Dorner, in the first edition of his work on the “Person of Christ,” says that the Lutheran theology carried the attempt to preserve the unity of Christ’s person, on the Church assumption that He possessed two distinct natures, to the utmost extreme. If that attempt be a failure, nothing more remains. He holds it to be a failure not only because it involves the impossible assumption of a transfer of attributes without a change of substance, but also because it is one-sided. It refuses to admit of the communication of human attributes to the divine nature, whilst it insists on the transfer of divine perfections to the human nature. And moreover, he urges, that admitting all the Lutheran theory claims, the union of the two natures remains just as unreal as it is on the Church doctrine. Any distinction of natures, in the ordinary sense of the words, must, he says, be given up. It is on this assumption that the modern views of the person of Christ are founded. These views may be divided into two classes, the Pantheistical and the Theistical. These two classes, however, have a good deal in common. Both are founded on the principle of the oneness of God and man. This is admitted on all sides. “The characteristic feature of all recent Christologies,” says Dorner, “is the endeavour to point out the essential unity of the divine and human.”1 The heading of the section in which this admission occurs, is, “The Foundations of the New Christology laid by Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher.” This is equivalent to saying that the New Christology is founded on the principles of the pantheistic philosophy. Baur2 says the same thing. He entitles the last division of his work on the Trinity, “Die gegenseitige Durchdringung der Philosophie und der Theologie,” i.e., The mutual interpenetration of Philosophy and Theology. The latter is merged into the former. Dr. Ullmann says, the doctrine of the oneness of God and man, which he represents as the fundamental idea of Schleiermacher’s theology and of Christianity itself, is not entirely new. It was inculcated by the German Mystics of the Middle Ages.3 Hegel says that what the Bible teaches of Christ is not true of an individual, but only of mankind as a whole; and Hegel’s Christological ideas, Dr. John Nevin of Mercersburg, says, “are very significant and full of instruction.”4 The objection that these principles are pantheistical, he pronounces “a mere sound without any force whatever,” and adds that we need a Christian pantheism to oppose the antichristian pantheism of the day. Schleiermacher says that a pantheism which holds to the formula “One and All” (“the all-one-doctrine”) is perfectly consistent with religion, and differs little in its effects from Monotheism! Similar avowals might be adduced without number. Theologians of this class deny that God and man are essentially different. They repeat, almost with every breath, that God and man are one, and they make this the fundamental idea of Christianity, and especially of Christology
Pantheistical Christology.
As Christian theology purports to be an exhibition of the theology of the Bible, every theory which involves the denial of a personal God, properly lies beyond its sphere. In modern systems, however, there is such a blending of pantheistic principles with theistic doctrines, that the two cannot be kept entirely separate. Pantheistical and theistical theologians, of the modern school, unite in asserting “the oneness of God and man.” They understand that doctrine, however, in different senses. With the former it is understood to mean identity, so that man is only the highest existence-form of God; with the others, it often means nothing more than that “natura humana capax est naturæ divinæ.” The human is capable of receiving the attributes of the divine. Man may become God.
It follows, in the first place, from the doctrine, that God is the only real Being of which the world is the ever changing phenomenon, that “die Menschwerdung Gottes ist eine Menschwerdung von Ewigkeit.” The incarnation of God is from eternity. And, in the second place, that this process is continuous, complete in no one instance, but only in the whole. Every man is a form of the life of God, but the infinite is never fully realized or revealed in any one manifestation. Some of these philosophers were willing to say that God was more fully manifested in Christ than in any other individual of our race, but the difference between Him and other men is only one of degree. Others say that the peculiar distinction of Christ was that He had a clearer view and a deeper conviction of the identity of God and man than any other man. It all amounts to the summation of the doctrine as given by Strauss.5 “If,” says he, “the idea of the oneness of the divine and human natures, of God and man, be a reality, does it follow that this reality is effected or manifested once for all in a single individual, as never before and never after him? … . An idea is never exhibited in all its fulness in a single exemplar; and in all others only imperfectly. An idea is always realized in a variety and multiplicity of exemplars, which complement each other; its richness being diffused by the constant change of individuals, one succeeding or supplanting another… . . Mankind, the human race, is the God-man. The key to a true Christology is that the predicates which the Church applies to Christ, as an individual, belong to an idea, or to a generic whole.” So Blasche6 says, “We understand by God’s becoming man, not the revelation of Himself in one or more of the most perfect of men, but the manifestation of Himself in the race of men (in der ganzen Menschheit).”