fare of his subjects at heart, who while seated on his throne does not mentally live with them in their dwellings, who, in feeling, is not, as the people say, “a common man,” such a king will not descend bodily from his throne to make his people happy by his personal presence. Thus, has not the subject risen to be a king, before the king descends to be a subject? And if the subject feels himself honoured and made happy by the personal presence of his king, does this feeling refer merely to the bodily presence, and not rather to the manifestation of the disposition, of the philanthropic nature which is the cause of the appearance? But that which in the truth of religion is the cause, takes in the consciousness of religion the form of a consequence; and so here the raising of man to God is made a consequence of the humiliation or descent of God to man. God, says religion, made himself human that he might make man divine.[1]
That which is mysterious and incomprehensible, i.e., contradictory, in the proposition, “God is or becomes a man,” arises only from the mingling or confusion of the idea or definitions of the universal, unlimited, metaphysical being with the idea of the religious God, i.e., the conditions of the understanding with the conditions of the heart, the emotive nature; a confusion which is the greatest hinderance to the correct knowledge of religion. But in fact the idea of the Incarnation is nothing more than the human form of a God, who already in his nature, in the profoundest depths of his soul, is a merciful and therefore a human God.
The form given to this truth in the doctrine of the church is, that it was not the first person of the Godhead who was incarnate, but the second, who is the representative of man in and before God; the second person being however in reality, as will be shown, the sole, true, first person in religion. And it is only apart from this distinction of persons, that the God-man appears mysterious, incomprehensible, “speculative;” for, considered in connexion with it, the Incarnation is a
- ↑ “Deus homo factus est, ut homo Deus fieret.”—Augustinus (Serm. ad Pop. p 371, c. 1). In Luther, however (T. i. P. 334,) there is a passage which indicates the true relation. When Moses called man “the image of God, the likeness of God,” he meant, says Luther, obscurely to intimate that “God was to become man.” Thus here the incarnation of God is clearly enough represented as a consequence of the deification of man.
