The Incarnate Word

Selected Writings on Christology

John Williamson Nevin, Philip Schaff, Daniel Gans, William B. Evans, W. Bradford Littlejohn

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625645227
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877545
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Incarnate Word contains a selection of the key writings on the doctrines of Christology produced by the theologians of Mercersburg Seminary during the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite the seminary's small stature and marginal position within American religious life, these texts represent some of the most profound wrestlings with the doctrine of the person of Christ that appeared in antebellum America, engaging the latest in German theological scholarship as well as the riches of the Christian tradition. As such, they command more than mere historical interest, providing rich conversation partners for contemporary debates in Reformed Christology, and anticipating the insights of such key twentieth-century theologians as T. F. Torrance. The present critical edition carefully preserves the original texts, while providing extensive introductions, annotations, and bibliography to orient the modern reader and facilitate further scholarship. The Mercersburg Theology Study Series is an attempt to make available for the first time, in attractive, readable, and scholarly modern editions, the key writings of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. An ambitious multi-year project, this aims to make an important contribution to the scholarly community and to the broader reading public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European, Reformed and catholic theology.

Article 1

“Sartorius on the Person and Work of Christ”

(by John W. Nevin)

Editor’s Introduction

This review essay appeared in the Mercersburg Review during the first year of its publication (1849). Given Nevin’s interests and the prominence of Christology in his writings to this point, the fact that an American translation of a significant work of this sort by the German Lutheran theologian Ernst Wilhelm Christian Sartorius (1797–1859) attracted Nevin’s attention should not surprise. Nevin’s review, however, is more a sustained criticism of the translation and the way that, in Nevin’s view, the translator had imposed his own baptistic theology on the robustly Lutheran text of Sartorius.

The translator in question was Oakman S. Stearns (1817–1893), a prominent figure among New England Baptists who spent the latter part of his career teaching at the Newton Theological Institution (which in the twentieth century merged with Andover Seminary to form Andover Newton Theological School). Nevin spends the first portion of the review taking issue with the quality of the English translation itself, which he found to be lacking in both accuracy and style, and later he excoriates Stearns for omitting a significant portion of the volume dealing with the sacraments, an act Nevin regarded as a “mutilation” of Sartorius’ original text.

But Nevin’s deeper objection is to Stearns’ “theory of religion” and “Baptistic theology,” which views the Incarnation as little more than a means to the end of the atonement. The problem here, according to Nevin, is that Stearns views Christ as an “outward instrument” rather than the one in whom salvation is concretely accomplished and mediated to Christians. In this, Stearns fails to do proper justice to the hypostatic union and to the role and importance of Christ’s incarnate humanity. By contrast, for Sartorius Christianity “is a new order of life that has its ground in the Christological fact itself.” In Christ’s person as the God-man he “reconciles heaven and earth” and effects the union of the divine and human. This organic union of God and man, according to Sartorius, takes place “through the medium of common consciousness” and involves a real communication of attributes from the deity to the humanity and from humanity to deity.

Nevin then turns to the question of how this new order of life is communicated to Christians in the means of grace, especially the sacraments, and here he summarizes the section from the Sartorius original on the sacraments that Stearns had chosen to omit from his translation. Once more, Nevin finds the difference between author and translator to be one of irreconcilably different theological systems rooted in different Christologies. For Stearns and those who hold to his system, Nevin argues, the work of Christ and the benefits of salvation can be separated from the person of Christ: “The work which was required to take away sin, needed indeed a conjunction of divinity and humanity in Christ, to qualify him for its execution; but once executed, it carries with it an independent and separate value in the divine mind, and may be set to the account of men as a mere abstraction in this way, apart from Christ’s life altogether.” By contrast, for Sartorius the sacraments are real means of grace that, along with the preaching of the Word, convey the divine-human life of Christ. Baptism is the rite of Christian initiation, which then comes to completion in confirmation, and the Christian life that has its inception in baptism is then nurtured and strengthened by the holy supper.

Nevin goes on to argue that such renunciation of sacramental efficacy is characteristic, not only of Stearns’ own Baptist tradition, but of “the American churches in general,” which he describes as of “Puritan and Methodistic tendency.” Here he implicates even the American Lutheran party of Benjamin Kurtz (who edited the Lutheran Observer). Such churches may have a deep affection for Martin Luther, especially as they claim to champion the Reformer’s doctrine of justification by faith, but the sacramental Luther is not so easily dispensed with. According to Nevin, “The sacramental doctrine of Luther . . . was no outward fungus upon his system. . . . To part with it is to give up the cause of the Reformation itself . . . and to turn his whole theology into a new and different shape.”

This charge of declension from the Reformation, of course, was strong language on Nevin’s part! In support of it he takes pains to emphasize the commonality of the classic Lutheran and Reformed traditions. While conceding that there were creedal differences, Nevin argues that both of these magisterial Protestant traditions “intended to hold fast to the substance of the ancient sacramental doctrine, as it had stood in the catholic Church from the beginning.” In addition, he suggests that this common stance “grew too out of a corresponding Christology.”

Here many will sense that, in his desire to make common cause with the Lutheran tradition over against the low-church, anti-sacramental “Puritans” of his day, Nevin overstated his case. Certainly there are important Christological and sacramental differences between the classic Lutheran and Reformed traditions. But Nevin also had a point, in that the sacramental theology of the Reformed confessions was much too high even for many American Presbyterians, as his earlier controversy with Charles Hodge had amply demonstrated.

“Sartorius on the Person and Work of Christ”1

1. Die Lehre von Christi Person und Werk in populairen Vorlesungen vorgetragen von Ernst Sartorius, Doctor der Theologie. Fuenfte Auflage. Hamburg, 1845.2

2. The Person and Work of Christ. By Ernest Sartorius, D. D., General Superintendent and Consistorial Director at Koenigsberg, Prussia. Translated by Rev. Oakman S. Stearns, A. M., Boston, 1848.

[AN UNFORTUNATE TRANSLATION]

The second work here named offers itself to the world as a translation of the first. If by a translation, however, we are to understand a true transfer of the sense and spirit of a book out of one language into another, it is wholly a misnomer to apply the term to this case. The original work of Sartorius3 is one which comes up in full, both in sentiment and style, to the wide reputation which has carried it in Germany through five editions, and made it a favorite with all who take an interest in practical piety under a manly and substantial form. No one can read it understandingly without admiration and respect; and the heart must be dull indeed that is not made to kindle, under its simple though profound devotional eloquence, into some corresponding glow of Christian edification. But of all this, it would be hard to form any conception from Mr. Stearns’ translation. This is neither elegant, nor intelligent, nor edifying. A most lame, clumsy performance throughout, it presents no single attraction either in thought or expression, no redeeming quality whatever, save in the broken fragments of truth and beauty that still look forth here and there upon the beholder, in spite of the general desolation with which the work has been overwhelmed as a whole. It is indeed Sartorius in ruins; a spectacle, whose remains of greatness serve only to render more affectingly sad the chaotic dreariness in which its exhibition mainly consists. Murderous translations are by no means uncommon; but we have seldom met with one which could be said more effectually to kill the life of the author it pretends to honor in this way.

In the first place, Mr. Stearns4 evidently has had no sufficient knowledge of the German language, and no proper mastery of the English either, to do justice to any undertaking of this sort. His own English, as we have it in his short preface, is anything but easy and smooth. Were his knowledge of the German ever so complete, he lacks altogether the freedom and pliancy of style that are required to make a good translator. But he has brought with him no such advantage to his task. It is only a smattering acquaintance with German, he can be said to possess at best. His knowledge of the language shows itself to be throughout mechanical, superficial, and in a great measure merely external. He has never entered at all into its true genius and life; its idiomatic soul remains, to a great extent, foreign from the view of his understanding. Still less can he be said to be at home in the peculiarities of German thought. There is not a page of his translation accordingly, we might say indeed hardly a sentence in its connections, which does not betray some want of insight, more or less, into the true living sense of the original work. Take as a specimen, the following extract, which is made to pass for the preface of Sartorius to the last German edition:

Several years have passed away since the first appearance of this little volume, and now the Fifth Edition is deemed necessary by the continual demand for it. It is absolutely necessary that the doctrine of the incarnation, by the union of divinity and humanity in it, and the re-union of both by it, which was rejected by many theologians out of the historical churches, and had become foreign to and far from the educated and uneducated in general, should be transferred in this artless, familiar manner, from the department of learned theology, to the more common orbit of faith and life, and should be brought to the Christian conscience of readers of every grade, as the basis of all Christianity and of all salvation. Great storms have been raised during this time respecting the proper field of the church, and they have been particularly directed against this fundamental doctrine. They have endeavored to turn away the testimony of the church and its judgement, thereby expecting to tear it asunder and destroy it. Some have spoken of the incarnate Jesus as the Lord of humanity, in the loose generalities of the multitude, and thereby robbed him of the excellence by which he was to increase to a confederate head, and by which he should become the reconciler of everything which sin had separated, even the fountain of life and love from which every favor and power of renovation should flow. He has a very narrow conception of the thing who expects to remove from Christ the concentration of the fulness of the Godhead. He most assuredly misunderstands himself, because if in him all fulness dwells, every favor, even grace for grace must come from him, and by means of him we become partakers of the divine nature.

These storms, however, have to a great degree blown over or turned out to be mere wind. Indeed, the church has strengthened itself, established itself, and made itself fast during the roar of the storm, clinging the more tenaciously to the reconciliation of heaven and earth by faith in Jesus Christ, the mighty God eternally generated from the Father, and the mighty man generated from the virgin Mary. This union of time and eternity cannot be removed. The denial of the divinity of Christ humbles him to an idol or a demi-god, and leads to a heathenish idolatry, or it degrades him to a mere man, and thereby sinks his religion behind Judaism. Very evidently everything spiritual and human becomes him who is the king of the heavenly kingdom, who was exalted from the cross to the right hand of the majesty, not to conquer, but to receive the name which the Father has given, by virtue of which he shall obtain the homage of both angels and men.

In spite of the stormy movements of the time, therefore, while the world renews the evidence of the Scriptures and the church respecting the Son of God, and the Son of man the mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ our Lord, who though in the image of God, humbled himself, and took upon himself the form of a servant, was obedient to the death of the cross, and from his humiliation is now exalted for us over all the world to his praise and for our salvation, this discussion will remain immovable by the side of that which is old and unchangeable. Neither the contents nor the form of this little book ought to suffer any material change. The circumstances of the time seem to demand the very same things. Indeed, they present themselves as another proper occasion for giving the book both in Germany and in other lands, by means of translations, a larger circle of readers. Its design is to meet not so much the wants of a theological public as those of a Christian public. Accordingly, the Fifth edition appears with every essential correspondence to the earlier ones. As I would not, however, omit any amount of care manifest in the other editions, I have inserted when and where it was proper, individual additions and emendations, and thereby increased the pages somewhat.

May this work receive the blessing of him concerning whom it treats. May it receive the sanction of the Lord who renovated the condition of the world by reconciling it to himself. May it aid in establishing the Christian reader upon the precious cornerstone, without which every church organization founded upon some other basis than the rock of confession, which was first testified to by the apostles before the Lord ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Editorial Approach and Acknowledgments
• General Introduction
• Article 1: “Sartorius on the Person and Work of Christ”
• Article 2: “The New Creation in Christ”
• Article 3: “Wilberforce on the Incarnation”
• Article 4: “Liebner’s Christology”
• Article 5: “Cur Deus Homo?”
• Article 6: “Jesus and the Resurrection”
• Article 7: “The Moral Character of Jesus Christ”
• Article 8: “The Person of Christ”
• Bibliography