DISPUTED DOCTRINES -- Chapter Six

DOCTRINE OF THE HUMILIATION OF CHRIST

Theoretically there is no dispute on this subject among dogmatical writers in our Lutheran Church in America. All are agreed that the State of Humiliation pertains to Christ according to His human nature, and that it is concerned with the use, not with the possession, of the Divine majesty, attributes and powers. Put when it comes to the practical application of this doctrine, considerable confusion exists. Who has not heard Lutheran pastors in sermons representing Christ as leaving the throne of glory and in great humiliation coming down to earth and becoming incarnate for man's sake? The inference is that this was the very acme [pinnacle] of His humiliation.

Now, while the act of Christ in assuming to Himself a human nature was a condescension, it involved no self-emptying or humiliation. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity surrendered none of His majesty, attributes or powers in becoming man. He never left heaven in the sense that during His incarnate life upon earth He was no longer ruling over the universe with the Father and the Holy Ghost, but that there was for the time being a rift in the Trinity.

The passage in 2 Cor. 8: 9, "For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich", does not refer to His leaving His heavenly throne for this poor world of ours, but to His refraining from exercising in His human nature the Divine prerogatives that He even then, as the present participle shows, possessed.

All that Christ did and suffered during the period of His earthly life, He did and suffered not as mere man, but as the God-man, the Divine Person that He was, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. He suffered and died indeed according to His human nature; but it was not the nature, but the Person that suffered and died; and that Person was none other than the Second Person of the Godhead. Hence we can not only say that the Son of man died, or that Jesus died, or that Christ died, but that God died. And we can with the early Church confess that the Virgin Mary is and is rightly called the mother of God; because she is not the mother of a nature but of this Person who is "true God begotten of the Father from eternity." And even when Jesus was a babe upon His mother's breast, He was still the Son of God, and in His Divine nature, ruling with the Father and the Holy Ghost over all things in heaven and earth. Hence He could speak of Himself even when He was here upon earth as "the Son of man which is in heaven."

The miracles which Christ performed by His own authority made manifest His possession of Divine power -- a power which He did not ordinarily use, but which He could use when the occasion called for it. And it is this fact, viz., that His work was the work of a Divine Person, that gives value to His redemption and assurance that it was sufficient to reconcile God to a world of sinners. Nothing less than the blood of God could effect so great a result.

The Humiliation of Christ is therefore not a mere academic question, or a question for acute theological speculation; but is a question having a very direct bearing upon our salvation and one about which we ought to be perfectly clear. It is important for us to know that our Lord Jesus Christ was no less Divine during His life of lowliness and meekness here upon earth than now when to heaven and glory raised He sits at God's right hand ruling and reigning over the universe and causing "all things to work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose."

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