CHAPTER IV.

Prevalent Theory of Christ’s Sufferings limits them to his Humanity—Necessary Result of Hypothesis of Divine Impassibility—Theory of the same Antiquity and Prevalence as Hypothesis—Object of our Argument stated—Remarks of Dr. Chalmers—Remarks of Dr. Harris—Remarks of Professor Vinet—Who and what Christ was—His Synonymes—Definite Article should have been prefixed to Name by Translators—Scriptural Passages declarative of Sufferings of Christ.

HAVING, in the preceding chapters, considered the preliminary objection arising from the alleged impassibility of the divine nature, we may now, it is hoped, pursue our inquiry, whether Christ suffered in his united natures, or in his manhood alone, without danger of impugning any of attributes the Godhead. The capacity of his divinity to suffer is not, of itself, proof that it actually suffered; nor can the question of its actual sufferance be decided by any mere reasoning process; it lies beyond the ken of our mental vision; the decision of the question rests on scriptural proofs.

The prevalent theory of Christ’s”s sufferings limits them to his human nature. This theory was the sure result of the prevalent hypothesis, that God is impassible. If the divine nature was held incapable of suffering, then the conclusion must have been inevitable that his sufferings were confined to his manhood. The prevalent theory, like its parent was born in early antiquity. It has followed the footsteps of its progenitor, as the shadow pursues its substance, along the track of near fifteen hundred years. Like its parent, it has stretched its shade over continents and pervaded Christendom.

Since the maturity of the prevalent hypothesis, and its kindred theory, in the fourth century, their adherents have generally aspired to sustain them by naked opinions alone, multiplied, indeed, to an almost incalculable extent. With the single exception of Bishop Pearson, we have met with no modern author who has attempted to support them by anything that could claim the name of an argument. His brief remarks have already been partially considered. They will come again under review in, the course of these pages. Whether the argument of Athanasius has self-supporting, competency to uphold a spiritual world, as the Oriental tortoise was supposed to sustain the material, our readers, by turning to the Appendix, may judge for themselves.

Whether the redeeming God, as well as the redeeming man, suffered for the salvation of the world, is a question which the adherents of the prevalent hypothesis and theory have never, to our knowledge, examined and fairly discussed on its scriptural merits, as a distinct point of theological inquiry. Holding the hypothesis of the divine impassibility as a self-evident truism, they have subfected to its control all scriptural passages bearing on the passion of our Lord. Such inspired passages as come into seeming collision with the hy-pothesis they regard as Eastern imagery. They understand them as mere metaphors and figures of speech. They deem the discussion of them superfluous, if not profane. They hold that, as the divine impassibility has become an elemental doctrine of the Christian Church, all debate upon the weight of scriptural proofs that the divinity of Christ bore its share in his expiatory agonies is forever precluded. They debar debate by a deep and mandatory call for the previous question. They will probably consider the invocation of scriptural authorities at this late day as a too bold impeachment of the irreversible decree of hoary haired Time.

That Christ suffered in both his natures we believe to be a revealed truth of our holy religion. Nor is it the least interesting department of inspired lore. It opens a celestial paradise, rich in more choice and lasting fruits than bloomed in the terrestrial Eden. “Search the Scriptures” is the passport of God to its tree of knowledge. Yet has an earth-formed apparition, clothed in the as-sumed vesture of an angel of truth, seemed to stand for centuries at its entrance, and, with its phantom sword, to interdict all ingress.

We design, by the blessing of God, to present the question relative to the nature and divinity of the mediatorial sufferings as a solemn issue to be tried, on scriptural evidence, before the inquisition of the Christian world. We assume the affirmative; we take upon ourselves the burden of showing that the divinity of Christ participated in his sufferings. Among the witnesses to be examined will be Isaiah, and Zechariah, and Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and the disciple who leaned on the bosom of Jesus, and Stephen, and Paul, and Peter. The awful proclamations of the Holy Ghost will be invoked. An appeal will be made to the affecting declarations of the incarnate, suffering, dying, risen God. We demand an impartial trial.

We shall address ourselves especially to plain enlightened common sense, well read in Holy Writ, unbiassed by deep-rooted theories, unfettered by the overbearing predominance of human dogmas, content to sit as a little child, and learn the attributes and demonstrations of the Godhead from the Oracles of revealed wisdom. The question to be tried is less one of doctrine than of fact. The evidence will be simple and practical, little needing the aid of learned exposition. It will be brought fresh from the gospel mint; it will carry the stamp of no human hypothesis; it will not bear the im-age and superscription of an earth-born Caesar; its pure gold will need no purification in the crucible of science. For the result of the verdict we feel no anxiety peculiar to ourselves. We seek truth rather than polemic victory.

If the question between our opponents and ourselves was to be tested by the mere reasonableness of our respective positions, we should confidently expect a decision adverse to the prevalent theory. Divine justice could not pardon mortal sin without aqequate satisfaction. Nor could it receive satisfaction in any coin save that of suffering. Without adequate suffering not a soul could be saved. The second person of the Trinity voluntarily became the vicarious Sufferer for the redeemed. The substitution was not to depress the awful standard of retributive justice. The Glory of the Godhead was to be maintained; heaven must be satisfied, hell silenced. The substituted coin was to bear the scrutiny of eternity. The redeeming God lacked not capacity to suffer. Did he in Godlike grandeur, most condescendingly and graciously suffer in his own ethereal essence? or did he, himself untouched by pain, form a redeeming man, destined from his birth to bear, in his frail human nature, the expiatory anguish required at the exchequer of heaven as the price of a world’s”s salvation? To borrow the terms wrought into the major proposition of the Athanasian syllogism, was it most “fitting to God” that the redeeming Son should save our fallen race by suffering in his own divine essence, or that he should devolve the whole burden of the vicarious suffering on his created proxy? Was the coin formed of divine, or that composed of human suffering, most acceptable at the celestial treasury, in satisfaction of the lofty requisitions of outraged and inflexible justice?

But we will not farther pursue this train of thought. It might conduct to irreverent speculation. It would seem that even human reason, unless blinded by the hypothesis of divine impassibility, must herself conclude, from, her own unbiassed reflections, that, in urging the prevalent theory, she is in danger of advocating a dogma derogatory to the disinterestedness and dignity of the Godhead. The question at issue is not however, to be decided by the mere umpirage of reason. It depends upon scriptural testimony. Reason can do nothing more than collect, and arrange, and present, and weigh the inspired proofs to be found in the Word of God.

We have expressed our belief that our opponents have left the questions of divine impassibility and the exclusive humanity of the mediatorial sufferings substantially where the Athanasian argument left them. We may have been mistaken. Chapters, and even volumes on the subject may possibly have appeared in some of the languages of earth, dead or living, and yet escaped our circumscribed knowledge. But if we are mistaken, the error, though it must doubtless impeach our theological scholarship, will derogate nothing from the strength of our scriptural argument. The increase of books is almost infinite, multiplying libraries to an extent which casts into the shade the Saracen devastation at Alexandria. With all the “multitudinous” volumes of theological lore, the countless progeny of the unceasing travail of eighteen centuries, there is but one created being that can claim universal familiarity. That being is the worm. It alone, of finite things, has bibliothecal ubiquity. The hugest tomes appal it not. To fastidiousness of taste it is a stranger. It feeds not on the ambrosia of genius alone. Its never -satiated appetite loathes not even the offals of polemical dulness. To rivalship with the worm, in compass of research, we dare not aspire.

Our argument seeks not shelter under the wing of human authority; yet it is satisfactory to find that some few of the best and the wisest have thought as we think. It will readily be perceived that the remarks we are about to quote, and which first reached our knowledge after these sheets were prepared for the press, stand seemingly opposed to the hypothesis of God’s”s impassibility, and to the theory that Christ’s”s sufferings were confined to his manhood.

The first quotation is from the illustrious Chalmers. He says:

“It is with great satisfaction that I now clear my way to a topic the most salutary, and, I will add, the most sacramental within the whole compass of revealed faith; even to the love wherewith God so loved the world as to send his Son into it to be the propitiation for our sins. I fear, my brethren, that there is a certain metaphysical notion of the Godheand which blunts our feelings of obligation for all the kindness of his good-will for all the tenderness of his mercies. There is an academic theology, which would divest him of all sensibility; which would make of him a Being devoid of all emotion and all tenderness; which concedes to him power, and wisdom, and a sort of cold and clear, and faultless morality, but which would denude him of all those fond and fatherly regards that so endear an earthly parent to the children who have sprung from him. It is thus that God hath been presented to the eye of our imagination as a sort of cheerless and abstract Divinity, who has no sympathy with his creatures, and who, therefore, can have no responding sympathy to him back again. I fear that such representations as these have done mischief in Christianity; that they have had a congealing property in them towards that affection which is represented the most important, and, indeed, the chief attribute of a religious character, even love to God; and that just because of the unloveliness which they throw over the aspect of our Father who is in heaven, whereby men are led to conceive of him as they would of some physical yet tremendous energy, that sitteth aloft in a kind of ungainly and unsocial remoteness from all the felt and familiar humanities of our species. And so it is, we apprehend, that the theism of nature and of science has taken unwarrantable freedoms with the theism of the Bible; attaching a mere figurative sense to all that is spoken there of the various affections of the Deity, and thus despoiling all the exhibitions which it makes of him to our world of the warmth and power to move and to engage, that properly belong to them. It represents God as altogether impassive; as made up of little more than of understanding and of power; as having no part in that system of emotions which occupies so wide a space in the constitution of man, made after his own image and according to his own likeness.”

“The Father sent his Son, for our sake, to the humiliation and the agony of a painful sacrifice, There is evident stress laid in the Bible on Jesus Christ being his only Son, and his only beloved Son. This is conceived to enhance the surrender; to aggravate, as it were, the cost of having given up unto the death so near and so dear a relative. In that memorable verse where it is represented that God so loved the world as to send his only begotten Son into it, I bid you mark well the emphasis that lies in the so. There was a difference, in respect of painful surrender, between his giving up another, more distantly, as it were, connected with him, and his giving up one who stood to him in such close and affecting relationship. The kin that he hath to Christ is the measure of the love that he manifested to the world, in giving up Christ as the propitiation for the world’s”s sins. What is this to say but that, in this great and solemn mystery, the Parent was put to the trial of his firmness? that, in the act of doing so, there was a soreness, and a suffering, and a struggle in the bosom of the Divinity? that a something was felt like that which an earthly father feels when he devotes the best and the dearest of his family to some high object of patriotism? God, in sparing him not, but in giving him up unto the death for us all, sustained a conflict between pity for his child and love for that world for whom he bowed down his head unto the sacrifice. In pouring out the vials of his wrath on the head of his only beloved Son, in awaking the sword of offended justice against his fellow; in laying upon him the whole burden of that propitiation, by which the law could be magnified and its transgressors could be saved; in holding forth on the cross of Christ this blended demonstration of his love and his holiness, and thus enduring the spectacle of his tears and of his agonies and cries till the full atonement was rendered; and not till it was finished did the meek and gentle sufferer give up the ghost. At that time, when angels, looking down from the high battlements of heaven, would have flown to rescue the Son of God from the hands of persecutors, think you that God himself was the only unconcerned and unfeeling spectator? or that, in consenting to these cruel sufferings of his Son for the world, he did not make his love to that world its strongest and most substantial testimony.”*

The next quotation is from the pen of the distinguished Harris, now a living personification of talent, learning, eloquence, and piety in the independent Church of England. He says:

“And how does it enhance our conceptions of the divine compassion when we reflect that there is a sense in which the sufferings of Christ were the sufferings of the Father also! From eternity their divine subsistence in the unity of the Godhead had been only short of identity; nor could the circumstance of the Saviour’s”s humiliation in the slightest degree relax the bonds of this mutual in-being. While walking the earth in the form of a servant, he could still affirm, My Father is in me and I in him”—- “I and my Father are one.”

“The love of God, then, invites our adoration not only as it at first sent his only begotten Son; during every moment of the Saviour’s”s sojourn on earth that love was repeating its gift, was making an infinite sacrifice for sinners; while every pang he endured in the prosecution of his work was the infliction of a wound in the very heart of paternal love. Who, then, shall venture to speak of the appeal which was made to that love, of the trial to which that love was put when the blessed Jesus took into his hand the cup of suffering, when his capacity for suffering was the only limitation his sufferings knew? If it be true that God is always in vital sympathetic communication with every part of the suffering creation; that as the sensorium of the universe, he apprehends every emotion, and commiserates every thrill of anguish, how exquisitely must he have felt the filial appeal, when in the extremity of pain; in the very crisis of his agonizing task, the Saviour cried, “My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?”

“What a new and amazing insight, then, does it give us into his love for sinners, that it was able to bear the stress of that crisis, that it did not yield and give way to the incalculable power of that appeal! This is a circumstance which, if I may say so, puts into our hands a line, enabling us to fathom his love to an infinite depth; but we find it immeasurably deeper still. It invests the attractions of the cross with augmented power; for in the sufferingssuffeiings of that scene we behold more—-if more we are capable of seeing—-more even than the love of Christ. In every pang which is there endured we behold the throes of paternal love, the pulsations and tears of infinite compassion; more than the creation in travail, the divine Creator himself travailing in the greatness of infinite love.:”*

The last quotation is from the celebrated Professor Vinet, justly styled “the Chalmers of Switzerland.” He says:

“Either the human heart is incapable, from its nature, of feeling love, or that man will feel it, who, enveloped in ignorance as a garment, has seen the God of glory descending even to him, to seek him in the depths of his disgrace; who, from the gloom and sorrow in which his conscience kept him plunged, has seen himself transported into a region of light and happiness; who, in respect to himself, has seen verified that amazing language of the prophet, “In all their afflictions he was afflicted;”—-who has seen, —- mystery, miracle!—-his God travelling by his side, in the rugged path of life; nay, voluntarily assuming the burden which was crushing him; a God humbled, a God weeping, a God anguished, a God dying! That long contest, if I may dare to say it, that agony of God for generations, that painful birth by which humanity was brought forth to the life of heaven, has been re-vealed to him in the ancient dispensation; he has been shown the very steps of God impressed upon the dust of ages, and mingled with the foot-prints of the human race; but at the trace which that God has left on the rock of Calvary, the rock of his heart is broken, the veil of his understanding torn away.”*

The Christ of the Bible was that “Holy. Thing,” born of the virgin, and conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost. He who begat him imparted to the infant Saviour the distinctive appellation of the Christ. The elements composing this unique and august Being were the human nature of his virgin mother, corporeal and intellectual, and the ethereal essence of the second person of the Trinity. His divine and human natures remained distinct, notwithstanding their union. They were united, not commingled. The name, the Christ, was not an unmeaning appellative; it was at once comprehensive and descriptive; pointing significantly to its absorbing centre, the mysterious and awful union of his manhood and his Godhead. To this illustrious personage other names are given in the New Testament. He is there called not only Christ, but also Jesus, Christ Jesus, Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, the Son of God, the Word, and the Lamb of God. All these appellatives are identical in their meaning with the name, the Christ, when applied to Him whose birth invoked the song of the descending angels.

(THIS NEEDS TO BE PUT BELOW THIS PARAGRAPH)

* Vinet’s Vital Christianity, by Turnbull, p. 293.

Note.—In referring to the translation of this distinguished author by the Rev. Robert Turnbull, of the American Baptist Church, we cannot but express our admiration, not only of the original work, but also of the fidelity and elegance of the translation. We know of the few foreign productions, ancient or modern, that have been rendered into our language with more faithfulness, spirit, and eloquence.

Our translators should always. have prefixed to the name of Christ the definite article. It belonged there. He was not only Messiah, but the Messiah; not only anointed, but the Anointed; not merely Christ, but the Christ. To the name of the Voice that cried in the wilderness they have almost invariably prefixed the article. In nearly every instance they have rendered the name, not John Baptist, but John the Baptist. This is as it should have been. The article gives to the name its proper significance and force. The prefixion of the definite article should no more have been omitted in the case of Christ than in that of his precursor. The translators have saved a short word. It was not true economy. They lost in meaning more than they gained in brevity.

From the numerous scriptural passages declarative of the sufferings of Christ, we have selected the following: “Before I” (Christ) “suffer.”—-Luke, 22. 15. “Ought not Christ to have suffered?” Luke, 24. 26. “Thus it behooved Christ to suffer.” —-Luke, 24. 46. God before showed , “that Christ should suffer.” —-Acts, 3. 18. “Opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered.” —-Acts, 17. 3. “That Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead.”—-Acts, 26. 23. “If so be that we suffer with him” (Christ).—-Romans, 8. 17. “For even Christ our passover is “sacrificed for us.”—-l Corinthians, 5. 7. “For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us.”—-2 Corinthians, 1i. 5. “ For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin.”—-2 Corinthians, 5. 21. “And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”—-Galatians, 2. 20. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.”—-Galatians, 3. 13. “As Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God.”—-Ephesians, 5. 2. “Even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave himself for it.”—-Ephesians, 5. 25. “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.—-Philippians, 3. 10. “To make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”—-Hebrews, 2. 10. “For in that he himself” (Christ) “hath suffered, being tempted.”—-Hebrews, 2. 18. “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.”—-Hebrews, 5. 8. “For then must he” (Christ) “often have suffered since the foundation of the world.”—-Hebrews, 9. 26. “Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate.”—-Hebrews, 13. 12. “When it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ.”—-l Peter, 1. 11II. “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example.”—-1l Peter, 2. 21. “When he” (Christ) “suffered, he threatened not.”—-1l Peter, 2. 23. “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.”—-1l Peter, 2. 24. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust.”—-1l Peter,. 3. 18. “For-asmuch, then, as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh.”—1- Peter, 4. 1. “As ye are partakers of Christ’s”s sufferings.”—-1l Peter, 4. 13. “Who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ.”—-1l Peter, 5. 1.