The Divine-Human Archetype

By way of introduction to the following Division, I record a lay of Zion sung by a congregation no longer known in Jerusalem, whose memorable history (God willing) I shall relate elsewhere :—

They told me that I was albumen:
How was I then distressed!
How did I despair,
Because spirit and soul were gone!

Then Jesus Christ found me,

And gave me intelligence once more;

I know surely that He is,

And that He does not forget me:

I know now who I am.

I am the Father's child,

And Jesus is leading me

Whither all His people are

Whom He has purchased with His blood.—

I am not albumen.

THE DIVINE-HUMAN ARCHETYPE.
Sec. L

If we were writing a general instead of a biblical psychology, we should require to begin phenomenally, not rationalistically; i.e. we should be compelled to seek to advance in an analytical manner from the psychical phenomena to their reasons, and to the nature of the soul. But biblical psychology is perfectly justified in proceeding synthetically: for its material is not now to be discovered for the first time, but it is already given; and wherever it occurs, Scripture labours not according to the manner of human science from below upwards, but sets forth the world of phenomena as an announcement of revelation, in the light of divine facts. Therefore as, when we considered the primeval and natural psychical condition of man, we proceeded from the godlike archetype, " for man was created after the image of God," so now, when we wish to consider the new spiritual life of the redeemed man, we proceed from the divinehuman archetype, the person of the Redeemer: "For whom God did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren" (Rom. viii. 29).

In the original position of man, his spirit and his soul were the exact image of God; the former of His triune nature, and the latter of His sevenfold doxa. Both were God's likeness, not merely in their constitution, but also according to their life; for their background was the presence of God's love, by which they were maintained and pervaded. Then, when man fell from the good beginning into which he had been created, spirit and soul did not indeed cease to be God's likeness according to their constitution, for their substance remained unchanged, but they were so no longer according to their life; for their substantially undiminished powers had fallen out of the standing of peace, into that of the Turba, which is the consequence of sin, and the effect of the wrath aroused thereby. How it happened that this state of self-corruption was transferred by inheritance, and could be again made good through no moral act of man, we have already seen in Div. III. Sec. V. But even although absolutely no reasons could be discovered to make this transference intelligible, it is still a fact which confirms itself to the self-knowledge of every individual, in all times and peoples, even to this day. And how radical, how physically and ethically profound, is, at the same time, the ruin consequent upon the fall, is shown by the fact, that even the might of redemption accomplishes its reversal no otherwise than as the progressive effect of a lengthened process, which begins within the sphere of this world's life, passes through death, and is not perfected until the resurrection.

Nothing less was necessary than that, to the primitive Beginning perverted by sin and devoured with wrath, with its development to death, a new beginning of similar creative intensity should be applied; and that, by means of a progressive perfecting of this new beginning, all the mischief wherein the primitive beginning had resulted should be finally abrogated. Any ethical deed of man's own by himself was incapable of accomplishing this; and still it could not be onesidedly an act of God's own, since a free nature such as man's cannot be acted upon by compulsion, like a machine. There must thus have been a spontaneous act of God, which might be at the same time a spontaneous act of humanity also. By a transaction of the internal divine nature, which would at the same time be a transaction of the history of the internal nature of man, God's wrath upon humanity must be overcome, and God's love must again be realized,—thoughts which assuredly could not originate in us, if we did not know that God is a tripersonal being; and which would not originate in our minds, if the mystery of the everlasting counsel of grace had not become actually revealed in the fulness of times.

If God were not a tri-personal being, an Incarnation of God would be absolutely.inconceivable. But being tri-personal, there can be conceived as well an event which is reciprocally accomplished within the Godhead, tending to change the divine wrath on humanity into love, as also a self-surrender of one of the three persons into humanity, without the two others renouncing on that account their supra-mundane glory. This self-surrender, indeed, would never be such, that by it the unity of the associated Trinity would be sundered, or the eternal nature of the Godhead, as it is in itself, be changed. But either result occurs in this case as little as it does generally in God's manifold relation to the world. The nature of God remains in every multiplicity of His revelation and operation, ad extra, always the same immutably in Himself.

This unchangeable self-identity will be found the more conceivable, if we remember that in the history of the world, and especially of humanity, nothing is realized in time which had not been from eternity in the consciousness and will of the Godhead. This is the case also with redemption. It is the eternal counsel of the Godhead. Its realization is only the temporal completion of that which had been willed from eternity. The world to be created stands eternally before God the Triune, in the mirror of His wisdom (yid. Div. I. Sec. II.), not without the manifestation to Him at the same time of the evil that is to usurp power over it, as something to be overcome, and to be eradicated by the redemption. But it so appears to Him, in that He regards the world, and especially humanity, in Christ (Col. i. 16), i.e. in the Son of God, who, having become man, will appease the future wrath, and change it into love. If the mystery of redemption had not been from all eternity hidden in God TM irdvra KTiaavri (Eph. iii. 9), the world would never have come to creation at all.

Moreover, let it now be considered that, the world being created, the incarnation of the Son so little contradicts the relation of the Trinity, that rather the three persons work together for the redemption of humanity, in a manner which is the historical counterpart of their eternal reciprocal relation. That the Mediator in the Godhead becomes also the Mediator between God and man; that the Father sends the Son, and begets Him into humanity; that the Son of the Father, as Godman, is unchangeably turned to the Father, and returns back to Him; that from the Father, through the exalted Son, the Spirit proceeds and descends;—these are all images of the eternal relation of the Trinity, in the history, that is encompassed by eternity, of the realized counsel of redemption.

Moreover, this history is infinitely deep and sacred earnest! In consequence of sin, God's wrath, the wrath of the Triune against humanity, is enkindled. Even the Son of God, as such, cannot quench this wrath; for it is indeed His own wrath: it is the sacred wrath of the Godhead. But in that He becomes man, and opposes to this wrath a holy human life, over which the wrathful will has no power; and in that He subjects this holy life for humanity, which is His flesh and blood, to the effects of the wrath enkindled in the divine nature, and thence outwardly in the world of spirits and of man, so that this wrath is given Him to drink, even to the last dregs of the cup of death,—He suffers this wrath in a manner propitiatory and meritorious; and thus establishes, instead of the beginning of good that had been lost in wrath, a new beginning, which is rooted in love regained, and no more restrained by wrath. And it is the sacred loving will of the Triune Godhead itself which thus equalizes itself in the way discovered from eternity, with the not less holy will of wrath, and quenches the not less holy fire of wrath of the judicially aroused doxa. The love of God to humanity, as of the Deviser of the work of reconciliation, and the love of the God-man to humanity, as of the Mediator of the work of reconciliation, mutually moved towards one another, and broke through the wrath between them. That these two loves, the eternal love and the historical love, plunged into humanity,—the atoning enduring love, and the decreed delivering love,—have joined hands in all forms by breaking through the wrath, is the fact that has accomplished our reconciliation.

But these are truths, whose biblical and systematic establishment is not a problem of theological psychology, but of dogmatics. On the other hand, it is psychology which has to offer to dogmatics the knowledge that is required for the understanding of the human essential constitution of the Godman; and, moreover, it is incumbent upon it itself, within certain limits to bring the divine-human internal nature of the Redeemer to our comprehension. For, first of all, this divinehuman internal nature of the Redeemer is in itself a phenomenon just as enigmatical as it is full of solutions of the enigmas; a phenomenon which puts the fundamental view arrived at by psychology, to a proof from whose decisive reaction it cannot withdraw itselfand further,'without a glimpse into the mystery of that man in whom was realized an originally new heginning of humanity, no psychological glimpse into the life of regeneration is possible.

It is confessedly one of the greatest problems of the later theology,—the most sacred and the most deserving of inquiry, in proportion to the pervading impression of true humanity and of undivided unity which the person of Christ produces, as it is presented to us in the Scripture,—to abolish the contradictory dualism beyond which the church view of the God-man has not been able to attain, in such a manner that, without a relapse into long vanquished errors, the substance of the Catholic dogma may be maintained.² That will be the true solution which, firstly, holds fast the divine-human double nature of Christ, without assuming, in contradiction to the eternally unchangeable self-identity of God, a changing of the divine nature into the human; which, secondly, acquiesces in the position in its scriptural truth, that in Christ, the Logos is the personifying nature, and the humanity the assumed nature; and which, thirdly, succeeds in showing how the Logos, without ceasing to be what it eternally is, could nevertheless make itself the subject of a

¹ Therefore may be mentioned the title of a book by Jac. Carpov, 1738, which otherwise is a feeble and valueless performance of Wolfianism melted down with orthodoxy: Psychologia Sacratissima hoc est de anima Chrisli hominis in se spectata commentatio theologico-philosophica. Theod. Kriiger, in his Theologia MoraUs (1747), says with reference to this work of Carpov, p. 232: Quamquam psychologia Christi principiis rationis non repugnet, transcendit tauien eandem, et non proponenda est meris sermonibus, quos docet humana sapientia, sed quos potissimum Spiritus sanctus docet, spiritualia spiritualibus comparans. The business of biblical-psychological inquiry in this region is acknowledged even by Beck, Clirislliche Lehr-Wissenschaft, i. 481.

² What is taught here, according to Brbmel (Kliefoth-Mejers Kirchlich, Zeitschr. 1857, p. 144), Hengstenberg, Schenkel, Strobel (Luth. Zeitschr. 1857, p. 760), Philippi (Glauhenskhre, iv. i. 369), by making the Redeemer actually a merely pure man, overthrows the manifestly great mystery of salvation. These all proceed upon the supposition, that the Ix>gos, if He surrender His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, ceases to be God. But this assumption contradicts the declarations of the God-man Himself, who in the Gospels disclaims for Himself these attributes, and still does not thereby disclaim the divine nature. The historical Christ is of more importance to me than the unhistorical defenders of His divinity, and the bugbears of their bungling conclusions. The objections

being as truly human as everywhere meets us in the Christ of the Gospels. The great question is this: How could the Logos so renounce Himself as to surrender His eternal doxa; and still more, as to surrender His eternal mode of being, and the attributes flowing from Him to the world, of omnipotence, of omniscience, and of omnipresence, without surrendering the identity of His being 1 The fact in question is established. The incarnate Logos is not in possession of the eternal doxa, for He looks back longingly after it (John xvii. 5). He is not omniscient, for He knows not, as He himself says, the day and the hour of the end (Mark xiii. 32). He is not almighty, for power over all things is given to Him, as He says, after His resurrection (Matt. xxviii. 18). He is not omnipresent, for He ascended up, that He might fill all things (Eph. iv. 10). If these three statements be merely referred to Him as man, the unity of the person is rent by inward contradiction, and the reality of the human nature is changed into an appearance. It must therefore be shown ¹ how the Logos might truly and actually surrender the eternal doxa, and these attributes of His divine manner of being, without nevertheless surrendering His divine

advanced even by Dorner against the notion subsequently set forth of the Kenosis, from the unchangeableness of God, deserve an examination which cannot here be undertaken. We observe here, in general: (1) That Dorner himself reduces the immutability to " ethical self-identity," i.e. the divine life of love, willing and maintaining itself; (2) that he himself teaches that the incarnation is not merely an act of God, as others are, but that it brings with itself a new being of God Himself in the world,—a being which has come into existence through God's act, and which previously only existed potentially, or in counsel; (3) but that his own view, according to which the unio naturarum in Christ did not become a full unio personalis till His exaltation, prejudices the truth of the incarnation, and is irreconcilable with the Incarnate One's own declarations, which everywhere express a perfect two-sided divine human self-consciousness, and thus drive him to another solution of the problem. We shall only severally reply to a few objections, especially concerning us, in what follows.

¹ There is found no inclination thereto in theosophy. "Hear dear reason," says J. Bohme, in the Book of the three Principles, xxiii. 8: "when the Word of God became man in the womb of Mary, was it not then at the same time also high above the stars? When it was at Nazareth, was it not also at Jerusalem, and everywhere in all thrones?" To a similar effect runs the magnificent passage of Melito, "Whilst He wandered on earth. He filled also the heavens," etc., in Cureton, Spicilegium Sacrum, pp. 52-54.

being, of which the doxa is the radiance, and of which these attributes are the energy.

It has been shown (Div. IV. Sec. IV. and VII.) wherein subsists the fundamental assumption of this possibility. The essence of the absolute personality consists in infinite, absolutely limitless self-determination; and the root of the essence of the Godhead chiefly, and of every one of the three persons in particular, (as, representatively, of the human spirit,) is the will which is related to the actualized self-consciousness as precedent. Thus God's Son, without foregoing Himself, might withdraw Himself to this lowest basis—this radical potentiality—this all-determining ground and origin of His nature; and so, by renunciation of His essential development, make Himself the subject of a human personality, and become objective to Himself in a newly originating self-consciousness, which, although it has as its substance His actual twofold nature, is still no double nature, but one that arises from a compact divine human ground of life.¹ By this there would neither ensue a difficulty in the immanent process of the Trinity, nor a breach in the worldmaintaining and world-governing activity of the triune Godhead. There would ensue no hindrance in the immanent process of the Trinity: for the act of the Father, by virtue of which He comprehends His essential fulness in the Son in exact resemblance, and objectively; and that of the Son, by virtue of which He comprehends Himself as God from God, and turns to His primitive source in bright love (Div. IV. Sec. IV.); and that of the Holy Ghost, by virtue of which He, proceeding from Father and Son, brings into manifestation the combined life of the two, and forms the embracing link of the Godhead;—these eternal

¹ The kind and manner of the apprehension of the anypostasy of human nature on the part of the ancients, suggests rather a humanity becoming God, than a God becoming man; yet it is also observed by them, that the anypostasy of human nature before its union with the personifying Logos is only an abstraction (see in Schmid, Dogm. p. 225). A deeper-seeing knowledge is made possible to us by the fact, that of later times the essence of personality and of life has become more transparent, and thereby the entire view of nature and of history has become organically complete. In the Incarnate One, the Logos is certainly the personifying principle; but the new self-consciousness of the Logos as the Incarnate One has both natures as coefficients, and arises out of the mutual operation of both, combining into one living centre.

acts of the internal divine nature continue in tlieir eternally self-identical progression (to which is related the absolute present 6 &v, John i. 18, iii. 13; comp. viii. 58, xvii. 24). The Son, moreover, remains—in that state of withdrawal, and, so to speak, systole of His essential development, wherein consists His resignation—the other divine will, in which is reflected the prototypical will of the Father, and which has the essential fulness of the Father as its moving substance. There would ensue no breach in the world-supporting and the world-ruling activity of the triune Godhead: for in the self-renunciation of the Son is realized the eternal loving will of God the triune, and therefore His own eternal will; and " as its realization is one with the government of the world, so it is true not less of the human self-assertion of the Son than of the divine, not less of the mundane than of the supra-mundane, that it is a government of the world on His part. In the womb ripening towards birth,— as a youth increasing in body and spirit,—sleeping and waking, doing and suffering,—He is a sharer in the government of the world; because upon the relation of the Son to the Father herein realized, which has the eternal fellowship of both for its indwelling ground, depends the carrying into action of the eternal counsel."¹ In other words, redemption is the centre of the sustaining and ordering of the world; and when therefore God the Son, retiring to the foundation of His nature, exchanged the form of God for the form of a servant, it caused so little of a breach in the world-maintaining and world-governing activity of the triune God, that in this self-privation of the Son, this activity, without being dissolved therein, rather converged as it were centripetally upon that very self-privation, and had its centre of gravity there, so that the cf>epaiv ret, iravra rw prffuni Tt)? Svvdfieav; ainov (Heb. i. 3) even thus maintained its enduring truth, although under the veil of a mystery not to be penetrated even by the angels; in like manner as the human spirit continues to be the living power that pervades the body by means of the

¹ See Hofmann, Schriftb. ii. 26 (the second edition, where now also Dorner's and Gess's objections are refuted); and to the same effect, Thomasius, Dogm. sec. xlvii. The apparent ceasing of the world-governing activity of the Son, which was the conditioning of His world-reconciling agency, is no cessation of His interest in the government of the world; rather co-operation in it was share in the completion of it.

soul, not less in the bondage of sleep than in the full activity of waking, without any interruption of its self-identical life. The self-privation of the Son, and His divine human passion associated therewith even to death, is indeed rightly considered the most strong-willed, most energetic, most intense self-confirmation of all. In this self-privation the free self-might of the eternal Son culminates, and the eternal lovewhich wills and accomplishes the perfection of the world'is concentrated; its effects extend not alone to the whole of humanity, but to heaven and earth.

Before proceeding onwards from this point, we will examine the objections¹ previously made by Dorner. To my assertion, that I had arrived in a psychological way to that apprehension of the Kenosis which coincides with that of Thomasius and Hofmann, he makes a note of interrogation; but, moreover, Konig, Gaupp, and others, have made a similar statement. The revision of the traditional views is actually here a necessity felt by many. My leading point of view was the perception, that the will is the essential ground of the spirit, and the archetypal manner also of the Godhead. To my assertion, that the Logos withdrew itself to this lowest basis of its nature, and thus, by privation of its essential development, made itself the subject of a human personality, he observes, "Plainly, according to the connection, with privation of His hypostasis also." But no: the Hypostasis continues; only, in its retreat to its essential ground is accomplished the eternal loving counsel of the triune Godhead in a manner historical, and still not interrupted from eternity: in other words, it is perfected temporally upon eternal ground. To my designation of this regress from essential development to the ground of being, as a systole, he observes, "Like the old Sabellianism;" but what has my ecclesiastical creed upon the triune God to do with the monad of unitarian Sabellianism enclosed in itself, and disclosing or expanding itself in the Logos? To my assertion, that the above comprehension of the Kenosis, as Thomasius shows, is the direct consequence of the ancient Catholic and Lutheran Christology, he remarks, "that the view is not new; and when it was new, and as often as it was renewed, it was rejected by the

¹ Treatise on the Right Conception of the Dogmatic Idea of the Immutability of God, in the Jahrbb. fiir deutsche Theol. 1856, p. 388: com p. 1857, p. 440; 1858, p. 579.

church." But in fact it occurs in none of the rejected heresies of the oecumenical councils from the first to the sixth, and has, moreover, never been rejected; because it grew out of perceptions which were never familiar in the old church, even to the Formula of Concord, and for that very reason also is not referred to by the more ancient judicial sentences. Finally, when I maintain that the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity is not affected thereby, Dorner suggests tfl me to consider whether, in so saying, I may not perhaps have forgotten the Athanasian Non tres wterni, immensi, omnipotentes. Is this to signify that the Son of God cannot deprive Himself of His absoluteness and omnipotence, without this privation at the same time affecting the Father? This conclusion is of no weight. He deprives Himself indeed of His absoluteness and omnipotence, that He may accomplish in Himself, as the centre of the divine loving action, the loving will of the one Godhead, the triumph of which actually consists in this sacrifice. Moreover, He can deprive Himself, because He has the self-consciousness which pertains to the threefold self-consciousness of the Godhead. And even after the privation, He remains still the absolute, and the almighty, because, being incarnate, it is in consequence of His own will that He is not actually absolute and almighty. As far as regards eternity, however, even Father and Holy Spirit, in their manner, are concerned in the historical process of the work of redemption. The unfolded nature of all the three persons, by the mere relation into which the Godhead comes towards humanity, actually undergoes a change, and such a one, too, as is eternally completed, and is perpetuated after the temporal completion. But the eternal fundamental nature of the three persons, and their relation to one another, remains absolutely unchanged; and not only God's ethical, but also His metaphysical identity of Himself with Himself, reaches beyond the process which goes forth from it, and which it turns back into itself. If indeed this conception of the Kenosis led to the consequences which Gess has drawn,¹ we should hasten to reject it, as the mother of the most fatal heresies. For probably the first consequence which Gess infers—that, in order to avoid in

¹ The Doctrine of the Person of Clirist developed from the Self-consciousness of Christ and the Testimony of the Apostles, 1856; comp. Thomasius, Dogm. ii. 196-199.

it that wliich is fruitless and illusory, tlie supposition of a human soul in the person of Christ, distinct from the Logos, must be abandoned—would throw us back upon a standing 'which the church with hard struggles rejected. But such distortions of truth are only incurred by seeking to grasp the mystery intellectually. We are only concerned with the fact— whose right comprehension has to approve itself in this—that it allows as well the immanent Trinity of the divine nature, as the true humanity and the personal unity of the two natures constituted in the incarnation, to continue, and leaves untouched the old Catholic dogmas upon the subject.

If the Son of God became very man, we must further distinguish, according to the knowledge that we have attained from the natural condition of man, just as well a irvevfia beginning to be in time, as a tyv^rj beginning to be in time, in Him. He even attributes to Himself both: the latter when He says, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" (Matt. xxvi. 38); the former when at His death He exclaims, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke xxiii. 46).¹ Further, as in man his spirit, but in the God-man His Logos, is the personifying element, we must assume that, in the moment of incarnation, the eternal will of the Logos surrendered itself up to the temporal will of the human spirit; so that from thenceforward He had this His human spirit in submission to the law of human development, as the mirror of His nature and the place of His consciousness. Thirdly, as the human soul is the sevenfold doxa which emanates from the human spirit, so the human soul is the "ri33 (Ps. xvi. 10, comp. ver. 9; Acts ii. 25-27) for which He has exchanged His heavenly 1i33. And fourthly, Because it is the destination of the body by means of the soul to become as the soul itself, the doxa of the Spirit, or what is the same thing, a awfia irvevyMTiKov, so mediately also the body of the God-man belongs to the doxa of the Logos united to His spirit. This psychico-corporeal doxa, indeed, is in a position of humiliation, because the Logos . appeared ev ofiouofiart avdpunrwv (Phil. ii. 7), and indeed eV

¹ "Immortalis Veritas," says Augustine (de, Agone Christi, c. 18), "per epiritum animam et per anitnam corpus suscipiens toto homine assumpto cum ab infirniitatibus suis liberavit." Thus also Hofuianu; comp. the direct confession in the Schriftb. ii. 43.

6fiouofuxTi aapKo<; afiapria< ; (Rom. viii. 3)—a doxa as yet veiled, and still waiting for its perfection; but even in the position of humiliation, the energy of the Logos was still so great, that the eyes of believers perceived in this man the doxa, as of the Only-begotten who had come into time (John i. 14); and from what they heard, saw, and tasted, received the impression of the Word of Life that had been from eternity with the Father, and was now manifested (1 John i. 1-3). But the result was, that the Logos broke through the created limits of His natural development, enhanced though they were by the consequence of sin,—a development into which He entered by the power of free agency, and swallowed up the assumed humanity into His recovered primitive doxa. The incarnation was a self-humiliation,¹ but now it is so no more.

This Jesus is the second Adam. The good beginning which the first Adam forfeited, found in Him a new indestructible reality, and—because He was exalted—its conclusive perfection. For the presence of God in the first Adam, which by his free agency was to have established itself into a unio mystica, was capable of being lost; but in the second Adam, Godhead and manhood have entered by a free agency of the Logos into the position of indissoluble unio personalis. This appropriation of human nature, through the Logos, and this impropriation of the Logos into the human nature, became the inviolable ground of a new humanity, which has in the God-man the creative principle and the superabundant archetype of its growth. Union of the spirit of man with God, and, what is the result thereof, perfecting of His psychico-corporeal doxa,—this is the twofold aim of the redemption, of which the Redeemer is the archetype for the redeemed. In that now this archetype realizes itself representatively, the psychical condition of man suffers a change, which as certainly falls within the range of biblical psychology as 1 Cor. xv. 45-49 is an apostolic instruction of psychologic character.

¹ A. Gunther, indeed, says (Vorschule, ii. 447, ed. 2), " It is no humiliation of God when He takes back again into Himself that which origi"nally proceeded from Him, by means of reunion;" but what is emptying Himself of glory (see John xvii. 5) other than humiliation? Strikingly, Thomasius had said (JDogm. ii. 236), "In the humiliation, the divine "fact of the beginning (the self-limitation already contained in the incarnatio became the divine-human fact of his whole life."