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Logos joined Himself in an ever-increasing measure to the unique and representative Man
(virtually a new creation), Christ Jesus, until the full union was finally consummated at the time
of the resurrection. The union resulted in the God-man with a single consciousness and a single
will. In this God-man the Logos does not supply the personality, but gives it its divine quality.
This theory finds no support in Scripture, which always represents the incarnation as a
momentary fact rather than as a process. It logically leads to Nestorianism or the doctrine of
two persons in the Mediator. And since it finds the real seat of the personality in the man Jesus,
it is utterly subversive of the real pre-existence of our Lord. Rothe and Bovon are two of the
most important supporters of this doctrine.
The crucial difference between the ancient and the really modern theories respecting the
person of Christ, lies in the fact that the latter, as appears also from the theory of Dorner,
distinguish the person of the Logos, conceived as a special mode of the personal life of God,
from the personality of Christ as a concrete human person uniquely divine in quality. According
to modern views it is not the Logos but the man Jesus that constitutes the ego in Christ. The
personality of Jesus is human in type of consciousness and also in moral growth, but at the
same time uniquely receptive for the divine, and thus really the climax of an incarnation of
which humanity itself is the general cosmic expression. This is true also of the theory suggested
by Sanday in his Christologies Ancient and Modern, a theory which seeks to give a psychological
explanation of the person of Jesus, which will do justice to both the human and the divine in
Jesus. He stresses the fact that the subliminal consciousness is the proper seat of all divine
indwelling, or divine action upon the human soul; and holds that the same or a corresponding
subliminal self is also the proper seat or locus of the deity of the incarnate Christ. The ordinary
consciousness of Jesus was the human consciousness, but there appeared in Him occasionally
an uprush of the divine consciousness from the subliminal self. This theory has rightly been
criticized severely. It ascribes a significance to the subliminal in the life of man which it does not
possess, wrongly supposes that the deity can be located in some particular place in the person
of Christ, and suggests a picture of Christ, as being only intermittently conscious of His deity,
which is not in harmony with the data of Scripture. It reveals once more the folly of trying to
give a psychological explanation of the person of Christ. Besides Sanday some of the more
influential representatives of modern Christology are Kunze, Schaeder, Kaehler, Moberly, and
Du Bose.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY.
What change did the eighteenth century effect in
Christology? What causes contributed to the present widespread denial of the deity of Christ?
How do negative critics deal with the Scriptural proofs for the deity of Christ? Did the Liberal-
Jesus-School succeed in presenting a tolerable picture of Jesus, which really squares with the
facts? What is the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and what