Divinity of Christ

divinity of Christ

The testimony of Christ, concerning Himself clearly reveals Him as the: Divine Son of God, and it is proved that Christ’s’ testimony is worthy of credence, and that the Gospels are authentic historical documents. In the Synoptics Christ declares Himself in the first place, as superior to all created beings. He is greater than Solomon and Jonas, greater than Moses and Elias, greater than John the Baptist whom He declared to be the greatest among the sons of men, greater, finally, than the angels of heaven. Secondly, Christ claims for Himself an authority and power which in the Old Testament belonged to Yahweh (God) alone: He performs miracles in His own name and confers the same power upon His Apostles; He teaches in His own name and as one having supreme authority; He forgives sin as if committed against Himself; He requires faith and love of Himself as conditions of salvation; He promises to His disciples His perpetual presence and assistance; He promises eternal beatitude for works done on account of Himself; and represents Himself as the final Judge of the living and the dead. Thirdly, Christ calls Himself or allows Himself to be called Son of God in the strict sense of the word (Matthew 11; 16; 26; 27). When speaking in the same breath of God’s relation to Himself and to His disciples He never says “Our Father” but “My Father” and “Your Father,” thereby indicating that the filiations of the two are not of the same order. Finally, in confirmation of the prophecies which He pronounced when the Jews sought from Him a sign of His Divine power, Christ rose from the dead on the third day. In Saint John’s Gospel Christ likewise represents Himself as the “only-begotten Son of God” (3); as consubstantial with the Father: “My Father worketh until now; and I work” (5); as ellsentially one with the Father: “I and the Father are one” (10), “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (14). He approves Saint Thomas’s confession, “My Lord, and my God” (20). In Saint Paul’s Epistles Christ is frequently called Kyrios (Lord), a title which in the Old Testament was reserved to God alone. He is described as preexisting in the “form of God” (Philemon 2), as the “image of the invisible God,” as one in whom “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead corporeally” (Colossians 1; 2 ), as the “great God” (Titus 2), and “God blessed forever” (Romans 9). The early liturgy invokes Christ by the title of Kyrios, contains hymns in His honor, and inserts His name in the doxologies. The numerous testimonies of the Fathers echo the clear teaching of the Scriptures.

Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary

Divinity Of Christ

SEE CHRISTOLOGY; SEE INCARNATION; SEE TRINITY.

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Divinity Of Christ

DIVINITY OF CHRIST

I.Preliminary considerations.

1.The mystery of Christ.

2.The movement Back to Christ.

3.Certain results of the movement.

II.Bases of Christological belief.

1.Primarily a new experience.

2.Analysis of the experience.

(a)Christs Messianic character.

(b)His self-consciousness: () His interior life, () His method in teaching, () His sinlessness, () His oneness with God.

(c)His appeal to deeper personality.

(d)His teaching and works.

3.Validity of the experience.

III.Beginnings of the doctrine of Christs Person in the NT.

1.General character of the doctrine.

2.Divine names applied to Christ.

3.Divine properties and acts attributed to Christ.

4.Divine relations as to God, man, the world.

IV.Subsequent development of NT ideas.

1.History of the doctrine.

(a)Patristic.

(b)Mediaeval.

(c)Modern.

2.Denial of the doctrine.

(a)Its history and motive.

(b)Its failure.

Literature.

I. Preliminary Considerations

1. The mystery of Christ.The historic question of Jesus to His disciples, Who do men say that I the Son of Man am? (Mat 16:13, Mar 8:27, Luk 9:18), was put not to confound, but to reveal, by awakening the desire for knowledge. The intelligent answer to the question preserves the precious truth, which is nothing less than Gods age-long secret about Himself. The disciples had been nurtured on a religious literature in which the whole national and individual future was seen blending in one anticipation, the coming of God to His people to deliver and save. One like the Son of Man comes, and there is given to Him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pass away. This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewish hope. Modern criticism dwells upon the factors in history which determined the form in which this hope took shape. The Hebrew religion, we are assured, was wrought out under constant pressure of disaster. It was the religion of a proud, brave people, who were constantly held in subjection to foreign conquerors. Hence came a quality of intense hostility to those tyrannous foes, and also a constant appeal to the Divine Power to declare itself. The hostility and the appeal inspire the Messianic Hope. Was there nothing more? Surely behind the history and the imagination lay elemental forces of the soul. What lend essential and abiding worth both to the Hebrew hostility to Gentile oppression and the Hebrew appeal to Jehovahs righteous right hand are a faith and a passion which, if quickened into power by the vicissitudes of history, were themselves underived from history, and native to the spirit of the nation. Nor in this high conviction do the Hebrews stand alone. Everywhere, wherever thought has advanced sufficiently near its Object, it has come to a yearning, at times poignant, for closer contact. The numerous idolatries of the lower religions are simply the objectivation of this desire. The no less numerous conceptions of Divinity in more cultured peoples are due to the same stress. There has been a ceaseless demand of the human race for an embodiment of Deity. The demand is a product of the hungry human heart for closer communion with God and larger loyalty to Him.

The existence of an instinct so universal is the guarantee of its fulfilment. The two considerations, that the Hebrew race had worked out the conception of the Messiah, and that the ethnic peoples were quite familiar with Divine incarnations, processes both present admittedly to the mind of the Early Church, furnish no evidence to the contrary. In themselves they prove nothing against a true Incarnation historically manifested, if it can be shown that its historical manifestation is not wholly traceable to naturalistic origins in the Hebrew and ethnic genius. The presence, in particular, of many myths parallel to the Christian story need not mean that the Christian story is itself a myth. As has been well said, If the Christian God really made the human race, would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God? If the centre of our life is a certain fact, would not people far from the centre have a muddled version of the fact? If we are so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is it odd that Patagonians (and others) should dream of a Son of God? (Chesterton, Religious Doubts of Democracy, p. 18). False beliefs live by the true elements within them. A persistent belief occurring in many false forms is likely to be true, and may reasonably be expected to occur in a true form. Each redeemer of heathenism is a prophetic anticipation of the satisfying of human desires in Jesus Christ, precisely as the Messianic disclosures of the OT were to the people of whom according to the flesh He came. They are anticipations only: since neither the pagan foregleams nor the Hebrew forecasts offered sufficient data for a complete or consistent delineation of an actual Person.* [Note: Westcott, Gospel of Life, pp. 295297.] The earlier experiences of men made the gospel intelligible, but they had no power to prouce it. It satisfies and crowns them, but does not grow out of them. The Person, when He came, did more than satisfy the old instinct by which men had hope, He reinforced and extended it: His advent not only accomplished the past promise, it gave earnest of greater things to come: He thus represented human ideals indeed, but still more Divine ideas. The highest prophecies of His appearance reveal, amid the circumstantial details, the element of mystery; that mystery is not eliminated when the Life appears. It is the singular significance of Jesus Christ that both in the anticipations of Him and in His actual appearance the details always lead on to inquiry as to what is not detailed, the facts to something beyond themselves; the Man and His words and works to the question Who is He? and Whence is this Man?

2. The movement Back to Christ.The question is prominently before the present age. The modern mind asks it with revived interest. Modern knowledge in its several departments of philosophy, history, science, has developed along lines and in obedience to principles which appear able to dispense with the old theistic axioms. God and Conscience are not so vividly active. And yet, on the other hand, the ancient instinct of the race for communion with God is assertive as ever. It turns for comfort almost exclusively to the Christian tradition. The Christian tradition, however, it is convinced, needs revision; and here the central necessity is the treatment and true understanding of the Person of Christ. The cry is Back to Christ. It is a cry dear to all who desire a simpler gospel than that set forth in the Creeds; all who are wearied with speculation on the elements of Christian truth, or are distraught with the variety of interpretation offered of it; all who are eager to embrace the ethics and as eager to abjure what they term the metaphysics of the Christian system. The movement referred to is natural; and its plea so plausible as to merit attention. The aim is nothing short of recovering the image of the original Founder of the Faith, expressed in His authentic words and acts; to bring back in all the distinct lineaments of a living Personality the great Teacher whom we now see in the Gospels as through a glass darkly. It seeks by a study of the original records in the light of all the historical and critical aids now open to us, and guided by the modern idea of evolution, not only to bring us face to face with Jesus of Nazareth, to listen to His direct words of wisdom, but to trace all the steps of His spiritual advance, all the steps by which He grew into the Messiah of Israel and the Ideal of humanity, giving the deepest interpretation to the prophetic dream of His nation, and so lifting it into that higher region in which the freely accepted Cross became the necessary means to the deliverance of man. The Jesus of history, it is argued, has been buried in the Christ of dogma; the Church in handing down the Saviour has presented Him with adoring hands and in idealized form. The more we throw off her encrustments, the nearer we get to the original, the nearer we are getting to the real Jesus, and, in Him, to the truth of our religion.

However natural the hope of such minds, it is based on illusion. It proceeds on erroneous ideas as to what we may learn from the past. What has been done, says the adage, even the gods themselves cannot make undone. All that historical reversions can do is to suggest that in the onward movement something precious has been left behind which it were well to recover before going further. There is no such Christ, no such Christianity in the first century as is sought for: a Christ and a Christianity purely invariable and true for all time and in every place. That is a conception which, the more it is studied, the more it will be found to be a pure abstraction to which no concrete in rerum natura corresponds. The absolute value of the Christian Faith, the real stature of the Christ, cannot be established by merely dropping the historical surroundings or setting of the traditional truth. The old truth that lived spiritually in the minds of those who first livingly apprehended it, and which has pulsated all through the historical process, has to be caught up again, realized in its essential vitality, and formulated anew in harmony with the modern spirit. We have to ask, Was the Christian Idea given in itself apart, in isolation, abstractly, and may this, as the essence, substance, or soul of the gospel, be rediscovered? Or, on the contrary, was the Christian Idea planted as a Life in a company of believers who manifested its power in their lives, so that it cannot be reduced to an invariable essence except by an unreal process of abstraction? Cf., further, art. Back to Christ.

3. Certain results of the movement.The effort to rediscover Christ (the phrase is Dr. Fairbairns) is important less in its avowed aim than in its subsidiary results. Through them it yields a real contribution to theological progress. We proceed to indicate three such results: (1) a new idea of the nature of Christian doctrine; (2) the insistence on the distinction between primary and variable elements in doctrines; (3) the deepened consciousness of the extent of variation.

(1) The same divines who have busied themselves in the search for the Christ of history have been instrumental in exhibiting Christian thought on His Person as a process. In that sphere of thought they have rigorously applied the idea of development, not indeed for the first time (since John Henry Newman, fifteen years before Darwins Origin of Species was published, had fascinated their fathers by his use of the idea), but with a more thorough insight than Newman, and with better tests, furnishing in consequence widely different results from his. They are enabled to distinguish between Creed and Doctrine, between articles of faith and the whole process of reflexion, even of a conflicting character, by which articles of faith are reached and defined. By them interest is transferred from the result to the process. The forces entering into the process are minutely analyzed. It is discovered that theology has a history; that its history is mixed up with general history; that it has been moulded by a vast deal external to the subject-matter of theology; and not only so, but even, as some (notably Harnack) contend, has been substantially and in its inner essence modified, if not perverted, in the process, It is seen that Christian dogmas were once inchoate; passed through many stages under influences social, political, intellectual; and that they have a constant tendency so to do in adapting themselves to their environmentthat, in short, they are not dead formulas, but a living organism.

(2) The emergence of so many factors merely accidental has brought into clearer perspective the reality immanent in the process. Besides the soil and the influences on growth, there is the seed, the Divine Truth on which human thought and earthly event exercised themselves. It is traceable to the teaching and life of Jesus and His Apostles. Only fragments of His utterances have been preserved to us, but the brief discourses and conversations that we read in the Gospels stand unique in spiritual power among the utterances of the world. They represent a large body of teaching, lost to us in form but preserved in its fruits; for out of His spiritual wealth there poured throughout His ministry an abundance of spoken truth that remained to perpetuate His influence and serve as the foundation of Christian doctrine. Together with His life they formed and still form Truth, not simply in a definite invariable quantity, but as a constant fountain and source of truth, ever open and flowing for them who believe. He gave a new light on all things to men; and by an inevitable necessity they proceeded to apply, and still must apply, what He has shown, to the interpretation of all they thought and knew. Thus Christian doctrine bases itself ultimately on two sources: (a) the Facts as to Christs teaching and life; and (b) the Experience of believers in Him interpreting life and its problems in the light of those facts. Christian doctrine has grown up as a vital thing in the soil of actual life; in the experience of Christian living. Jesus appeared among men and lived and taught. He gave the Truth by what He was, by what He said, by what He did. Words, Works, Personality: all preached. This rich and various utterance fell into the hearing and the hearts of men and women who became His followers. Into their very being it entered with transforming power, making them new creatures. By and by it filtered through their minds and life, and expressed itself in the form which their own experience gave to it. It is this reproduction of the truth Jesus brought that constitutes Christian doctrine. Its fundamental elements are to be kept clearly in viewviz. the Christian Facts and the Experience of Believers.

(3) The origin of variation in doctrinal belief immediately becomes manifest. Believing experience cannot be expected to be invariable. Still less the expression of experience. Variety of views enters. There are differences of mind, of education, of disposition and degrees of sympathy, of ability to apprehend and explain: differences all of them, when given free scope, likely to lead to mixed results. Present-day religious thought is profoundly impressed with the fact and with the necessity of it. And if in consequence the theological mind is infected with a certain sense of insecurity, there is compensation in the new breath of freedom. Obviously it is gain to be able to review the doctrinal process and results of the past, to disentangle the Divine Truth from its temporary formulation, and to elaborate it anew in such wise as will subserve the highest interests of men to-day, as well as do justice to its own ever fresh wealth of content. (Cf. the interesting exposition in Dr. Newton Clarkes What shall we think of Christianity? Lect. ii.).

II. Bases of Christological belief

1. Primarily a new experience.The new methods found early application to the doctrine of Christs Person. That doctrine is central in the Christian system. It is by Christ, His Person and Work, that salvation is mediated. Historically and experimentally the Church learned it so. A study of the NT and of the two subsequent centuries is chiefly a study of one great fact or truth, to the understanding and interpreting of which the mind and life of the period were devoted, and devoted with absorbing interestthe Person of Christ. That problem soon became at once the impulse and the starting-point of an entire science of God, of man, and of the essential and final relation between God and man. But primarily the question at issue was simply that of His Person. It was provoked by Christs own questions and by His claims. Its urgency was enhanced by the experience of believers. Their experience was unprecedentedly novel. Unlike that of Hebrew faith, its ground was individual and personal.

Its origin lay in the revolutionary impression His presence created in the heart, an impression which came as a thing incomparable, and remained as the most precious fact of life. It grew as a new power in the soul to resist and overcome sin, assuring not the promise only but the potency of real holiness, imparting to the latent faculties of the changing heart an increasing plenitude of spiritual force making for righteousness. Concurrently with this feature in the new experience went another, or two others. Awakened by the sense of power in the inner life imparted by Christ, men came to understand what the evil is from which God seeks to save them, and what the good is which He seeks to impart to them. In Christ moral goodness, the righteousness of God, laid its inexorable claims upon mans life, determining feelings and shaping resolutions as does the real entrance of God into our hearts. The impression of Christ was thus seen to be the power of God. A further step was won when reflexion forced forward the question how it could be so, in what mode the nature of Christs Person must be regarded in the light of the above experiences. But the root of the matter was reached when the fact was realized that the more the strength of His character overwhelmed them, the more undeniable was made the reality of God to them. That was reached, however, at the very outset. It was the primary conviction which entitled to the name of believer, and confession of it meant salvation. It formed the fundamental basis of Christological belief. Jesus comes acting on human hearts with winsome gentleness, with a soul-moving sorrow for sin, and with a great enabling power. The high demands He brings raise no fear, for He who demands approaches with the means of fulfilling, which He is ready to impart. Herein rests the real originality of His message, by which His gospel differentiates itself from all other religions on the one hand, and from all merely philosophical or ethical Idealisms on the other; in virtue of which also all interpretations of His Person on humanitarian lines prove inadequate. On this point a clear understanding is indispensable. It is to be insisted that the Christ of History and the Christ of Experience were not separable to the mind of the disciples; they were one and indivisible. Their Christ is not the Teaching of Jesus alone, or His Works alone; or both together alone, but both together along with what they revealed regarding the inner life of Jesus, and what they created in the inner life of believers. It is impossible to separate the last from the first. It is illegitimate to seek to resolve it into a creation of the religious idealizing faculty of believers in Him. The thought of the Apostles consciously felt itself engaged not in evolving dreams and speculations of its own, but in striving to receive and appreciate a truth which was before, above, independent of them. By no single fact in His biography does His message, in this view, stand or fall, but by Himself whom the facts reveal; the facts come embedded, and are vital because thus embedded, in one cardinal fact, Himself. He came to them not as a prophet, although He had much in common with the prophets; nor as a culture-hero, the offspring of spiritual imagination; but as an inner force of life absolutely unique; an inner experience in which God entered into their hearts in a manner heretofore unparalleled, being borne in on them rather than presented to their imitation, leavening them practically with Himself, and demonstratively in such a way that henceforth to their very existence in God, He, the Revealer, must belong. In the NT we move amid scenes where the common has been broken up by vast events. God from the Unseen has struck into history a fresh note, and a new era has opened. The whole suggestion is of possibilities and resources waiting to be disclosed. (Cf. Wernle, Beginnings of Christianity). The beginning of Christianity is neither a theological idea nor a moral precept; it is an experience of a Fact, the Fact of Christ, revealing and imparting the life of God.

The impression Christ made on those who saw and heard Him is a solid fact which no criticism can upset. Is it possible to get behind this fact? The effort is strenuously made by many. What was He who produced the impression reported in the Gospels? Better still, What was He who produced not this or that impression, but the resultant of actual and permanent impressions which He has made upon the world? In seeking an answer, historical and critical research has been lavished on every aspect of the question. Christs teaching, career, personality, have been studied as never before. The result is that He is better known to us than to any previous age. It is at the same time being increasingly felt that a naturalistic reconstruction of His life is not possible. Candid students of the anti-supernaturalist camps (e.g., in history, Keim [Jesus of Nazara]; in philosophy, Ed. Caird [Evol. of Religion]; in science, Sir Oliver Lodge [Hibbert Journal, iii. i.] and Prof. James [Varieties of Religious Experience]) practically confess the failure of past attempts, and succeed in evading the postulate of Divinity only by attributing to the human life so ample a magnificence as to make it embrace all that Christian thought understands by Divinity. The new rationalism shows how decidedly the old materialism has spent its force. Of special interest is its frank recognition of the presence and vitality of experiences on which hitherto naturalism has set taboo. The more the new criticism endeavours to revivify the dead past and live over again the life of the disciples who enjoyed the personal communion of Christ, the more it sees it must combine in itself all the qualifications necessary for seeing and understanding all that He really was. This conviction, however, involves the finding of a place for criteria for the adjudging of Christ, specifically extra-naturalistic, but not extra-scientific, and spiritual; and where this happens without prepossession, the irresistible sense of Christs transcendence impresses. His mystery remains (cf. Contentio Veritatis, Essay ii.; also Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, v. and vi.).

2. Analysis of the experience.But if we cannot go behind the fact in the sense of reaching something more ultimate, we may analyze its elements. It will be found in content to comprise at least four constituents: His teaching and works; His growing consciousness of His own nature; His response to prophetic promise; His appeal to deeper personality.

(a) Of these the most obvious is the third, the contemporary conviction of His Messianic dignity. That Jesus is the Christ is one of the dominating ideas of the Gospels and Epistles. More than one recent writer (Martineau, Meinhold, Wrede, etc.) have sought to show that Jesus did not accept the title of Messiah; but not even these deny its attribution to Him by the disciples, and that as their main view of His Person. Careful analysis indicates that in whatever respects the Synoptics differ in their representations,and they are not absolutely harmonious,they yet represent a general agreement of view, and set forth what the primitive belief was. In that belief Jesus stands forth as Messiah, Himself accepting as appropriate what they attribute; a sublime figure, not merely human, or exalted to Messiahship only by self-mastery and self-dedication, but by peculiar nature and special appointment. The endeavour to reduee the Evangelic description of Messiah to human dimensions is ludicrously inadequate to the facts. If it be the case that His disciples caressed Him in the most familiar manner as a fellow-human being (Crooker, NT Views of Jesus, p. 25), the statement is crudely one-sided, since the familiar fellowship He vouchsafed, as is very evident, is but the framework of an intimate disillusionment on the part of His followers, and a growing revelation on His part. We can trace the stages by which the higher idea was unfolded to them. It came in a series of disappointments, intended, probably, to wean them from the popular ideas of what the Messiah should be. There is first the death of the Baptist, the prophet of Messiah. Then there is the refusal to commit Himself to the enthusiasm of those who would have made Him a king (Joh 2:24; Joh 6:15). Again, Christ avoids or evades the challenge to manifest Himself to the world (Joh 7:4; Joh 7:6). Lastly came the crisis, as it were, the open challenge to prove His Messiahship by a sign and legitimate His claim, a challenge refused (Luk 22:67; Luk 23:35). Hand in hand with this progressive disillusionment of all that was contrary to His thought in current Messianic ideas went the progressive revelation of the true Messiah,a revelation which became at once a testing and a discipline of the character of the disciples, and an unfolding of undreamt of forces in His; so that at last they fell at His feet and worshipped, while others acknowledged Him as Lord and God (Joh 20:28); and still others plainly felt that He was ascending to the Father (Joh 20:17). That Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, and gave His sanction to the belief on the part of His disciples is certain* [Note: The inquiry into the Messiah-consciousness of Christ has led so far to little agreement. Opinions multiply. The main points under consideration are: (1) Did the Messiah idea enter into His ministry at all? (2) If it did, when? From childhood? at baptism? at some later point in His ministry? and from what causes? (3) How did He conceive of His Messiahship? Was His conception complete at first, or the subject of development? (see art. Messiah). Probably it is true to say that the present popular study of Christs self-consciousness is less fruitful for the interpretation of His Person than the older method of studying His God-consciousness. His life is not so much a self-witness as a revelation of the Father.] (see next sect.); no less certain (and admitted) is it that the disciples believed Him to be the Messiah. The point of importance for the present is, how the belief originated with the latter. It is a practice among many scholars to reverse the actual facts. They argue as if the belief had been first formulated and officially offered, so to speak, for their acceptance, a formal external idea taken up because it had been put forth by Jesus as a scheme in which to frame His person; in the light of which they are to regard His life and words; exercising a prodigious influence on, and lending a force to, His words and a sanctity to His person beyond that which, but for it, they could possibly have had (cf. such writers as Mackintosh, Nat. Hist. of Christ. Relig.; Percy Gardner, Historic View of NT, ch. iv.; Estlin Carpenter, First Three Gospels, chs. ii., iii.). The actual facts of Christs career, i.e., are conformed in the NT narratives to already existing Messianic traditions. And because of this the accumulated sanctities of the old religion were laid claim to by the new, whereby the latter maintained itself in face of the opposition which it encountered at the first and found a soil prepared for its reception. The contention cannot be sustained. It may receive some countenance from the circumstance that the writers of the NT never record any fact or incident merely as fact or incident, but as part of the substance of the gospel, illustrating and conveying spiritual principles. But the very ease with which the NT method of presenting historical circumstance might be turned to account under the influence of Messianic bias becomes valuable evidence against that hypothesis. For although the NT history is presented with a bias, i.e. as bearing and bodying forth a Person, the presentation, whether that of the Synoptics, or of the Fourth Gospel, or of St. Paul and the others, cannot with any measure of success be wholly identified with or wholly summed up in that of the Messiah. The Messianic claims of Jesus may be made (as they are made) to rest on the facts; but the facts are not exhausted in those claims, even in the immensely enriched and original form in which Jesus made them. There are other portraitures of Jesus in the NT besides that of Him as Messiah; and even those writers who set forth to portray Him solely as Messiah cannot be restrained from bursting through their self-imposed limits, in fidelity to the facts, and portraying Him as more than they meant. Moreover, the same writers convey to us the explicit assurance that they have not apprehended all the truth about His Person. Subsequent theology accepted the assurance, departed widely from the purely Messianic portraiture, yet claimed, and with perfect justice, that the new departures were in no sense new additions to the original Gospel, but fresh interpretations, designed to recover and vitalize truths discernible in the Gospels, but imperfectly understood by the Gospel writers.

(b) What has been adverted to finds illustration in another source of Christological idea, the self-conscionsness of Jesus. In the most noteworthy discussion of this subject, that of Baldensperger (Das Sclbstbewusstsein Jesu), only about one half of the work is taken up with determining the sense in which Jesus regarded Himself as Messiah; the second part is devoted to other aspects arising out of His self-designations, His teaching as to the Kingdom, etc. Withal, much that cannot be excluded from Christs self-revelation is not even touched upon. Any adequate exposition of Christs idea of His own nature will include the following features: His interior life, His method in teaching, His moral perfection, His oneness with the Father.

() The true secret of Christs life is not open. Who can ever know His intimate mind? Could He have revealed it even if He would? We know His words and deeds; we distinguish the forces He set agoing in the worlds history; we venture on assertions of growth both of idea and of action in His life; but where was the source of these? or what the process? or when the great choices and decisive operations of His marvellous soul? What were the supremely triumphant and supremely terrible moments of His life? What were the events in which He found Himself? His abounding energy implies a rich self-consciousness; the completest self-consciousness rests on a plenitude of interior self-relationships. That these last existed in Him we are certain. But in what manner or in obedience to what impulses, who can discern? The records give results not processes, and just at those points where our curiosity is most eager, the limitations of our power to perceive are most urgent. We see but a few things. We observe the self-indulgence of His own consciousness again and again. We have glimpses of its exercise in solitary communings with God, in a life of intercourse with men, in the collision with incident and event. Above all, we know it in its great occasions,Baptism, Temptation, Discussion with the Doctors, Transfiguration, Agony in the Garden, Resurrection, Ascension,all of which are equally discoveries of His nature to Himself and revelations to His disciples. Because the meaning of these events seems to lie on the surface, we must be careful not to give them a superficial reception. They must be so received when regarded as parts of a religious idea, and not, as they are, experiences of a real Person. They constitute events which were no mere form gone through to proclaim a spiritual truth to men or to certify to them by wondrous signs a new relation opened for them with God. They were not dramatic: they were as personal to Him as they are instructive for us. He did what He did because He was what He wasfrom a deeper necessity than any deliberate persuasion that His disciples needed this or that teaching at this or that time. These events are far from summing up His inner life. They are but flashes out of a deep darkness. They reveal a life that is really human, in constant communion with a source of sustenance beyond the human, receiving the fulness of that source and translating it into earthly relations, yet with a self-possession and self-knowledge, i.e. a consciousness differentiated and personal. But the revelation does not uncover all the secrets of that life, leaving nothing to elude or bewilder. There are reservations in the knowledge given (cf. Dale, Atonement, pp. 45, 47). And these are not to be identified with the necessary inscrutabilities inherent in all finite personality. They are the intimations of a glory in His nature which separates it from all common natures, signs that in Him there are abysses of impenetrable splendour into which finite natures may not enter, however closely they may touch.

() Christs method in teaching was characteristic. He taught neither as the scribes (Mat 7:29), nor as a prophet (Mat 11:9). And this because of His own nature and the nature of His message. He came not as a teacher; compelling assent by the complete answer to every difficulty, silencing dispute with arguments. He was more personal and spiritual. His teaching did not profess to offer an absolute intellectual proof of itself which must convince all sufficiently intelligent persons. It claimed the belief of all men, but not on the ground of its incontrovertible evidence; on the ground rather that all men were created to be good, and to know the truth, and would know it if their perceptions were not dulled and distorted by sin. It convinced only by a process which at the same time purified. He made His message not an argument but a force.

Hence His method was both declarative and suggestive; both thought and incentive to further thought. At times He is clear and authoritative; His words are such that men may refuse them but cannot mistake them. At other times He shrouds His doctrine in parables, and, pointing to principles, leaves them to work and unfold their purport as men are found ready to receive them. This was so, because the teaching was not simply of truths but Truth, infinite, inalienable, imperishable; the fulfilment of all partial truths. His Verily I say asserts His belief that it was so. The mind of Christ which the teaching offers is not mere neutrality but soul, personalityback to which the teaching goes for justification. He appeals to no higher sanction than Himself. For Himself also He assumes a right to revise the law of Moses (Mat 5:21), and claims authority over every individual soul (Mat 19:29). For this reason it is futile to found an argument against the final and the revealed character of His message on its fragmentariness or its want of originality, futile also to limit His teaching to any detached portion of its recorded whole, e.g. the Sermon on the Mount. The fragments are numerous enough to enable us with ease to trace His mind. They form a unity which is not a new edition simply of anything preceding. That some of His thoughts and precepts were anticipated by Jewish and ethnie men of wisdom does not detract from His originality (see art. Originality), because that consists, not in isolated truths, but in the remarkable sum of truth in which they take their appropriate and articulate place. That doctrine again explains the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount more fully than the Sermon sums up the doctrine. The method of Christ challenges reflexion and suggests as origin of His teaching His own statement from God (Mat 11:27, Joh 7:16).

() What is meant by the moral perfection of Christ is at times misconceived, yet embodies a difference in His nature as compared with ordinary men that is perfectly realizable. Ullmann in a treatise of great power has made it familiar under the term sinlessness (Sinlessness of Jesus, T. & T. Clark). The term has been objected to as a negative conception, the negative absence of evil, a negative difficult to prove from the limited induction available in a life of a few years. To give the conception a concrete expression may be impossible; but the term is of value as pointing to the stainless purity of Christ. His moral self-witness is in the highest degree positive.* [Note: The passage, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God (Mar 10:18 ||), is still a difficult question of criticism and interpretation. That it is a self-depreciatory word is the least tenable explanation. That, as a self-depreciatory saying it is the only certainly authentic word of Christ with reference to His moral nature (Schmiedel, Encyc. Bibl, ii. 1881), is perverse (cf. Marcus Dods, The Bible, its Origin and Nature, p. 205).]

It implies not simply the consciousness of flawless conduct, but the consciousness of perfect character as well as the assurance of power to create in others perfect character. Man may fail to meet his moral obligation in three ways: by falling short of his ideal of duty, by forming lower ideals than he ought, by direct transgression. And the witness of the ordinary conscience is that man has failed in all three, and has reason to fear God. The peculiarity of Christs moral life is that all suspicion of this is wholly absent. He never confesses sin. He never fears any consequences of His acts either from God or from men. He seeks forgiveness, but only for others. He dreads sin, but not for Himself. He claims to be apart from it. He gives the impression of breathing an atmosphere in which sin cannot be. He is possessed with a holy energy, constant and powerful. Yet His moral life finds exereise not in abstracts but within conditions of earthly existence. He fought His way through those experiences which make goodness difficult. For this reason His goodness is both provable and imitable. The crux of the proof must rest less in special pleading for particulars of conduct than in a central view of His moral personality. Particulars have been contested. He has been charged with harshness to His mother (Joh 2:4); with petulance (Luk 2:49); with brusque contempt (Mat 7:6); with discourtesy and personal bitterness (Luk 11:37 ff.); with violation of property rights (Mar 5:13; Mar 11:2-6; Mar 11:15); with underrating family duty and affection (Mat 10:37, Luk 14:25-26); with defective and impracticable theories as to civic virtue, wealth, almsgiving, non-resistance, etc. (For these and others cf. such writers as Voysey, Dole, Philip Sidney, Goldwin Smith; and the tendency of younger Unitarians). Charges on particulars cannot be met except in the light of character. The above are all defensible consistently with the character of Jesus as that character appears in the record. Nor need we resort to the plea (Martineau) that the blemishes are due to the fault of the delineators. Christs moral nature is a unity. It is a unity in virtue of that principle by which He knew Himself to be always doing the will of God. He knew Himself to be in the activity of spirit and will what God in nature gave Him to become. In this respect He felt Himself solitary among men, and acted on the feeling. His perfection thus consists, first, not in any completeness of precepts given or concrete relations sustained in conductthese flow from it; but in the possession of that spirit and of those principles which not only supply all due regulation as occasion requires, but give unity, consistency, and purity to the moral life. In the light of this consideration we argue for His constant maintenance of moral supremacy in particular acts. His moral consciousness penetrated all His thought and feeling, and all expressions of both. It was the secret, further, of His power over sin, both in the world (cosmic) and in man: His power to overthrow sin and to forgive sins. He did not disregard sin. He inherited the teaching of His race as to sin, a teaching characteristically striking and comprehensive. He appropriates all its truth, and develops it in His own original spirit. He did this just because He was so pure. Sin was the haunting dread of His days. In meeting its malign force and subduing it, He broke His life. Against it He put forth all His strength, and in so doing rose to the fulness of stature we know, being raised up by God to his right hand. More by what He did against sin than by what He declared of sin or of His own goodness did He prove His sinlessness. He did what He was. His presence raised the disciples, as His story raises us, to a level which, like Him, knows no sin (1Jn 3:5-6; 1Jn 3:9).

() His equality with God* [Note: See below under Divine designations, Son of Man, Son of God.] connects itself chiefly (in the Synoptics) with the thought of His sinlessness and His power to forgive sins (Mat 9:2-6, Mar 2:10, Luk 5:20; Luk 5:23. Less unquestioned is Mat 28:19, where He includes Himself in the unity of the Divine name). St. Johns Gospel is full of the idea (Joh 5:22 f., Joh 6:33-35, Joh 8:42; Joh 8:58, Joh 9:25 f., Joh 10:9, Joh 11:25, Joh 14:1; Joh 14:6; Joh 14:9, Joh 15:5 f., Joh 15:23), and to this point attacks have in consequence been directed with vigour (cf. in particular Martineaus Seat of Authority; and for an effective rejoinder, Forrests Christ of History and Experience, Lect. i.).

(c) As remarkable a factor as any in the spell Christ laid on mans spirit has been His appeal to the deeper forces of personal being. There have been those whose presence seemed to lower for the time being the vitality and intelligence of those who came into contact with them, and so acted as to destroy their self-possession. Some men overawe and paralyze others who come within the field of their influence. The power of Christ acted contrariwise. It empowered. He revealed men to themselves in revealing Himself to their inner sense. In receiving Him into their hearts new powers therein arose, reserve forces showed themselves; His influence was that of reason begetting reason, love begetting love. In fellowship with Him men came to higher ideals. From Him, in fact, mankind has learned to know itself as it ought to be, and to estimate its own best possibilities. He has lifted up human aspiration more than any other. The reason of this may be found in the fact that He appealed persuasively to human instinct. To appeal to such instinct is often to create it. When a child is told a story of heroism, when rough untaught natures are sottened by the beauty of tenderness seen or pictured, there is a creation of courage or gentleness where it was not before. When the instinct is quickened we know that it is native. The movement Christ initiated has proved of unrivalled creativeness in the history of human instinct and in every direction of human activity. The idea of Jesus is the illumination and inspiration of existence (Phillips Brooks, whose Bohlen Lectures, 1879, are an eloquent exposition of Christs creative influence, in moral, social, intellectual, emotional life). The first perception of this fact glows through the NT writings: not one of the writers fails to make us understand that the One he writes about is One who has opened new powers in, and disclosed new horizons to, his own soul. This is their witnessa witness corroborated by every succeeding agethat He called them, and in communion with Him, He made them a new creation, disciplining and elevating character, calling out a higher faith, creating profounder emotions, inspiring with ever-increasing reverence, and bringing into play those higher and more creative faculties of the soul that see the things of God in a wide perspective impossible to the reason.

(d) The specialities of Christs teaching and works may be briefly indicated. Their speciality has been challenged. The opinion of a recent Gifford lecturer is shared by many, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to select any special article of religious faith which is in its general aspect a doctrine peculiar to Christianity. Its uniqueness lies rather in what some would call the personality of the founder (Wallace, Lectures, iii.). That is true; but its suggestion is not true, that there is no uniqueness in the teaching of Christ. The uniqueness of the Teacher draws with it uniqueness in the teaching; and that both in its method (see above) and in its substance. Similarly His works exhibit higher potency than the ordinary human. A strong feeling to this effect is resulting from the minute analysis which at the present time both the Words and the Miracles are undergoing (cf. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus; Dalman, Words of Jesus, et al.). His dependence on others, His anticipations by others, are less confidently asserted. It is difficult, if not impossible, to discover any form of Gentile culture which is likely to have entered into the formative influences of His mind. From Greek philosophy He probably lived remote as much by natural temperament as by patriotic interest. He was not beyond its range, but then as now the Jew had a wonderful power of living in the fire without suffering the smell of it to pass upon his garments. Every Jew appeared in his own eyes to stand morally and intellectually on a higher level than the Gentile; his system of education seemed less destitute of vivifying and invigorating ideals. He was nurtured on the history, the scenery, the religion of his land, all of them of exquisite interest, stimulating the fresh mind in the highest degree to habits of independent wisdom (cf. Ramsay, Education of Christ, ch. 3). Of Jewish sects and teachers three have been suggested as contributory forces: the Pharisees, the Baptist, the Essenes. The first proved His worst foes; they had an influence, but it was solely negative. The second is remarkable for his consciousness of his own inferiority, of Christs higher range in mission and higher rank in Person. Of the third let Hausrath judge: From the Essenes His whole conception of the world separated Him.* [Note: It hardly comes within the scope of this article to consider the alleged influence of Buddhism or Mithraism.] There can be little question that the impulse to reflexion was fostered in Christ by study of the sacred books, the Law and the Prophets, under the usual Rabbinical direction. The master-words of His teaching are drawn thence. The substance of His teaching, in numerous details, is defined negatively by contrast with the comments of the scribes and positively by fulfilment of the Law through a clearer discernment and profounder enrichment of the proper principles of the Law. The substance of His teaching in its main positions is intrinsically so separate from even its closest approximations in previous prophecy as to be justly entitled to the claim of originality. The source of its originality was in Himself. Christs teaching is His own exposition of the Divine life which was revealed in Himself [Note: Perownes Hulsean Lects, pp, 93, 94.] (Mat 11:25-27). Out of a perfect relation with God flows His teaching like a crystal stream. Its form is drawn from the religious vocabulary of the time; its matter from His own mind. In this connexion the following is admirably put, and meets a common objection:

It is not enough to show that particular statements of our Lord may be found embedded in earlier writings which consist mainly of foolish superstitions and childish conceits. It would be strange indeed if, with the Scriptures in their hands, the great teachers of Israel never said, or never uttered in pregnant phrase, any of those lofty spiritual truths which shine forth from the pages of the prophets. But if we find, on referring to contemporary literature, that such references are only like rare jewels shining among vast heaps of error and superstition, that they are only like flashes of lightning in an all-embracing night, then their concurrence in nowise diminishes our wonder. The problem only takes another shape. How is it, we ask, that out of all this spiritual lumber the soul of Jesus only selected what was good and great, and rejected all the rest? How is it, e.g., that from the teaching of Hillel He took (if, indeed, He took anything directly theoce) only what was eternally true, rejecting at the same time all the frivolous ritualism and puerile casuistry in the consideration of which Hillel spent his life? Remember again that it detracts in nowise from our Lords claim to originality, that even His master thought had been partially or casually expressed by those who went before Him. The question to be decided in our Lords day was this, Which of all the thoughts about God that have passed through the mind of saints and prophets should become the master-thought of religion, which should condition and determine all the rest? It would not be true to say that Jesus selected one, as though He had been passing all in review and comparing them. No, the truth is that Jesus laid hold of one by His Divine intuition, in virtue of His direct insight into the nature of God (Moorhouse, Teaching of Christ, p. 66 f.).

When we add that Christs teaching was given, so to speak, casually; not systematically, in no ordered or finished statement; that the whole is comparatively small, and yet that it is easy to draw up from the scattered sayings a sum of doctrine coherent, self-consistent, and completely satisfying to the needs of the soul, further cogency is lent to the witness, Never man so spake (Joh 7:46), and point to the question, Whence hath this man this wisdom? (Mat 13:54). See artt. Originality and Uniqueness.

To His words have to be added His works. His ordinary doings were those of a good man (Act 10:38). His miracles proved a special presence of God with Him (Joh 3:2). There is a crude view of the Gospel wonders which has made many see in them an unimportant part of the Gospel story, and even feel it desirable to do without them. So long as they are looked upon as thaumaturgic signs or violations of Natures sequence, so long will both religion and science reject them. If, however, they are considered as indications of laws which embrace and in a sense unite the seen and unseen worlds, it is of immense importance to Christianity that they should occur in connexion with the foundation of that faith. As a matter of fact, in face of all attempts to explain them or explain them away, a certain robust sense of the general mind has refused to concur in any view that denies their reality or their essential place in the history. They reveal Christ no less than His doctrine. They constitute warrants of His Divine power: they also form part of the Gospel. They stand as a real item in the list of testimonies to His impression. They are one of the modes in which His life found utterance, an anthentic element of the original gospel offered to faith (A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, p. 376; Miraculous Elements in Gospels, chs. vi. and viii.). In this respect they are on a different plane from the prodigies credited to pagan heroes. That men might see the will of God at work, Jesus did the works of His Father. A reckless historical scepticism evaporates the miracles partly into odd natural events, partly into nervous healings, partly into gradually growing legends. Sane criticism, however, admits their congruity with the record, their naturalness to His Person, and their value to faith. The supreme miracle of the Resurrection (wh. see) is of primary import.

3. Validity of the experience.The lines thus traced converge in one picture. Their effect is striking, and of the cumulative kind. They may not produce infallible certainty of the truth of Christs Divinity. But no infallible certainty can be given. The Christ they portray is not absolute in the sense of abstract; He is absolute in the sense of the fullest concrete; all the elements, therefore, which go to make up this impression of His Person contribute to the proof of its power: by exhibiting what He is they testify to Him: their witness is, This is the Son of God. It was mens experience of Christ as Divine that gave them the right to affirm His Divinity. Is the witness true? The contention here made is that what we know along many lines as the Christian experience is a new and distinctive development, and demands a new and unique factor introduced to the human consciousness. Is the contention verifiable? The witness is an interpretation: can we trust it? Has the impression an exact equivalent behind it of objective fact? What were the dimensions of the objective fact capable of producing this inner effect? The answer must be that the same law of rationality holds here as in other parts of knowledge. The effect must have an adequate cause. What the soul realizes as the highest in its inner feeling is proof of reality that the reason may recognize. If the soul attains the vision of a Reality whose authority over it is absolute and from whom it receives a power that masters all other powers, then it knows the meaning of God. The finality of such experience cannot be questioned, when its source is personality (personality being the only full reality of which we have knowledge), and its seat the moral disposition and not individual temperament. Now to those conditions the impression of Christ recorded in the Gospels conforms. Behind the records He stands, greater than themselves, and that by their own showing; and because of this they furnish to their readers a vision which does not fade but grows, a power that is new and permanent, a command from which the conscience cannot dissent, a mastery that sets free. He Himself had this effect on men as they companied with Him; the record of their intercourse with Him has the same effect. The effect is a fact of continuous experience fundamentally identical in kind throughout the Christian centuries. Both are the envelope that enwraps Truth transcending time and place. Only the universal and everlasting can transcend the limitations of our separateness and speak in the same manner to thousands of different souls. The phenomena of Christian history are so diverse in kind from those of other historic faiths as to require the supposition of a supernatural origin (cf. Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine, p. 200). The witness that God Himself is here stepping into the history of the race must be accounted true.

III. Beginnings of the doctrine of Christs Person in the NT

1. General character of the doctrine.It has been necessary to make the above analysis of the bases of belief in Christ as presented in the Gospels and to justify it, because it is only by understanding them fully that we gain any test by which to determine the character and worth of the belief itself, or reach the point of view for appreciating aright its beginnings and its growth. It is a doctrine that has no finality. It is based on an experience which cannot rest, but must grow with the growth of all life, and pervade all other experience of life. It is a doctrine therefore that has a history down to the present, and which is destined to continue beyond the present. We are now in the midst of a new growth of its meaning. In moving on we can purchase security only by retracing our steps, unravelling the web of the past and weaving it over again. Recurrence to the original will reinvigorate like the touch of earth to the feet of Antaeus. In the first expression there is a universality which is apt to be lost in the divisions of later opinion: there is an implicit fulness in the beginning which is not completely represented in any subsequent stage. To that beginning we now advert. In the conviction that in Christ they were a new creation, partakers of a Divine nature (2Co 5:17; 2Pe 1:4), the Apostles must seek expression of their conviction. The expression runs over into every phase of their thought and life. It breeds in them a sense of new relation to Christ akin to that felt towards God, originating a new thought of His Person. We see it in the Names they give to Him, in the Properties and Attributes they ascribe to Him, in their acceptance of wonders attending His Origin and His passing from sight, in the relations they proceed to institute between Him and previous history as well as future ages. The NT idea of His Divinity is not to be built up as an induction from these particulars; these, on the contrary, are the reflexions, inevitable and faint, of the experience of His Divinity; they are the inward seeking utterance.

It is an utterance that is quite spontaneous. It is the outcome of religious faith not of philosophic interest. The speculative instinct is wholly secondary to the spiritual facts. But while this is so, the philosophic interest is there, and that of necessity. While the Person hidden behind the life of the NT is vaster than the NT record of Him, it remains true that if that Person were to survive and His impression, they must be shown to ring true to the intellect. What happens to the emotions suggests problems to the mind. Proved facts, even those deep-seated in our mystic frame, have to formulate themselves in thought. And so the moral life created by Christ furnished material for new great convictions fitted to be at once its expression and its safeguard. The doctrine of His Person was the necessary correlate of the impression of His Personality.

In the facts thus noted is to be found the answer to two inquiries of rationalism. On the one hand, it is asked, Why is He never called God? and on the other, Why such diversity of view among the writers? Take the latter first. The criticism here has been carefully made by Dr. Martineau (Seat of Authority, p. 361) and others, who urge that Jesus was construed successively into (1) the Jewish ideal or Messiah, (2) the Human ideal or Second Adam, (3) a Divine Incarnation. This construction of theories is asserted to be only a fanciful achievement of early Christian thought. The personal attendants of Jesus worked out the first; the Apostle of the Gentiles, the second; the school whence the Fourth Gospel proceeded, the third. In reply it may be affirmed that such criticism holds its ground only by (a) doing violence to the facts on which it seeks to rest, by subjecting them to a narrowly subjective standard: the facts include those in which Christ is represented as accepting the name of Lord; by (b) an arbitrary application of the idea of development to the narrative. It is possible to prove the alleged constructions to have been made successively only by a series of unwarranted eliminations. The Synoptists are not without knowledge of (2) and (3), nor is (1) unknown to St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel. The facts, when viewed without prepossession, point to no such clear-cut theories. They do, however, indicate both movement and diversity of belief, changes constantly going on in the opinions respecting Christs nature, and very material differences in individual emphasis and interpretation, a movement and diversity only less remarkable than the unmistakable unity pervading them. It was natural that men of the character and training of St. James and St. Peter should discover in OT conceptions of the Messiah approximate lines of thought wherewith to describe their experience of Christ. Temperamental and other causes led St. Paul and St. John as naturally to give representations of their experience such as they have done, the former anthropological and practical, the latter contemplative and mystical. As types these three are distinguishable, but not exclusively of each other. There are others also, as, e.g., that of the Ep. to the Hebrews, of Ephesians and Colossians, of the Apocalypse. These expressions differ among themselves, and differ in precisely the manner that is natural and desirable. The variety is that of life and reality. These all represent differences that are not separate developments of substance in the doctrine so much as precious elements constitutive of a richer fulness than any one of them or all of them; a fulness of necessary mysteriousness. They represent no signs of a struggle to assert Divinity in opposition to a bare humanity: of such a struggle there is not a trace in the NT.

As to the second point of criticism, it is possible with some reason to maintain that the term is never applied to Christ. The matter is still in dispute among scholars. The crucial passages are (not taking into account Joh 1:1; Joh 20:28, 1Jn 5:20, Heb 1:8 ff.) Rom 9:5, Tit 2:13, Act 20:28, 1Ti 3:16, Php 2:6, 2Pe 1:1, Col 2:9. In 2Pe 1:1 the rendering, Our God and the Saviour Jesus Christ, is not excluded; similarly Tit 2:13. In Rom 9:5 the doxology may be regarded as referring to God. In 1Ti 3:16 the true text is not . In Act 20:28 the Authorized Version reading is probably correct (God). Col 2:2, Eph 5:5, 2Th 1:12, Tit 2:13 have been adduced as proofs that St. Paul speaks of Christ as God; but erroneously. The two strongest pasages are Php 2:6-8, Col 2:9. But if the texts are not unambiguous, that does not affect the truth of the Divinity of Christ. It was scarcely natural for a Jew to use the Divine Name in any connexion (cf. Dalman, Words of Jesus, vii., also p. 233). If it were used, it applied to God in His absolute being. Cf. Westcott, Ep. of St. John, p. 172. God manifesting Himself in Christ was affirmed in a variety of other modes. The Apostles were not so much concerned to prove His Divinity as to persuade men to accept Christ as their Saviour. The question whether He was God or not was in this view a subordinate question. They wrote about Him as they preached, in His human manifestation and in His Exalted Glory. From that point of view they neither missed the consciousness of His Godhood nor failed abundantly to declare it. The declarations they make are of One who, they were persuaded, was absolutely unique in position, in character, in work; One whose relationship to God was perfect, who was the Saviour, Light and Life of men. Are such declarations consistent with anything short of His Divinity?

2. Divine designations applied to Christ.Of the names implying distinctiveness of nature assigned to Christ in the Gospels and Epistles, there are four of supreme import: (a) Son of Man, which stands by itself; (b) Son of God, with which may be set as allied in significance, Son of the Highest, Only-begotten Son, My beloved Son (or My Son, my Chosen), and The Son: (c) Christ; (d) Lord. Others are the Word of God and the Word; Son of David, with which may be placed Root and offspring of David, and perhaps Prince of life and Prince; Saviour; Image of God; Second Adam; First and Last; The Holy, Just One.

Son of Man.To this title there attaches a peculiar interest, which is reflected in the amount of discussion it has excited. Controversy circles round its use, its source, its meaning. It occurs in all the four Gospels. It is the one name Christ is represented as reserving for His exclusive use. That He did so is plainly implied in the narratives.

His use of it has been denied (cf. Bruno Bauer, Volkmar, Oort, Lietzmann, etc.). One of the most capable of recent critics (Wellhausen, Das Evang. Marci) argues that the term, if used at all by Christ, was not made current by Him but by the Christian community, and came into use in the following manner. The early Christians believed that Jesus had prophesied His Parousia. They hesitated to make Him say so outright, and hence represented Him as saying only that the Man of Daniel should appear with the clouds of heaven. He could say that without meaning Himself. But the Christian interpretation soon read Him into the announcement, then used the title in the prophecies of the Passion and Resurrection, and finally as a simple equivalent of the first person singular on the lips of Jesus. The position, in this and other forms, fails to account, inter alia, for two facts: (a) the term is not found in St. Paul or elsewhere in NT, but almost solely on the lips of Jesus (instances to the contrary are Joh 12:34, Act 7:56); (b) if a coinage of the Early Church, how does ita term denoting lowlinessharmonize with the evident endeavour to portray a glorified Christ?

The expression occurs in previous Hebrew and Aramaic literature. The references of importance are in Ezekiel, Daniel (Dan 7:13), and Enoch, in all of which the Messianic significance is not indisputable (see Schmidt, art. Son of Man in Encyc. Bibl., who inclines to refer even Dan 7:13 to Michael, not Messiah). In what sense is it to be understood? The commonly accepted view (e.g. BeyschlagWendt) may be thus stated: Christ was desirous of being recognized as the Messiah. He was not desirous of fulfilling the current expectations of what the Messiah should be and do. He therefore did not apply the current designations of Messiah to Himself, but, finding one term, Son of Man (in Daniel), employed it as expressing (1) Messianic character, and (2) much more than the expected Messianic character, viz. the generically human character.

Dalman (Words of Jesus) has adduced grave considerations against this view. It is a view, he holds, started by the Greek divines, and has no basis in primitive Christian thought. He maintains that Christ adopted it from Dan 7:13, and used it of Himself in its original sense, a sense which was not widely prevalent in His time as applicable to the Messiah. There the emphasis rather lies on the lact that in contrast with the winged lion, the devouring bear, the four-headed leopard, the fourth heast with ten horns terrible exceedingly beyond its predecessors, he appears unarmed and inoffensive, incapable through any power of his own of making himself master of the world; he is only as a son of man. If ever he is to be master of the world, God must make him so. The Son of Man, on this view, is not the son of man in the sense of being a man like other men. but as being a man distinct from other men, in the sense that God has given him to be what he is. The expression intimates less his human nature than his Divine. Son of Man denotes that member of the human race, in his own nature impotent, whom God will make Lord of the world.

To indicate results, it may be taken that there is a fair consensus of agreement on the following points: (a) that the use of the title as applicable to Himself is due to Christ; (b) that a wider source than the passage in Daniel is probable; (c) that in meaning it embodies a composite conception, combining various OT suggestions, and these the most rich and salient; the seed of the woman, the one like a son of man, the suffering Servant of Jehovah, the ideal people, the recipient of special privilege, the apportioner of judgment, of celestial origin. In wealth of content the expression stands alone. It was thus peculiarly appropriate as a self-designation of Christ. In it there met the two divisions of Messianic reference, those pointing to the glory and those pointing to the humiliation of the Messiah, comprising elements seemingly incongruous and irreconcilable, yet in essentials capable of being unified in a single character. In the course of His ministry He was to manifest Himself as the conqueror of Satan, as perfect man, as concentrating His race in an intense personal life, as conscious of a special mission from God, of absolutely intimate relation to God, of perfect dependence upon God, and as sharing with God in the judgment of the world, characteristics all of them Messianic, and impossible to be included in any of the terms of Messianic intention more fully than in this, the Son of Man. Its meaning on His lips goes further than even the fulness of Messianic intention; so that it is not at once intelligible (mystifying title of Weisse and others is not justified), a feature it shares with Him whom it designates and the hopes it unified. In it these features find place: much contemporary Messianic belief of a familiar kind; less prominent ideas that had before this time passed into the background; novel functions in Christs conception, such as the life of the Son of Man as a life of service, and His death as necessary to redeem men; and the combination of all these in a new synthesis which was not simply a mosaic of old data or gathering up of the disparate details of earlier expectation, but which was reached by the entrance of a new thing that made the fulfilment infinitely more glorious than the promise might have seemed to warrant (cf. art. Son of Man).

Son of God (the Son, My Son). This title, like the former, belongs to the OT writings, being found in Gen 6:2, Exo 4:22, 2Sa 7:14, Psa 2:7; Psa 82:6; Psa 89:27, Job 1:6; Job 38:7, Hos 1:10; Hos 11:1, and there applied in various connexions: to offspring of the gods, to angels, to judges, to Israel as a people serving Jehovah, to individual Israelites, to the theocratic king, to the Messiah (Dalman and others object to Son of God as a Messianic title). The expression Son of God [or My Son] occurs in the Synoptics 27 times, and the Son 9 times. In St. John Son of God occurs 10 times and the Son 14 times. Both occur in St. Johns First Epistle, in several of St. Pauls, in Hebrews, in Revelation. In the Gospels they are applied to Christ by the Father, angels, demoniacs, Himself (rarely, and only in St. John), disciples (N.B.St. Peters confession, Mat 16:16), elders, high priest, centurion. In determining its meaning, we may exclude the idea of pagan influence. There is little probability that the cult of the Roman emperors suggested either the word or its idea. Its application to believers (Mat 5:9; Mat 5:45, Luk 6:35, Eph 1:5, Joh 1:12, 1Jn 3:1-2, Rom 8:14; Rom 8:19, Php 2:15) does not necessarily confine its import to the merely human sphere, Its previous usage in the OT could not fail to prepare the way for a connotation of special relationship to God.

That the term contains Messianic reference is contested by few. In line with it are to be explained the testimony of the demoniacs (Mat 8:29 || Luk 4:41), and the heavenly voices at the Baptism and the Transfiguration (Mat 3:17; Mat 17:5). Here, too, possibly lies the reason for Christs use of the term in debates with the Jewish leaders (Joh 3:18; Joh 5:15 ff; Joh 8:25 ff.). The Messianic sense is obvious in St. Peters confession (Mat 16:16); less so in that of the centurion (Mar 15:39). The answer to the high priests question was treated as blasphemy (Mat 26:63 ff.), because by it He claimed more than Messiahship. St. Johns statements enhance the feeling of the Synoptists. He points clearly to Christs use of the term and in the solitary sense. He is careful in his use of names, and would hardly put into Christs mouth a self-designation without some warrant of sanction from His personal usage. But the Synoptists are not without traces of the same clearness. In Mat 22:41-46, Mar 12:35-37, Luk 20:41-44, the inference is inevitable that the Messiah is the son of One more exalted than David.

What meaning did Christ attach to the term? The above passage is significant. He is not denying Davidic descent. He affirms it (see on the other side Wellhausen, Evangel. Marci). By His descent from David He satisfies one condition expected in the Messiah. That fact, however, does not preclude Him from satisfying further conditions not included in the Messianic prophecy, evincing a power in Him which points to another and higher origin. This further scope in His filial relation is intimated in such passages as Mat 11:27; Mat 16:17, Luk 10:22, Mat 3:11, Mar 4:11, Luk 8:10, Joh 8:35-36; Joh 15:10; Joh 4:34 etc.). He taught the disciples to call God our Father, and called God His own Father in a special sense. He asserts that He alone adequately reveals and knows God. He suggests a special sonship in the parable of the Wicked Husbandman (Mar 12:6). The double strain is present in His consciousness. He is Son in the Messianic sense. He is also Son in a Divine sense: of absolute oneness with the Father. He has the mission of the former with its dignity: He has the infallible knowledge with perfect obedience of the latter. Both features emerge in the Synoptics as in the Fourth Gospel. Both are not justly interpreted in such a sense as suggests a merely ethical relation to God, a relation which others may actually possess or are destined to attain. In them there is the basis of the ethical but of the essential as well. The Sonship of Christ is human and historical yet solitary and transcendent.

St. Paul corroborates the Evangelic positions. The earlier Epistles contain a large amount of teaching as to the Person of Christ. We have lucid references to the Sonship: 1Th 1:10, Rom 8:3; Rom 8:32, 2Co 4:4, Rom 1:4, 2Co 1:19 ff., Gal 2:20, Eph 4:13, Rom 1:9, Gal 1:16; Gal 4:4, where, through the position assigned to Him on the one hand, and on the other the special Spirit dwelling in Him, equality with God is asserted and Divine functions attributed. In one passage, 2 Thessalonians 2, Christ, while not named Son, is regarded in His capacity as the opponent of Antichrist as a consubstantial representative of God. This idea in another context we have in Col 1:13-15, Heb 1:2-8; Heb 3:3 etc.

A survey of the texts reveals a complex conception, including (1) a Messianic predicate asserting the place of Christ as the complete antitype of the theocratic king; (2) an ethical identity in the realization of Divine holiness in a stainless life; (3) a spiritual unity revealing itself in a perfect harmony with the mind of God and a perfect obedience to His will, which were as much innate properties of His personality as achievements of His moral self. In addition, the conviction of His pre-existent glory* [Note: See art. Pre-existence.] and of His cosmic agency necessitates (1) a physical descent from Deity by a creative act of the Divine Spirit (See Annunciation and Virgin-birth); and (2) an equality of essence in virtue of which Divine acts and qualities are ascribed to Him. Cf., further, art. Son of God.

Christ (the Christ), King of the Jews, Lord, may all be taken together. Christ is the Greek equivalent of Messiah. Both words signify the Anointed. While applied in the OT to prophets (Psa 105:15, 1Ki 19:16) and high priests (Zec 4:14), the name is specially identified with the kings, from the passage (Psa 2:2) implying that they were under the special protection of Jehovah, and exercised righteous government. Later, when Israel had come under Gentile rule, the idea entered into the name that the Messiah would overthrow the secular might and liberate the people, i.e. be at once the Saviour of the faithful and the Prince or King of the saved. In the NT the name is accorded to Jesus everywhere. It is practically His surname, a circumstance remarkable when it is remembered that He forbade its use in His earthly life. He is greeted also as King and as Son of David, recognitions of Him as Messiah. That He Himself accepted the role appears from the following: (a) His sanction of the terms Son of Man and Son of God as applicable to Him; (b) His consciousness of being endowed with the Spirit of God (Luk 4:18 ff.), a mark of the Messianic King (Isa 11:2) and of the Servant of Jehovah (Isa 42:1; Isa 61:1); (c) His self-witness as to His being the Son and Heir of God (Psa 2:2); (d) His assurance of the reference in Psalms 110 to Himself, where the King in Zion is in His view the Messiah; (c) He spoke of the building of the Temple in the same sense in which the Messiah is the builder of the Temple (cf. Mat 26:61, Mar 14:58 with Zec 6:12-13); (f) He spoke of His kingdom and therefore Messianic rank; (g) He described Himself as Judge of the worlda Messianic function; (h) He commended St. Peters confession (Mat 16:17); (i) He acknowledged His Messiahship before His judges (both Sanhedrin and Pilate); (j) He was put to death as King of the Jews. Messiahship, it has been said, is not Divinity (Ottley, art. Incarnation in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible ). True, but Messiahship as enriched by Christ is. The new features with which He fulfilled the old conception, suffering and resurrection, brought it as near Divinity as was possible for the Hebrew mind. In them was concentrated the work of salvation, always assigned in NT to Jehovah Himself, in the OT always and in all its parts assigned to Christ. The step is but so short one from the unhesitating acknowledgment of the Divinity of Christs work to that of the Divinity of His nature.

The step is taken when He is called Lord. Christ refers to Himself as your Lord (Mat 24:42). There is evidence of growth in the meaning of Lordship in NT usage. Resch has shown that the name was interchangeable in instances with Master and Rabbi. Between that stage and the view of the Epistles that Christ is Lord over Nature, the Universe, the Church (Col 1:16-18, Php 2:10 ff. etc.), there is a wide gulf. The transition was probably effected in Hellenistic circles, and aided by the use of Lord as a title of the Roman Emperor and associated with the divine honour paid to him.

The Second Adam (the Man from Heaven) is a designation peculiar to St. Paul. In idea it is more speculative than the foregoing. The impulse to its construction is to be found in the Apostles conversion through the glorified appearance of the Risen Christ on the way to Damascus. On the ground of that experience he contrasts men, as he finds them, subject to sin and death, and this man exalted over both (1Co 15:45-49, Rom 5:12-21). The religious and moral destinies of the human race are traced to the action of two typical men, the first Adam, a living soul, and the second Adam, a quickening spirit. In so thinking, he gives an original turn to his Messianic views. The ordinary Messianic hopes of his nation he shares. He is acquainted also with the tradition of the life and teachings of Christ. But neither his intellect nor his conscience, endued with fresh vision and power by Christ risen, could rest satisfied with those. He departs from them, but not to supersede, rather to develop. He regards Christ as the foretold of the prophets (Rom 1:2), His ministry as a manifestation of the righteousness of God (Rom 3:21), His death and resurrection as the fulfilment of foreshadowings in the OT Scriptures (1Co 15:3-4). He shares with the Synoptists and Acts the position that Christ is the Saviour and bringer-in of the kingdom of righteousness; with them he applies to Christ the names Son of God, Christ, etc., in a sense of exceptional dignity. What they had reached by a gradually increasing insight he won by the vision (Gal 1:16), and from the point of view of his spiritual intuition he reads the Person of Christ. What he had seen colours all his thought, which is essentially a Christology centring in the idea of the Lord of Glory. the term signified, of Christs work, relief from the oppression and burden of sin and the law and death, with hope of regeneration for himself and all men; it signified, of Christs Person, that He was Spirit (2Co 3:17); man, in the likeness of sinful flesh but the man from heaven whom the heavenly principle made perfect (2Co 5:21), pre-existent (Rom 8:3, 1Co 10:1, Gal 4:4) and head of every man (1Co 11:3), human nature in its archetypal form, particularly in creation (1Co 8:6 etc.). That He of whom all this was affirmed was not conceived to be an ordinary human personality in His intimate nature, goes without saying. Taken in conjunction with other terms used, the Lord of Glory declares Divinity. In the later Epistles, Eph., Col., Ph., Ti., Tit., the Divinity is explained in the same directions with greater precision and fulness, and exemplified in fresh relations.

The fact that these writings contain a more developed Christology than that of the undisputed Epistles has been made a ground for discrediting them. But without good reason. The later thought is in organic line with the earlier; both fix attention on what Christ did and does, and not on what He taught; both rise to the thought of the glorified Christ through the work of Christ on earth. The later illustrates and emphasizes rather than increases the heavenly dignity of Christ, assigning an increment of function rather than of rank (cf. Lightfoot, Col. p. 120).

In the Ep. to the Hebrews there is a remarkable type of doctrine which has not yet been definitively located. It has very little in common with the NT writings generally, or even with the Pauline. Its conception of Christs Person is characterized by significant differences in substance and expression. After a prologue (almost in the manner of the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse, which looks like a summary of previous thought) it proceeds to its main thesis, the superiority of the New Covenant over the Old. In the first seven chapters Christ is presented as the Son, the Revealer, and the King-Priest. As the Son, He has been prepared for in Israel (Heb 1:1), has participated in the creation and is its consummation (Heb 1:2), is the manifestation of the Fathers glory as its effulgence (), and the expression of the Divine essence () as its embodiment () (Heb 1:3), and is now at the Fathers right hand. As the Revealer, He is superior to angels and Moses; while yet a partaker of flesh and blood (Heb 2:14), wherein He has done away with sin and death, establishing and vindicating His glory by His sufferings. As the King-Priest He realizes in perfection the qualifications of the priesthood imperfectly met in the OT system. In his exegesis the author applies to Christ two series of OT texts, the one having in view in their original meaning the Messiah (Heb 1:5, cf. Psa 2:7; Ps 1:8, 9, cf. Psa 45:7-8), the other relating to God (Heb 1:6, cf. Psa 97:7; Ps 1:1012, cf. Psa 102:26-28). All three aspects point to such pre-eminence of Christ as makes Him incomparable with men, to be equalled with God alone. It is at the same time a pre-eminence appropriated in His human experience, made His own by obediencea point insisted on. These two form the idea of Christ: He is God who by a Divine Incarnation fulfils Himself in man; and He is man who by a human faith and endurance realizes himself in God. If the terminology is less Hebraic than in St. Paul or the Synoptists, the motive is the same, viz. to express in the terms available the new contrasts and special aspects of Christs Person impressed on the authors mind by his independent experience of Christ.

The Logos (the Word) is the term distinctive of St. John (Joh 1:1; Joh 1:14, 1Jn 1:1, Rev 19:13). It is introduced in a way which indicates that it was familiar to the writer and his readers. As a term it is traceable in both Palestinian and Alexandrian thought. Its idea is Hebraic not Philonian, and to be taken in connexion with the Only-begotten. It is no impersonal abstract Idea. The Logos is, as in the Targums, personal and active as the equivalent of God manifesting Himself (1Jn 1:2). He is an historical human life (Joh 1:14, Joh 1:1-3), a fact not to be minimized. Yet His coming within the conditions of humanity was the coming of One who had been pre-existent with God in and from the beginning (Joh 1:1, Joh 3:13; Joh 3:31, Joh 6:62), sharing in the life of God and in the Divine acts of creation and preservation, and operative in previous history as an illuminating and quickening potency in the hearts of the righteous (Joh 1:3-4; Joh 1:9; Joh 1:12, Joh 10:16; Joh 10:16; Joh 11:52). Complementary is the thought of the Apocalypse of His eternity or semi-eternity in nature, the Alpha and Omega, and in redemptive activityLamb slain from the foundation of the world, and of the perfect and perpetual adoration accorded to Him with God in heaven. The recital of the work of the Logos, so brief, covering the vastest realms, cosmic, historical, personal, in the most summary space, is majestic. The absence of any line of intermediate beings between God and man is notable. The identification of the Word with God () is deliberate. The description gives no plausibility to the view that here we have a category taken from philosophy and applied loosely to the facts. There is nothing in the Synoptic representation of the human character and consciousness of Christ which unfits it or renders it inadequate for the Logos conception; equally there is nothing in the Logos conceived as becoming incarnate in the man Jesus which contradicts or impairs the reality or the completeness of His humanity as portrayed in the Synoptics.

The two are adequate and congruous to each other. They are also necessary to each other, each being a torso without the other. The source of the doctrine was the actual experience of the author, but it is the experience of a mind of profound spirituality and devout idealism. He gives the impression of having been determined in the particular cast he gives his doctrine by contemporary circumstances. A specific method is apparent. It is not that he seeks to prove that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (Joh 20:31); it is the special manner of his proof that differentiates his record, and above all the specially intense feeling towards Christ that pervades it, characteristics that have led some to assert that he sees Christ as primarily Divine and less human than the Synoptists see Him. It is truer to say that he sees Christ both as more Divine and more human than the Synoptists; driven beyond them by deepened experience of Christ on the one hand, and that richer reflexion on the other hand to which he was incited by the increasing Gnostic licence of the age. Gnosticism was a subtler foe than current Messianism. Its sophisms could be met only by a simpler and profoundersimpler because profoundertruth. The Fourth Gospel gives that truth. It attempts a portrait of Christ corresponding to the most intimate and overwhelming sense of His power conceivable, at once wholly revealing God, and the Divine revelation of the whole nature, life, and destiny of man. Hence to the historian it is an enigma, to the devout a poem. Its outline is simple and free because so broad and high. Its structure is less of the historic than of the spiritual sense. The test of its genuineness, like that of art, is not in its technique but in the dim and powerful feeling of infinite meaning it throws upon the reader. It is in consequence the most fruitful of all the sources of subsequent thought.

3. Divine, properties attributed to Christ.We may note, to begin with, the ascription to Christ of what had been ascribed by OT prophets to Jehovah (cf. Psa 45:6; Psa 45:8 with Heb 1:8-9; Isa 7:14; Isa 9:6 with Mat 1:23; Jer 23:5; Jer 23:8 [where the Branch of David is called the Lord our righteousness] Jer 33:16 with the NT term Root of David applied to Christ; Mal 3:1, where the messenger about to come to his own temple is called Lord, with Mar 1:2, Luk 1:76). Again, the tempting of Jehovah (Num 14:2; Num 21:5; Num 21:8, Psa 95:9) is the tempting of Christ (1Co 10:9). In Heb 1:10-11 what is attributed to Jehovah in Psa 102:26 is attributed to Christ. In Joh 12:40-41 it is asserted that the language of Isaiah (Isa 6:9-10) concerning Jehovah refers to Christ. Isa 45:23, compared with Rom 14:10-11, shows that the judgment-seat of God is that of Christ. From Joe 2:32 and Rom 10:13 the name of Jehovah is the name of Christ.

More impressive are the references to Christs participation in Divine attributes. He has self-existence like the Father (Joh 5:26), and therefore His life is eternal (Joh 1:4; Joh 11:25; Joh 14:6, 1Jn 1:2; 1Jn 5:11-12). He has pre-existence; cf. the Apostolic testimony (Heb 7:3, Rev 1:8; Rev 22:13) with Christs (Joh 8:28; Joh 17:7). He cannot yield to death or see corruption (Resurrection narratives, also Joh 10:16, Rom 1:4, Heb 7:16, Joh 11:25, Act 13:37; Act 2:27), He will come again (Joh 14:3; Joh 14:28, Act 1:11, 1Co 11:26 etc.), He gives life to others (Joh 5:25; Joh 5:21; Joh 6:40, Php 3:10-11), He has all power (Mat 18:18, Rev 1:8, Joh 5:19, Heb 1:3, Php 2:9), including power over nature and man (miracles and healings, cf. Luk 6:19; Luk 8:46, Mat 9:28, also Rom 8:10-23), a power He can communicate to disciples (Act 9:34; Act 3:16; Act 4:16). St. Paul attributes to Him the Divine plenitude (Col 2:9). He has superhuman knowledge of God and superhuman insight into man (Joh 16:30; Joh 2:24, Rev 2:28), He is unchangeable as Jehovah (cf. Psa 102:26 with Heb 1:11-12, also Heb 13:8).

Of Divine acts asserted of Christ are the following:Creation (Joh 1:3, Col 1:16-17, Heb 1:2; Heb 1:10); Providence (Heb 1:3, Joh 5:17, Col 1:17); Redemption (Act 20:28, Joh 13:18; Joh 13:10; Joh 13:16, Mat 9:13, Eph 5:20, passages too numerous to be specified); Forgiveness of sins (Mat 9:6, Mar 2:16, Luk 5:24 etc.); Judgment (Joh 5:22; Joh 5:27, Act 17:31, Rom 14:10, Mat 25:31-46); Restitution of all things (Php 3:21, 1Co 15:24-28). Finally, the whole atmosphere of feeling and disposition towards Christ in the NT is one of worship. He claims it, and His disciples accord it. The faith given to God is given to Him (Joh 14:1 etc.). Examples of doxologies are 1Pe 4:11, 2Ti 4:18, Rev 1:6; 2Pe 3:18, Rev 5:13. The honour of the Son equals that of the Father (Joh 5:23, Php 2:9; Php 2:16, Heb 1:6). The Blessing of God is invoked from Christ not less. Distinctively Christian worship is a calling upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (1Co 1:2, Act 9:14). Distinctively Christian belief is the confession that Jesus is the Messiah, or that He is the Son of God (Rom 10:9, 1Jn 4:15) Baptism is into His name (Act 2:38; Act 8:16), the Lords Supper is significant of His Death and its specific virtue, new life (1Co 10:16; 1Co 11:26).

A patient study of the texts cited in the two preceding sections will set in relief several facts as to Apostolic reflexion on Christs Person. The beginnings lie unquestionably in the Messianic hope and in Christs claim to be the Messiah. The first proclamation of the gospel we have in the discourses in Acts, the one burden of which is the Messiahship of the Master. The Apostles there speak out of an experience whose roots lie in the nations past, and which are renewed into fresh growth by Christ. The proof they offer is the evidence of facts and of what the facts point to They detail three distinct orders of facts: the life and works of Christ, the death on the Cross, the resurrection and exaltation. They emphasize the peculiar and wondrous power revealed in all three and especially in the last, in which they find the key to the wholethe Risen Lord. Traces of transcendental interest are not absent (Act 5:31; Act 3:15; Act 3:26; Act 10:42; 1Pe 1:23; 1Pe 4:5; 1Pe 1:11; 1Pe 1:20, Jam 2:1; Jam 5:8-9; Jam 1:18; Jam 1:21), the perception of dignity and powers beyond the Messianic attaching to Him. This type of thought is common to St. Peter, St. James, St. Jude. It is a simple objective, practical presentation of Christ, yet with features of its own so specifically new as to make it impossible to identify it with the existing religious schools. The other writings base themselves upon those beginnings, the Synoptics most obviously. They give the facts with fulness which are given in the Acts discourses in sum. They show the process of the movement, of which Acts gives the results. There are, however, important differences. The conviction of the higher nature of Christ is more prominent; it in fact pervades them; it is not imposed on their substance as an after-thought or under the stress of polemical tendency; it is part and parcel of the whole. Their portraiture is the portraiture of One who is man yet stands apart from men in character, and takes the place of God in the heart. Of speculation there is no sign. The growth of conviction is gradual, indeed, but comes in natural course by contact with facts. With the Synoptics we place the Apocalypse. Speculative features appear in St. Paul (earlier and later Epistles), the Fourth Gospel, Epistle to Hebrews, in the doctrines of the Man from heaven, the Second Adam, the Logos and the Revealer, and High Priest of the New, Covenant respectively.

There is a wide cleavage of opinion on questions as to the source and worth of the aforementioned factors. Were they due to the influence of the Hellenistic schools, or did they descend in the Palestinian tradition? Are they alien accretions to be east aside, or are they of the essence of the Christian message? Much ingenuity has been expended in trying to prove that the original facts have been largely worked over in the Synoptic and in the Pauline and Johannine doctrines.

In the former case, it is maintained, there was a twofold process of adapting prophecy to suit the facts of the life, and of adapting the facts of the life to suit prophecy; in the case of the latter the facts of the life are interpreted in the light of some of the fundamental ideas of the Greek cults and philosophy, taking on along with the forms much of the substance of Greek religion. Thus originated the scenery of hyper-physical events that surrounds the life in the one instance, and the Logos Christology in the other. Both, it is alleged, changed the true character of the gospel, and are entirely inappropriate to its inner spirit. Such contentions have certainly not yet been made good. They have nevertheless served to discover deep affinities existing between Apostolic thought and the higher mind of that age, affinities not directly derived from each other. Considerations are constantly increasing to vindicate the real independence of the Apostolic mind, and its essential continuity with the fundamental religion of the Hebrew race and the religious consciousness of Jesus. It is not intrinsically different from them. Its novel constituents are not alien; they do not arrive from without, they are perceived within, as the result of the life and teaching of the Founder of their faith and still more as the effect of His character. There is a freedom both in previous Jewish religious ideas and in the religious consciousness of Jesus which assured to them a vast future vitally and organically related to them, to which the above theory does seant justice, and which suggests the warrant of truth to the Apostolic developments.

IV. Subsequent development of NT ideas

1. History of the doctrine.The Logos idea became the centre of a remarkable theological growth which engrossed the intellectual energy of the first five centuries. During that period the subtle Greek mind left its mark so substantially on the current forms of Christian belief as to render it problematical how far the definitions of the great Councils really embody the essence of the original faith. The naturalness of the development is acknowledged. Its necessity was created by certain obvious causes due to the historic character of the Church, and its presence as a living organization in the world. The age which witnessed the dissolution of paganism and the triumph of new ideals of thought and duty was one of missionary zeal and mental anguish. The early propaganda was extensive and intense. It had to confront the corruption of pagan morals and the medley of heathen beliefs. It had to justify its own novel convictions. Its final purpose was practical: to make men like Christ. A faithful delineation of what He was and did became imperative; still more a consistent conception of what made Him what He was. The Church offered a new life, whose experiences were of profound interest, created and sustained by Christ, to a world of almost feverish intellectual curiosity. The mystery of Christ which had revived Hebrew devotion began to fascinate and excite the Gentile mind. Speculation was stimulated, and increasing effort made to bring the potential elements of Christs teaching within the scope of mens understanding. The new world was at its best in reflexion, it yielded to Christ only after understanding Him.

Something to be understood there was. The whole process is intelligible only on the assumption of the unhesitating acceptance of belief in Christs higher nature. The problem to the Jews had been, Is this rabbi more than the Messiah? The problem to the Hellenic world now was, Is this Word more than our ? and before the problem was solved to its satisfaction, Greek thought passed through an experience as recreative and revolutionary as Jewish aspiration had done in the Apostolic age. The answer, further, preserved the best ideal of classical culture, and translated it into a constituent treasure of the Christian consciousness. The result was the conquest of the older conceptions of deity, whether of prophets or philosophers, by a new conception, a monotheism identical with no previous form, the richest hitherto reached, and one which eventually proved capable of imparting a spiritual unity to men of vastly more educative value than any system of organized culture before or since.

(a) Patristic age.At first (up to a.d. 300) the process is slow and uncongenial. There are parties of practical outlook only and others of conservative instinct which fail to comprehend the new situation. But in the better representatives of the Christian movement there is a readier courage and a more vigorous intellect. They manifest, indeed, no lapse from Apostolic attainments. The desire to keep to what is primitive is with them, as with the others, passionate, but in no narrow spirit. They are eager to search into the implications of their doctrine. But they plainly exhibit a want of equipment for the task. They are always vague, often conflicting. A clear theory cannot be gained from their writings. Both facts, the existence of sects which refused to theorize and the uncertainties of those who did, are alleged by some historians as a ground for denying to that age any assured belief in Christs Divinity. The material for judgment is not too abundant, but there are certain guiding facts. Christ is everywhere worshipped as God. Cf. Plinys well-known letter to Trajan; the Vesper hymn of the Eastern Church, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Tersanctus, all in use in the 2nd century. Lucians satire betrays a series of characteristic traits of Christians, including the worship of the crucified sophist. There is the witness of the martyrs who preferred death to replacing Christ by the Emperor in their adoration. The baptismal professions of the period, too, maintain unimpaired the NT practice of combining the Son with the Father and Spirit. We distinguish between the popular belief embodied in the foregoing, and explanations of the belief in face of the Greek mind. The former was generalthe latter were but tentative. The efforts of the First Fathers and Apologists were neither profound nor precise. They were directed towards three aims, (1) to justify the worship of Christ, (2) to define aright the relation of the Son to the Father, and (3) to elucidate the operation of the Word in creation. Their discussions have in view three types of opposition, of which the first refused to recognize Christ as the equal of God (Ebionism); the second denied His perfect manhood (Docetism); while the third, prepared for by Docetism and embracing an embarrassing mixture of tendencies known as Gnosticism, conceived amiss the relation between God and the Universe. The Christian thinkers were profoundly moved by this threefold antagonism. They keep their faith firm, but their apologetics are uncertain and incautious. An adequate philosophy is beyond their power. Let it be remembered, however, that the views they repel are also chaotic and crude: moreover, all of them represent some sort of a faith in Christ as a Being of a higher order. By the controversy conducted by writers such as Barnabas, St. Ignatius, Hennas, in particular, Church doctrine attains at this stage a certain measure of self-consciousness, especially over against Judaism, and to a slighter extent over against the abstract notions of heathen speculation.

Around the problems raised by the latter, thought in the next period deepens immeasurably, the seeds of all future discussion are planted, both of orthodox and heretical opinion. A succession of writers, interesting and copious in suggestion, including such names as Justin Martyr, lrenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, develop the Christian positions in various directions with dialectical skill and considerable spiritual insight: (1) the nature of our knowledge of God as relative and our knowledge of the nature of God as wholly separate from the created world, spiritual and immaterial; (2) our knowledge of the nature of the Logos as immanent in the Divine nature and expressed in the world of created things, as eternal and manifest in time; (3) our knowledge of the identity of the Son with the Father as one in essence as in will, related by generation, and of the identity of the Son with the human race as its recapitulation or archetype, leading to affirmations of a real Fatherhood in the Godhead and the conception of the Divine Unity as a life of moral relationships. The stress of the argument came to concentrate itself in the third of these points, against the Adoptionists on the one hand, who secured the unity of God by confining Christ within the limits of humanity, and against the Sabellians on the other hand, who secured it by treating the distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as simply modes of the one God. By the beginning of the 4th cent. this long interior process of conflicting reflexion was ready for a final issue.

It came in the Arian disputes, which for a centuryto a.d. 451filled the Christian world and passed through several phases. Arius was incited to action by the teaching of Alexander the bishop of Alexandria, who taught the eternal generation of the Son (there never was a time when He was not). He maintained that as a father must exist before his son, therefore the Son of God did not exist eternally with the Father; that not being eternal He was created, but before time began; that being created, He is in all things unlike the Father. The Council of Nicaea (a.d. 325), convened by the Emperor for the settlement of peace, decided against Arianism, and defined the authoritative doctrine to be that the Son is of one substance (ousia) with the Father; that He was begotten, not made, that there never was a time when He was not, that He was not created. The Nicene Creed was established largely by the brilliant advocacy of Athanasius, subsequently bishop of Alexandria. It was a signal triumph in favour of the essential Divinity of Christ as distinct from a merely moral likeness to God. There can be little doubt that Arian contentions propagated themselves over a wide area; and that partly through the ability of the Arian leaders to gather into association with themselves much floating dissatisfaction with the deeper currents discernible and now becoming dominant, and partly by the aid of political and secular methods. It is unquestionably the case, however, that the Arian position had a vitality of its own which the Athanasian dogmatics never wholly quenched, and which has burst out again and again in subsequent thought. It is the natural standpoint of all minds that, in seeking to appreciate Christ, start from the idea of God rather than the fact of Christ; its main interest is not religious but theistic, a theoretical deduction, not the statement of an inner experience. Athanasius met it on the basis of that Christian experience which initiated the problem, and from the beginning had determined its development. His instinct was justified; for although the Arian agitation protracted itself all through the 4th cent., it was gradually deserted by the more religious adherents, whom the Athanasian divines took pains to conciliate by removing false impressions, by deepening their thought, and by popularizing it with illustrations.

The second great Council, that of Constantinople (a.d. 381), saw practically the death of Arianism. It reaffirmed the Nicene dogmas against various novelties, and especially that offshoot of Arianism which denied the Divinity of the Holy Ghost (Macedonians). The third Council, at Ephesus (in 431), and the fourth, at Chalcedon (in 451), dealt with other three consequences of Arian doctrine, known as the Nestorian, Apollinarian, and Eutychian heresies. The three have reference to the constitution of Christs Divine-human Person. Jesus Christ being Divine in the Nicene sense, in what sense could He also at the same time be human? It had been determined that He was primarily Divine; not a man like other men, who became Divine, but the personal Logos of God manifesting Himself through the human person with whom He had entered into union. According to this view, He was necessarily two distinct natures, to one of which it seemed impossible to render all the significance of its proper functions, viz. the human nature. In particular, Was His knowledge limited? Had He a true body and a reasonable soul? Was His Person single?problems which enlisted the most earnest interest of Athanasius, the Gregorys, Cyril of Alexandria, Leo of Rome, and, above all, Augustine of Hippo. Briefly the answers were: (1) as to Christs human knowledge, that omniscience belongs to the God head of the Word, but that the human mind which the Word took was limited; (2) as to Christs body, that it was a true body, really born of Mary, and passible in the experiences of life; (3) as to the union of the Divine and human natures, that these two were each perfect, without confusion, and united in one Person; although He be God and man, He is not two but one Christ. In the words of Chalcedon, He is

One and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same being perfect in Godhead and the same being perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same having a rational soul and a body, of one substance with the Father according to the Godhead, and the same being of one substance with us according to the manhood, in all things like unto us except sin one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures, without fusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the two natures having been in no wise taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and combining to form one person and one hypostasis.

Or, in the words of the last of the great Creeds, the so-called Athanasian, which fairly represents the theology of the 5th century:

He is not two, but one Christ; One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God; One altogether; not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person.

(b) Mediaeval period (5th to 15th centuries).The conciliar definitions remained undisturbed as the official formulas of the Church right through the Middle Ages up to the present; and without important modification or advance. To account for this prolonged acquiescence of the mediaeval mind is not at once simple, for the Nicene system is both uncritical and incomplete. The Church had to address herself to new and arduous tasks, chiefly of organization. She had assumed the external equipment of the Roman empire for practical efficiency in educating the multitude of peoples brought within her pale. Her paramount requirements were unity and a working belief. All available spiritual forces were ranged in a practical order for a practical end. The effect on the doctrine of Christs Person is observable in the following results: (1) the less speculative and more practical discussion of the older problems, especially those concerned with the effect of the Incarnation on Christs knowledge and will; (2) the consideration of Christs Person in association with the soteriological aspects of His Work; (3) the systematic co-ordination of the several parts of Christological science into a connected whole, and of the whole with other doctrines such as those of God and the Church; (4) the more lucid realization of the nature and principles of this doctrine in line with the elaboration of the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Mass; (5) the popular illustration of its truth, mainly in its place as part of the Trinitarian conception, by analogies drawn from outward nature, and still more from the human mind. Two subsidiary streams are not to be omitted, noteworthy because of their influence in helping to discredit the methods of the Schoolmen and in preparing for the Reformation; viz. (6) free and fruitless inquiry into quotlibeta, i.e. questions arbitrarily suggested and only remotely affecting religious interests or fundamental truth; and (7) the rise of mystical and pietist communities cherishing an emotional, sometimes sentimental, contemplation of the Saviour in His purely human qualities. Scholasticism has often been criticised; but it taught the thoughtful theologian at least one great lesson, that it is unsafe to develop the theological consequences of any doctrine without continual reference to the proportion of the whole. It effectually awakened also the more religious minds to return for that reference to the primitive sources in the Scriptures and the Fathers.

(c) Modern (from Reformation era, 16th cent., onward).The new spiritual experiences in which the Reformation originated brought out into clearer relief the disparity between the matter and the method of the Scholastic disputations. A religious Reason began to assert itself independently of the Scholastic process. It gave the intellect a new freedom to question the authority and relevancy of the old; one of whose first utterances expressed dislike of further speculation as empty. It blessed only those energies which made religion inward and personal. As the previous centuries had deepened the mind sufficiently to speak for itself, so now the age was dawning which should so completely sanctify the moral nature as to make its instincts supreme. In Luther pre-eminently, but not less in Calvin, Zwingli, and others, the ethical interpretation of spiritual facts takes rise. Hence the immense importance ascribed to that act of faith by which the individual soul connects itself with Christ (justification by faith), in a union not of intellect but of heart. Out of the experiences of this inner union we reach the true knowledge of Christ (and also of God). The man now who so knows Christ that Christ has taken away from him all his sin, death and devil, freely through His suffering, he has truly recognized Christ as the Son of God (Luther, Werke, xvii. 265). And when we thus know Christ, we let go utterly all thoughts and speculations concerning the Divine Majesty and Glory, and hang and cling to the humanity of Christ and I learn thus through Him to know the Father. Thus arises such a light and knowledge within me that I know certainly what God is and what is His mind (xx. i. 161). It is in the experience of redemption that we know the Redeemer. Modern religious theory has been one long endeavour to appropriate this position. It has sought to explicate its principles (1) by a more radical and penetrating criticism of the past; (2) by the application to the problems of Christian theism of other categories than that of the Nicene ousia or substance; (3) in particular by insistence on moral personality as the determining principle of theological construction.

When we look back at this great historical development, it is impossible not to be struck by the parallel between the age of early Christianity, the beginnings of the Middle Ages, and the Reformation. The bankruptcy of the pagan world was not its defect but its merit. It had generated a universal need and a universal mode of feeling which were incompatible with the highest culture which had generated them, but which were destined ultimately to combine that culture itself with something beyond, viz. the new Christian experience. The so-called Dark Ages were brought on by a new possibility and a new necessity, the necessity of disciplining the mass of believers to appreciate that combination and apprehend its elements of culture and faith,a discipline which, when it had accomplished its ends, left its subjects with a deeper experience than ever, and a more positive possession of its substance. The first Reformers were clear on the central fact of this new experience. Their successors were forced by the exigencies of their ecclesiastical situation to limit themselves to simple defence of the fact. Later thinkers, with more freedom, and under the impulse of vast movements of philosophy and science, have gone on to unfold and organize its content. There is much that is still obscure. But we may venture to state these convictions, that although (1) the analysis of the forces that have entered into the development of Christian doctrine in the past, popular at present, has by no means vindicated beyond appeal its own presuppositions; nor (2) has it yet been proved that the predominant impulses of the modern spirit are sufficient adequately to mould anew all the facts and truths of the inherited faith; yet (3) it is indubitable that broad and abiding foundations are being laid for a system of religious thought at once expressive of the religious ideals of the age, and consistent with its historical and scientific temper. In elaborating that system it is already clear that two of its fundamental postulates must be these: () the principle that Christian truth is not the creation of the human intellect, nor are the forces of human reason and emotion sufficient to explain it; and () the principle of the absolute value of Christs Person as the norm of all religious experience. The Christological impulse is central. In the moral personality of Christ, men are seeking better answers to the old problems. The past answers are not wrong; it is that they are not relevant. And this because of the growth, not of science but of conscience. The type of religious experience and emotion has changed, the experience is deeper, the emotion richer. The modern mind stands less awe-struck, perhaps, before the Deity of Christ, but it is more conscience-struck before the perfection of His human character, within the sacred processes of which it wistfully looks for the mystery of His Divinity and the secret of God.

2. Denial of the doctrine of Christs Divinity.

(a) History and motive.Christianity has in all the stages of its evolution been accompanied by rationalistic hesitation. Based on experience, it has never commended itself to the reason un-enriched by that experience. A strong under-current of antagonism runs through the centuries. It is possible to indicate special periods when the antagonism becomes more pronounced. Such periods will be found, on the whole, coincident with the points of transition in the advance of the doctrine. It may well be, as modern Unitarians argue, that Christ was regarded at first as a man simply, a prophet mighty in deed and word (Luk 24:19); but their contention that this is the point of view of the NT cannot be sustained. The Epistles, even the earliest, start from the Risen Christ, and the Gospel narratives are not to be comprehended apart from the initial experience of His higher dignity. Both sets of books owe their origin to the new sense as to His Person created by the new sense of power with which He possessed them. Their ostensible design is to set Him forth as Christ, or Lord, or Saviour, or Word, etc., i.e. as something more than man, to whom, as such, worship is paid. They show their authors busied with problems as to the constitution of His Person. Those problems emerged from the first, and among Jewish Christians who had to make clear to themselves Christs true position if, in His lordship over them, they were no longer required strictly to follow the law of Moses, and were now required to conceive of the transcendence of God permitting fellowship with Him. But those were problems which could never have emerged at all unless from the conviction of His suprahuman rank. The opposition, Ebionism, was not so much concerned with denial of His superior dignity as directed to affirm the supremacy of the Father. Its protest was immensely strengthened when the conflict with Gnostic theories necessitated an alien apologetic with an unscriptural terminology, derived from Greek philosophy, both obnoxious (and probably bewildering) to the pious Jew.

The second serious outburst of hostility was occasioned by the Nicene theologians. In Ebionism the Jewish temper found vent. In Arianism it was the heathen intellect. Amid Gentile surroundings christological ideas had never ceased to grow. Tradition, Scripture, experience, combined to deepen the conviction of Christs Divinity, and to enlarge the range of its problems. Hellenic rationalism confronted the Church at every point. It could not tolerate the thought of two Gods; and it had not yet grasped the unity of God as embracing eternal distinctions facing inward on each other. It revolted from an Incarnation in time and human form. It therefore denied to the Son coequality with the Father. Yet everything short of the full deity it was ready to acknowledge. For the Arian Christ is no mere man: He is much more than man, only not God, but a kind of demi-god, the loftiest of all creatures, to be imitated and worshipped. The idea, from its wide acceptance in that age, must have embodied certain prevalent mental tendencies of the time. Its plausibility depends on the idea of God which it conceives, viz. that of an abstract, otiose Being, beyond interest in human things. It is an idea as far removed from modern modes as from the Gospel facts. It is more beset with difficulty than the conception it opposed. In later times it has been often revived, but never effectively, and mainly in individual opinion.

The sincere emphasis laid on the proper Divinity of Christ throughout the Middle Ages has been continued in the Churches of the Reformation. The opposition has been correspondingly sincere and continuous. Its course manifests remarkable variation. In the earlier stages it was determined chiefly by the common study of the Scriptures now distributed to the multitudes. Almost every phase of former heresy was reproduced, but without real advance in thought or real influence on orthodox opinion. Afterwards the special developments of Reformed theology, notably in the doctrine of the Atonement, created, both by natural evolution and by reaction, the powerful contrary movement of Socinianism. The Socinian argument, assuming that the Infinite and the finite are exclusive of each other, maintained the Incarnation to be impossible, rejected the pre-existence, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, asserted the essential moment of His person to be His human nature, rendered free from sin by the Virgin-birth, and free from ignorance by special endowments of knowledge. Socinians did good service by bringing into clear relief the Docetic elements in the traditional doctrine, and in preparing for a deeper appreciation of the humanity of Christ in the work of salvation. The reverent recognition of this last (finitum capax infiniti), that the human is capable of bodying forth the essence of the Divine nature as distinct from merely being the bearer of the Divine attributes, is the greatest step that has been taken since the Nicene definitions. It has incited to a speculative ardour, and secured a place for the application of scientific method, in dealing with the contents of Christian thought, that are rapidly working out its complete reorganization and reconstruction. To discern and describe the ideal unity of the higher spiritual life which will exhibit the Divine-human principle of Christs Person in its fulness, is the task of the modern Church. The spiritual potentialities of the human mind are earnestly and perseveringly investigated. It is a complex process, building as largely on religious induction as on religious insight, and sustained by a magnificent confidence in the native powers of reason and conscience. But the same forces which have impelled to new Christological affirmation have infused new vigour into Christological doubt. The representatives of Unitarianism have been active and influential. They stand for a much more humanitarian view of Christ than either Arians or Socinians. But their phrase, the pure humanity of Jesus, covers much diversity of conviction. Some are almost Trinitarians, approaching Christ on the Divine side, and affirming, in a real if unorthodox sense, His pre-existence, uniqueness, sinlessness, and spiritual authority. Others contemplate the human side, believe that He was naturally born, and endowed with qualities and gifts differing in degree and not in kind from those which all men enjoy; that His character was a growth, and that by degrees He rose out of temptation and error into the serene strength of a pure and noble manhood; that He became a providential teacher and leader of men to a higher spiritual development. The Unitarian polemic killed popular Calvinism; in its higher forms it is rich in ethical appeal.

(b) Failure.Unitarianism has at all times failed to lead. It has uniformly won a certain measure of popularity by successfully representing the dominant forces pulsating in the spirit of the age. But it is by not being an average that a man becomes a guide. Deniers of the Divinity have flourished in times of utter confusion, when whoever would attain some coherence of life and thought must let drop much that is held in solution, and show the path of progress by manifesting the direction of change. By this law Catholic theology has stood; to representative insight it has added prophetic foresight. The sense of its insufficiency, when brought home, has only driven it the deeper into the inner secrets of that experience which yielded its original impulse, and so it has escaped becoming a prey to the narrower reason and limited emotion of the Unitarian schools. See also art. Incarnation.

Literature.Besides the works mentioned in the body of the article, (1) for the history of the doctrine the following are to be consulted: Dorner, Doctrine of the Person of Christ; Harnack, Hist. of Dogma; A. Rville, Hist. of the Dogma of the Deity of Jesus Christ; Hagenbsch, Hist. of Doctrines; Macarius, Thol. dogmatique orthodoxe; Hetele, Hist. of the Councils.

(2) For the dogmatic aspects of the subject the older manuals of Systematic Theology are still of value, e.g. Shedd, Dogmatie Theology; Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics; cf. also Wilberforce, Doctrine of the Incarnation; Dale, Christian Doctrine; Gore, The Incarnation; Strong, Manual of Theology; and, for a more popular treatment, Liddon, Divinity of our Lord; Eck, Incarnation. Of recent standpoint are Nitzsch, Evangel. Dogmatik; Clarke, Outline of Christ. Theol.; Denney, Studies in Theology; Hodgson, Theologia Pectoris; Bovon, Dogmatique Chrtienne, and Thol, du NT; Fairbsirn, Christ in Modern Theology; Powell, Principle of the Incarnation; H. Holtzmann, Lehrb. der NT Theologie.

(3) For the historical data of Christs ministry, works, teaching, etc., see the numerous Lives of Christ, e.g. by Weiss, Bsyschlag, Keim, Renan, O. Holtzmann, H. von Soden, Sanday, Farrar, Stalker; G. Matheson, Studies in Portrait of Christ. Shorter dissertations on particular points form a large literature. Of special interest are those which attempt to define the primitive conception of Christ, such as Wredes Das Messiasgeheimniss in den Evangelien; Stantons Messiah; H. von Sodens Urehristl. Literaturgesch.; Pfleiderers The Early Christian Conception of Christ: Schmiedels Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu Forschung; Estlin Carpenters First Three Gospels; Mackintoshs Natural History of the Christian Religion.

(4) On the problem of Christs Person for modern thought consult such works as Fairbairns Studies in the Life of Christ, Christ in Modern Theology, and Philosophy of the Christian Religion; Adams Browns Essence of Christianity; Losinskys War Jesus Gott, Mensch, oder Ubermensch?; Kalthoffs Das Christusproblem; Dykes in ExpT [Note: xpT Expository Times.] , Oct. 1905Jan. 1906.

A. S. Martin.

Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels

Divinity of Christ

See Jesus, The Christ, Divinity of

Jesus, The Christ, Divinity of

Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible