Many formulations
of Trinitarian Christology tends to pay lip service to the true humanity of
Jesus, and as many (including
Robert Bellarmine) have noted, much of Protestantism is, functionally,
Nestorian. For a discussion of some of the problems, see Latter-day
Saints have Chosen the True, Biblical Jesus. Commenting on this vis-à-vis the
mediatorship of Jesus (cf. 1 Tim 2:5), one 19th century Unitarian
critic of the Trinity wrote:
What, says Unitarianism, are the moral wants
of man? Consequently, what is the mediator he requires?
Religion, we maintain, was made for man, and
not man for religion. The mediator, therefore, which we require, is one who
would guide and not confound our nature; who would ennoble but not perplex it.
We would look for a mediator by whom we should receive the light and truth of
God and heaven to our souls. We need to see the capacities, the duties, and the
destinies of our kind, in one who is perfectly, but yet simply, of ourselves.
Our sorrows, our sufferings, and our darkness, we regard as but so many reasons
why our Redeemer and Saviour should be entirely our own kind. We require one
who would manifest to all that God is really interested in us. We require one
who would show that we are not shut out from communion with the infinite, the
invisible, and the future. We require one who would correct our evils, and ye
resolve our doubts. We require one who could sympathize with our weakness. We
require one who would show us of what our nature is capable, and thus flash
upon us the guilt of our deficiencies, or inspire us with the hope of
advancement. We are feeble, and need strength; we are tempted, and need
support. Jesus proves to us that the strength is in us, if we use it; and that
the support is at hand, if we choose to apply it. In our transgressions, we are
but too much inclined to yield to, or justify ourselves with, a guilty
sophistry; but our views of Jesus leave us no room for such delusion. Whilst
Trinitarianism places most of our religious wants afar of and outside us, Unitarianism
fixes them within us. Whilst Trinitarianism demands a Christ which shall
reconcile God to us, Unitarianism holds a Christ which shall conform us to
God:--to us his word and work is a spirit of life, his word and work to them
but dogma or mystery. (Henry Giles, Lecture IV: “There is One God, and One
Mediator Between God and Men, the Man Christ Jesus,” pp. 26-27, in Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures
By Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool: In Reply to A Course of
Lectures, Entitled “Unitarianism Confuted,” By Thirteen Clergymen of the Church
of England [Liverpool: Wilmer and Smith, 1839], 264-65)
Latter-day
Saints are in the enviable position of allowing, unlike Giles (who rejected such)
can affirm both the doctrine that Jesus had a personal pre-existence and hold to his complete humanity
without the dogma of the Hypostatic Union; indeed, we can answer the likes of
Anthony Buzzard and others who argue that one cannot claim Jesus’ experience of
humanity is the same as ours if he had a “pre-human existence.” On this, see:
The
Christological Necessity of Universal Pre-Existence
