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

powers, it is exceedingly difficult to prevent this low view from running out
into Socinianism, as, indeed, it actually has run in Calvinistic lands, so that
it became a proverb, often met with in the older theological writers--“A
young Calvinist, an old Socinian." This peril is confessed and mourned
over by great Calvinistic divines. New England is an illustration of it on an
immense scale, in our own land. Even the Socinianism of other parts of
the Protestant world illustrates the same tendency, for these communions
have either developed out of Calvinistic Churches, as, for example, the
Arminians, or have first gone over, practically, to the Reformed basis, and
on it have built their later Rationalism, as in the apostate portions of the
Lutheran Church. Just those portions of the Reformed Churches which
have been most free from Socinianism, are those which have been
characteristically Lutheranizing, as the German Reformed and the Church
of England. And it seems to us that the most dangerous consequences
might be logically deduced from the Reformed theory. The divine nature is
a totality and an absolute unit, in which there can be no fractions. It does
not exist, and is not present, by parts, but as a whole. It is present not by
extension nor locality, but after another manner, wholly incomprehensible
to us, not less real, but if there may be degrees of reality, more real than the
local. If the divine nature is present at all without the human nature of
Christ, the whole of it is present without that human nature. If the whole
divine nature of Christ be present on earth without His human nature, then
the whole divine nature is unincarnate here. If it be unincarnate here, then
it could take to itself another human nature on earth, or, for the matter of
that, an infinite number of human natures, each of them as really one
person with it apparently, on this theory, as the human nature of Christ
now is. If, moreover, such a conjunction as this theory asserts is really a
unity of person, then this infinitude of human natures being one person in
the divine, would be one person with each other also. Nor is this
supposition of the evolution of such a theory from these premises purely
imaginary. Dr. Brewster, in his Defence of the Theory of the Plurality of
Worlds,