Bible Dictionaries
Individuality (2)

Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament

Search for…

Enter query below:

or

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

Prev Entry
Individuality

Next Entry
Indolence

Resource Toolbox

Print Article

INDIVIDUALITY (of Christ).—Regarded simply as a historical character, or as a subject of a visible career among men, Christ undoubtedly presents as distinct an aspect of individuality, or concrete reality, as can be affirmed of any historical personage. On the other hand, when we pass from the historical point of view to that of Christological construction, we can hardly fail to raise the question whether it is possible to escape from qualifying the category of individuality as applied to Christ on the side of His humanity. Proceeding from the latter point of view, and deferring to the Catholic postulates respecting the union of our Lord’s manhood with the pre-existent Logos or Son of God, we are confronted with the task of explaining how a real concrete manhood can be taken into veritable union with the Logos without effecting a heterogeneous and double personality. The task is a very difficult one, and in wrestling with it a temptation easily arises to strip the manhood of concreteness or individuality, and thus to accommodate it more fully to the demands of personal unity. But a resort to this alternative has its own difficulty, and that by no means a slight one, since the thought of an Incarnation which means the union of the Son of God with a mutilated manhood, or with a mere semblance of manhood, is far from being satisfactory. Indeed, there is little hazard in affirming that the mind and heart of Christendom would sooner tolerate an element of unresolved dualism in the person of Christ, than sacrifice in any appreciable degree the reality and perfection of His manhood.

1. Among the prominent theories involving a sacrifice of this kind the Apollinarian is the most explicit and intelligible. By its supposition that the Logos took the place of the rational soul in the Redeemer, so that the Incarnation involved only the assumption of a human body with its principle of animal life, it evidently simplifies very much the problem of Christ’s person. But the simplification takes place at too great a cost. The immutable Logos clothed in a fleshly garment is obviously no proper subject for temptation or for a real implication in human experiences generally. He cannot be brought into accord with the Gospel representations, except by resort to an artificial, Docetic interpretation. As lacking the most essential factor of manhood, He is destitute of the most apprehensible bond of brotherhood and ground of companionship. In short, the advantage which pertains to the Apollinarian theory, on the score of simplicity and intelligibility, is overmatched by the disadvantage which it incurs by its incompatibility with Gospel facts and by its abridgment of Christ’s competency to enter into the life of men, and thus to fulfil the complete office of mediation. In effect it abolishes the Son of Man; for the archetypal manhood, which Apollinaris supposed to be resident in the eternal Logos, is a far off thing in comparison with the concrete reality which naturally is present to our thought when we use the term ‘manhood.’

2. A second historic theory which has a distinct bearing upon our theme is that of Monophysitism. This differs from Apollinarism in its formal acknowledgment that by the incarnation of the Son of God is to be understood the assumption of a complete human nature. This acknowledgment, however, turns out to be rather verbal than substantial. The Monophysite assertion of a single nature in the incarnated Christ involved the compounding of the human nature in Him with the Divine; and this, in connexion with the vast preponderance assigned to the Divine in post-Nicene thinking, meant virtually the reduction of the human to the rank of an accident, a secondary and contingent property or group of properties, superinduced upon a Divine subject. Such an outcome, it is needless to say, runs very close to the submergence of the human side of Christ. It leaves no place for the thought of a real ethical manhood; for a proper ethical character is not predicable of a selfless accident. And with this deficit is conjoined a serious metaphysical difficulty, since fundamental thinking insists upon a relation of commensurability between attributes and their subject, and does not approve the notion that attributes appropriate to a finite personality can be made properly to inhere in an infinite subject.

3. A theory favoured with more orthodox associations than the Monophysite, but having a somewhat questionable bearing on the Christological problem, is the theory of the impersonality of Christ’s manhood, or more specifically, the theory that His manhood, being devoid of a personality of its own, obtained from the first moment of subsistence its personal subject in the Ego of the pre-existent Logos (the so-called doctrine of enhypostasis). This theory was broached by Leontius in the 6th cent., was advocated by John of Damascus in the 8th cent., and has had in later times considerable currency among theologians of reputed orthodoxy, though never receiving any distinct œcumenical sanction. As handled by John of Damascus, the notion of the impersonality of Christ’s manhood cannot be said to have been suitably reconciled with the full reality of that manhood. While formally he assigned to the Redeemer the full complement of human faculties, he felt obliged in one connexion or another to deny to them their characteristic forms of activity. It would not do, as he conceived, to admit progress in knowledge on the part of Christ, as this would contravene the truth that the hypostatic union of the human with the Divine in Him was complete from the start. For a like reason it was considered inadmissible to impute real prayer to Him. Divinity needs nothing, and a humanity that is perfectly united with Divinity shares in its sufficiency. In relation to the will also the Damascene considered it necessary to retrench from the proper human mode. The logical issue of his representations is to deny to the human will in Christ all power of initiative, and to reduce it entirely to the office of a ‘medium through which the Logos moved the man Jesus.’ Quite possibly John of Damascus does not afford the best specimen of what can be done in Christological construction with the notion that the human nature of Christ, being without personality of its own, derived such personal character as pertained to it from its relation to the person of the Logos. But certainly it is difficult in the light of his exposition to discover the real Son of Man. The image of a genuine and living manhood does not stand forth in his representation of the Redeemer.

It has sometimes been concluded that a special advantage belongs to the doctrine of the impersonality of the human nature of Christ, as helping to explain the atoning efficacy of His work. The inference is made that human nature in this character is not a concrete, limited entity, such as is the human nature of the individual man, but rather generic or universal. It is then argued that Christ in perfecting His own human nature sanctified human nature in general. Again, it is claimed that, in virtue of His literal community with men, His doing was in the proper sense a transaction within, as well as for, the whole body of humanity. As an eminently spiritual writer has expressed the thought, ‘every man was a part of Him, and He felt the sins of every man, not in sympathy, but in sorrow and abhorrence’ (Thomas Erskine). To such representations it is legitimate to reply, that what needs to be sanctified is not human nature in itself, but myriads of human beings; that the sanctification of human nature in Christ cannot rationally be conceived to have any immediate effect upon its sanctification elsewhere, inasmuch as human nature in Christ cannot be regarded as a stuff out of which men universally are fashioned; and that a generic or universal human nature belongs purely to the realm of the conceptual, and cannot possibly have any place in the sphere of real being. In short, the line of representation in question rests upon a fiction which modern philosophy for the most part has discountenanced—the fiction of the real existence of universal.

4. While it is impossible to be satisfied with any one of these historic theories, as respects its bearing on the integrity or concrete reality of Christ’s manhood, it is far from easy to offer a definite substitute which is not open to exception. Indeed, an attempt at strict construction is certain to miscarry. The extraordinary as such rebels against complete elucidation, and by supposition the union of the Divine and the human in Christ is an extraordinary fact. Any one who accepts the Incarnation must admit that the individuality of Christ’s manhood was specially conditioned; but equally, any one who admits the extraordinary character of the Incarnation must grant the impossibility of giving a full explanation of the mode and measure of this special conditioning. We cannot fully construe our own relation to the Divine; how then should we expect to gain clear insight into the relation of the human to the Divine in the person of our Lord? Probably the best that can be done is to form an ideal picture of the normal relation of perfected manhood to the Divine, and then beyond this to postulate the mystery of a special bond between Christ’s manhood and His Divinity. The forming of the ideal picture will be distinctly helpful. For, having clearly apprehended the great truth that manhood loses nothing of its proper character by intimate union with the Divine, that the human spirit is never more itself than when it is possessed by and insphered in the Divine Spirit, that freedom is never so complete as when the human will by its own consent passes under the absolute direction of the Divine will, we shall be prepared to believe that manhood in Christ suffered no retrenchment by its extraordinary union with the Divine, but rather is to be accounted the full-orbed specimen of manhood as respects ethical worth and all tender and beautiful traits.

Taken in a popular sense, rather than in relation to Christological theory, the subject of individuality suggests a discussion of those characteristics which may be regarded as specially distinctive of Christ as a historic personage. This discussion, however, is reserved for the art. Uniqueness.

Literature.—J. A. Dorner, History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ; Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma; R. L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation; John Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Lectures xiii.–xv.; Contentio Veritatis, ch. ii.; Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine.

Henry C. Sheldon.