The modern philosophy has introduced certain principles as to the nature of God and his relation to the world, and as to the nature of man and his relation to God, which when applied to Christian doctrines have produced a revolution in theology. It has already been shown that the principles of this philosophy in their application to the origin and present state of man, to the person and work of Christ, and to the way in which men are made partakers of his salvation, have introduced a method of presenting the gospel utterly unintelligible to those unacquainted with the modern speculations. The word philosophy is to be understood in a sense wide enough to include a great diversity of systems, which although they have certain principles in common, differ widely from each other. They belong to two general classes, the pantheistic and theistic, which merge off into each other in every variety of form, and in different degrees of approximation towards identity.
According to the pantheistic theory, the world is the ever varying and unfolding existence form of God; and man is the form in which He comes to consciousness on this earth. According to the theistic theory, the world owes its existence to the will of God, in which He is immanent and of which He is the life. Man is the form in which generic humanity is manifested in connection with a given corporeal organization. On neither view is there any real dualism between God and the world, or God and man except as occasioned by sin. The oneness of God and man is affirmed by both classes, by Cousin and Ullman for example, with equal earnestness. This is a oneness which admits of diversity; it is a unity in plurality; but it is a oneness of life; and such a unity of nature that God may become man, and man God.
The individuality or personality of man depends on the body. Generic humanity is not in itself a person. It becomes personal only by its union with an organized body. It loses its personality when it has nobody; and therefore the immortality of the soul, as distinct from the body, is pronounced by Olshausen an anti-Christian or pagan idea. Whatever of conscious existence the soul has between death and the resurrection must be connection with its body, which is not the prison, or garment, or shell, or hull of the soul; it is not in any way one form of existence and the soul another; both form one life. The soul to be complete to develop itself, as a soul, must externalize itself, throw itself out in space; and this externalization is the body. All is one process, one and the same organic principle, dividing itself only that its unity may become the more free and intensely complete. The soul and body are one; one and the same organic principle.1
The same principles are applied to the explanation of the doctrine of the person of Christ. According to the decisions of the ecumenical councils of Chalcedon and Constantinople, which have been accepted by all Christendom, 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, both God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever. By nature (φύσις) is meant substance (οὐσία), as these words are used interchangeably. By the one nature He is consubstantial with us men; and by the other He is consubstantial with the Father.
This dualism, this hypostatic union of two distinct substances in the person of Christ, involves, as taught by those councils and believed by all Christendom, two ἐνέργειαι, two operations, two wills. There is no mixture or confusion of these two natures; no transfer of the properties of the one to the other, but each retains its own peculiar attributes.
On the other hand, the modern German theology rejects this distinction of natures in Christ. It denies all dualism in the constitution of his person. It teaches that Christ did not assume, “a reasonable soul” into personal union with Himself, but either that He himself became, by a process of self-limitation, such a soul, or that He assumed generic humanity, so that He did not become a man, but the man. His assumption of humanity was something general, and not merely particular. The Word became flesh; not a single man only as one of many; but flesh of humanity in its universal conception; otherwise He could not be the principle of a new order of existence for the human world as such. By this assumption of humanity, the divine and human, God and man, become one in such a sense as to exclude all dualism. There are not a divine and a human, but there is a theanthropic, or divine-human nature or life. As in man there is not one life of the body and another of the soul, but the two are one and the same organic principle, so in the case of Christ the divine and human are one and the same. The divine nature of Christ is at the same time human in the fullest sense. Humanity is never complete till it reaches his person. It includes in its very constitution a struggle towards the form in which it is here exhibited, and can never rest until this end is attained. Our nature reaches after a true and real union with the nature of God, as the necessary complement and consummation of its own life. The idea which it embodied can never be fully actualized under any other form. The incarnation, then, is the proper completion of humanity. Christ is the true ideal man. Here is reached ultimately the highest summit of human life, which is of course the crowning sense of the word, or that in which it finds its last and full significance.