Gisle on Christ's State of Humiliation

Gisle's dogmatics is a distinctly Christ-centered dogmatic. It is both driven by the need for a lived experience with Jesus Christ as the central person of Christianity, as well as by the central concerns of orthodox Lutheran theology. This is demonstrated in his extensive section on Christ's humiliation in the 1878 Swedish edition. Utilizing the classic status duplex of Christ's humiliation and exaltation, he considers the necessary theological realities involved in what is truly means for Christ to be Immanuel, "God with us."

§116. CHRIST'S LIFE AS THE GOD-MAN.

This peculiar essence of the God-man must, however, in the Christian reality appear in a different form according to the different tasks Christ has to accomplish in His life and in His activity. Just as these are essentially two, so too will the life of Christ appear in a doubly-basic form. The objective reconciliation of the world is not only conditioned by the fact that the Redeemer is God-man, but also just as much by the fact that He, as such, enters into our earthly existence, with its natural limitation and weakness based on sin. Essentially, Christ could not do this without, as God-man, voluntarily renouncing the form of existence that belongs to Him, and in which His idea as such can first find its complete realization. This self-humiliation of the God-man thus forms not only the necessary prerequisite but also the essential starting point for the entire fulfilling activity of Christ, which in its entirety appears as an uninterrupted self-humiliation spanning the entire earthly life of the Son. But on the other hand, the subjective realization of the salvation objectively made possible by this is just as essentially conditioned by the exaltation of the humbled Savior or his entering into a form of existence in which He, even as a human being, stands in the absolutely perfect life-community with God and finds Himself in unrestricted possession and exercise of all of God's essential properties. The divine-human life of Christ thus distilled into two stages, in which He is the same in His essence, but in His real self-revelation is different: in a state of humiliation, which encompasses Christ's earthly life, and a state of exaltation, which encompasses Christ's heavenly life.

Notes [anmärker]. We have found Christ as a divine-human person, in whom both natures are united without any mixture into an indissoluble personal communion in will, knowledge and life. But we cannot stop there. We have as yet only found the divine-human person of Christ in its idea, but how this idea in concrete reality realizes itself, we do not yet know, and yet this is necessary for a complete understanding of the person of Christ. We have hitherto seen only the skeleton of the divine-human person, so-to-speak; we should now learn to know it filled with flesh and blood. We must therefore go back to the work of Christ, since the divine-human person and life of Christ are the necessary basis for His divine-human work of salvation. What we have previously found as elements in the work of redemption will appear to us here again exactly the same as elements in the divine-human life of Christ. It follows that this will appear in two basic forms, which correspond to the two sides of the work of Christ: objective and subjective redemption. To the one corresponds the state of humiliation of Christ, to the other the state of exaltation of God. Our objective reconciliation with God through the complete fulfillment of the demand of the law is conditioned: 1) by the fact that the Redeemer is a divine-human; 2) by the fact that the divine-human is in everything like us perfectly, except for sin. The Son of God must therefore, in becoming man, and also in becoming flesh, enter into the life of earthly man, take upon Himself his conditions, undergo his special development in all its special states. He must, together with human nature, take upon himself everything that is upon him as an effect of his sinfulness, with the exception of sin itself. He must be revealed, 1 Tim. 3:16; 1 Pet. 3:18; cf. Rom. 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; bear the weakness of the flesh, 2 Cor. 13:4; Heb. 5:2; etc. But thus Christ could not appear except through a self-humiliation, and objective reconciliation is thus necessarily conditioned by the fact that the Son of God, in entering into human nature and this upon himself, thereby voluntarily renounces, not his Godhead, but the Divine form of existence which, as a result of the personal union of his human nature with the Divine nature, essentially belongs to him. Cf. Philippians 2:5-8; 2 Cor. 8:9. The entire earthly life of the God-man as the result of his voluntary self-humiliation we call Christ's state of humiliation, His status of self-humiliation. But just as objective reconciliation can only proceed from or in the state of humiliation, so it is true of subjective redemption, on the other hand , that it is equally essentially conditioned by the exaltation and life of the same Savior in a corresponding state of exaltation. In order to carry out this side of his work, he must stand in absolute communion with the God for whom he was to act as an eternal high priest, be in absolute possession of the truth and fullness of life which he was to communicate to the world, and of the Divine attributes without which he could not act as the King of his kingdom, John 7:39; 16:7; Acts 2:33; Eph. 4:10. But this can only be done through the exaltation of the humiliated, through the entrance of God into the status exaltationis, Philippians 2:9; Luke 24:26; John 3:14; Hebrews 5:1; cf. John 17:5.

The state of humiliation of Christ encompasses the Savior's entire earthly life. The state of exaltation begins with the resurrection of Christ and lasts forever. In both these forms of existence the human being is and remains essentially the same, but gives himself a different manifestation of life, a different form of existence. We now proceed to consider more closely the state of humiliation of Christ.

§117. CHRIST'S STATE OF HUMILIATION

The God-Man's humiliation state is Christ's life under the general conditions and limitations of earthly human life, partly natural, partly based on the sinfulness of human nature. The characteristic of this state of His humiliation is that, insofar as the mission of His earthly life requires it, He has renounced the full actual possession and revelation of the glory of God that essentially belongs to Him, from the full, unlimited use of His Divine omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. In this humiliation He is indeed only human, but since it must encompass His entire human-earthly existence and thus in reality coincides with the Incarnation, the free decision in which it has its basis can, however, most nearly be an act of the Divine Person alone, from whom the Incarnation also proceeded, while His human will can only have any share in this humiliation of human nature to the extent that, since it begins to assert itself during His earthly development, it enters approvingly into the eternal decision of the Divine will. The humiliation thus begins with Christ's becoming human and already emphasizes this as its peculiar characteristic; as an entry into a state of humilation, God's human existence must in reality appear as a supernatural conception and birth, through which His human nature, although organically connected with ours, could nevertheless remain untainted by the sin of the race. The man thus created must then undergo genuine human development, even though the development of the God-man appears at every point as the perfect realization of the idea of earthly human life. The ethical development of the God-man was thus an uninterrupted, undisturbed progress in the holiness originally co-created with Him, which, however, surrounded as it was everywhere by the sin of the world, could not thus advance, but through an uninterrupted struggle with this sin, which must in so far become a struggle of temptation, as He must indeed come to stand in a suffering relationship to the sin that intruded upon Him. The possibility of a fall thus given could never become a reality. The life of the humiliated one must throughout be a life of perfect active and passive obedience to God, an obedience which reaches its apex in His painful and ignominious death. The immediate consequence of Christ's death is the repose of the soul separated from the body in paradise and the repose of the lifeless body in its grave.

Notes [anmärker]. Christ's state of humiliation is His existence as subject to human, earthly life under all its general limitations and conditions. These conditions are of two kinds: 1) natural, based on the finitude of human nature; 2) based on the sinfulness of human nature. Christ must submit to them in both these respects; He must enter into the whole of genuine suffering, which is the wages of sin. This earthly state of Christ must be designated as a state of humiliation, otherwise it is not the adequately complete, closest expression of His human essence, thus insofar as it is a consequence of a free choice and a state in which He lacks something of what belongs to appearing in the adequate form of the God-man. If we now ask what it is that the God-man thus renounced, then this is all that is incompatible with the appearance of Jesus as an ordinary earthly man, i.e. the glory (doxa) that essentially belongs to Jesus as the God-man, John 17: 5; 7: 39. This God-man's doxa has been renounced by Jesus, but only insofar as Jesus' earthly life-task must require it; therefore we also find that in individual moments, when it could contribute to the solution of this task, it really also reveals its presence, as in individual moments, John 1: 14; 2: 11. By the Divine doxa is not understood the fullness of the Divine essence as such, but its fullness in the outward revelation; thus the complex of the qualities in which God absolutely subsists, which live in Him, actually would and could reveal themselves outwardly in relation to the world. It is thus the Divine omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience that the Son of God has renounced, which come into view when we consider the difference between God's essential properties and God's relational properties. The former, of course, cannot have been renounced by Him, but the emergence of these essential properties in relation to the world as relational properties is what He has renounced in his state of humiliation. Cf. John 5: 19, 30; 11: 41, 42; 14: 10; Acts 2: 22; Luke 5: 22; 18: 31; 11: 26, 27; Mark 13: 32; John 1: 48; 3: 11; 17:25. The giving up of these by the God-man was not a mere appearance, but a real giving up. It was a real kenosis [emptying], not a krupsis [concealment], because the God-man is henceforth in full possession (ktesis) of them, some say. But the distinction between ktesis and kresis is incorrect when applied to the above-mentioned relations, in that their possession is precisely the same as their use. Applied to the essential properties of God, however, this distinction obtains its meaning: the God-man renunciates (renuntiare) letting His essential properties appear as relational properties. In the closest connection with this is the question whether this humiliation applies to the whole person or only to human nature.

The oldest Lutheran theologians answer this: that it is only to his human nature that the God-man is humiliated; it is only for what concerns human nature that Christ gives up the union which essentially belongs to the communio naturarum. As God, on the other hand, Christ remains in eternal, unchangeable possession and use of his divine glory. This way of thinking, which excludes the humiliation of the divine nature, had a great, extraordinary difficulty to contend with. It is in this teaching that the crux of thought, which is connected with the person of Christ, becomes an absolute paradox: the incomprehensible thing in this teaching lies, above all, in the concept of the God-man Himself. The more intimately the union of the natures in the person of the Lord is conceived, the more impossible it becomes to form a rational concept of the person of the Savior. At the same time that God rested in his mother's womb as a child, He was in absolute possession of His Divine knowledge; at the same time that He hung on the cross, it was He who carried the whole world by His powerful Word. What makes this view doubtful, however, is not its incomprehensibility, but the conflict which this dogma then seems to bring with the doctrine of the union of both natures. Do we not in this way have two Christs, each with His own power? This difficulty has been attempted to be removed by extending the humiliation of Christ also to His Divine nature (so Thomasius, Hoffmann and several more recent individuals). The meaning here is that Christ was not at all in possession of the Divine omnipotence, neither as God nor as man, that He had thus also as God given up the Divine essence. The God-Man was in His earthly existence perfectly in the general development of human consciousness. It cannot be denied that through this view the matter becomes much simpler: the personal unity is thus made as complete as possible, and individual passages of Scripture are also cited for this purpose, such as, for example, Philippians 2:5 ff.; 2 Corinthians 8:9; John 17:5.

However, it is a question whether these advantages must not be purchased at a high price. For the question necessarily arises: what is the relationship of Christ to the Trinity? Is this not completely destroyed by a self-restriction of the Divine nature? Is it not even a nullification of the Divine nature in the person of Christ? We must here stop at the incongruity which thus appears between the essence and reality of the God-man, as we cannot remove it. We must maintain that God, in becoming man, humbles Himself. Thus He enters into the humbled human nature. His entrance into human nature is eo ipso—an entry into the state of humiliation, a relinquishment of a glory which the God-man as such does possess, and which essentially belongs to Him, not of a glory of which He had only previously been in possession.

If we now ask from whom this act of humiliation proceeded, who is the subject of humiliation, the answer must be the eternal Son of God. The humiliation, as well as the incarnation, must be a free decision of the pre-existing Divine subject. Just as certainly as the humiliation affects human nature, so certainly it proceeds from the Divine. It is the personal Son of God who, in assuming human nature, also humbles His human nature. However, the human nature of Christ cannot be excluded from all participation in the humiliation of human nature. The humiliation is certainly something that precedes Christ's human self-determination. In other words, the state of humiliation is immediately given to Him as a human being. However, the unity of the human will with the Divine requires that as soon as His human will begins to assert itself, it enters into the Divine act of will, as a result of which Christ finds himself in this state. The human will of the God-man must here immediately coincide with the Divine will. Even as a human being, He must freely choose what He as God has chosen through the incarnation.

In this state of Christ's humiliation we must distinguish between three main moments: 1) its beginning; 2) its continuation; 3) its end, which then also forms its apex. The beginning must coincide in time with the incarnation itself. For if the God-man were to exist in the same way as other men (Phil. 2:5), then His entry into human existence must also be the genuinely human, one common to all men, mediated through the birth of a woman. Only in this way could He come into organic union with the existing human race, the necessary condition for the entire saving activity of God. He had to become human, so that He entered into humanity, in order to come out of the womb as an earthly human child, Matt. 1:16, 18; Luke 1:31, 35; 2:5-7; Gal. 4: 4. But on the other hand it is equally clear that His becoming human must be so far separated from the becoming of all other individuals, as He must remain untouched by the sin of the race. We know, however, that the sin of the race is propagated precisely through natural generation and birth. Should Christ thus be exempt from the original sin of the race, then His becoming through generation and birth must also be the product of a Divine creative power, mediated through a Divine, creative intervention in the corrupt human nature, so that this might thereby be purified from sin and in this purified form become the human nature of the Logos. Christ's birth must therefore have a supernatural character: He is born of the Holy Spirit and therefore also born of a virgin, Luke 1: 34, 35; cf. John 1: 13; 3:6. As for the development in this state of humiliation, it must be thought of as a human development, which proceeds according to the laws that apply to all human development, both in terms of His soul (consciousness and will) and His physical life. Cf. Luke 2: 40, 52. The only thing that must distinguish the development of the degraded God-man from every other human development is that, raised above the corrupting influence of sin, it must appear at every point as the normal development, as the absolute realization of the idea of the human individual. He is the perfect man, the normative man. As a child He is a perfect child, as a man a perfect man. This applies especially to the development of the will, the ethical development of the God-man. It is as such an uninterrupted progression in the holiness which was originally co-created with Him, a development of the seed of holiness implanted in Him; a development which thus essentially coincides with that which Adam would have undergone if he had not fallen.

However, there is a point in which Christ's development bears a greater resemblance to a sinful development than to the sinless one of the first Adam. Adam, apart from the fall, was outside all personal contact with sin. Christ, on the other hand, enters by His coming into the world into the midst of the sin at hand. He lives in the midst of a race in which sin penetrates Him and encompasses Him everywhere. His development could therefore proceed only during a constant struggle against sin, a struggle which differs from the struggle of the believer only in that he also has sin within him. This struggle of Christ must encompass His entire earthly life; nevertheless it could and must appear in a particularly strong and in a more striking way at particular, more epoch-making points in the life of the Church, and thus we find that it is particularly at the commencement of Christ's public calling and then at its completion that the struggle concentrates in a more striking form. Matt. 4:1 ff.; 16:23; 26:37; Luke 22:53; John 14:30.

What makes it difficult to understand Christ's position in this struggle with sin, and which makes Him completely unique in the history of the human race, is the double relationship in which He stands to sin, in that he exists in the "likeness of sinful flesh", and on the other hand is "without sin", untainted by it , if not unaffected and untouched by it (Heb. 9:28). It is Christ's peculiar weakness that places him in a peculiar relationship to sin, which consists in his being tempted by it, without ever falling into it. We must here think of the relationship to sin as a passive, suffering relationship, which has its basis in his being tempted by it (Heb. 4:15). This temptation had full reality; the struggle and suffering therefore also. It became for him a training school in obedience, Heb. 2:10; 5:7ff. Sin certainly made a tempting impression on His soul, otherwise the temptation would be only a vain spectacle. However, the temptation cannot proceed from Christ's own flesh, so pure and untainted by the sin of the race; and just as it could have no point of departure in Christ, so it could have no point of connection with it. Christ's relation to sin was a purely passive one. He felt its pressure and pain, but His heart was always alienated from it, because His will could not in the least be led in the direction of sin.

The question arises here whether Christ could or could not sin. The answer must be both yes and no. Sin was for Him a possibility, but at the same time an impossibility. Its possibility is given in the concept of His life as a developing and thus uncomplete life of freedom, which possibility also lies hidden in His whole struggle against sin (without the possibility of a fall, temptation is a mere appearance). But on the other hand, His whole position as the Savior of the world and God-man alike certainly entailed the impossibility of a fall. The union with the Divine nature must exclude as impossible every human fall into sin. If He as a human fell, would follow from this a complete dissolution of the personal union between the Divine and the human nature. In addition, the human nature of Jesus is the human nature of the Son of God, and the fall of this human nature would therefore be nothing other than the fall of God, which is an impossibility. It thus becomes a mere and bare abstract possibility, a possibility that is annulled at every moment and thus becomes an impossibility. We must therefore hold: Christ could sin; He could not sin. Cf. Heb. 4: 15. As in the person of Christ, we have no analogue here: Christ's relation to sin is as separated from God's absolute freedom from sin as from Adam's original sinlessness (could not sin; here: could not sin; he could not sin), and from the sinlessness of the perfected saints, where both conditions are innate. Here again we have a riddle that faith cannot solve.

Christ's life is a life of servanthood, and the exponent of His relationship to God is obedience, Philippians 2:7 ff.; John 6:38, an active and passive one. Christ's active obedience appears in the servanthood in which He stood to the law, Gal. 4:4. These include His circumcision and offering in the temple (Luke 2:21 ff., 41 ff.); His paying of the tax (Matt. 17:26 ff.); His relationship to the Sabbath; His baptism (John's baptism was certainly not prescribed in the law of Moses, but John's appearance has a legal character throughout, it was a law that every Israelite was to submit to confession of sin and in testimony of his longing for the forgiveness of sins), an institution to which He submits in order to fulfill all righteousness; He thereby allows Himself to be treated as a sinner, is anointed with the Holy Spirit and is thereby consecrated to His vocational prophetic and high priestly activity. Cf. Acts 10:38; John 3:34.

In other moments of Christ's life of humiliation, obedience appears more as a passive obedience. This applies, for example, to His hunger and thirst, His earthly poverty, pain, and anguish, etc. His suffering is almost a spiritual, a soul's anguish, which reaches its peak in His passio magna, which culminates in and is abolished by His death. The suffering appears as a forsaking of God, as a consequence of His bearing the guilt of sin of the entire race before God's holy and punishing justice and therefore also feels what it is to be abandoned, cast out, condemned by God. Yet this belongs to the fathomless mysteries of Christ's life, in which it is impossible for us to reach the bottom. However, we must not thing of these particular sides of Christ's obedience as disjointed from each other, but as two sides of an essential unity, which is the willing self-surrender to the will of the Father. Thus His death was on the one hand the necessary and ultimate consequence of the opposition in which the pure and sinless must necessarily stand to His sinful surroundings, but on the other hand founded on the free counsel of God's grace as well as on Christ's self-humbling obedience. It is at once the highest outburst of the sin of the world reacting against the holiness of Christ, and at the same time a work decided by His heavenly Father and carried out by Him in free will, for the execution of which the sinful race appears as an unconscious and voluntary instrument in the service of the saving God, cf. Matt. 26:53, 57; John. 18: 36; Acts 2: 23. That this death of Christ was not an involuntary suffering, to which He only related passively, see John 10: 18; Philippians 2: 8; Hebrews 5: 8; John 15: 13; Gal. 2: 20 and other passages.

Therefore, precisely because it signifies the deepest humiliation of the Son of God, it was also the beginning of His exaltation. In His death He conquers death, John 19: 18, 30; Luke 23 : 46. It is a necessity founded in God's grace, Matt. 16: 21: 17: 25. He therefore also foresees his death long before it occurs. His life is a journey to the altar of sacrifice, John 2: 19; 3: 14; Matt. 12: 39, 40; Luke 11: 29; 12: 50; etc. The death of Christ was furthermore a real death, a real separation of soul and body, and therefore also the state into which Christ entered by His death, nothing other than that common to all human souls separated from their bodies, insofar as death is not a punishment for their sin. There are those who hold that Christ suffered the torments of the damned in Hades, but this opinion directly contradicts the teaching of Scripture. With His death on the cross His atonement is completed, and thus also His suffering of punishment has come to an end. Therefore in death He commends His spirit into the hands of His Father: He passes over to a dwelling place of peace and joy, to a communion with God, of which the communion in the Garden of Eden was only a feable image. Cf. Acts 2: 31-34 (hades is the New Testament translation of the Hebrew, sheol, the realm of the dead). For Christ the transition was a transition to a blessed state, Luke 23:43. Parallel to Christ's sojourn in paradise stands the presence of His body, separated from the soul, in the grave, which is only the natural consequence of His death and of the reality of His death. When Christ's descent into hell is generally connected with His rest in paradise, this is based on a misunderstanding of 1 Pet. 3:19. They are two entirely different things, which must not be confused, in that Christ's descent into hell is not part of Christ's state of humiliation, but of His state of exaltation.