REVIEW, CONTINUED [HODGE]
But in the other view of this
matter. What was this one life (or nature) of Christ? Dr. Nevin says: “It was
in all respects a true human life” (p. 167). “Christ is the archetypal man, in
whom the true idea of humanity is brought to view.” He “is the true ideal man.”
Our nature is complete only in him (p. 201). But is a perfect, or ideal man, anything
more than a mere man after all? If all that was in Christ pertains to the perfection
of our nature, he was at best, but a perfect man. The only way to escape
Socinianism, on this theory, is by defying the divine and human, and making all
the glory, wisdom and power, which belong to Christ the proper attributes of
humanity. Christ is a perfect man? But what is a perfect man? We may give a
pantheistic, or a Socinian answer to that question, and not really help the
matter—for the real and infinite hiatus between us and Christ, is in either
case closed. Thus it is that mysticism falls back on rationalism. They are but
different phases of the tone spirit. In Germany, it has long been a matter of
dispute, to which class Schleiermacher belongs. He was accustomed to smile at
the controversy as a mere logomachy. Steudel objects to Schleiermacher’s
Christology, that according to him “Christ is a finished man.” Albert Knapp says:
“He deifies the human and renders human the divine.” We, therefore, do not
stand alone in thinking that to represent Christ’s life as in all respects
human, to say he was the ideal man, that human nature found its completion in
him, admits naturally only of a pantheistic or Socinian interpretation. We of
course do not attribute to Dr. Nevin either of these forms of doctrine. We do
not believe that he adopts either. But we object both to his language and
doctrine that one or the other of those heresies, is their legitimate
consequence.
CRITICISM [NEVIN]
Here are two new heresies, Socinianism
and Pantheism, one of the other or which, we are told, is the legitimate
consequences of my doctrine. Why? Let he reader fix his eye steadily now on the
point, which is made to bear the weight of this momentous charge. I make Christ
the perfect idea of humanity, and say of his mediatorial person that it was in
all respects truly human, and not so merely in semblance or outward show. But,
says Dr. Hodge, this is either to make him a mere man, or else to deify
humanity. I deny the consequences. Is a perfect, or ideal man, it is asked, anything
more than a mere man after all? Without any regard to Schleiermacher’s theory,
I answer unhesitatingly: Yes, the true idea of humanity involves such a union
with the divine nature, as we have exhibited in the SON OF MAN, Jesus Christ.
Mark well, the true idea of humanity, nor the conception of a single man
separately taken. Dr. Hodge imagines plainly that the idea of man as a whole,
is something proper full to the nature of each man as a solitary unit. But this
is not the true force of the word humanity. It expresses the universal life
of our race, as a whole, which for this very reason can never be fully
at hand in any ordinary single man separately considered. And now of such a
whole we say, humanity cannot be complete save in living union with God; and to
this union it comes fully only in the person of Christ, who on this very
account is the central, universal, archetypal MAN; not a copy of what should
have place in all as dreamed by Hegel; but the actual bearer of a fact or
reality in which all are required to participate through Him;, and through Him alone.
Does this imply any such deification of others, as it admitted to hold in this
case? Just the reverse. It makes him the universal center, for the very purpose
of placing the whole world over against him, as a moral planetarium that can
have no meaning or force, except as it revolves with perpetual consciousness
around HIM, the Sun of Righteousness, in this character. In this way we are all
called to be “partakers of the divine nature,” and so to have part in the true ideals
of humanity, though it is reversed for our glorious Head alone to be at once,
in his single separate personality, all that the perfection of humanity
requires in this view. Is this Socinianism? Or does it land us in Pantheism Is
it not rather the only right sense of the Eighth Psalm, as interpreted Heb.
2:5-9?
But turn not to Dr. Hodges’s
theory, as we have seen it here by plain implication. For him, the constitution
of Christ is not perfectly human; the divine Word has not so become
flesh as to be itself, in this form, the legitimate expression of what belongs
to the idea of humanity; it has not entered inwardly, organically, really into
union with out human nature, in any such way as to be itself human as well as
divine. The mystery of the incarnation, according to Dr. Hodge, is not any such
process as can be said to bring the supernatural side of Christ’s life, into
historical and abiding marriage with the natural. Divinity and humanity cannot,
with him, be so married into a single personal consciousness. They are two worlds
that necessarily stand out of each other; and if they seem to meet and
to become one in Christ, it can only be after all in the way of outward bond;
the higher nature remains still always beyond the precincts of the lower; they
never become concentric circles around a single ME or I.
But this is Nestorianism again
almost without disguise. To say that the divine has not become human, and that
the supernatural has not entered into organic union with the natural, in the
person of Jesus Christ, what is lost at last than to say in other terms: The WORD
has not become FLESH!
Source: John Williamson Nevin
(1803-1886) and Charles Hodge (1797-1878), Coena Mystica: Debating Reformed
Eucharistic Theology, ed. Linden J. DeBie (The Mercersburg Theology Study
Series 2; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 139-41
