Basic HTML Version
292
resurrection. It was a spiritual birth that made Christ the adopted Son of God. The Church saw
the unity of the person in Christ once more endangered by this view, and therefore it was
condemned by the Synod of Frankfort in 794 A.D.
The Middle Ages added very little to the doctrine of the person of Christ. Due to various
influences, such as the emphasis on the imitation of Christ, the theories of the atonement, and
the development of the doctrine of the mass, the Church retained a strong grasp on the full
humanity of Christ. “The deity of Christ,” says Mackintosh, “came into view rather as the
infinite co-efficient raising human action and passion to an infinite value.” And yet some of the
Scholastics in their Christology set forth a docetic view of Christ. Peter the Lombard did not
hesitate to say that in respect of His humanity Christ was nothing at all. But this Nihilism was
condemned by the Church. Some new points were stressed by Thomas Aquinas. According to
him the person of the Logos became composite at the incarnation, and its union with the
manhood “hindered” the latter from arriving at an independent personality. The human nature
of Christ received a twofold grace in virtue of its union with the Logos, (a) the gratia unionis,
imparting to it a special dignity, so that it even became an object of worship, and (b) the gratia
habitualis, which sustained it in its relationship to God. The human knowledge of Christ was
twofold, namely, an infused and an acquired knowledge. There are two wills in Christ, but
ultimate causality belongs to the divine will, to which the human will is always subject.
C. THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST AFTER THE REFORMATION.
1. UP TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The Reformation did not bring any great changes in the
doctrine of the person of Christ. Both the Church of Rome and the Churches of the Reformation
subscribed to the doctrine of Christ as it was formulated by the Council of Chalcedon. Their
important and deep-seated differences lay elsewhere. There is one peculiarity of Lutheran
Christology that deserves special mention. Luther’s doctrine of the physical presence of Christ
in the Lord’s supper led to the characteristically Lutheran view of the communicatio idiomatum,
to the effect “that each of Christ’s natures permeates the other (perichoresis), and that His
humanity participates in the attributes of His divinity.”[Neve, Lutheran Symbolics, p. 132.] It is
held that the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence were communicated
to the human nature of Christ at the time of the incarnation. The question naturally arose, how
this could be harmonized with what we know of the earthly life of Jesus. This question led to a
difference of opinion among Lutheran theologians. Some held that Christ laid aside the divine
attributes received in the incarnation, or used them only occasionally, while others said that He
continued in possession of them during His entire earthly life, but concealed them or used them
only secretly. Some Lutherans now seem inclined to discard this doctrine.