MONOPHYSITISM SHOWN IN THE MODERN TENDENCY TO MAKE THE DEATH OF CHRIST A SECONDARY FACTOR IN THE SCHEME OF REDEMPTION

We have seen above that monophysitism discredits the reality of Christ's sufferings. Dogmatic reasons apart, the monophysite is motived by a repugnance to physical pain and by a wish to exclude it from the experience of the human ideal. To this motive we can trace the modern tendency to transfer the doctrinal centre of gravity from the Passion to the incarnation. The Passion and Death used to occupy the first place in the thoughts of Christians and formed the foundation for all theories of atonement. The incarnation was regarded as, for the purposes of dogma, subsidiary. Within recent times the position has been reversed. The main stress falls now on the incarnation. The Passion seems of secondary importance, if, as modern theology often teaches, all purposes of redemption were secured prior to it. In thus changing the venue of redemption modern theology is wrong. The mistake is prompted largely, so it seems to the writer, by monophysitism latent in modern religious thought; at any rate strict adherence to the catholic doctrine of two natures would have prevented it. The human nature that Christ assumed had to be perfected through suffering; otherwise it could not attain that universality and representative character which enabled it to become the medium of universal salvation. If it had been enough for the divine spirit to mingle with men, to show them a pattern life, and to touch them to higher things, an apparition would have been adequate, and no community of suffering would have been necessary. Since Christ not only appeared as man, but experienced in His flesh all man's experiences, death which is the climax of human experience fell to His lot and set the seal to the divine enterprise. Since He who died was the flesh and blood embodiment of the cosmic relation. His death has cosmic significance. The doctrinal edifice in which Calvary is of ornamental and not of structural value has monophysitism for its foundation.



HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF CHRISTIANITY OBSCURED

Christ's mission is misunderstood to-day as well as His cosmic work. In certain religious quarters where zeal is not balanced by learning, His mission as the founder of a religious society is forgotten. To those who are deficient in historic sense the continuity of the Church down the centuries seems unimportant, and institutional religion a hindrance rather than a help to the spiritual life of the individual Christian. Pietism of this kind has always been present in the church; to-day it is prevalent. It nominally associates its piety with the historic Christ, but actually it worships an ideal constructed by its own ethical imagination. Such pietists spiritualise the faith. The facts of the historic creed are to them little more than symbols of religious truth. Spiritual resurrection, spiritual ascension are the only miracles for them. This tendency to spiritualise everything is a phase of monophysitism. It results from losing sight of the person of the historic Christ, and resolving His assumption of human nature into the assumption of a title.



CHRISTOLOGY A DETERMINANT OF SACRAMENTAL THOUGHT

Errors in sacramental teaching necessarily accompany misconceptions of the person of Christ. The incarnation is a cosmic sacrament, the meeting-point of divine and human, and the sacraments of the church are types of the vaster mystery. In both type and antitype it is all important to give due weight to divine and human, and not to exalt one element at the expense of the other. Those who undervalue the human nature of Christ are disposed to undervalue the outward sign in the sacraments. Not appreciating the hypostatic union of divine with human, they misunderstand the sacramental union of the same elements. Blind to the significance of Christ's humanity in the economy of redemption, they fail to see how matter can be the channel of sacramental grace. Yet the discipline of faith is the same in both cases. The Christian enterprise is not merely to believe in the divine, but to believe in the divine manifested in the human.

There are two divergent, almost opposing, schools of sacramental teaching, both of which have inherited the spirit of monophysitism. Both are instances of sacramental monism. First, there are those who identify the outward signs and the inward grace; second, those to whom the inward grace is everything and the outward sign nothing. Both schools of thought destroy the nature of a sacrament. The radical error of both consists in undervaluing the human and material. In the first case the error takes the form of the transubstantiation doctrine, which is exactly parallel to the extreme form of Eutychianism. According to Eutyches, the human nature of Christ was absorbed into the divine and lost there; the truth of His being was the divine personality; the human element was only an appearance. Similarly the transubstantiation theory conceives the mutation of the substance of the material elements and the loss of their proper nature; the appearance of reality that the accidents possess is an illusion of the senses. We may note in passing that the opposite error to transubstantiation finds its Christological parallel in Nestorianism. Socinianism which separates symbol from sacramental grace is sacramental dualism, as Nestorianism is Christological dualism. Both abandon a vital unity of divine and human. The pietistic or mystical view of the sacraments does so too, but in a different way. This second form of sacramental monism has much in common with the doctrine of one nature. To the pietist the divine seems all important, and the material no help, but rather a hindrance to the spiritual life. The faith of the individual to him is the seat of the efficacy of the sacraments; he regards matter as unreal if not sinful, and in either case unworthy to be a channel of divine grace. Echo after echo of monophysite thought can be caught here. The surest way to combat sacramental errors on both sides is a clear and definite statement of the catholic doctrine of Christology.



NEED OF A MENTAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN NATURE OF CHRIST

As the interval of time widens, separating Christians from the human life of their God, the more urgent becomes the obligation to put forth a constructive effort of the historical imagination. The attempt to keep that memory green grows harder and harder as the centuries pass; but Christians must make it; otherwise the historical character of their religion will perish. There need be no fear that the interests of spiritual religion will suffer. Amongst moderns the danger of idealising the human is greater than that of humanising the divine. An intelligent appreciation of Christ's human life draws out love and kindles reverence towards the divine personality who condescended to the level of mankind. We may point by way of illustration to the effect of biblical criticism. Christians of a previous generation dreaded the touch of criticism. They thought it profanation. They refused to admit any human element in the bible. Criticism, however, had its way. Bibliolatry had to go. The result is that the bible is a living book to us to-day. In spite of the fears of the devout there was little to lose and much to gain by recognising the human element in the bible. As with the written word, so with the living Word. Without a recognition of the human element in His being, a full assimilation of His teaching and an intimate perception of His real presence are unattainable. If this recognition be accorded, the great past will live again in the present. Hostile critics study the life and character of Christ and the records of them with a view to proving that He was merely man. Believers may adopt their method with a different object. They may undertake the same study in order to comprehend the wonder of the Man, and so rise to some conception of the wonder of the God. The gospels are read mainly as a handbook of devotion; they should be studied as the biography of a hero. The face-value of its incidents is often neglected, while the reader seeks allegorical and mystical interpretations. To form a mental picture of Christ in His environment, to read ourselves back into His world and then into His ways of thought, such efforts are more than ever needed to-day, and they are more than ever absent. Historic sense and imagination should be allowed to play upon the recorded acts and sayings of Jesus, until a great temple to His memory rises in the high places of the mind, dominating thence the whole intellectual and moral life. Such an enterprise would infuse life and meaning into the Christological formula, and would effect, so to speak, a reconstruction of the human nature of the historic Christ. The Christian's attitude towards the Man Christ Jesus is the "acid test" of the sincerity of his faith. No one can bring intellectual difficulties to a being to whom cognising was a foreign process, nor moral difficulties to one who knew no conflict of wills, nor sorrows to one "all breathing human passion far above." If we picture the ideal of all mankind as thinking our thoughts, willing as we will, feeling as we feel, we are united to Him by an intellectual, moral and emotional bond of sympathy. Such a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Communion with such a Being leads the worshipper to the heart of the Christian religion.



THE END



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