CHAPTER III.

Hypothesis of God’s Impassibility continued—Not a Self-evident Proposition—Incarnation itself implies Suffering—Prevalent Hypothesis Traced to its Source in early Antiquity—Argument of Athanasius examined.

THE hypothesis of God’s impassibility to voluntary sufferings is not a self-evident proposition. It carries not demonstration on its face; it proves not itself; it requires extraneous confirmation. Whence is such confirmation to be derived? It is yielded neither by the Bible nor by the deliberative process of sound reasoning. The prevalent hypothesis, then, rests on opinion alone. But unsupported opinion, though emanating from the wisest and the best, is incompetent, however long continued or widely diffused, to sustain a dogma claiming the place of a corner-stone in the structure of Christian faith. The opinion of one man, or of millions, of one age, or of successive ages, is not the test of theological truth. Christianity should be the last to recognise such test. She repudiated it by her own example. Her first achievement on earth was her unsparing invasion of the empire of ancient and almost unanimous opinion. Should she admit that the force of opinion can impart to religious belief the stamp of truth, she must, to be consistent, spare the deep-seated, and wide-spread, and time-consecrated superstitions of Africa and of India. An insulated opinion on theological tenets, without support, is but a cipher. Such unsupported opinion, however multiplied, cannot form a unit.

The incarnation itself is a death-blow to the hypothesis of God’s impassibility. If the Godhead is of necessity impassible, one of its august persons could not have become incarnate. The mighty Being who, in the fifth verse of the seventeenth chapter of John, uttered the prayer, “And now, Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was,” could have been none other than the second person of the Trinity, clothed, indeed, in flesh. The prayer itself demonstrates that the Supplicant was not of earth, that he had come down from heaven, that he had existed there, and enjoyed the intimate fellowship of the Father before the world was created. It contains intrinsic evidence that, at the time of the prayer, the divine Supplicant was sustaining the temporary privation of his glorious fellowship with the infinite Father, and that he longed to have it restored. His prayer breathed forth his deep consciousness of the severity of the bereavement. It evinced a bereavement which had marred for a time his infinite beatitude. His eclipsed beatitude was not, for the moment, like the ineffable beatitude which he had enjoyed before incarnation. This very bereavement is but another name for suffering.

There is a passage in the epistles german to that upon which we have been commenting: “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”—-Philippians, 2. 6, 7, 8. The words in this passage translated “made himself of no reputation," should, in justice, have been rendered, “emptied himself.” That is their literal meaning. By the substitution of their own language, the translators may have gained something in elegance; they have lost much in strength. Our argument prefers the plain Doric of Paul to the more fastidious style of his translators.

The illustrious personage who had “emptied himself” was he “who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” He was, beyond peradventure, the second person of the Trinity. Of what had he “emptied himself?” He had “emptied himself” of the “form of God” for the “form of a servant.” He had “emptied himself” of his celestial mansion to become a houseless wanderer upon the earth. He had “emptied himself” of the ministration of angels to wash the feet of his betraying and deserting disciples. He had “emptied himself” of the glory which he had with the Father before the world was created. He had “emptied himself” of his beatific communion with his august companions of the Trinity. And has privation no suffering? Say, ye exiled princes, is there no suffering in privation? Say, ye fallen families, whose fortunes have taken to themselves wings and flown away, is there no suffering in privation? Declare, ye lately bereaved widows, ye newly smitten parents, from the depths of your breaking hearts declare, is there no suffering in privation? The very incarnation, then, should have strangled in its cradle the earthborn hypothesis, “God is impassible.”

We have taken some little pains to trace the prevalent hypothesis to its source in early antiquity. Not that we bow to the authority of the judicatory of tradition, verbal or written. We recognise but one Caesar in this terrestrial province of the great empire of spiritual truth. That imperial, sovereign, infallible arbiter is the Bible. To this most august of potentates we reserve the privilege of appealing. It is an unalienable privilege; it is the sacred birthright of the Christian, guarantied to him by the last will of the “Alpha and Omega,” who was dead and is alive again.

The prevalent hypothesis we have traced to the fourth century. Some brief intimations of the divine impassibility are, no doubt, to be found sparsely scattered in the writings of the earlier fathers. There are also in the earlier fathers some intimations to the contrary. The fourth century, if it was not the creator of the hypothesis, was at least the first that formally incorporated it into Christian theology. The correctness of this position seems to be demonstrated by the letter written about the middle of the fourth century by Liberius, the pope of Rome, to Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, asking his opinion on the impassibility of God, and submitting himself to the paramount authority of such opinion. The letter and the reply of Athanasius are contained in an early page of the writings of that distinguished bishop. If the Roman Pontiff had found plenary evidence of the hypothesis in the Word of God, he would scarcely have appealed, for its authority, to the word of man. Had he deemed the hypothesis an established article of Christian theology, he would not have sought to strengthen the sacred and firm-seated column by the frail prop of a private opinion. If he clearly perceived that God had incorporated it into his own Holy Oracles, the head of the Catholic church would not have submitted himself, in so essential an article of faith, to the judgment of Athanasius.

He of the fourth century, who gave “a local habitation and a name” to the prevalent hypothesis, was this same Bishop of Alexandria That Athanasius was a great man, the intelligent reader has not to learn from these humble sheets. Though then young, he was the master spirit of the Nicene Council. He is the man whose name was borrowed to clothe with immortality that summary of faith afterward compiled, and baptized by the appellation of “the Athanasian Creed.” His spiritual domination has almost equalled, in its extent and permanence, the intellectual empire of the illustrious Stagyrite. It was he of whom the great Hooker exclaimed, “The world against Athanasius, and Athanasius against the world!” This distinguished theologian wrote a regular and elaborate argument in favour of the hypothesis of God’s impassibility and the kindred theory of the exclusive humanity of Christ’s sufferings.

We have searched out this argument with profound interest and high-raised expectations. It may justly be regarded as the official proclamation of the fourth century in support of the prevalent hypothesis and its lineally -descended theory. It was written by him who is generally held to have been the great champion of primeval orthodoxy. The general father of Western Christendom had specially invoked his attention to the important subject. We may fairly presume that his argument was induced by the promptings of the papal letter. The world in every age may therefore confidently regard his exposition as having concentrated within its ample limits all that Christian antiquity could gather in favour of his doctrine from the freshly inspired Oracles, or glean from the writings of its uninspired, yet learned patriarchs. Of this elaborated argument we have appended a translation from the original Greek. We must beseech the kind reader to pause here, and, turning to, the Appendix, listen to this oracular voice of the olden time before he resumes the thread of our unaspiring essay.³³See Appendix, No. 1, page 341

Supposing that the reader has complied with the closing request of the last paragraph, he will now be prepared to proceed with us in a brief review of the Athanasian argument, embodying, as it does more on our subject than can probably be found elsewhere in the whole compass of sacred literature, ancient and modern, if gleaned and compacted together. The first ingredient that we justly look for in a theological argument is scriptural authority. The argument of Athanasius scarcely claims such authority for its support; on the contrary, he seemingly wishes to have removed out of his way a mass of scriptural verbality, to afford an appropriate site for the erection of his reasoning edifice. He objects to a literal construction of Scripture; from thence we infer his deep conviction that the language of Holy Writ, if taken according to its plain import, must needs have excluded him from access to his building site. With more point than courtesy, he significantly intimates that the literal readers of the Bible are like, “brutes;” nor does he allow them the rank even of “clean beasts” that “ruminate,” because they chew not the meditative cud of subtle philosophy. The very corner-stone of the Athanasian the rank even of “clean beasts” that “ruminate,” because they chew not the meditative cud of subtle philosophy. The very corner-stone of the Athanasian hypothesis is thus founded on bold aberration from the ostensible signification of scriptural language.

This assumed right of man to amend the declarations of the Holy Ghost, Athanasius had been taught by at least one of his venerated predecessors. The celebrated Origen, in the tenth book of his Stromata, dared to utter the following startling sentiments which, if uttered by us, would be held impious; he says, “the source of many evils lies in adhering to the carnal or external part of Scripture. Those who do so shall not attain to the kingdom of God. Let us, therefore, seek after the spirit and the substantial fruits of the Word, which are hidden and mysterious.” And again he says, “The Scriptures are of little use to those who understand them as they are written.”

These sentiments of Origen seem to have been adopted by Athanasius. They are fully developed in his renowned argument. They form the basis of that bold hypothesis which by its confident pretensions and its author’s brilliant name, seems, for near fifteen centuries, to have dazzled the mental vision of the wisest and the best. Nothing can be more dangerous to the vital elements of Christian faith than this latitudinarian construction of the Holy Oracles. It commingles with the inspiration of heaven a controlling infusion of the philosophy of earth. It substitutes for the Word of the infallible God the fallible word of frail and presumptuous man. This latitudinarian interpretation of the Bible was the great moral disease of the first five centuries of the Christian era. It converted what should have been its “high and palmy state” into one vast receptacle of schisms and heresies. We would not do injustice to the primitive ages of the Church; their persecutions and martyrdoms, so patiently and so nobly borne, are deeply engraven on our memory; the roll of impartial history unfolds, also, the imperishable record of their wild phantasies, their bitter intestine divisions, their frequent shipwrecks of the faith -the legitimate offspring of their reckless constructions of the Oracles of Truth.

Athanasius says that the Bible is to be construed with special reference to what human reason deems “fitting to God.” We hence. conclude that the supposed unfitness of suffering to the dignity of the Godhead is the prime element of the Athanasian hypothesis. The syllogism of Athanasius, then, stands thus: It is not “fitting to God” to suffer. The God incarnate did suffer: therefore the incarnate God suffered not in his divine nature. The correctness of the syllogism turns on the truth of its major proposition, viz., the supposed unfitness of the divine nature for suffering. But that was a point for the decision of the conclave of the Trinity. In that august tribunal it must have been decided before the holy incarnation. We purpose to show, by scriptural proofs, that it was there decided adversely to the decision of the author of the prevalent hypothesis. From his philosophical syllogism to the Inspired Volume we bring our writ of review. We appeal from Athanasius to God.

In the course of our future argument, we shall accumulate scriptural passages denoting that, besides the privations incident to his incarnation, the second person of the Trinity did, in very truth, suffer in his ethereal essence infinitely, or, at least, unimaginably, for the salvation of the world. To insert those passages here would be reversing the order of our argument. When they come to be introduced, if understood by others as we understand them, we must beg the kind reader to transplant them, in thought, to this identical place. When they shall have been thus transplanted, they will carry home to that time-consecrated, yet fallacious hypothesis, “God is impassible,” the work of demolition more surely and demonstratively than could volumes of argument drawn from the storehouse of reason. Will not plenary proof from Scripture, that the divine nature of Christ actually participated in his mediatorial sufferings, convince even reasoning skepticism that his divinity had physical and moral capacity to suffer?

The dogma of divine impassibility precludes the supposition that the redeeming God suffered even by sympathy. Impassibility excludes suffering in all its forms, whether caused by sympathy or direct personal infliction. Sympathy may induce pangs intense as any corporeal agonies. The anguish of the suffering child is often surpassed by that of the sympathizing mother. The redeeming God was united to the redeeming man by ties closer than ever bound a mother to the child of her affections. But if the prevalent hypothesis be true, how could the throes and spasms of the suffering man have moved any emotion of sympathy in the heart of the impassive God? How could he have pitied the sufferer “like as a father pitieth his children?”—Psalms 103. 13. Impassibility would be just as inaccessible to the pangs of sympathy as to any other modification of pain.