^{page 225 note 1} Cf. Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics I, i, The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans. Thomson, G. T. (New York. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), pp. 401, 404–405.Google Scholar

^{page 226 note 1} Textual critics are familiar with the practice which some scribes had of changing the text to fit a theological point of view. Borrowing from the canons of the textual critic, the form critic may contend that because the Mark-Luke statement is the ‘more difficult’ or ‘harder’ it is therefore more genuine or authentic. In this case, the statement of Mark-Luke was theologically too difficult for the writer of Matthew. Indeed, if unreliable textual ‘corrections’ of one or two words were imposed by scribes for the sake of doctrinal purity, why could not an entire statement have been imposed by the writer of Matthew? (For a brief treatment of the practice of ‘doctrinal corrections’ see Robertson, A. T., An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament [Nashville. Broadman, 1952], pp. 158–162.)Google Scholar

^{page 226 note 2} It is significant that Tertullian himself, in discussing the Logos, uses the phrase ‘second person’ to mean not a second centre of experience but rather a function of a person. In essence Tertullian is saying that conscious reasoning can be distinguished from the rest of the self, but not actually separated from the self in which the reasoning occurs. ‘Thus, in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you, through which in thinking you utter a speech, and through which also (by reciprocity of process) in uttering speech you generate thought. The world is itself a different thing from yourself. Now how much more fully is all this transacted in God, whose image and likeness even you are regarded as being, inasmuch as He has reason within Himself even while He is silent, and involved in that Reason His Word! I may therefore without rashness first lay this down (as a fixed principle) that even then before the creation of the universe God was not alone, since He had within Himself both Reason, and, inherent in Reason, His Word, which He made second to Himself by agitating it within Himself’ (Tertullian, ‘Against Praxeas’ in Ferm, Robert L. [ed.], Readings in the History of Christian Thought [New York. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964], pp. 110–111).Google Scholar This insight by Tertullian is much more fruitful than the reduction of persona to mean ‘mask’ in every context.

To use the psychological phenomenon of dual personality as a clue to understanding how Jesus could ontologically be both God and man at the same time is to forget that ‘dual personality’ is actually two personalities emerging from the basis of one common body.

^{page 227 note 1} The term mystery should be reserved for matters the explanation of which cannot even in principle be offered by earthly human beings (Thomas Aquinas). The term ignorance should be reserved for explanations of which we are not (yet) in possession. There is no reason to assume that a person is especially humble if he tends to think that his particular theological ignorance is usually due to the fact that no theological explanation is possible even in principle. Mystery must not be reduced to mean simply my ignorance at the present. At the same time, we can hardly avoid concluding that there is a large area—the unexplained—regarding which we cannot clearly determine whether we are dealing with mystery or with ignorance.

^{page 227 note 2} II Cor. 5: 19. Italics added.

^{page 227 note 3} John 10: 30.

^{page 227 note 4} John 14: 11. Italics added.

^{page 228 note 1} Cf. Emmet, Dorothy, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (New York. St Martin's Press, 1957), pp. 215, 227.Google Scholar

^{page 228 note 2} The purpose of this particular article is not to set forth arguments for the existence of God. The personalism of Brightman and Bertocci and the panpsychism of Whitehead and Hartshorne provide a philosophical base with which the empathy theory of the Incarnation is in greatest harmony.

^{page 228 note 3} Carlyle Marney insists that it was ‘the desire of God that made the incarnation ’ (Structures of Prejudice [New York. Abingdon, 1961], p. 97).Google Scholar

^{page 228 note 4} ‘What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world’ (Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality [New York. Macmillan, 1929], p. 532).Google Scholar Barth seems to mean that the doctrine of the Incarnation is epistemologically prerequisite to any doctrine of the Trinity (cf. Church Dogmatics I, i, pp. 471–472).Google Scholar

^{page 229 note 1} Cf. Philippians 2:9.

^{page 229 note 2} The temptations of Jesus were real even to God, and had Jesus yielded to the pressure to abuse his capacities for the purposes of self-aggrandisement, God would have suffered a loss. The ‘fullness of time’ would have been postponed. In the words of Tillich, ‘In the Biblical records of Jesus as the Christ (there are no records besides the New Testament) Jesus became the Christ by conquering the demonic forces which tried to make him demonic by tempting him to claim ultimacy for his finite nature. These forces, often represented by his own disciples, tried to induce him to avoid sacrificing of himself as a medium of revelation. They wanted him to avoid the cross (cf. Matthew, chap. 16). They tried to make him an object of idolatry. Idolatry is the perversion of a genuine revelation; it is the elevation of the medium of revelation to the dignity of the revelation itself’ (Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology [Chicago. University of Chicago. 1951], I, p. 133).Google Scholar

^{page 229 note 3} John 14: 28.

^{page 229 note 4} I use the term ‘objectively’ similar to the way A. N. Whitehead uses the term ‘objective’ in his theory of objective immortality (cf. Process and Reality, pp. 44, 530–533). Objective immortality is the abiding effect which one subject has on the life (i.e. the subjectivity) of another subject. Tillich explains the meaning of the immortality of Jesus: ‘Even the Christ is Christ only because he did not insist on his equality with God but renounced it as a personal possession (Philippians, chap. 2)’ (Systematic Theology, I, p. 134).Google Scholar ‘A Christianity which does not assert that Jesus of Nazareth is sacrificed to Jesus as the Christ is just one more religion among many others’ (ibid. I, p. 135).

^{page 230 note 1} ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father …’ (John 14:9).

^{page 230 note 2} Philosophical Fragments, trans. Swenson, D. F. (Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 87.Google Scholar Italics added. Apparently unaware of the implication of this statement, Kierkegaard, the supreme existentialist, is in effect admitting that existential faith implies essence or content. ‘Belief in’ implies ‘belief that’.

^{page 230 note 3} ‘To start with him [Jesus] is to start where both thought and feeling can sense a contact which may have for everyone some real solidity’ (Bowie, Walter Russell, Jesus and the Trinity [New York. Abingdon, 1960], p. 133).Google Scholar ‘It was what they saw and felt in the Master whom they loved and followed that made the disciples aware of God’ (Ibid. p. 155).

^{page 231 note 1} Philosopher E. S. Brightman argues that ‘to assert that divine activity created reason would be to assert that the activity was intrinsically irrational and that reason needed to be created; on the contrary, reason must be coeternal with the will of God’ (Person and Reality [New York. Ronald Press, 1958], P. 338).Google Scholar

^{page 231 note 2} Mutatus mutandis Tertullian expresses a similar idea: ‘[God] silently planned and arranged within Himself everything which He was afterwards about to utter through His Word’ (‘Against Praxaes’ in Ferm, Readings in the History of Christian Thought, p. 110).

Karl Barth, aware of the development of psychological theories of personality, insists that God is not some impersonal essence out of which three divine persons flow. Rather Barth affirms God's essence to be Person in three eternal modes. ‘The one personal God is what He is not in one mode only …’ (Church Dogmatics, I, i, p. 413). Personalist E. S. Brightman frequently quotes W. Stern's phrase ‘unitas multiplex’ as a defining characteristic of a person (cf. Person and Reality, ed. Bertocci, P. A., Jannette, Newhall and Brightman, Robert S. [New York. Ronald Press, 1958], p. 59Google Scholar n.9; Personality and Religion [New York. Abingdon, 1934], p. 35).Google Scholar

^{page 231 note 3} Cf. Menninger, Karl et al. , The Vital Balance (New York. Viking Press, 1963), p. 368.Google Scholar

^{page 231 note 4} John 1: 14.

^{page 231 note 5} While agape is the fulfilment and enrichment of eros, the former does not exist in God apart from eros. Karl Barth, of course, denies any need in God.

^{page 231 note 6} Whitehead and Brightman consider time to be immanent in the divine life. Hence, the will-to-value-and-fellowship is conditioned by the World (in Whitehead's philosophy) and by God's own nonrational Given (in Brightman's philosophy). The birth of Jesus was not then a matter of pure divine fiat. The ‘fullness of time’ takes on a more concrete meaning when understood within the context of a process philosophy. God's will-to-value-and-fellowship remained at a less fulfilled level until the human Jesus responded uniquely to his Creator. In that sense Jesus is the unique (monogenes) son of God. Jesus gave greater expression to the everlasting divine Word. In him the divine Word became exemplified in human flesh.

Those who resist the idea that God's purpose is ‘conditioned’ either by that which is other than God or that which is other than God's will but nevertheless an aspect of his being should consider the probability that any definite view of God assumes that God's will is conditioned. For orthodoxy the condition may be called ‘holiness’, ‘wrath’, or some other name. Indeed, it is because he pays tribute to something in God conditioning God's will that Athanasius is forced into the predicament of affirming that God, before he can forgive men, must somehow himself become literally a human being.

The great insight which Athanasius has at this point should, however, not be treated lighdy. He understands—doubtless from experience—that there can be no real forgiveness without personal involvement. The mistake which Athanasius makes is to insist that God could not be involved without literally becoming a human being. The empathy theory of the Incarnation—the involvement of God in human redemption—can account for the involvement without affirming that somehow one person can literally be two persons. Furthermore the empathy theory is not forced into Athanasius’ problem of deifying the body of Jesus, a problem which, incidentally, raises the whole problem of whether or not the body is homoousion or homoiousion (cf. Athanasius, , ‘Against the Arians’ in Ferm, [ed.], Readings in the History of Christian Thought, p. 149).Google Scholar

For an argument that even Karl Barth's theological system conceives of God as conditioned by something similar to what Brightman calls the nonrational Given, see my article, ‘An Ontology of Inevitable Moral Evil’, The Personalist (Winter, 1966), pp. 102–111.Google Scholar

^{page 232 note 1} Cf. Hartshorne, Charles, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics (LaSalle. Open Court, 1962), pp. xiii, 8, 262, 323.Google Scholar

^{page 232 note 2} With Hegel the empathy theory holds that through history and nature God's own consciousness is enriched. But in direct opposition to Hegel it affirms that the divine enrichment is not brought about by the Absolute's uninvolved use of humanity as a means only. Hegel's theology is not anthropology but demonology (or a deification of the demonic in man). Hegel writes: ‘It is not the general Idea that involves itself in opposition and combat and exposes itself to danger; it remains in the background untouched and uninjured. This may be called the cunning of Reason—that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that through which it develops itself pays the penalty and suffers the loss. For it is the phenomenal which in part is negative, in part positive. The particular in most cases is too trifling as compared with the universal; the individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. The Idea pays the tribute of existence and transience, not out of its own funds but with the passions of the individuals. …

‘We might find it tolerable that individuals, their purposes and gratifications, are thus sacrified,… and that individuals in general are regarded under the category of means’ (Reason in History, trans. Hartman, Robert S. [New York. Liberal Arts Press, 1953], pp. 43–44).Google Scholar

At best Hegel's theory of the Incarnation is an I-it relationship whereby the Absolute drains off humanity for the benefit of his own self-aggrandisement. Given this anti-empathy view of the Incarnation, Feuerbach had no other choice but to affirm either Satanism or atheism. While it is no tribute to Feuerbach's philosophic genius that he could not go between the horns of the Hegelian dilemma, it is nevertheless a tribute to his religious integrity that he chose humanistic atheism rather than Satanism.