time a pantheistic meaning, denoting that the contrast existing between God and man did
not exist in Jesus, but that in Him the antithesis of the divine and the human was not found.
And this is wholly anti-Scriptural, and results in its final consequences in a pure theo-
sophy. For the actual result is a blending of the two natures: a divine nature in God, a human
331nature in man, and a divine-human nature in the Mediator. So that if man had not fallen,
the Mediator would nevertheless have appeared in a divine-human nature.
This is a truly abhorrent doctrine. It puts in the place of the Savior from our sins another
and entirely different person; the contrasts between the Creator and the creature disappear;
the divine-human nature of the Christ is actually placed above the divine nature itself. For
the Mediator in the divine-human nature, possesses something that is lacking in the divine
nature, viz., its reconciliation with the human.
This shows how much further the Ethicals have departed from the pure confession of
the Lord Jesus Christ than is generally believed. According to them there is in the Person
of the Mediator a kind of new nature, a kind of third nature, a kind of higher nature, which
is called “human-divine.” And the union with Christ is found (not subjectively, but object-
ively) in the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ pours into us that new, third, higher kind, viz.,
the divine-human nature. Hence the regenerate are the persons who have received this new,
third, higher kind of nature. This has no connection with sin, but would have appeared even
in the absence of sin. The reconciliation of sinners is something additional, and does not
touch the root of the matter.
The real and principal thing is, that the Mediator between the “finite and the infinite”
(to use the very words of Professor Gunning) imparts unto us, who have the lower, human
nature, this new, third, higher, divine-human nature.
Not that the human nature is to be removed, and the divine-human nature take its place.
No, indeed; but, according to the Ethical theologians, the human nature is originally intended
and destined to be thus ennobled, refined, and exalted. As the slip of a plant, under the in-
fluence of the sun, develops and produces by and by choice flowers, so does the human
nature develop and unfold itself under the influence of the Sun of Righteousness into this
higher nature.
That this must be accomplished by means of regeneration ison account of sin. If there
had been no fall in Paradise, and no sin after the fall, there would have been no regeneration,
and our nature’s lower degree would have passed over spontaneously into that higher, divine-
human nature. And this is, in the circles of the Ethicals, the basis of that much-lauded unio
mysticawith the Christ.
332The invisible church is, according to their view, that circle of men into whom this
higher and nobler tincture of life has been instilled, and others not so favored still stand
without. Hence their lack of appreciation of the visible churches; for does not the divine-
human tincture of life determine this circle of itself? Hence their preference for the “uncon-
XXV. Not a Divine-Human Nature