5.03. Christ's Humanity

Christ’s Humanity

Christ’s humanity is undisputed, being demonstrable from all the descriptions of him given in the gospels. Some of the more important of the numerous texts are “the seed of the woman” (Genesis 3:15); “the Son of Man” (Matthew 13:37); “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14); “God shall give unto him the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32); Christ was “the son of David, of Abraham, and of Adam” (3:23-38); Christ was “made of a woman” (Galatians 4:4); “Jesus Christ concerning the flesh was made of the seed of David” (Romans 1:3); “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Christ was born and died, hungered and thirsted, grew from infancy to childhood and manhood, was subject to the alternations of pleasure and pain, was tempted and struggled with temptation-in short, had all the experiences of man excepting those which involve sin (Luke 2:52; Luke 24:36-44; Matthew 4:1; John 11:33; John 11:35; John 13:23; Hebrews 4:15; Hebrews 5:8; Php 2:7-8).

What is implied in humanity has never been a dispute within the church; but as some heretical parties have asserted a defective or mutilated humanity in Christ, the church has specified particulars:

1. Christ had “a true body” (Westminster Larger Catechism 37). This was maintained in opposition to the Docetists (dokein),¹[Note: 1. δοκεῖν = to think, suppose] who asserted that Christ’s body was seeming only, and spectral, a phantom of ghostlike appearance and not solid flesh and blood. This heresy is refuted by the following: “A spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see me have” (Luke 24:39); “reach hither your hand and thrust it into my side” (John 20:27); “he did eat before them” (Luke 24:43).

2. Christ had “a rational soul” (Westminster Larger Catechism 37). This was held in opposition to Apollinarianism, which would find the rational element for the human nature in the eternal reason of the Logos. Apollinaris at first asserted that the Logos united with a human body only. Afterward he modified this by asserting that he united with a body and an irrational animal soul (Socrates, History 2.66). Texts that disprove this are “my soul is sorrowful” (Matthew 26:38) and Jesus “marveled” (Mark 6:6; Matthew 8:10; Luke 7:9). Sorrow and wonder are rational emotions, proper to man, but not to God. Apollinaris, from the account given of him by Gregory of Nyssa (Against the Apollinarians), seems to have blended and confused the human and divine natures even in the Godhead, for he asserted a human element in the divine essence itself. The divine, he contended, is also essentially and eternally human. There is, thus, an eternal humanity. Divine nature necessarily tends to the human form, inherently yearns to become man, and is unsatisfied until it is incarnate. This is the worst feature in Apollinaris’s scheme, who was nevertheless a strong advocate of the Athanasian trinitarianism against the Arians. Apollinaris also held that the mental suffering of Christ was the suffering of divine nature; otherwise it could not be a real atonement (see Dorner, Person of Christ). The rational objections to Apollinarianism are the following: (a) A human nature destitute of finite reason would be either idiotic or brutal. If the Logos assumed into union only the body and the animal soul-the sōma²[Note: 2. σῶμα = body, flesh] and psychē³[Note: 3. ψυχή =soul] and not the pneuma⁴[Note: 4. πνεῦμα = spirit] in St. Paul’s classification in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 -he did not unite himself with a rational nature. (b) In this case, also, he did not unite with a complete, but a defective humanity. Some of the essential properties of human nature, namely, rationality and voluntariness, would have been wanting. (c) In this case, none of Christ’s mental processes could have been of a finite kind. Nothing but infinite and divine reason could have been manifested in his self-consciousness. The same would be true of his voluntary action. This must have been infinite only. There could have been no exhibition of finite human will or of finite human reason in his earthly life.

3. Christ “continues to be God and man in two distinct natures” (Westminster Larger Catechism 36). This statement is in opposition to Eutychianism, which asserts that the union of the Logos with a human nature results in a single nature of a third species, which nature is neither divine nor human, but theanthropic. Eutychianism is contradicted by Romans 1:3-4, which describes Christ kata sarka⁵[Note: 5. κατὰ σάρκα = according to the flesh] and kata pneuma hagiōsynēs,⁶[Note: 6. κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης = according to the spirit of holiness] and by 9:5, which describes him kata sarka⁷[Note: 7. κατὰ σάρκα = according to the flesh] and epi pantōn theos.⁸[Note: 8. ἐπί παντῶν θεός = God over all (things)] Christ, in these and similar passages, is represented as having two natures, not one only. A nature is necessarily incomplex and simple. A person may be incomplex, like a trinitarian person who has only one nature, or complex, like a human person who has two natures and a theanthropic person who has three natures. A person may have two or more heterogeneous natures, but a nature cannot have two or more classes of heterogeneous properties. A substance or nature is homogeneous as to its qualities. A theanthropic nature, therefore, such as Eutyches supposed, having two classes of heterogeneous properties, divine and human, is inconceivable. We cannot think of a substance composed of both immaterial and material properties, a substance which is both mind and matter. This is Spinoza’s error. But we can think of a person so composed. We cannot logically conceive of a divine-human nature. It would be like an immaterial-material nature. But a person may be immaterial-material. Man is such.⁹[Note: 9. WS: Dorner (Christian Doctrine 3.280) is Eutychian in asserting that Christ had “a God-human nature” and in denominating “the God-human personality” “a God-humanity.” This is confounding and mixing the natures. A “God-human nature” would be a theanthropic nature. There is a “God-human” or theanthropic person having two natures, but not a “God-human” or theanthropic nature having two sets of properties, divine and human. A “God-humanity,” strictly speaking, would be a divine humanity, that is, a human nature that is divine. But this is very different from a divine-human person. Hooker’s statement is excellent on this point: “Let us set it down for a rule or principle necessary to the plain deciding of all doubts and questions about the union of natures in Christ, that of both natures there is a cooperation often, an association always, but never any mutual participation, whereby the properties of the one are infused into the other” (Polity 5.53). Hooker quotes the following from Gregory of Nyssa and adds that it is “so plain and direct for Eutyches” that he “stands in doubt that the words are his whose name they carry”: “The nature which Christ took weak and feeble from us, by being mingled with deity, became the same which deity is; so that the assumption of our substance into his was like the blending of a drop of vinegar with the huge ocean, whereby although it continue still, yet not with those properties which severed it has; because since the instant of the conjunction all distinction of the one from the other is extinct, and whatsoever we can now conceive of the Son of God is nothing else but mere deity.” It may be objected that the traducianist seems to affirm a nature with two sets of properties when he postulates a “human nature” that is both psychical and physical. But this does not mean that one and the same substance has both psychical and physical properties, but that two distinct and different substances, the psychical and the physical, are combined in a complex unity to which the general title of “human nature” is given. Each substance has its own properties diverse from those of the other. But the two are associated in a complex whole, a common “specific nature,” from which each individual man is derived both mentally and bodily.]