SECT. VIII.

CHRIST NOT GOD, BUT THE REPRESENTATIVE, THE

MANIFESTATION, THE MORAL IMAGE, OF GOD.

Whatever of the falsely or the superstitiously fearful imagination conjures up, because of God being at a distance, can only be dispelled by God brought nigh unto us. The spiritual must become sensible: the veil which hides the unseen God from the eye of mortals must be somehow withdrawn. Now, all this has been done once, and done only, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ; he being the brightness of his Father's glory, and the express image of his person. The Godhead became palpable to human senses; and man could behold, as in a picture or in distinct personification, the very characteristics of the Being who made him. Then truly did men hold converse with Immanuel; which is, being interpreted, God with us. They saw his glory in the face of Jesus Christ; and the very characteristics of the Divinity himself may be said to have appeared in authentic representation before them, when God manifest in the flesh descended on Judea, and sojourned among its earthly tabernacles. By this mysterious movement from heaven to earth, the dark, the untrodden interval, which separates the corporeal from the spiritual, was at length overcome. The King eternal and invisible was then placed within the ken of mortals. They saw the Son, and in him saw the Father also; so that, while contemplating the person and the history of a man, they could make a study of the Godhead. . . . In no way could a more palpable exhibition have been made, than when the eternal Son, shrined in humanity, stepped forth on the platform of visible things, and on the proclaimed errand to seek and to save us. We can now read the character of God in the human looks and in the human language of him who is the very image and visible representation of the Deity. We see it in the tears of sympathy which he shed. We hear it in the accents of tenderness which fell from him. Even his very remonstrances were those of a meek and gentle nature; for they are remonstrances of deepest pathos, the complaints of a longing and affectionate spirit, against the sad perversity of men bent

on their own undoing. When visited with the fear that God looks hardly and adversely towards us, let us think of him who had compassion on the famishing multitudes; of him who mourned with the sisters of Lazarus; of him who, when he approached the city of Jerusalem, wept over it at the thought of its coming desolation. And, knowing that the Son is like unto the Father, let us re-assure our hopes with the certainty that God is love. - DR. T. CHALMERS : Select Works, vol. iii. pp. 161–2.

If we do not misunderstand the import of this extract, Dr. CHALMERS, though he uses some expressions which are of an unscriptural character, means to affirm that Jesus was the image of the Father, and the manifestation of God in the flesh, not because he was or represented God the Son (who, according to this divine, was the Jehovah who appeared visibly to the patriarchs and others), but because he imaged forth the moral character of the Deity, of the Invisible One, the Father, who became visible in the person, the offices, and the life of the Son of God, the man Christ Jesus. Such a sentiment is surely more in unison with the teachings of the New Testament than with the dicta of human creeds or the dogmas of a metaphysical orthodoxy.

Let us observe again, and be thankful for, the perfect wisdom of God. Even while presenting to us God in Christ, that is to say, God with all those attributes which we can understand and fear and love; and without those which throw us, as it were, to an infinite distance, overwhelming our minds and baffling all our conceptions, even then the utmost care is taken to make us remember that God in himself is really that infinite and incomprehensible Being to whom we cannot, in our present state, approach; that even his manifestation of himself in Christ Jesus is one less perfect than we shall be permitted to see hereafter; that Christ stands at the right hand of the Majesty on high; that he has received from the Father all his kingdom and his glory; finally, that the Father is greater than he, inasmuch as any other nature added to the pure and perfect essence of God must, in a certain measure, if I may venture so to speak, be a coming down to a lower point from the very and unmixed Divinity. . . . It was very necessary, especially at a time when men were so accustomed to worship their highest gods under the form of men, that, whilst the gospel was itself holding out the man Christ Jesus as the object of religious faith and fear and love, and teaching that all power was given to him in heaven and in earth, it should also guard us against supposing that it meant to represent God as, in himself, wearing a human form, or having a nature partaking of our infirmities; and

therefore it always speaks of there being something in God higher and more perfect than could possibly be revealed to man; and for this eternal and infinite and inconceivable Being it claims the reserve of our highest thoughts, or rather it commands us to believe that they who shall hereafter see God face to face shall be allowed to see something still greater than is now revealed to us, even in Him who is the express image of God, and the brightness of his glory. — DR. THOMAS ARNOLD: Sermons on the Christian Life, pp. 238–40.

Whatever opinion may be entertained of some of the views presented in this extract, we think it unquestionable that the eternal and infinite Being who was pleased to manifest himself to the world in and through Christ, and who was the Source of all the kingdom, power, and glory, of which Christ was and is in possession, is greater than the recipient of his bounty; and that, however worthy his holy Son, Messenger, Representative, and Image may be of receiving our reverential regards and heartfelt obedience, God claims for himself our highest thoughts and profoundest veneration. This is the uniform lesson of the New Testament, and seems to be inculcated here by Dr. ARNOLD.

No doubt, the benevolence of the Creator had awakened grateful feelings, and kindled the most exquisite poetry of expression, in the hearts and from the lips of many before the coming of Christ; no doubt, general humanity had been impressed upon mankind in the most vivid and earnest language. But the gospel first placed these two great principles as the main pillars of the new moral structure : God the universal Father, mankind one brotherhood; God made known through the mediation of his Son, the image and humanized type and exemplar of his goodness; mankind of one kindred, and therefore of equal rank in the sight of the Creator, and to be united in one spiritual commonwealth. HENRY H. MILMAN: History of

Christianity, vol. i. p. 207.

Here Christ is beautifully and scripturally spoken of, not as God the Son, but as the Son of God, "the image and humanized type of God's good

ness; one who, through his mediation, makes God known to mankind, not as a Triune Being, but as the universal Father.

Almighty God has revealed himself as the proper object of religion, as the one only Power on whom we are to feel ourselves continually dependent for all things, and the one only Being whose favor we are continually to seek; and, lest we should complain that an infinite Being is an object too remote and incomprehensible for our minds to dwell upon, he has manifested himself in his Son, the man Jesus

Christ, whose history and character are largely described to us in the Gospels; so that to love, fear, honor, and serve Jesus Christ, is to love, fear, honor, and serve Almighty God; Jesus Christ being "one with the Father,” and “all the fulness of the Godhead” dwelling in him. ARCHBISHOP WHATELY: Cautions to the Times, p. 71.

Whatever shade of meaning the Archbishop of Dublin may attach to the scriptural expressions with which this paragraph closes, the main sentiment he inculcates is unequivocally Unitarian; namely, that "the only Being whose favor we are continually to seek," the Infinite and Incomprehensible One, "manifested himself in his Son, the man Jesus Christ." This sentiment is, we think, in perfect unison with the teachings of the New Testament, and in total opposition to the notion, either that three infinite persons manifested themselves, or that the second of these infinite persons manifested himself, in what is termed the human nature of our Lord.

We accept the fact of the incarnation, because we feel that it is impossible to know the absolute and invisible God, as man needs to know him and craves to know him, without an incarnation. . . . You cannot believe the words [“ We beheld his glory as of the onlybegotten of the Father, full of grace and truth," John i. 14], however habitual and familiar they may be to you, if there is that in them which contradicts the spirit of a man that is in you; which does not address that with demonstration and power. What we say is, that these words have not contradicted that spirit, but have entered it with the demonstration of the spirit and of power. Men have declared, "The actual creatures of our race do tell us of something which must belong to us, must be most needful for us. A gentle human being does give us the hint of a higher gentleness: a brave man makes us think of a courage far greater than he can exhibit. Friendships, sadly and continually interrupted, suggest the belief of an unalterable friendship. Every brother awakens the hope of a love stronger than any affinity in nature, and disappoints it. Every father demands a love and reverence and obedience which we know is his due, and which something in him, as well as in us, hinders us from paying. Every man who suffers and dies, rather than lie, bears witness of a truth beyond his life and death, of which he has a glimpse." Men have asked, "Are all these delusions? Is this goodness we have dreamed of, all a dream? this truth a fiction of ours? Is there no Brother, no Father, beneath those who have taught us to believe there must be such? Who will tell us?" What St. John answers is this: "No, they are not delusions. It has pleased the Father to

show us what he is. A man did dwell among us, an actual man like ourselves, who told us that he had come from this Father; that he knew him. And we believed him: we could not help believing him. There did shine forth, in his words, looks, acts, that which we felt to be the grace and the truth we were wanting to see. We were sure they were not of this earth; that they did not spring from that body which was such as ours is. We should have been ready enough to call them his. But he did not: he said they were his Father's; that he could do nothing of himself, only what he saw his Father do [John v. 19]. That was the most wonderful token to us of all. We never saw any man before who took nothing to himself, who would glorify himself in nothing. Therefore, when we beheld him, we felt that he was a Son, an only-begotten Son; and that the glory of One whom no man had seen, or could see, was shining forth in him, and through him upon us.” - - F. D. MAURICE: Theological Essays, No. VI. pp. 79, 81-2.

This passage may not be consistent with the other portions of the Essay from which it is taken; but we regard it as containing a beautiful summary of what John in his Gospel has recorded of his divine Master. It is not improbable that Unitarians may have felt too great a dislike to the word "incarnation," on account of the gross ideas which it has been so often made to express; but the term is not the less fitted to convey the truly scriptural doctrine, that the Absolute, the Infinite, the Invisible One, the Maker of the universe, and the Parent of all intelligences, has exhibited himself to mankind in a clearer and more affectionate manner by his wellbeloved Son, than by any other teacher or agent, whether animate or inanimate, physical, intellectual, or moral; and that his union with Jesus, the Nazarean Man, was more real, intimate, transcendent, than any which has ever subsisted between the same Father and the best and greatest of his human children. But this doctrine is, we think, very different from that which regards Jesus as a second hypostasis in the Godhead, or as God himself, assuming human flesh, in order either to manifest his own divine nature, or to exhibit the character and will of a Triune Being; or as a single person uniting in himself the contradictory properties of Divinity and Humanity.

He [God] brings out the purity and spotlessness and moral glory of the Divinity, through the workings of a human mind called into existence for this purpose, and stationed in a most conspicuous attitude among men. . . . The moral perfections of Divinity show themselves to us in the only way by which, so far as we can see, it is possible directly to show them, by coming out in action, in the very field of human duty, by a mysterious union with a human intellect and human powers. It is God manifest in the flesh; the visible moral image