"GOD IN CHRIST"
"But even less than literature and the Church and criticism can theology remain unaffected by this return, as it were, into His very presence. We all feel the distance placed by fifty years of the most radical and penetrating critical discussions between us and the older theology, and as the distance widens, the theology that then reigned grows less credible, because less relevant to living mind. Does this mean that the days of definite theological beliefs are over, or not, rather, that the attempt ought to be made to restate them in more living and relevant terms? One thing seems clear: if a Christian theology means a theology of Christ, at once concerning Him and derived from Him, then to construct one ought, because of our greater knowledge of Him and His history, to be more possible today than at any previous moment. And if this is clear, then the most provisional attempt at per-forming the possible is more dutiful than the selfish and idle acquiescence that would simply leave the old theology and the new criticism standing side by side, unrelated and un-reconciled." - Professor A. M. FAIRBAIRN, D. D., The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 296.
"THE year 1848 was the central point in the life of Horace Bushnell. It was a year of great experiences, great thoughts, great labors." So his wife writes in his "Biography." The outcome was the volume "God in Christ." The order in this category is rightly given. Whatever came from him was first the result of experience. He was not chiefly a speculator in the world of thought, nor a dreamer in a world of visions, but a practical man in a real world. The death of his child five years before had not ceased to bear fruit in revelations of the fatherhood of God. "He took my son to his own more fatherly bosom, and revealed in my bosom the same expectation and faith of his own eternal Son." He read the Life of Madame Guyon, and Upham's "Interior Life," and Fénelon, and yielded somewhat to a mystical wave of thought that was then passing over New England. He touched "quietism," but quickly and by a necessity of his nature reacted from it, yet not without retaining something of its value in the practical world where he belonged and worked. A crisis seems to have been reached in an experience described as follows: -
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"On an early morning of February, his wife awoke, to hear that the light they had waited for, more than they that watch for the morning, had risen indeed. She asked, 'What have you seen?' He replied, 'The gospel.' It came to him at last, after all his thought and study, not as something reasoned out, hut as an inspiration, a revelation from the mind of God himself. The full meaning of his answer he embodied at once in a sermon on 'Christ the Form of the Soul,' from the text, 'Until Christ be formed in you.' The very title of this sermon expresses his spiritually illuminated conception of Christ as the indwelling, formative life of the soul, the new creating power of righteousness for humanity. And this conception was soon after more adequately set forth in his book, 'God in Christ.' That he regarded this as a crisis in his spiritual life is evident from his not infrequent reference to it among his Christian friends."
He regarded this experience as a "personal discovery of Christ, and of God as represented in Him. "To those about him he seemed" a new man, or, rather, the same man with a heavenly investiture." Or, as he himself explained it: "I seemed to pass a boundary. I had never been very legal in my Christian life, but now I passed from those partial seeings, glimpses, and doubts, into a clearer knowledge of God and into his inspirations, which I have never wholly lost. The change was into faith, a sense of the freeness of God, and the ease of approach to Him."
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He at once moved toward expression. The vision must be translated into form, its implications detected, and its reasonableness made clear. The reality and intensity of this experience must not be overlooked as one reads the book to which it gave rise and the criticism that followed. More weight must be attached to his conclusions than if they had been the mere fruit of reflection; he had felt and he had seen, and the force of life was behind his contentions. It was then that he began to define Christian doctrine as "formulated Christian experience."
By a conjunction of events that seem providential, the amplest opportunity was offered for speaking on the subject, which had been thus opened to him. Almost simultaneously invitations carne from the Divinity School in Cambridge, then unqualifiedly Unitarian; from the Theological Seminary at Andover, where the battle with Unitarianism had been fought, and from the Divinity School in New Haven, to give the addresses at their graduating exercises. Bushnell promptly accepted these invitations, and thus reopened the question that had indeed not ceased to be discussed. But he will not enter into the wide arena as a debater of the old fashion; he will go as a mediator, if at all. He cannot be understood at this period without keeping in mind the spiritual elevation and intensity that possessed him. He had seen a heavenly vision, and his obedience to it was full and imperative. This experience subdued the
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polemic and revived the "vein of comprehensiveness" which was more congenial to him. He understood the relation to the two parties into which "Christian Nurture" had brought him, and stood between them, hoping to win the blessing of the peacemaker. In a letter to Dr. Bartol, written in 1847, when under accusation of heresy, he said: "I consider myself to be an orthodox man, and yet I think I can state my orthodox faith in such a way that no serious Unitarian will conflict with me, or feel that I am beyond the terms of reason."1
The first of the sermons forming this book was preached as a condo ad clerum, in the North now the United Church in New Haven, before the General Association of Connecticut, which had suggested to him as a subject the "Divinity of Christ." 2
As this discussion became the ground for a large part of the criticism he afterward encountered, we give its main points.
1 This was before Rev. Theodore Parker had preached the sermon, at West
Roxbury, on "The Transient and the Permanent in Religion," which
would have led Bushnell to speak less hopefully.
2 The writer, then a student in college, heard the sermon, but recalls little except the appearance of the preacher and the rhythmic music of his voice. His delivery was without stress or passion, but full of quiet dignity, and serious to the last degree, almost a solitary meditation on his absorbing theme. But the writer remembers two remarks made at the close of the ser-vice; one from a saintly woman, ''They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him." Her plaint found an echo soon after in the pamphlet, " What does Dr. Bushnell Mean?" The other remark came from a theological student, " I could kiss the soul of Dr. Bushnell." What was darkness to one was light to the other.
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Taking as a text 1 John i. 2, he states that his purpose is to show that "the reality of Christ is God," and that the term "was manifested" covers and contains this fact. He defines the divinity of Christ as follows: "He is in such a sense God, or God manifested, that the unknown term of his nature, that which we are most in doubt of, and about which we are least capable of any positive information, is the human" (p. 123). It should be stated at the outset that this definition, which has been and is still more criticised than any other made by Bushnell in connection with the trinity, was due in part to the fact that his chief perplexity as to the person of Christ grew out of the orthodox doctrine of two distinct or distinctly active natures.
The tritheism implied in three metaphysical personalities in the essential Godhead was equally perplexing. In order to escape from both, he merged the personality of Christ in the Father, and so escaped the first difficulty. By refusing to penetrate the interior nature of God he escaped the other. His method may not be correct, and the vagueness of his treatment of the humanity of Christ raises the suspicion that it is not, but it is easy to see why he followed it: he saw at the time no other way of escape.
After quoting the classical texts on the subject, he infers that the sinless-ness of Jesus "must be because the divine is so far uppermost in him as to suspend the proper manhood of his person. He
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does not any longer act the man; practically speaking, the man sleeps in him. He acts the divine, not the human, and the only true reality in him, as far as moral conduct is concerned, is the divine" (p. 126).
He insists with passionate reiteration that "We want Jesus as divine, not as human. . . . God is what we want, not a man; God revealed through man, that we may see his heart, and hide our guilty nature in the bosom of his love; God so identified with our race, as to signify the possible union and eternal identification of our nature with his" (p. 127).
He sees no difficulty in maintaining the essential divinity of Christ "till we begin to speculate or dogmatize about the humanity, or find ourselves in contact with the more commonly accepted doc-trine of trinity" (p. 129).
This accepted doctrine he discusses at length, stating it as follows: -
"It seems to be agreed by the orthodox, that there are three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in the divine nature. These three persons, too, are generally regarded as belonging, not to the machina Dei, by which God is revealed, but to the very esse, the substantial being of God, or the interior contents of his being. They are declared to be equal; all to be infinite; all to be the same in substance; all to be one. ... A very large portion of the Christian teachers hold three real living persons in the interior nature of God; that
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is, three consciousnesses, wills, hearts, understandings " (p. 130).i
He contends that this is contrary to "the very idea of a person; as well hold that three units are one unit." After describing the way in which person is used, he infers that the result is "three vital personal Gods, and back of them, as a ground of unity, an Inorganic Deity" which "leaves no unity at all." Following Schleiermacher, he contends that under a metaphysical tri-personality "the proper deity of Christ is not held." "He is begotten, sent, supported, directed by the Father, in such a sense as really annihilates his deity."
Having thus stated his objections to the orthodox view on the ground of its tritheism, he raises the question, "How shall we resolve the divinity or deity of Christ . . . so as to make it consist with the proper unity of God?" The tenor of his answer is contained in the following passage: -
"The trinity we seek will be a trinity that results of necessity from the revelation of God to man. I do not undertake to fathom the interior being of God, and tell how it is composed. That is a matter too high for me, and I think for us all. I only insist that, assuming the strictest unity and even simplicity of God's nature, He could not be
1 The writer of the series of letters in the New York Evangelist, reprinted in 1849 under the title: " What does Dr. Bushnell Mean? " denies that any " Trinitarian ever said or believed that the three persons of the Godhead are one person." The denial overlooks Bushnell's full discussion of the meaning of person, which sets the charge in a different light.
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efficiently or sufficiently revealed to us without evolving a trinity of persons, such as we meet in the Scriptures. These persons or personalities are the dramatis persone of revelation, and their reality is measured by what of the infinite they convey in these finite forms. As such, they bear, on the one hand, a relation to God, who is to be conveyed or imported into knowledge; on the other, they are related to our human capacities and wants, being that presentation of God which is necessary to make Him a subject of thought, or bring Him within the discourse of reason; that also which is necessary to produce mutuality, or terms of conversableness, between us and Him, and pour his love most effectually into our feeling " (p. 187).
This conception is enforced by showing the impossibility of knowing God as the Absolute, and insisting on "a trinity, and incarnation, and other like devices of revelation" as the only means of knowing Him. " It is only through relations, contrasts, actions, and reactions that we come into a knowledge of God." He attributes to God "a capacity of self-expression, - a generative power of form," by which he can " represent himself in the finite. . . . This is the Logos, the Word, elsewhere called the 'form of God.'" As "the human form of our race . . . God will live himself into the acquaintance and biographic history of the world." Here, of course, he enters into the Sabellian atmosphere. Having stated the proper divinity of Christ, he proceeds to discuss "the dif-
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ficulties created by the supposed relations of the divine to the human in the person of Christ." He meets them through the doctrine of the Logos, as God puts himself under limitations in creation, so "God may act a human personality with-out being measured by it" as in other created forms. After much discussion of this point, he denies "two distinct substances" in Christ, and contends that" the reality of Christ is what he expresses of God" (p. 156).
In respect to the obedience of Christ he makes a significant remark indicating his Sabellian tendency: "Man obeys for what obedience is, but the subject obedient state of Christ is accepted for what it conveys, or expresses." This remark lets in the Grotian theory of the atonement, to which the Sabellian theory of the person of Christ easily lends itself, both theories being based on expression. "And so it may be that Christ sanctifies the law that we have broken, erecting it again, in its original sacredness and majesty, before all mankind" (p. 161). His discussion brings him face to face with the passibility of God, which he accepts, though acknowledging, "the mystery of the divine-human must remain a mystery." Still, he gravitates toward an affirmative answer to his question, "Whether God, by a mysterious union with the human, can so far employ the element of suffering as to make it a vehicle for the expression of his own grace and tenderness " (p. 162).
At last he comes to a distinct and full statement of his conception of Christ: -
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" Perhaps it may be imagined that I intend, in holding this view of the incarnation, or the person of Christ, to deny that he had a human soul, or anything human but a human body. I only deny that his human soul, or nature, is to be spoken of, or looked upon, as having a distinct subsistence, so as to live, think, learn, worship, suffer, by itself. Disclaiming all thought of denying, or affirming anything as regards the interior composition or construction of his person, I insist that he stands before us in simple unity, one person, the divine-human, re-presenting the qualities of his double parentage as the Son of God and the son of Mary. I do not say that he is composed of three elements, a divine person, a human soul, and a human body; nor of these that they are distinctly three, or absolutely one. I look upon him only in the external way; for he comes to be viewed externally in what may be expressed through him, and not in any other way. As to any metaphysical or speculative difficulties involved in the union of the divine and the human, I dismiss them all, by observing that Christ is not here for the sake of something accomplished in his metaphysical or psychological interior, but for that which appears and is outwardly signified in his life. And it is certainly competent for God to work out the expression of his own feeling, and his union to the race, in what way most approves itself to him. Regarding Christ in this exterior, and, as it were, aesthetic way, he is that Holy Thing in which my God is brought to me, brought even
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down to a fellow relation with me. I shall not call him two, I shall not decompose him and label off his doings, one to the credit of his divinity, and another to the credit of his humanity, I shall receive him, In the simplicity of faith, as my one Lord and Saviour, nor any the less so that he is my brother " (p. 163).
After meeting the objection that this view makes Christ "too exclusively divine," he surprises the reader by putting in a criticism of the Sabellian theory as representing that "God is the Father in virtue of his creation and government of the world," Bushnell contends that he is not the Father " as one God," but that he is so named as incidental to the central fact or mystery of the incarnation. So far as Sabellianism is a theory of the mode of the divine existence, Bushnell is not a Sabellian, for he will not enter that mystery; but so far as it stands for a self-expressing power of God in the Son who thus reveals the Father, he is a Sabellian, he will not go farther into deity than the Logos. But this refusal does not relieve him from the designation. The distinction he makes cuts the ancient heresy in two, one part of which becomes increasingly defensible under modern thought, and largely stands for the doctrine.
If asked whether he means simply "to assert a modal trinity, or three modal persons," he says: "I must answer obscurely, just as I answered in regard to the humanity of Christ. If I say that they are modal only, as the word is commonly used,
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I may deny more than I am justified in denying, or am required to deny, by the ground I have taken. I will only say that the trinity, or the three persons, are given to me for the sake of their external expression, not for the internal investigation of their contents. If I use them rationally or wisely, then I shall use them according to their object. I must not intrude upon their interior nature, either by assertion or denial. They must have their reality to me in what they express when taken as the wording forth of God. Perhaps I shall come nearest to the simple, positive idea of the trinity here maintained if I call it an INSTRUMENTAL TRINITY, and the persons INSTRUMENTAL PERSONS " (p. 175).
If required to answer whether the three persons are eternal, or only occasional and to be discontinued, he says: "Undoubtedly the distinction of the Word, or the power of self-representation in God thus denominated, is eternal. And in this we have a permanent ground of possibility for the threefold impersonation called trinity. Accordingly, if God has been eternally revealed, or revealing himself to created minds, it is likely always to have been and always to be as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Consequently, it may always be in this manner that we shall get our impressions of God, and have our communion with Him" (p. 177).
He grants, however, that St. Paul (1 Cor. xv. 28) discourages this view. The trend of his thought evidently is towards a trinity of expression only,
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leaving room for a possible corresponding basis in the divine nature. He will not try to find intimations of an analogous triad in St. John or St. Paul or Plato: "Let us rather baptize our over-curious spirit into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and teach it quietly to rest in what of God's infinite nature it may there receive. We talk of simplicity, often, when upon this matter of trinity, - as we rightly may. Oh, that we had simplicity enough to let God be God, and the revelation He gives us, a revelation! Neither trying to make Him a finite person after our own human model, nor ourselves three, that we may bring our humanity up to solve the mysteries of his absolute, infinite substance! There is no so true simplicity as that which takes the practical at its face, uses instruments as instruments, however complex and mysterious, and refuses to be cheated of the uses of life by an over-curious questioning of that which God has given for its uses" (p. 179). We have in these words a repetition of that cry of his heart when undergoing his first struggle with the subject, "My heart wants the Father; my heart wants the Son; my heart wants the Holy Ghost." However much he may speculate on the question, and he could keep pace with the most diligent, in that play of mind, there are two things that go before and invest all his thinking; he will make room for nothing that does not ally itself with experience; and he will not let go the clue that connects him with nature in its larger sense.
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The incarnation is simply "another outgoing from the Absolute into the human;" it has analogies in nature that may be more than such under the light of the Logos, a reality large enough, to suggest a universal law. His theory, whether orthodox or not, is not weak, nor is it without a vast amount of substance. If he does not plant the trinity on the interior nature of the Deity, he puts it into the Logos, in which and through which is all of God that is known or can be known. Back of it lies the Eternal Mystery.
Bushnell refused to be called a Sabellian, and yet he is so named, and not wholly without reason. The difference is real, but not enough to relieve him of the imputation. Sabellianism asserts a trinity of manifestations, and denies that God exists eternally as a triad of persons. Bushnell assents to the first, but, as we have said, declines to make any assertion, positive or negative, in respect to the second. God may or may not exist as a trinity of persons, but He has the power of expressing himself in three forms, and in how many other forms we do not know; it is a mystery into which he will not enter. But the substance of Sabellianism lies in its positive assertion, with which he was in accord. Bushnell, however, should have full credit for the amount of meaning he put into his refusal to dogmatize as to the interior nature of God. He would not touch that mystery, simply be-cause it is a mystery and beyond conception. There was nothing concerning the Godhead which the over-
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brave theologians of New England did not attempt to make clear on the strength of a few passages of Scripture, doctrinal traditions, and a dialectic framed to meet certain conceived necessities of the divine government. Bushnell's entire career, more even than he knew, was a protest against these ways of thinking and reasoning. More also than he knew was he leading the way into a habit of thought that is becoming daily more imperative, namely, a humble and careful search after grounds of belief. While he found no reason for asserting an eternal triad in the divine being, he saw many reasons for asserting a Logos, an eternal self-expressing power in God, which appeared as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That is, he was wide open to the growing and already dominant conception of the universe as a manifestation of the immanent God. Under this conception he found full room for a trinity of manifestation and expression, confident that a truth which embraced the universe was sufficient to cover the revelation of God in humanity. In an article on "The Christian Trinity a Practical Truth," not in answer to criticism, but to explain himself, and to state some change of opinion, he goes over the subject again with great care. He does not accept the trinity because it has uses, but accepting it, he finds uses.
"In this respect, the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, practically accepted and freely used, with never a question about the speculative nature of the mystery, with never a doubt of God's rigid
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and perfect unity, will be found to answer exactly the great problem of the practical life of religion; viz., how to keep alive the profoundest, most adequate sense of God's infinity, and, at the same time, the most vivid and in tensest sense of his social and mutual relationship as a person." (Building- Eras, p. 122.)
The trinity is needed first, "to save the dimensions or practical infinity of God, consistently with his personality." His object here is to escape pantheism, and also to show that Unitarianism does not cover the infinity of God by its "presentation of a Universal Father, one person." The second use is summed up in the phrase "an economic Trinity;" that is, on account of its practical relation to our character and our state as sinners; it is "the instrument and coefficient of a supernatural grace or redemptive economy." He is careful to state that these are not reasons for accepting the trinity, but having accepted it, he finds them. From this point he goes a long way toward assenting to the Nicene formula, but he is always retreating into his theory of language, and falling back on his ingrained sense of the universe as an expression of God; he cannot quite put his new wine into old bottles.
The discourse at Andover on "Dogma and Spirit" consisted in a statement of the causes that led to the schism in the churches by which the two parties became known as Orthodox and Unitarian, and in a plea for reunion. He protests against
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suffering opinion to pass into dogma under the sanction of authority, and contends that the gospel, being a manifestation of God through the medium of expression, "requires for an inlet, not reason, or logic, or a scientific power, so much as a right sensibility."
The chief significance of the address lay in the fact that it was a flag of truce raised while the battle was at its height, and neither side had yet showed signs of weakening or of approaching de-feat. Nothing of the spirit that pervaded the ranks on either side found its way into his words. He covered both with explanatory reasons, and lifted them into a region of the spirit where dogma and denial of dogma sink, not out of existence, but into subservience. A single quotation gives the keynote to the whole discourse, and explains why one side grew bitterer in its criticism, and why the other side hesitated over accepting concessions that were attended with strictures so severe.
"The manner in which dogmatism necessitates division may be well enough illustrated by the mournful separation which has taken place in the New England churches. Had we been embodied in the simple love of God under some such badge, for example, as the Apostles' Creed, it is very probable to me that the causes of the division would never have existed. But we had an article, which asserted a metaphysical trinity, and this made the assertion of a metaphysical unity inevitable; nay, more, even desirable. So we had a
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theory of atonement, another of depravity, another of regeneration, or the ingeneration of character, which required the appearance, so to speak, of antagonistic theories. Our theological culture, meantime, was so limited, on one side, that we took what was really our own opinion only, to "be the unalterable truth of God; on the other, the side of the revolt, too limited to perceive the insufficiency of dogma as a fruit of the mere understanding, too limited not to take the opposite, with the same seriousness and totality of conviction. On this sidle they assumed the sufficiency of opinions and of speculative comprehension, in a more unrestrained sense than had been done before. They even fell to the work of constructing a religion "wholly within the moulds of natural reason itself, admitting nothing transcendent in the reach of faith, or the manifestation of the life of God. They asserted liberty, as they must to vindicate their revolt, producing, however, meantime, the most intensely human, and in that sense, the most intensely opinionative religion ever invented, under the name of Christianity.
"Have they no reason, together with us, to take up now, at last, some suspicion of the insufficiency of dogma and of all mere speculative opinions formed within the life of nature? May we not all "begin to see that the ministration of life is somewhat broader, deeper, more sufficient, more divine? And what if we all, feeling our deep want, and sorrowing over the shame our human wisdom has
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cost us, should come back together to the simple Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, there to enter into peace through the blood of Jesus, and there to abide in the fullness of love and brother-hood. Or if we should kneel down together be-fore Him, and say, ' I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,' and go on thus, to ' the life everlasting,' what invisible minister of God, hanging as a listener about us, would not join us, at the close, and say ' AMEN.'
"Perhaps it may be too soon to look for any so beautiful result as this. But it is not too soon for us to be setting the human in the place of the human, the divine in the place of the divine; to be drawing, all, towards simplicity; to pray more, and expect more light to come of the Life; to be more in love, and less in opinion; oftener to bless, and as much less often to judge " (pp. 338-340).
The discourse at Cambridge on "The Atonement" was afterward expanded into "The Vicarious Sacrifice," which will be considered farther on.