CHAPTER VI.

Phrase, the Person of Christ—-Means nothing more than simple Name, the Christ—-No Analogy between Person of Christ suffering from Pains of Human Nature and Person of ordinary Man suffering from corporeal Pains—-Bishop Pearson again considered—-Bishop Beveridge. considered—-Divinity of Christ suffered actually, not merely by construction—-If Christ suffered only in Humanity, his Sufferings, taken in reference to Divine Beatitude were inconceivably small.

THE phrase, the person of Christ, holds a conspicuous place in Christian theology, and is intimately connected with our subject. The union of his two natures constitutes what is termed the person of Christ; and it is supposed by our opponents that, from the suffering of either of his united natures, his person would be said to suffer. Hence it is argued that the scriptural declarations affirming that Christ suffered, in general and unrestricted terms, had abundant aliment in the suffering of his manhood alone. This is a citadel, claiming impregnable strength, in which the advocates of the prevalent theory have entrenched themselves; it requires, therefore to be accurately examined.

It is believed that the phrase, the person of Christ, is found but once in the translation of the New Testament, 2 Corinthians, 2. 10. The verse in the translation reads thus: “To whom ye forgive anything, I forgive also; for if I forgave anything, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ.” The best commentators think that this passage is incorrectly translated, and that the original Greek words rendered “in the person of Christ” should have been rendered “in the name and by the authority of Christ.” So thought Macknight, and other commentators agree with him.

But it would be useless to pursue the inquiry whether the phrase, the person of Christ, is of divine or human origin. Whatever its origin may be, the phrase has no greater amplitude of meaning than the simple scriptural name, the Christ. The name expresses the union of the divine and human natures; the phrase expresses nothing more. Christ and the person of Christ are synonymous. Should theology seek to clothe the phrase with a wider meaning than belongs to the simple name, the extension must be wrought out by the artificial process of human reasoning. On such extension no true theory of Christian faith can repose. None can object to the use of the phrase as a convenient synonyme for the name of Christ; we may ourselves use it for that purpose in these sheets; beyond that its use is not sanctioned by scriptural authority. The name itself imports the union of the Godhead and the manhood; the phrase can legitimately import nothing more.

It has been urged, that as the union of his two natures forms the person of Christ in the same way as the union of the soul, and body of an ordinary man forms the person of that man, so the numerous passages of Scripture declarative of Christ’s”s sufferings are all satisfied by his having suffered in his humanity, in the same manner as an ordinary person is said to suffer, though his pains are corporeal. It is not within our province to complain of the comparison between the person of Christ, composed of his two natures, and the person of an ordinary man, composed of his body and soul, when used for purposes of general illustration; but when applied to Christ’s”s expiatory agonies, and urged to satisfy, by the suffering of his mere manhood, the oft-repeated declarations of Scripture, averring his sufferings in terms which, according to their natural and plain import, would make them pervade every recess of his united being, nothing can be more fallacious and misleading than this very comparison.

The person of an ordinary man is said to suffer from corporeal pains, because corporeal pains affect his whole united being. If any one doubts whether an ailment of the body communicates itself to the mind, let the skeptic attempt some intellectual effort with a raging toothache, or with a limb writhing under the agonies of the gout. So, mental suffering, when intense or protracted, affects the body. The disease of a broken heart, though it may find no place on the bills of mortality, has, nevertheless, many victims.

But if there was no sympathetic link between the human soul and her humble sister; if she stood impregnable in her impassibility; if she was cased in armour of proof less penetrable than the fabled armour of the Grecian hero; if she felt the ailments of her encircling flesh no more than the body feels the rents of the garments which it wears, then, indeed, the local pains of the outer man could not be ranked under the denomination of the suffering of his person. The chief element of his person is the immortal, priceless spirit within. Should that continue to bask in the sunshine of bliss, untouched by the local ailments of his mere body, those ailments would be classed under some more limited and humble appellation than that of the suffering of his person. A part of a person is not the person. This position is based on the elemental principle that a part is not the whole. The foot is not the person, though forming one of its integral parts. Any ailment of the foot, unless it generally affected the person, could not be denominated the suffering of the person.

If we are at liberty to suppose that, by the laws of his united being, the agonies of Christ’s”s human nature pervaded and affected his divine essence also, then, and then only, would any similitude exist between the person of Christ suffering from his human anguish, and the persona of an ordinary man suffering from corporeal pain. But the very corner-stone of the prevalent theory rests on the supposition that. the anguish of Christ’s”s human nature did not affect the divine; that while the man Christ Jesus was writhing under agonies unparalleled in the annals of profane or sacred story, the God Christ Jesus was untouched by pain; that his beatitude was as perfect at Gethsemane, and on the cross, as it had been when, in his presence, “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” to celebrate the birth of the new world which he had just brought into being. Job, 38. 7.

If the divinity of Christ, cased in everlasting impassibility, participated not in the agonies of his manhood, then the supposed analogy between the person of an ordinary man suffering from his corporeal pains, and the person of Christ suffering from the pains of his human nature, utterly fails. The manhood of Christ was but an insulated atom in the infinitude of his being. The local and incommunicable pains of that insulated atom would have been termed the sufferings of the person of Christ, no more than the rippling of some small and sequestered bay would be denominated the commotion of the mighty ocean to which it is joined. The Godhead of Christ was the infinite constituent of his person. While his divinity retained in full perfection its primeval and ineffable beatitude, suffering would not have been predicated of the person of Christ. The insulated pangs of his manhood would rather have been denominated the sufferings of his terrestrial adjunct, than the sufferings of the august person of the incarnate Deity. Upon the prevalent theory, the little rivulet of human wo, bitter indeed, and dark, as it could not have ruffled or discoloured, so it would not have given its melancholy name to the peaceful, illimitable, and heavenly sea of divine felicity which formed the predominating, the almost absorbing element of the person of the God, “manifest in the flesh.”

The suffering of a person implies the suffering of the whole person, whatever may be the locality of the pain. Personality is indivisible; and every thing affirmed of it, unless there are very special words of limitation and restriction, is predicated of its entirety. The personality of Christ, compounded of the God and the man, would have been severed by the abstraction of either. The inspired and unqualified ascriptions of suffering to Christ, or, in the language of the prevalent theory, to the person of Christ, required for their aliment the totality of his person. If, from participation in the agonies of the suffering Christ of the Bible, either the man or the God had stood dissevered and aloof, the personality of the scriptural sufferer would have been gone; the real vicarious sufferer, and the vicarious sufferer named in the Gospel, would have ceased to be identical.

Many other corollaries have been drawn from the phrase, the person of Christ, by the advocates of the prevalent theory. A few of these corollaries will be noticed here, even at the hazard of a partial anticipation of some future branches of our argument. It will hereafter appear that the Bible, in addition to its application of the name of Christ. to the redeeming sufferer, virtually asserts, in various other forms, that the second person of the Trinity suffered for the salvation of the world. All these intimations of Scripture are sought to be neutralized by the mysterious potency of the phrase, the person of Christ.

Bishop Pearson and Bishop Beveridge, and other advocates of the prevalent theory, have ingeniously urged, that, from the intimate connexion of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ, the God became constructively man, and the man constructively God; and that, therefore, the Bible, in virtually declaring that the second person of the Trinity suffered and died, meant nothing more than to declare that the impassible God constructively suffered and died in the suffering and death of the passible man.

The words of Bishop Pearson are as follows:

“And now the only difficulty will consist in this, how we can reconcile the person suffering with the subject. of his passion; how we can say that God did suffer, when we profess the Godhead suffered not. But this seeming difficulty will admit an easy solution, if we consider the intimate conjunction of the divine and human nature, and their union in the person of the Son. For hereby those attributes which properly belong to the one are given to the other, and that upon good reason; for seeing the same individual person is, by the conjunction of the nature of God and the nature of man, really and truly both God and man, it necessarily followeth that it is true to say God is man, and as true, a man is God; because, in this particular, he which is man is God, and he which is God is man”⁴⁴Pearson on the Creed, p.313, 314

The words of Bishop Beveridge are as follows:

“When he died, God himself may be truly said to have laid down his life; for so his beloved disciple saith expressly: “Hereby we perceive the love of God, because he laid down his life for us.”—-

I John, 3., 16. Strange expressions! Yet not so strange as true, as being uttered by truth itself. Neither will they seem strange unto us, if we truly believe, and consider that he who suffered all this was and is both God and man; not in two distinct persons, as if he was one person as God, and another person as man, according to the Nestorian heresy; for if so, then his sufferings as man would have been of no value for us, nor have stood us in any stead, as being the sufferings only of a finite person; but he is both God and man in one and the same person, as the third general council declared out of the Holy Scriptures, and the Catholic Church always believed. From whence it comes to pass, that, although his sufferings affected only the manhood, yet that, being at the same time united to the Godhead in one and the same person, they therefore were, and may be properly called the sufferings of God himself; the person that suffered them being really and truly God.”⁵⁵Beveridge’s”s Sermons, vol. 1i. p. 128

With profound respect for these learned and pious prelates, we cannot but regard their distinctions as too subtile, too involved, too metaphysical for gospel simplicity. We must humbly protest against the startling dogmas, that, by virtue of the union of the two natures in the person of Christ, “those attributes which properly belong to the one are given to the oother,” and “that it is true to say, “God is man, and as true, a man is God.” Where are the attributes of almightiness, and omniscience, and eternal pre-existence, and creative potency “given” to his human nature? Or, where is it affirmed of his divine nature that it lacked infinite goodness, or prescience, or power, or that it was formed out of nothing in the days of Herod? The Bible’s”s great Mediator himself taught the infinite distinction between his manhood and his Godhead, notwithstanding their union. “My Father is greater than I.”—-John, 14. 28. “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one; that is God.”—-Matthew, 19. 17. “But to sit on my right hand and on my left is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.”—-Matthew, 20. 23. “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man; no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”—-Mark, 13. 32. Thus it appears, from the highest authority in the universe, that, notwithstanding the union of the two natures in the person of Christ, the man did not become God, or assume the divine attributes. Nor did the God sink into the man. Christ recognised, in his divine capacity, no inferiority to the Father, either in power, or goodness, or prescience.

The manhood of Christ, then, was not God. The sufferings of his manhood were not the sufferings of the Deity. The man did not become constructively God; nor were the sufferings of his manhood constructively the sufferings of the Diety. If the God was impassive, and the man only suffered, his human sufferings touched not his divine nature. The Bible would not have styled them the sufferings of the God. God the Son suffered not by proxy. He could no more have suffered by proxy than he could have become incarnate by proxy. If the God suffered not in his ethereal essence, the scriptural declarations of his sufferings are not true, in the amplitude of scriptural verity. The Bible says nothing of suffering by construction. The thought is not to be found in Holy Writ. If is the imagination of the prevalent theory. The Son of God suffered not constructively, any more than he formed the world constructively. There is nothing constructive, or merely seeming, in the actions of the Holy Trinity.

If, according to the prevalent hypothesis and theory, the divine nature is, by its own inherent laws, necessarily wrapped in ever-lasting impassibility; if eternal and infinite beatitude belongs to it as an inseparable incident, whether it so wills or not, then the term suffering could, under no possible circumstances, have been applied by Scripture to a person of the Godhead, whether standing by himself in unapproached glory, or united to an inferior nature. Impassibility and suffering are opposites, as much as light and darkness. They are, in respect to each other, foreign and incommunicable properties. Suffering cannot be infused into impassibility by the closest proximity or the most intimate union. If the God had been really impassive, the suffering of the man could no more have been infused into the impassible God by construction than the salt of the ocean could be constructively infused into the diamond which its waves have ingulfed. Suffering could no more be predicated of an infinitely impassible God, than sin could be predicated of an infinitely holy God. Suffering is as much opposed to the inherent laws of impassibility as sin is opposed to the inherent laws of holiness.

Upon the prevalent theory and its parent hypothesis, the beloved disciple could no more have been taught by Inspiration to say as he did in truth say in the passage quoted from one of his epistles by Bishop Beveridge himself, “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us,” than he would have been taught by Inspiration to say, that the infinitely holy God committed some flagrant sin for the redemptions of the world. He might have declared that the man united to the God, or the man whose body was the shrine of the God, had “laid down his life for us.” But the inspired writer could not, if the prevalent theory and its parent hypothesis are true, have declared that the eternally impassible God had “laid down his life for us;” for that would have been declaring that the eternally impassible God had violated the immutable laws of his own infinite being. It would have been the assertion of a moral, perhaps physical impossibility, and the presumptuous application of such assertion to the awful majesty of the Godhead.

The supposition that St. John, and his inspired brethren of the New Testament, when they so often declared that God the Son suffered to save our sinking race, meant only to indicate the sufferings of the man, and to affirm that the human suffering became the suffering of the God by construction, is a gratuitous assumption of the advocates of the prevalent theory. The inspired declarations are numerous and unequivocal. They are couched in simple and plain terms. They include, “Within their fair purport and compass, the divine as well as the human nature of the person of Christ. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that the Holy Ghost meant differently from what he has graciously said. It is the prevalent theory, and not the Bible, which affirms that the man suffered actually, and the God only constructively.

We have thus followed, through several of its varying aspects, the argument of our learned and pious opponents, derived from the phrase, the person of Christ; a phrase deemed by them competent to satisfy not only the abounding averments of the Bible that Christ suffered, but also the affirmation that God : “laid down his life for us,” and various other like scriptural declarations, indicating that the second person of the Trinity actually suffered for the redemption of the world. We now propose to bring this far-reaching and high soaring argument of the prevalent theory to another test.

Christ combined in holy union the human son of the Virgin, and he who, from everlasting, had filled the right-hand seat of the omnipotent throne. This holy union our opponents love to designate by the phrase, the person of Christ. The person of Christ, then, combined the finite man and the infinite God. The union of the manhood and the Godhead was complete and indissoluble. Time never for a moment severed it on earth; nor will eternity ever sever it in heaven. The prevalent theory affirms that into this holy union the God carried his own primeval felicity, and that it remained, in unimpaired perfection, during every hour of his terrestrial sojourn. According to this theory, the person of Christ enclosed in its bosom, from the manger of Bethlehem to the tomb of Joseph, the ineffable felicity of the blessed God. The theory, of course, holds that the person of Christ suffered, not by the suffering of his whole person, but by that of his manhood alone.

Suffering consists in the diminution of what would otherwise have been the happiness of the sufferer. The amount of the suffering is tested by the amount of such diminution. In the case under consideration, the person of Christ was the sufferer. What, then, was the diminution of the felicity of the person of Christ, caused by the mere suffering of his manhood? We have no weight or measure to ascertain it; but brief reflection will teach us that it must have been inconceivably small. The happiness of the person of Christ, if his divinity tasted not of suffering, was infinite. It embraced the plenitude of the felicity of the Godhead. According to the prevalent theory, the suffering of the person of Christ was finite. It consisted in the suffering of the man alone. Subtract finite suffering from infinite beatitude, and the diminution will be too small for the most microscopic vision. Heavy as no doubt were the sufferings of Christ’s”s humanity, when estimated by an earthly standard, they must have been comparatively light when taken in reference to the person of him “who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,” and “taketh up the isles as a very little thing.”—-Isaiah, 40. 12, 15. The bitter stream of human wo must have been absorbed and lost in the illimitable ocean of divine felicity. If you subtract a single grain of sand from the globe we inhabit, arithmetic can perceive, and perhaps estimate the diminution; but the subtraction of the suffering of the finite man from the felicity of the person of Christ, embracing the full beatitude of the infinite God, would have caused a diminution of bliss too small for creature perception. Doubtless the ken of an archangel could not have perceived it. The happiness of the person of Christ, subject to his human suffering, must have been incalculably greater even at Gethsemane and Calvary, if the God suffered not in his ethereal essence, than the happiness of any other person who ever dwelt in this lower world, including the days of Eden. It must have surpassed the felicity of any other being in the universe, save that of the Father and the Holy Ghost. The minute atom of his human suffering, compared with the mighty totality of his divine beatitude, was less than the scarcely perceptible speck that often passes over without obscuring the orb of day.

Yet the Bible everywhere darkly shadows forth the sufferings of Christ, or, if our opponents prefer the phrase, the sufferings of the person of Christ, as having been too intense and vast for even Inspiration intelligibly to express in mortal language. The dimly portrayed sufferings darkened the face of day; they convulsed the earth; they must have wrung tears from heavenly eyes; they shook, well-nigh to dissolution, the person of the incarnate God. And was it, indeed, the mere finite suffering of Clhirist’s”s humanity, bearing a less proportion to the totality of his infinite bliss than the glow-worm bears to the luminary of our system, that the Bible thus labours, and labours, as it were, in vain, adequately to express to mortal ears? No! The sufferings, in the delineation of which even Inspiration seems to falter, were not limited to the finite, but pervaded also the most sacred recesses of that infinite essence which went to constitute the holy union, styled by our opponents the person of Christ. The sufferings of the man lay within the limits of scriptural delineation. The agonies of the God none but a God could conceive. Perhaps even Omnipotence could not make them intelligible to creature apprehension.

The theory which holds that the suffering element in the person of Christ was only the little speck of his humanity, with the inference to which it inevitably leads of the minuteness of the subtraction from the bliss of his united person caused by the suffering of that human speck, cannot but detract immeasurably from the dignity and glory of the atonement. It sinks the expiatory sufferings of the person of Christ from their scriptural infinitude down to a point too small for mortal, doubtless too small for angelic vision.

The position that, of the two natures united in the person of Christ, the one suffered and the other never tasted of suffering; that the one was filled to overflowing with unutterable anguish and the other with inconceivable joy; that the one drank to its dregs “the cup of trembling,” while the other was quaffing the ocean of more than seraphic beatitude, can derive no support from human reason. Such a theory, tending, as it does in no small degree, to augment, “the mystery of godliness,” required plenary scriptural proof for its support. Its advocates have not furnished such proof. In the face of the Christian world, we affectionately, yet solemnly invoke its production, if to be found in the Word of God.