When Jesus Christ is said by His Church to be God, that word
is used in its natural, its absolute, its incommunicable sense.
This must be constantly borne in mind if we would escape from
equivocations which might again and again obscure the true point
before us. For Arianism will confess Christ's Divinity if, when
it terms Him God, it may really mean that He is only a being
of an inferior and created nature. Socinianism will confess Christ's
Divinity if this confession involves nothing more emphatic than
an acknowledgement of the fact that certain moral features of
God's character shone forth from the human life of Christ with
an absolutely unrivalled splendour. Pantheism will confess Christ's
Divinity, but then it is a Divinity which He must share with
the universe. Christ may well be divine when all is divine...When
God is nature, and nature is God, everything indeed is divine,
but also nothing is divine...
This assertion of the Divinity of Jesus Christ depends on a truth
beyond itself. It postulates the existence in God of certain
real distinctions having their necessary basis in the essence
of the Godhead. That three such distinctions exist is a matter
of revelation. In the common language of the western Church these
distinct forms of being are named persons...Not, however, that
we are therefore to suppose nothing more to be intended by the
revealed doctrine than three varying relations of God in His
dealings with the world...These three distinct "subsistences,"
which we name Father, Son, and Spirit, while they enable us the
better to understand the mystery of the self-sufficing and blessed
life of God before He surrounded Himself with created beings
are also strictly compatible with the truth of the Divine Unity.
And when we say that Jesus Christ is God we mean that in the
Man Christ Jesus, the second of these persons or subsistances,
one in essence with the first and with the third, vouchsafed
to become incarnate.
Perfect Man And Eternal God
The position then which is before us in these lectures is briefly
the following: Our Lord Jesus Christ, being truly and perfectly
man, is also, according to His higher pre-existent nature, very
and eternal God; since it was the Second Person of the ever blessed
Trinity who, at the incarnation, robed Himself with a human body
and a human soul.
The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. H.P.
Liddon. Pickering & Inglis LTD. 29 Ludgate Hill, London,
England. E.C.4 No date. Pages 20, 24 and 25.
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