There is a beauty
to correct theology that is difficult to express. We may put it best by saying
that it is a harmonious unity of parts. All portions connect to and mutually
prove the others. If we surrender one point, we lose everything. Such is the
case with our present topic. If we consider what sin is and what it means to
make satisfaction for sins, we will see how the Hypostatic Union is the only
live option. Conversely, if we reject the Hypostatic Union, we thereby either
destroy all hope of salvation or reveal a secret commitment to the religion of
Cain.
All
creatures, by virtue of their creaturehood, owe to God, as their Creator and
Sustainer, perfect conformity to His will. Sin, then, is nothing else than to
not render to God His due. Every thought of a rational creature
should be subject to God’s will. This is what man and angel owe to God. Everyone
who does not do this, sins. When a person sins, he robs God of the honor of
perfect obedience. Consequently, everyone who sins ought to pay back the honor
of which he has robbed God. This is the satisfaction that every sinner owes to
God. Moreover, the satisfaction should be proportionate to the guilt.
What payment would
we make for our sins: Repentance, a broken and contrite heart, self-denial,
various bodily sufferings, pity in giving and forgiving, and obedience? But
what do we give God in all these things that we do not already owe Him as His
creatures? Nothing. How will we then be saved?
If we suppose that
our contrite heart and repentant feelings are enough to blot out our sin, this
is only because we have not considered aright what the true nature and burden
of sin is. In his classic work, Cur Deus Homo, Anselm of Canterbury
asks: “If you should find yourself in the sight of God, and someone said to
you: ‘Look over there;’ and God, on the other hand, should say: ‘It is not my
will that you should look;’ ask your own heart what there is in all of
existence which would make it right for you to give that look contrary to the
will of God.[i]
Of course, we would all answer that there is absolutely no motive that would
make it right. Anselm continues by asking, “what if it were necessary either
that the whole universe, except God himself, should perish and fall back into
nothing, or else that you should do so small a thing against the will of God?”[ii]
The deed, which seems so insignificant, when viewed as contrary to God’s will,
becomes the worst deed imaginable.
This is precisely
the case of man. In Adam we have all given the look God forbade. It is contrary
to God’s honor that man be reconciled to Him while this reproach is still
heaped upon God. Man still owes God the perfect obedience required of Adam
before the Fall. But man is no longer capable of this because he is conceived
in and born in sin. Man has a two-fold plight: His depravity makes him unable
to render to God the obedience God demands, and he stands under the just wrath
of God for this violation.
God must recover
His right. Supreme justice cannot forego this. Therefore it is an absolute
perversion of justice for man to receive from God what God designed to give
him, unless he return to God everything which he took from him. But this cannot
be achieved except in this way: In the fall of man all humanity was corrupted
and tainted with sin. God will not choose one of this nature to fill up the
number in his heavenly kingdom. But, if man gained this victory, as many men as
are needed to complete the number which man was made to fill, could be
justified from sin. But a sinner cannot do this: a sinner cannot justify a
sinner. Only God can do what man needs done. But that serves no purpose, since God
is the offended party. Man must pay what only God can afford. God cannot pay
the debt owed to Himself. This is surely the mother of all quandaries and an
enigma that only the mind of God could unravel.
Hence
when we look at the state of fallen man in Original Sin, we see that no other
solution will prevail but that which God has actually given in His Son, Jesus
Christ. The only solution to this dilemma is if God could become a man, and, as
a man could pay man’s debt to God. Enter Jesus Christ - very God and very man,
hypostatically united as our Mediator!
One of the finest New Testament passages describing
for us the Hypostatic Union is Luke 1:35:
kai; ajpokriqei;" oJ a[ggelo" ei\pen aujth'/, Pneu'ma a{gion ejpeleuvsetai ejpi; sev, kai; duvnami" uJyivstou ejpiskiavsei soi: dio; kai; to; gennwvmenon a{gion klhqhvsetai, uiJo;" qeou'.
And
the angel answered and said unto her, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and
the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing
which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”
These
words contain a brief description of the supernatural conception. They not only
show us that Christ’s humanity was sinless, but also that it was never in
Adam’s covenant. The second clause more fully describes what is affirmed in the
first clause. (We are all familiar with the exegetic rule that in corresponding
members of this type the darker is to be explained by the clearer.) The
significance of both clauses is this: The Holy Spirit was the former of
Christ’s human nature; and that the Son by assuming it into personal union,
made it His own by a right unique to Himself – that is, by a union that is
personal and incommunicable to the other Persons of the Godhead.* It
was united to Him in such a sense that it also (kai9) is
the Son of God. That Holy Thing began to be at the conception of the Spirit. And these words are
important to refute those who dislike the idea that our Lord’s flesh was formed
by the Spirit from Mary’s substance, and imagine to themselves a certain
heavenly flesh brought with Him from above.
*(The words “of thee” (en sou~), deleted
by many in the phrase, should probably be retained in the text. They are found
in such a number of Fathers (Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius,
Chrysostom, Epiphanius, Jerome) that the balance of authority from this source alone
goes far to counterbalance the evidence of faulty manuscripts against them.)
There are two poles of error regarding the
union of natures in Christ. There is the heresy of Nestorius - Nestorianism,
the rejection of the “hypostatic union” meaning that Christ was two persons,
one human and one divine. Nestorianism denies any union between the two
natures, making Christ a split personality, in fact, a dual personality. Christ
becomes something of a schizophrenic whose actions cannot be clearly attributed
to His humanity or His deity.
Springing from the same source, the opposite
error is Eutychianism, the heresy of Eutychus (d.
454). His doctrine that the incarnate Christ had
only a single, divine nature, clad in human flesh is sometimes called
monophysitism. Incumbent in the heresy of Eutychus is the denial that Christ’s
flesh derived from the virgin Mary.
We can expose the
fallacy of this thinking quite simply. Christ either did
or did not take human flesh from Mary. If He did not take it from her, then we
must inquire what manhood He put on when He came among us. If His flesh did not
come from the seed of Abraham and David and finally of Mary, then we must show
what man's flesh he descended from, since, after the first man, all human flesh
is derived from human flesh. If we name anybody beside Mary
the virgin as the cause of the conception of Christ Savior, we will have
stamped deception on the Godhead for shifting to others the promise of the
prophecies made to Abraham and David that from their seed salvation would arise
for the world. On the other hand, if it was not a truly human body, the Godhead
is likewise convicted of falsehood for displaying to men a body that was not
real and thus deceiving those who thought it real. If it was not a truly human
body, the result is in essence no different than Docetism. But if flesh had
been formed new and real but not taken from man, what was the purpose of the
whole drama of the conception? Where is the value of His passion? The error of
Eutyches takes its rise from the same source as that of Nestorius. Therefore,
it ends the same way: the human race has not been saved, since man who was dead
in sin and needed salvation was not taken into Godhead.
Returning to our
text we note that the words dio; kai indicate
that there is both: an eternal generation, and a holy thing begotten - created
when assumed and assumed when created. And the result is not two Persons, but
one; for the holy thing to which Mary gave birth is also called the Son
of God.
Therefore it is
abundantly clear from Scripture that the Lord’s humanity was produced by the
Holy Spirit in a supernatural way, which at once prevented the possibility of
contracting guilt from Adam and which, by an act of infinite wisdom and power,
put Him within the human family as a kinsman-Redeemer, and yet exempted Him
from being in Adam’s covenant; for He was the second Adam, the Son of man.
The mother did not
need an immaculate nature. The question, “How could pure humanity be derived
from a defiled source which unanimously entails corruption on others?” is a
difficulty that has confounded many: the Valentinians, the Anabaptists, the
Quakers and some of the Plymouth Brethren on the one side, and the entire
Church of Rome on the other. The sects named attempted to meet the difficulty
by representing Mary as but a pipe or channel (swlh9n)
through which a heavenly body or flesh, immediately created by the Holy Spirit,
but not formed from her substance, was introduced into the world. But on this
principle the Lord Jesus would belong to another order of beings and would not
be our brother, born into our family[iii].
Redemption was only possible when affected by a goel, or
kinsman-Redeemer.[iv]
The Romish church
met this difficulty (in the Papal Bull of Dec. 10, 1854) by affirming the
immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary and her exemption from all taint of
original sin before she was born. Of this theory, the presupposition (or, as
the theologians express it, the prw~ton
yeu~dov) can be nothing else but the theory of
Flacius on the subject of original sin, viz., that sin had become the very
essence of man. The theologians who confuted Flacius immediately saw that on
such a supposition the Incarnation would have been impossible. They saw that
human nature, corrupted as it was by the sin of Adam, was still, as a work of
God, good, and was therefore capable of redemption. We can distinguish in idea
between the good work of God and the vitiating taint superinduced upon it. We
cannot separate these elements. God can do both – redeem His creature, and
separate sin.
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