divine person with a human nature, and therefore everything true of that nature may be predicated of that divine person, just as freely as every thing true of our material bodies may be predicated of us, whose real personality is an immaterial spirit. In some feeble analogy to the three classes of the acts of Christ, above referred to, is a similar classification of human actions. Some are purely bodily, as the pulsations of the heart; others are purely mental, as thought; others are mixed, as sensation, or voluntary muscular action, or the emotions of shame, fear, &c. It is absurd to confound all these, and to assert that the spirit has a pulse. It is no less absurd so to separate them, as to say any one of these kinds of actions is not the activity of the man. In asserting, then, a personal union, between the two natures in Christ, the church asserts a real union, not confounding, but uniting them, so that the acts of the human nature of Christ, are as truly the acts of the Son of God, as the acts of our bodies are our acts. All those objections, therefore, founded on the assumption that the common doctrine provides no explanation of the mediatorial work, representing it, after all, as the work of a mere man, are destitute of foundation. It was because the divine nature, as such, could neither suffer nor obey, that the Son of God assumed a nature capable of such obedience and suffering, but the assumption of that nature into personal union with himself made the nature His, and therefore the obedience and sufferings were also His. It is right to say, God purchased the church with his own blood.

A third objection is, that while separate activity is made a proof of the distinct personality of the Son and Spirit, it is not allowed to be a proof of the distinct personality of the human nature of Christ. What in the Godhead is affirmed to be evidence of a distinction of persons, is denied to be sufficient evidence of such distinction in the reference to the two natures in Christ. Or, to state the case still more strongly, we ascribe separate intelligence and will to the human nature of Christ, and deny it to be a person; though we dare not say there are three intelligences and wills in God, and still insist there are three persons in the Godhead.

The simple and sufficient answer to this objection is that in the Bible, the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinguished as separate persons, and the two natures in Christ are not so distinguished. This is reason enough to justify the church in refusing to consider even separate intelligence and will, in the one case, proof of distinct personality; while, in the other, identity of intelligence and will is affirmed to be consistent with diversity of person. The fact is plain that the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinguished as persons; the one sends and another is sent; the one promises the other engages, the one says I, the other Thou. It is not less plain, that the two natures of Christ are not thus distinguished. The one nature does not address the other; the one does not send the other; neither does the one say I and Thou in reference to the other. There is not only the absence of all evidence of distinct personality, but there is also the direct, manifold, and uniform assertion of unity of person. There is nothing about Christ more perfectly undeniable than this, and, therefore, there never has been even a heresy in the church (the doubtful case of the Nestorians excepted) ascribing a two-fold personality to the Redeemer. It is one and the same person of whom birth, life, death, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, and all other attributes, human and divine, are predicated. So far, therefore, as the Scriptures are concerned, there is the greatest possible difference between the relation in which the distinctions of the Trinity stand to each other, and the mutual relations of the two natures in Christ. In the one case, the distinction is personal, in the other it is not. If there is any contradiction here it is chargeable on the Bible itself.

But it may still be said that we must frame a definition of person which shall not involve the affirmation and denial of the same proposition. We cannot say separate intelligent agency constitutes or evinces personality, and then ascribe such agency to the human nature of Christ, while we deny it to be a person. Very true. We do not deny that theologians often fail in their definitions; we should be satisfied with saying, that the distinctions in the God-head are such as to lay an adequate foundation for the reciprocal use of the pronouns, I, Thou, He; and that the distinction between the two natures in Christ does not. If asked where lies the difference, since in both cases there is separate activity? we answer, no one can tell. We may say indeed, that distinct subsistence is essential to personality, and that such subsistence cannot be predicated of the human nature of Christ, but is predicable of the distinctions in the God-head. It is not, therefore, all kinds of separate activity which imply personality, but only such as involves distinct subsistence, showing that the source of the activity is an agent, and not merely a power.²

The following illustration of this subject is not designed to explain it: a mystery is not capable of explanation. It is designed merely to show how much of the same obscurity overhangs other subjects about which we give ourselves very little trouble. We may, for the sake of illustration, assume the truth of the Platonic doctrine which ascribes to man a body, an animal soul, and an immortal spirit. This is not a scriptural distinction, though it is not obviously absurd, and, if a matter of revelation, would be cheerfully admitted. What, however, is involved in this doctrine? There is a unity of person in man, and yet three distinct activities; that of the body in the processes of respiration and digestion; that of the animal soul, in all mere sensations and instincts; and that of the spirit, in all intellectual and moral action. The animal soul is not a person, it has no distinct subsistence, though it may have its activity and even its own consciousness, as in the case of brutes. Now if there is no contradiction involved in this view of the nature of man; if the animal soul may have its activity and life in personal union with the intelligent spirit, and yet that soul be not a person, then the human nature of Christ may have its activity, in personal union with the Logos, and yet not be a person. We place little stress, however, on any such illustrations. Our faith rests on the plain declarations of Scripture. God is infinite, omniscient, and almighty, and therefore of him no limitation can be predicated, whether ignorance or weakness; of Christ is predicated all the perfections of God and all the attributes of man, and therefore there is in him both a divine and human nature; and notwithstanding the possession of this twofold nature, he is but one person. It is not necessary to our faith that we should understand this. We can understand it just as well as we understand the mysteries of our own nature, or the attributes of God. After all, the difficulty is not in the doctrines of the Trinity or the Incarnation, but in Theism, the most certain and essential, and yet the most incomprehensible of all truths.

But if we insist on acknowledging only one nature in Christ, how are we to conceive of his person? The following would seem to be the only possible modes in which he can be regarded: 1. That his one nature is human, and that he was a mere man. 2. That his one nature was divine; then it may be assumed, with the Docetæ, that this human appearance is but a phantasm; or, with the Apollinarians, that he had a real body, but not a rational soul. 3. That his one nature was neither divine nor human, but theanthropical, the two united into one, according to the Eutychean notion. 4. That the human and divine are identical, which is the doctrine of the new philosophy. Every one of these views, incompatible as they obviously are, Dr. Bushnell adopts by turns, except the first.

He adopts, or at least dallies with, the doctrine of the Docetæ, that the whole manifestation of Christ was a mere Theophany. To assert the union of two natures in the Redeemer, or to attempt any precise statement of the constitution of his person, he says, is as though Abraham, “after he had entertained as a guest the Jehovah Angel, or Angel of the Lord, instead of receiving his message, had fallen to inquiring into the digestive process of the Angel;” or, “as if Moses, when he saw the burning bush, had fallen to speculating about the fire.” Thus those who “live in their logic,” exclaim: “See Christ obeys and suffers; how can the subject be supreme—the suffering man the impassible God!” And then, in one of those exquisite illustrations, which, as our Saviour says of another kind of lying wonders, would, if it were possible, deceive the very elect, he adds: “Indeed you may figure this whole tribe of sophisters as a man standing before that most beautiful and wondrous work of art, the ‘Beatified Spirit’ of Guido, and there commencing a quarrel with the artist, that he should be so absurd as to think of making a beatified spirit out of mere linseed, ochres and oxides! Would it not be more dignified to let the pigments go, and take the expression of the canvas? Just so (!) are the human personality, the obedient, subject, suffering state of Jesus, all to be taken as colors of the divine, and we are not to fool ourselves in practising our logic on the colors, but to seize at once upon the divine import and significance thereof; ascending thus to the heart of God, there to rest, in the vision of his beatific glory.” P. 160. The meaning of this is, that as the value and power of a picture is in “the expression of the canvas,” so the power of Christ is in “what he expresses.” In order to this expression, however, there is no need of a true body and a reasonable soul; a theophany, as in the case of the Jehovah Angel, is all that is necessary. We accept this illustration as to one point. There is all the difference between the Christ of the Bible and the Christ of Dr. Bushnell, that there is between an Ecce Homo and the living incarnate God.

In a few pages further on, the author rejects this view of the subject, and says: “Christ is no such theophany, no such casual, unhistorical being as the Jehovah Angel who visited Abraham.” P. 165. So unsteady, however, is his tread, that in a few more steps he falls again into the same mode of representation. On p. 172, he says: “Just as the Logos is incarnated in the flesh, so the Spirit makes his advent under physical signs, appropriate to his office, coming in a rushing mighty wind, tipping the heads of an assembly with lambent flames, &c., &c.” The Logos, therefore, was no more really incarnate than the Spirit was incorporate in the dove, the wind, or the tongues of fire—all is appearance, expression.

But if Dr. Bushnell teaches the doctrine of the Docetæ, he still more distinctly avows that of the Apollinarians. The main point in their theory on this subject is, that Christ had a human body, but not a human soul; the Logos in him taking the place of the intelligent Spirit. The nature of our author’s view of the constitution of Christ’s person, is best learned from the answers which he gives to the objections which he sees will be made against it. The first objection is, that “the infinite God is represented as dwelling in a finite human person, subject to its limitations and even to its evils; and this is incredible—an insult to reason.” P. 148. His answer is, “It no more follows that a human body measures God, when revealed through it, than that a star, a tree, or an insect, measures him, when he is revealed through that.” P. 152. A second objection is, Christ grew in wisdom and knowledge. This he answers by saying: 1. “That the language may well enough be taken as language of external description merely.” Or, 2. “If the divine was manifested in the ways of a child, it creates no difficulty which does not exist when it is manifested in the ways of a man or a world.” It is as repugnant, he says, to Christ’s proper Deity, to reason and think, as to say he learns or grows in knowledge. P. 153. A third objection is, that Christ obeys, worships, and suffers. He says, the Trinitarian answer to this objection—viz., that these things are to be understood of the human soul of Christ, is an affront to the Scriptures, which assert that “the real divinity came into the finite and was subject to human conditions.” P. 154. When we see the Absolute Being “under the conditions of increase, obedience, worship, suffering, we have nothing to do but to ask what is here expressed, and, as long as we do that, we shall have no difficulty.” P. 156. All is a mockery and show—even the agony in the garden, the calling on God in Gethsemane and on the cross, was, we tremble as we write, a pantomime, in which the infinite God was the actor. To such depths does a man sink when, inflated with self-conceit, he pretends to be wise above that which is written. “Of what so great consequence to us,” he asks, “are the humanities of a mere human soul? The very thing we want is to find God is moved by such humanities—touched with a feeling of our infirmities.” P. 165.

These passages teach distinctly the Apollinarian doctrine. They deny that there are two distinct natures in Christ; and they affirm that ignorance, weakness, obedience, worshipping and suffering, are to be predicated of the Logos, the Deity, the divine nature as such. Thus far the doctrine taught in this book is little more than the re-introduction, with great pomp and circumstance, of an effete and half-forgotten heresy. It is the bringing back a dead Napoleon to the Invalides.

Dr. Bushnell next teaches the Eutychean doctrine. Eutyches taught that the divine and human were so united in Christ as to become one nature as well as one person. He taught, as Dr. Bushnell does, that two nature simply two persons. (Ὁ δύο λέγων φύσεις δύο λέγει υἱούς.) Before the union there were two natures; after it, only one. He acknowledged, therefore, in Christ, but one life, intelligence, and will. This, after all, appears to be the doctrine which Dr. Bushnell is really aiming at.

We have Eutycheanism distinctly asserted, for example, on p. 154. The common doctrine, he says, “virtually denies any real unity between the human and divine, and substitutes collocation, co-partnership for unity.” “Instead of a person whose nature is the unity of the divine and the human, we have,” he adds, “two distinct persons, between whom our thoughts are constantly alternating; referring this to one, and that to the other, and imagining, all the while, not a union of the two, in which our possible union with God is signified and sealed forever, but a practical, historical assertion of his incommunicability thrust upon our notice.” In these, among other passages, we have the doctrine, not that the divine nature or Logos, was in the place of the human soul, but that the divine and human natures were so united as to make one, neither human nor divine, but, as our author calls it, “the divine human.”

All these forms of doctrine respecting the person of Christ, sprang up in the church. They all suppose the doctrine of a personal God distinct from the world. They take for granted a real creation in time. They assume a distinction between God and man, as two different natures, and between matter and mind as two substances. In man, therefore, there are two substances or subjects, spirit and body, united in one person. It was at a later period the heathen doctrine found its way into the church, that there is but one substance, intelligence, and life in the universe (ἓν μόνον τὸ ὂν εἶναι); a doctrine which identifies God and the world; which denies any extra-mundane deity, any proper creation, any real distinction between God and man. This is the Atheistic doctrine which has been revived in our day, and which has been, and still is, taught by deceivers and the deceived, in the church, as the doctrine of the Bible, or at least as consistent with it. The new philosophy teaches, as before stated, that the absolute God is nothing; he exists only as he is revealed. He produces himself in the world; or, in the world he becomes objective to himself, and thus self-conscious. The human race is the highest form of the world, and, consequently the highest development of God. Men are God as self-conscious. What the Bible says of the Son as being God, one with the Father, his image, &c., is to be understood of the race. God is but the substance or power of which all phenomena are the manifestations. All life is God’s life, all action is his acting; there is no liberty, no sin, no immortality. The race is immortal, but not the individuals; they succeed each other as the waves of the sea, or the leaves of the forest. This is the worst form of Atheism; for it not only denies God, but deifies man, and destroys all morality in its very principle.

Schleiermacher, in his later writings, does not go all these lengths. His system however is founded on the real identity of God and the world, the human and divine.³ It makes creation eternal and necessary. It destroys entirely human liberty and responsibility. It admits nothing as sin except to the consciousness and apprehension of the sinner. And the personal immortality of the soul it repudiates; i. e., his system leads to its rejection; but out of deference to Christ it is admitted as a fact. With him the divine Being, as such, is the one hidden God; the Trinity is the manifested God; the Father is God as manifested in the world; the Son, God as manifested in Christ; and the Spirit, God as manifested in the church. With this view of the Trinity a corresponding view of the person of Christ is necessarily connected. The world is one manifestation of God; God in one form; the human race a higher manifestation of God; which manifestation, imperfect in Adam and his posterity, is perfected in Christ; the creation begun in the former is completed in the latter. Christ is the ideal man, and, as God and man are one, Christ is God. There are not two natures in Christ, but one only, a divine nature which is truly human. As men are partakers of the imperfect nature of Adam, they are redeemed by partaking of the perfect nature of Christ, and thus the incarnation of God is continued in the church. Hence follows subjective justification, and rejection of the doctrines of the atonement and regeneration by the Holy Spirit, as matters of course.⁴

As Dr. Bushnell adopts Schleiermacher’s views of the Trinity, he naturally adopts his doctrine as to the person of Christ. In Christ there is but one nature; that nature is divine, “the real divinity;” it is also truly human, God in human flesh is a perfect man. He becomes incorporated in the history of our race, and thus redemption is effected. All this we have on page 149 and elsewhere. “If God,” says our author, “were to inhabit such a vehicle [i. e., a human person,] one so fellow to ourselves and live himself as a perfect character into the biographic history of the world, a result would follow of as great magnificence as the creation of the world itself, viz.: the incorporation of the divine in the history of the world—so a renovation, at last, of the moral and religious life of the world. If now the human person will express more of God than the whole created universe besides—and it certainly will more of God’s feeling and character—and if a motive possessing as great consequence as the creation of the world invites him to do it, is it more extravagant to believe that the Word will become flesh, than that the Word has become, or produced in time a material universe?” According to this passage: The Word or God became a material universe; (i. e., became objective to himself in the world, we suppose). In the same sense he became flesh and was a “perfect character,” or a perfect man. As such he became biographically, historically, or organically (all these expressions are used), connected with our race. The divine was thus incorporated in the history of the world; or in other words, the incarnation of God is continued in the church. This incorporation, or incarnation, is the source of the renovation of the moral and religious life of the world. All this agrees with Schleiermacher to a tittle.

In accordance with this same theory are such expressions as the following, which are of frequent occurrence through the work. “The highest glory of the incarnation, viz.: the union signified and historically begun, between God and man.” P. 156. Christ is “an integral part, in one view, of the world’s history, only bringing into it, and setting into organic union with it, the Eternal Life.” “God manifested in the flesh—historically united with our race.” P. 165; and all the other cant phrases of the day, which are designed and adapted to ensnare silly women, male and female.

We think we have made out our case. Dr. Bushnell’s book, in our poor judgment, is a failure. It pulls down, but does not erect. He attacks and argues against the doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, and after all acknowledges not only that they are taught in Scripture, but that we are forced by the constitution or necessities of our nature, to conceive of them in their scriptural form. He mixes up in his volume the most incongruous materials. He is Rationalist, Mystic, Pantheist, Christian, by turns, just as the emergency demands. He is extravagant to the extreme of paradox. He adopts, on all the subjects he discusses, the long exploded heresies of former centuries, and endeavors to cover them all with the gaudy mantle of the new philosophy. His mysticism spoils his rationalism, and his philosophy spoils his mysticism, and is then, in its turn spoiled by having its essential element left out. Instead of a real Trinity he gives us a threefold appearance. Instead of Emmanuel, God manifest in the flesh, he gives us a Christ which is either a mere expression thrown on the dark canvas of history, or a being who is neither God nor man. Instead of a true propitiation, he bids us behold a splendid work of art! These are the doctrines which, he says, “live in their own majesty,” and for which he predicts a triumph which finds its appropriate prefiguration in nothing short of the resurrection of the Son of God! P. 116. For the honor of our race we hope that such a book as this is not about to turn the world upside down.

We have reserved to the close of our review a remark, which was the first to occur to us on a perusal of these Discourses. Dr. Bushnell forgets that there are certain doctrines so settled by the faith of the Church, that they are no longer open questions. They are finally adjudged and determined. If men set aside the Bible, and choose to speak or write as philosophers, then of course the way is open for them to teach what they please. But for Christians, who acknowledge the Scriptures as their rule of faith, there are doctrines which they are bound to take as settled beyond all rational or innocent dispute. This may be regarded as a popish sentiment; as a denial of the right of private judgment, or an assertion of the infallibility of the church. It is very far from being either. Does, however, the objector think that the errors of Romanism rest on the thin air, or are mere grotesque forms of unsubstantial vapor? If this were so, they could have neither permanence nor import. They are all sustained by an inward truth, which gives them life and power, despite of their deformities. It is as though a perfect statue had been left under the calcareous dripping of a cavern, until deformed by incrustations; or, as if some exquisite work of art, in church or convent, had been so daubed over by the annual whitewasher, or covered by the dust of centuries, as to escape recognition; but which, when the superincumbent filth is removed, appears in all its truth and beauty. The truth which underlies and sustains the Romish doctrine as to the authority of the church in matters of faith, is this: The Holy Spirit dwells in the people of God, and leads them to the saving knowledge of divine things: so that those who depart from the faith of God’s people, depart from the teachings of the Spirit, and from the source of life. The Romish distortion of this truth is, that the Holy Ghost dwells in the Pope, as the ultramontanists say; or in the bishops, as the Gallican theologians say, and guides him or them into the infallible knowledge of all matters pertaining to faith and practice. They err both as to the subjects and object of this divine guidance. They make the rulers of the external church to be its recipients, and its object to render them infallible as judges and teachers. Its true subjects are all the sincere people of God, and its object is to make them wise unto salvation. The promise of divine teaching no more secures infallibility than the promise of holiness secures perfection in this life. There is, however, such a divine teaching, and its effect is to bring the children of God, in all parts of the world, and in all ages of the church, to unity of faith. As an historical fact, they have always and everywhere agreed in all points of necessary doctrine. And therefore to depart from their faith, in such matters of agreement, is to renounce the gospel. In some cases it may be difficult to determine what the true people of God have in all ages believed. This is an historical fact, which evinces itself more or less distinctly, as all other facts of history do. In many cases, however, there is and can be no reasonable doubt about the matter; and the doctrines which Dr. Bushnell discusses and discards, viz.: the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, are precisely those in which their agreement is most certain and complete. It is high time, therefore, it should be universally agreed among Christians, that the rejection of these doctrines, as determined by the faith of the church, is the rejection of Christianity, and should be so regarded and treated. Let sceptics and philosophers teach what they please, or what they dare, but it is surely time to have some certain ground in Christianity; and to put the brand of universal reprobation on the hypocritical and wicked device of preaching infidelity in a cassock.

Dr. Bushnell is like a man who, wearied with the obscurity or monotony of a crowded ship, jumps overboard, determined to scull single-handed his little boat across the ocean. Or, he is like a man who should leave the ark to ride out the deluge on a slimy log. Such madness excites nothing but commiseration. It is evident Dr. Bushnell does not fully understand himself. He is lost, and therefore, often crosses his own path; and it is to be hoped that much of the error contained in his book has not got real or permanent possession of his mind. He is a poet, and neither a philosopher nor theologian; a bright star, which has wandered from its orbit, and which must continue to wander, unless it return and obey the attraction of the great central orb—God’s everlasting word.

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Footnotes

1. Quid? quod etiam Papatus simpliciter est merus enthusiasmus, quo Papa gloriatur, omnia jura esse in scrinio sui pectoris, et quidquid ipse in ecclesia sua sentit et jubet, id spiritum et justum esse, etiamsi supra et contra scripturam et vocale verbum aliquid statuat et praecipiat. Articuli Smalcaldici, p. iii. 8. ↩

2. Dr. Bushnell has no great right to make a wry face at Trinitarians for asserting that separate intelligence and will do not necessarily infer personality, since he has begun to swallow a philosophy which asserts the single personality of the human race, though each man has his own intelligence, will and consciousness. ↩

3. DORNER, the disciple of Schleiermacher, gives as his reason for associating him with Schelling and Hegel, that “he undoubtedly proceeds on the assumption of the essential unity of God and man, though he did not hold that substantial Pantheism in which subjectivity is a mere accident.” See his Christologie, p. 487. Schleiermacher was educated a Moravian. His philosophy was pantheistical; with his philosophy his early religious convictions kept up a continual struggle, and, as it is hoped, ultimately gained the victory. This, however, does not alter the nature of his system. ↩

4. Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre §§. 299—328. Dorner’s Christologie (Stuttgart 1839.) pp. 487—529. ↩