What is the hypostatic union?

This is a great mystery, and all the historic fundamental errors concerning His Person have been attempts to explain it in some measure. It is inexplicable. He is a real Man and true God in One Person. The two natures, manhood and Deity, are not joined together to form one nature, but are united in One Person. They ever remain distinct but are never separated. Their union is personal, not consubstantial.

The opposite error to saying that He is two persons is to say that His two natures have combined into one. It was an ancient heresy that the two natures, Manhood and Deity, merged together. For this reason the writer does not like the expression the “God-man”. It implies to him (though not to many orthodox Christians) that He is half man and half God. Such an idea must be resisted. He is wholly Man and wholly God. He possesses all the attributes and properties of real, unfallen, holy Manhood, and at the same time possesses all the infinite attributes and properties of Deity. The unity consists, not in the amalgamation of essence, but in the Oneness of His Person.

As to the glory of His Person. Scripture is careful to show that the Incarnation involves no change in the Person, and no addition to the Person, of the One who became incarnate. He was ever the Son and remains the Son. There was indeed a great change in the "form" which He took, the "likeness" in which He was found and the nature of which He partook, but there was no change as to His Person; Nothing that in grace He became, could add to, or take from, what He was. There was no dual personality in the Son become incarnate. He can say, "I and the Father are one," He never said "I and the Son are one," for He was the Son, and the Manhood that He took conferred upon Him no fresh personality distinct from, or in conjunction with, the Person of the Son. The Person was one and to that nothing could be added by what He became. He comes forth from the Father, sent by the Father, having the very nature of the Father, but was born of a woman, and so partook of human nature, while ever remaining a Divine Person. We do not see two persons united in Christ, as some have falsely taught, but two natures in One Person, which are surely distinct though nevermore to be viewed as separate.

He took up humanity into union with deity in His Person; yet His incarnation did not in the least detract from His deity nor His eternal relationship as Son to the Father but only gave to His humanity His infinite perfection. Each of His two natures retained its own proper character without any confusion. His human nature as well as His divine nature possessed each their excellent characteristics and both united to form His glorious Person as incarnate Son. Scripture never divides the Person nor confounds the natures. They are united in His Person by a unique and inscrutable bond. He is the God-man He is God in all that God is and He is Man in all that man is, apart from sin. Such is the Son of God come in flesh — the God-man — that He might manifest the Godhead in the flesh and by His obedience unto death, even the death of the cross, might redeem us unto God.

As the incarnate Son He ever kept and will keep eternally (1 Cor. 15: 28) that place of a perfect Man in complete dependence, entire submission and implicit obedience to His Father's will and yet in it all He ever acts in His own Person as Son from eternity, who voluntarily took His place in manhood (being one with the Father in His will and purpose in it) that He might manifest unto us the Father and accomplish His will and the desire of His heart in our redemption to the praise of the glory of His grace. As incarnate Son He continually displays absolute submission to the will of the Father, yet this sacred service was and is equally the exercise of His own will, which was and always is uniform with that of His Father both in His deity and His perfect manhood.

Failure to confess a human spirit in Christ may be due to an unwitting belief in another form of error entirely. It may be admitted that a human spirit is an essential part of humanity, but some may feel that one cannot be sure what was the product when full humanity and full deity came together in union in Christ. When two things fuse together they may become something different. It is not therefore ‘safe' they will say, to affirm that Christ has a human spirit. Here there is a lapse into the error of the Monophysites, i.e., the confusion of the substance of the Lord's humanity and deity — another of the four main heresies that disturbed the church in the Pergamos period. (The word ‘substance' is used for want of a better one in the English language.) Sound doctrine is that the Lord Jesus Christ is God and Man; God of the substance of the Father; and Man of the substance of His mother born in the world (apart from sin). He is God and Man—one Christ. The unity of the Godhead and Manhood is not in confusion or fusion of substance, else the substance of manhood would be raised to something more than true humanity. (In all things it behoved Him to be made like unto His brethren. Heb. 2:17). This spurious explanation of the Incarnation, attempted by human intellect, that the union of Godhead and Manhood in Christ is by confusion of substance, must be rejected. We can say that the union of the natures consists in the Unity of the Person Who possesses both, this being in no sense an attempted explanation or complete definition of the unknowable mystery of the Incarnation. That is impossible.

Scripture never divides His Person into two parts, one human and one divine, but reveals Him as having taken up perfect humanity into union with His eternal deity so that they are united in one unique, inscrutable and indissoluble bond in His Person. While Scripture never confounds the two natures it never divides the Person. Even what He does in manhood is still the action of Himself, the eternal Son, who has of His own self, and without giving up His personality as eternal Son, "taking a bondman's form, taking His place in the likeness of men" (Phil. 2:7, J. N. D. Trans.). It is He the eternal Son that is there as Man. It is this fact of His Person as the eternal Son of God, having taken His place as Man, that gives the infinite perfection of His unique Person to all that He does as incarnate Son. It is this indissoluble union of perfect manhood with eternal deity in His unique Person that constantly comes out in all that He does as God (the Son) manifest in flesh.

Now who does not know that a person among men consists of both parts and unity? There are spirit and soul and body; and yet they constitute the person. There may be temporary dissolution of the outer tie by death; there will surely be their unity in one person for eternity. But for the true believer Christ's Person is distinguished from every other by the infinite fact of God and man united thus. These are in Him for ever indissoluble, though no saint doubts that He is Son of God and Son of man. Whatever His profound emotion in spirit, whatever the conflict when He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became as great drops of blood, that Man was inseparably God; and as from His conception, so fully in His death and resurrection. Thus had His every word, work, thought, and suffering divine value. It is not the Son alone, but "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." The man Christ Jesus is not only the one Mediator, but the true God and eternal life; the sent Servant, and the "I AM"; Christ of the fathers as according to flesh, yet He that is over all, God blessed for evermore. Amen.

The error falsifies the truth in human things and yet more in divine. F.E.R. has fallen into Satan's trap in the most solemn of all truths through morbid self-confidence, and the mania of correcting every body by the standard of his fanciful ideas. He has imagined for the Christ a being, Who, if God, is certainly not complete man. For in his theory the soul does not enter Christ's personality which is exclusively the Logos. Thus he bans that unity of the two natures which every saint hitherto confesses to be in Christ's Person. He was already wrong as to man's person; for like most philosophers he follows the error of the heathen, and ignores the teaching of scripture which points to "the soul" by many plain and irrefragable proofs. But the awful weight of the falsehood lies in his audacious rising up against faith's mystery of Him Who was manifested in flesh (the body prepared for God's Son), not taken up as a mere condition but united with Himself indivisibly to all eternity for God's counsels, work, and ways. If we can rightly say condition, it is that of humanity sustained by Deity in the Person of the Christ.

Beyond doubt the union of God and man in one Person is the wondrous and unfathomable One revealed, not for our comprehension, but for unquestioning faith, love, and honour as we honour the Father. He is thus at once the weary man and the only-begotten Son that is (not "was" merely) in the Father's bosom; the Son of man here below that is in heaven, and the "I am" on earth threatened by the Jews with stoning because He told them the truth. He must have been the Logos to have been what He was here as man. His soul was united to the Logos: else the Person had been doubled or severed, and He could not be true and complete man. He cried, Let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt. There was His holy will; and it was right to lay it before His Father, but in entire submissiveness to His will and glory; of which none but a divine Person was capable. It was not therefore the Logos superseding the spirit (still less the soul), but perfectly associated with the soul in His one Person. He was true man and true God in the same indivisible Person. In Him dwelt and dwells the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

This necessity that, for the work He came to do, He should be God and man in unity of Person, appears also from the nature of that work, which is that of a Mediator between God and men.

If He had not been a partaker of the Divine nature He could not have been able to treat with God, if He had not been a partaker of the human nature He could not have been able to treat for or with man. The Eternal Son, therefore, assumed our nature, coming in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, in all things made like unto His brethren, that He might be fitted to be the Mediator, the One who could lay His hand upon both; bring from God what man needed, and bring to God what He required.

God He was they confess. God He remained, but with everything proper to Godhead in abeyance, all divine prerogatives absolutely renounced, and all the conditions and limitations of real humanity assumed. A sort of temporary depotentiation of His divine nature in, by, or for its contact with the humanity He took to Himself. "Deity can," they say, "without real self-impairment lay aside what belongs to it except essential attributes, and omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, are not these, but only expressions of free relation to the world he has made." Still another way to put it is to say that "He retained the ethical attributes of God while abandoning the physical." Accordingly, within a carefully defined list of prerogatives capable of being surrendered there has been an absolute kenosis, and among the abdicated attributes are to be found such as the above-mentioned — omnipotence and omniscience, but a short step being needed also, which many, alas, do not hesitate to take, to include the holiness, or inherent sinlessness proper to God. And in such limitations, physical, mental, or moral as the case may be, it is thought there may be found not only relief from the distracting problem of the relation of the divine to the human in His person incarnate; but fresh evidence also of the genuineness of His sympathy and the reality of His humanity.

Altogether does it not seem like what may be called intellectual tight-rope walking with metaphysics for a balancing-pole. On the Godhead, the manhood, and the unity of the Person alike, or in turn, one is in danger of losing balance. Even a modernist of the Roman communion can warn that "The whole doctrine of Christ's kenosis or self-emptying can be explained in a minimising way almost fatal to doctrine, and calculated to rob the incarnation of all its helpfulness by leaving the ordinary mind with something perilously near the phantasmal Christ of the Docetans." If an unbeliever sneers at their "limited God slowly emerging from imperfection and limitation," they have nothing but their theory to blame; although pity it is that they should give occasion for his scoff at the incarnation as "an absurd localisation of the Infinite, a differentiated moment in eternity, a limitation within the conditions of a fleeting human organism, of the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect God." This from the very class the theory is best calculated to conciliate. Kenoticists speak of saving the divine in Jesus by not shattering His humanity through ascribing extravagances of powers and faculties to Him. It rather appears to be sacrificing the divine to accommodate those who make all of the human. And when they do venture forth on their narrow fine-spun theory, such as the above quoted, they show no hesitation in using these their concessions to push them ruthlessly from their slippery foothold. If the precipice will be encountered, the overbalancing need not surprise. Precarious at the best any theory that can be framed to explain the adjustment of the two natures in one person must be. This metaphysically-inclined conception of Christ Jesus as a sort of amalgam of a self-emptied, depotentiated divinity, and humanity raised to its highest power, inspires no more confidence than others.

Of Kenoticism as a theory to account for the relation between the two natures in the one person of Christ it may quite safely be predicted that it shall only have its day. The face of things is in fact undergoing a change even now, and this fashionable theory is now beginning to be tainted and tinctured with new and ever newer ideas. This is not the first attempt by any means to construe into intelligibility the question of how Christ could be God and man in one person, and to set out in rational fashion how the two natures were related. To take what are generally regarded as the most conspicuous points in the history of Christology, there was in Apollinarianism a sort of pruning away of the humanity of Christ, excluding a rational human soul, principally with the idea of maintaining intact the singleness of His personality. Nestorianism, again, brought the two natures into no more than sympathetic harmony with one another, and by holding them too far apart the person was no longer an irrefragible unity. Eutychianism, in the very opposite direction, merged the two natures into one compound, a confusion not at all counterbalanced by the singleness of personality still retained. The statement of the Council of Chalcedon propounds no theory; but merely asserts the unity of personality and duality of natures. Not so the next landmark, Lutheran doctrine, which by almost a deification of His humanity approximates to Eutychianism. After all these comes Kenoticism, with its attempt to adjust the relation between the two natures, as we have seen, by the idea of a kenosis or self-emptying on Christ's part in the sphere of His divinity, not in the relative way legitimately following from the scripture supplying the term, but in an absolute and universal fashion unsupported by it, and inconsistent with all that otherwise scripture reveals of Him.