History of Opinions concerning Jesus Christ. 39

believe any such thing; nor can it be supposed that the Gospel, which was intended to be the solid foundation of the faith, hope, and joy of common people, should require so much acuteness as is necessary to give even a plausible colour to these strange assertions. The attempt to explain them (and, till they be explained, they can no more be believed than a proposition in an unknown tongue) can lead to nothing but endless and unprofitable controversy. It is happy, therefore, that so many persons make a better use of the Gospel than their tenets would lead them to do, and that they consider it chiefly as a rule of life, and the foundation of hope after death. But, as far as the principles I have been arguing against are believed, they cannot but do harm to those who entertain them, as well as bring disgrace upon the Christian name; both which every lover of the Gospel should endeavour to prevent.

A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE ABOVE-MENTIONED

DOCTRINES.

I. A concise History of Opinions concerning Jesus Christ.

You will say, If Christ be not really God, but merely a man, though inspired and assisted by God, how came the Christian world to fall into so great an error? In return, I might ask, how, if

Christ be truly God, equal to the Father, so many Christians, and especially the Jewish Christians, and many others in the very early ages of the Christian church, came to think him to be merely a man, when it may be easily conceived that, on many accounts, Christians, who were continually reproached with the meanness of their master, would be disposed to add to rather than take from his dignity? But it is not difficult to show by what means, and by what steps, Christians came to think as the generality of them now do.

It was the universal opinion of philosophers, at the time of the promulgation of Christianity, that › the souls of all men had existed before they were sent to animate the bodies that were provided for them here, and also that all souls were emanations or parts detached from the Deity. For at that time there was no idea of any substance being properly immaterial and indivisible. When these philosophers became Christians, and yet werc ashamed of being the disciples of a man who had been crucified, they naturally gave a distinguished rank to the soul of Christ before he came into the world. They even went one step further, and maintained that Christ had a body in appearance only, and not in reality, and therefore that he suffered nothing at all when he was scourged and crucified.

This opinion the apostle John reprobates with great severity, and even calls it Antichristian, 1 John

1 John iv. 3. whereas, though it is acknowledged that the other opinion, viz. that of Christ being merely a man, existed in the times of the apostles, it is remarkable that this apostle takes no notice of it. It was plainly the doctrine of those only who maintained that Christ was not truly a man that gave this apostle any disturbance, or he could never have said as he does, 1 John iv. 2. "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (that is, was truly a man) is of God."

After this, philosophizing Christians began to add to the pre-existent dignity of Christ in another way, and at length carried it much higher than those upon whom this apostle animadverted with so much severity. They said that Christ was originally in God, being his reason, or logos, which came out of him, and was personified before the creation of the world, in which he was the immediate agent; and that this new personage was henceforth the medium of all the divine communications to mankind, having been the person who spake to Adam in paradise, to Noah, to Abraham, ~and all the Patriarchs, who delivered the law from mount Sinai, and, lastly, inhabited the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

On this principle they explained many passages in the Old Testament, in which the word of God is spoken of, as that of the psalmist, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made," &c. making

this

this word to be a person distinct from God, whose word it was; whereas nothing can be more plain, than that by the word of God in this place, is meant the power of God, exerted with as much ease as men utter words.

These philosophizing Christians took great pains to explain how the reason or wisdom of God could thus become a person distinct from God, and yet. God continue a reasonable being; but their account of it is too trifling to be recited in this place. However, it was far from being pretended, in general, that the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. was such a mystery as could not be explained. For by mystery they only meant something of a solemn nature, which was unknown till it wasrevealed or explained. And indeed this is plainly the use of the word mystery, in the New Testament; and it was also the usual meaning of the word when the present translation of the Bible was made; the mysteries of any particular trade being the secrets of that trade, which yet every master taught his apprentices.

In this state the doctrine continued till after the council of Nice, in the year of our Lord 325; but in all this time a real superiority was always acknowledged in the Father, as the only source of divinity and it was even explicitly acknowledged that there was a time when the Son of God had no

separate existence, being only the reason of God,

just

man.

just as the reason of man is apart, or a property, of One of the most eminent of the Christian Fathers says, "There was a time when God was neither a Father nor a judge; for he could not be a Father before he had a son, nor a judge before

there was sin."

So far were they from supposing the Son of God to be equal to the Father, that when they were charged, as they frequently were, with making two Gods, they generally replied, that the Son was only God of God, as having proceeded from a superior God, which is the language of the Nicene Creed; whereas the Father was God of himself (auros), by which they meant underived, which they held to be the prerogative of the Father only.

In all this time the Jewish Christians, who were not tainted with the heathen philosophy, maintained the doctrine of the proper and simple humanity of Christ. Athanasius himself was so far from being able to deny this, that he says all the Jews were so fully persuaded that their Messiah was to be a man like themselves, that the apostles were obliged to use great caution in divulging the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. He says that the reason why Peter, Acts ii. 22. only calls him a man approved of God, and why, on other occasions, in the course of that book, and other parts of the New Testament, he is simply called a man, was, that at first the apostles did not think proper to do more than prove that Jesus was the Christ, or Messiah,

and