The Deity of Christ

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 11, 1909

The Deity of Christ

IT has come to be quite the fashion in some quarters to acknowledge the divinity of Christ, using the term, however, only in an accommodated sense, while denying his deity. The real consequence of this teaching, and the importance of maintaining as a cardinal doctrine the deity of Christ, and consequently his supernatural birth, are well set forth in an article by Dr. Louis Matthews Sweet, in the Bible Record, from which we take the following liberal extracts:—

The view of Christianity which makes the deity of Christ, and hence the incarnation, a non-essential point not to be defended, diverts the attack from Christianity, which by the definition is rendered too insignificant to provoke discussion, only to concentrate it upon Theism, which, thus weakened and impoverished, is ill able to stand the assault. Note carefully the issue. The evangelical view of the “essence” is that the life of Christ is the “human life of God,” and being this, it becomes the power of a divine life for man. Christ reveals primarily the divine attitude toward men as the necessary precondition for the attainment of the right attitude on the part of men toward God. And he does this not by any mere expression of private opinion or conviction as to the character of God, but by the actual historical manifestation of the being of God among men. When we make a humanistic interpretation of Christ’s person compatible with essential Christianity, this element of immediate supernatural revelation is at one stroke removed from the gospel. It is expelled by the terms of the definition, and can not be brought back except by reconstructing it. Christ becomes the “Prophet of Nazareth,” and what he thought about God becomes our whole gospel. Now the vital question in the exposition of Theism is to make good the contention that God is of such a character as to warrant our taking the filial attitude toward him. There can be no question that the filial attitude toward God is the only reasonable one, provided God is our Father. But this is the very point in question with many minds: “Can we believe in God the Father?” This has been called the doctrine which is too good to be true. That Jesus of Nazareth was a convinced Theist must mean much to the seeker for truth, but it must be remembered that, by the terms of the definition under review, all that we have in Christ is a human being’s judgment and testimony as to the character of God. And if first his confessed moral and spiritual greatness give unique meaning and weight to his testimony, on the other hand his poverty, distress, and shame, all the horrible injustice of a tragic career as the reward of unexampled fidelity to high ideals, must be added to the already portentous sum of the world’s unexplained woe. It can not be added to the other side as an element, and a decisive element, in the solution of the most difficult of all theistic problems. For the very burning core of that question lies in this: that, seemingly, God thrusts us into a furnace where he himself never walks; he lays upon us burdens which he himself never bears. This thought may be taken as the real cause of most of the sincere unbelief in the history of the world. In the vivid story of an outlaw hiding among remote cliffs of the Pyrenees occurs this sentence, spoken when the fugitive looks down, unseen, upon his foes: “I am as safe here as God is in heaven.” Perhaps the skilful narrator imagined this sentence as appropriate to the situation, but it has a smack of reality, as if it had been taken from the lips of men. At any rate, it expresses a genuine feeling. God seems so safe in his heaven, while we are exposed to the bludgeonings of fate! For the bitter waters of this Marah of unbelief, Christianity, according to this interpretation of it, has no branch of healing.

It is only when we define Christianity in such a way that Christ’s deity and true incarnation become central and essential, that we can guard the doctrine of God at this point where the heart of man is apt to make its most powerful revolt. “Then,” to use the words of Van Dyke, “we can look up to a God who is not impassible, as the speculations of men have falsely represented him, but passible, and therefore full of infinite capacities of pure sorrow and saving sympathy. Then the dumb and sullen resentment which rises in noble minds at the thought of a universe in which there is so much helpless pain and hopeless grief, created by an immovable Being who has never felt and can never feel either pain or grief,—that sense of moral repulsion from the idea of an unsuffering and unsympathetic Creator which is, and always has been, the deepest, darkest spring of doubt, fades away, and we behold a God who became human in order that he might bear, though innocent and undeserving, all our pains and all our griefs.”