The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

present without his humanity, is to deny that this humanity is a part of that
personality, and the doctrine of the incarnation falls to the dust: Christ
becomes no more than the organ of a special revelation of Deity: His
humanity is no more properly one person with God than the burning bush
was one person with Jehovah. Accepting the doctrine of a real incarnation,
the omnipresence of the human nature of Christ, not in itself, in which
respect its presence is determinate, but through the divine, is a necessary
result and involves no new mystery. If that whole Godhead which dwells
in Christ's body can, without motion, without leaving heaven, or extending
itself, be present with us on earth, then can it render present with us,
without motion or extension, that other nature which is one person with it.
What the divine nature of Christ has of itself, his human nature has through
the divine, which has taken it to be one person with itself. This is one result
of that doctrine of the Communicatio idiomatum, of which, as we shall see
in a moment, Dr. Shedd offers so extremely inaccurate a definition. If the
Evangelical Lutheran is asked, how can Christ's human nature be present
with us? he can reply: After the manner in which an infinite Spirit renders
present a human nature, which it has taken to be an inseparable constituent
of its own person, a manner most real, but utterly incomprehensible to us.
This is the doctrine at which Dr. Shedd levels, as has often been done
before him, the term Ubiquity. It was the whole Christ- the man as well as
the God - who said: “Where two or three are gathered together in my
name, there am I in the midst of them." It was the whole Christ who said:
"Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." And what the
whole Christ promised, the whole Christ will perform. On any other
theory, the Christian on earth has no more a personal Christ with him than
the Patriarchs had; the New Dispensation has made no advance on the
Old; the divine nature, the second person of the Trinity, was just as much
on earth then as he is now; and all the light, peace and joy, which a sense
of the actual nearness, tender guardianship, and personal sympathy of an
incarnate Christ sheds upon the soul, vanish in a haze of hyperboles, a
miserable