CHAPTER I.

THE DIVINE IDEA OF MAN.

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Jesus Christ in the process of becoming the perfect man realizes in Himself the divine ideal of the race.

To develop a Christian conception of humanity, of its beginning, its ultimate end, and present abnormal condition, it is needful to study the Person and history of the Son of Man.

The account of creation as given in the first chapters of Genesis, when taken by itself, is inadequate, for it represents man only as he was on the lowest plane of the history of normal development.

1. The person and history of our Lord declare a twofold fundamental truth, the truth respecting God and the truth respecting man. As we have to study the Christ in order to get an adequate conception of God, of His will, His essence and His attributes, so we have to study the Christ in order to get an adequate conception of man, of his origin and destiny, his aptitudes and his essential relations. It is the divine idea of mankind that is actualized by His wonderful history on earth, and in its final form by His perfected mediatorship in heaven. His glorification reveals the significance of the truth that man was made in the image of God; reveals his essential dignity and his divine destiny; reveals the nature of his ideal relation to the cosmos, both to the kingdom of light. and the kingdom of darkness. What Jesus became as the

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result of His mediatorial work, that the first man was as to possibility and intention from the beginning.

The humiliation of Jesus and His sufferings on earth show that the present condition of mankind is abnormal, a condition that presupposes a moral fall. His ideal life of love and righteousness provokes the hatred and deadly enmity of the world; it brings to light the fact that moral evil is antagonism to truth and goodness, a violation alike of the divine will and of the original laws of human

nature.

The significance of the 'fall described in Genesis we cannot discover if inquiry begins with reflection on the false and the wrong in human history, or on contra-ideal phenomena of the natural world, and then endeavors in thought to rise upward from the wrong to the ideal right, from the abnormal to the normal; for the bad cannot teach the good, nor the imperfect teach the perfect. To get an insight into the greatness of that catastrophe thought has to proceed in the opposite order. Thought must begin with an idea of the true and the right respecting man's nature, his relations and destiny, then in the light of truth pass on to reflect on the false and the wrong in human history. "Knowledge of the good," says Nitzsch, "always commences from above, and necessarily proceeds from the absolute good. The bad is not a condition of the good." By this twofold process, by reflection on ideal manhood, and with its support by reflection on the actual history of man, it is possible rightly to estimate his debased natural condition.

2. Christian anthropology observes the same law that governs other sciences. Every science studies its proper

'System of Christian Doctrine, p. 235.

object, not a caricature, nor even an imperfect representation. Botany studies the plant; optics the light. Though light and the plant are related, yet the knowledge of either can be obtained only by the investigation of itself; not the knowledge of light from empirical studies of the plant, nor knowledge of the plant from experiments on light. Being the science of man, anthropology, in order to develop a scientific conception, proceeds on the same principle. And as botany needs the best specimen of a plant, as optics demands the investigation of light under legitimate conditions, so Christian anthropology, in order to ascertain the truth respecting mankind, rises to the study of the human constitution as it confronts thought on the highest plane of development.

3. If we compare the first Adam with the last Adam, man in the garden of Eden with the Son of Man amid the errors and sins of the Jews in the Holy Land, we at once observe the great contrast. Exalted and good as the first man was in his primeval state, he is in all respects inferior to the Second Man.

Waiving the question whether the account of the first man given in Genesis is symbolical or historical, or is historical truth in symbolical forms, but accepting the record as authoritative, it in the nature of the case is rather a prophecy than a fulfillment of the divine purpose, a type of ideal manhood rather than the final realization, Adam in his primeval state of innocence is the beautiful aurora of the human race, not the noon-day sun, or as Clement calls him, "the most beautiful hymn to the praise of Deity;" but his original condition realizes his idea in its first stage, not on the highest plane of its manifestation. Jesus Christ resumes the original status of the Adamic

race; then developing human nature in Himself according to the divine idea, He advances it from its primeval plane to its ultimate plane. Fulfilling the end of creation, He represents man to faith, as to body and soul, under a character that is perfect. The reality which the history and glorification of the Son of Man set before us is commensurate with the divine idea. Genesis must be studied in its subordinate relation to the complement of that record which Jesus Christ has actualized. Otherwise we shall fail to do justice to the book of beginnings; for the Old Testament and the New Testament are an historical unity; Genesis anticipates the Gospels, the Gospels presuppose Genesis.

4. Neither does the pictorial representation in Genesis afford an adequate conception of Adam's apostasy, of its nature, conditions and consequences.

It is not in my mind to imply that the representation is wanting in validity, or that it fails to declare historical truth, but that it is incomplete. Complete it is for that first period of the history of human sin, but not for the mystery of sin in its profoundest relations. A more complete exhibition of the iniquity of transgression involved in that fatal beginning is provoked by Christianity.

The nature of sin, the falsehood of the Devil and the wickedness of temptation, stand out as the dark background of the absolute revelation of Truth. The agonies of the spotless Lamb of God expose the iniquity of sin. As Dorner teaches, the most prominent characteristic of Satan in the New Testament is that he is "the enemy of God and of man, that as to contents and form he wills what is contrary to God." His persistent antagonisms to

1System of Christian Doctrine, 86, 2.

Jesus Christ exhibit the hypocrisy of temptation and the malicious attitude of the kingdom of darkness toward man and toward God, as these diabolical powers were never brought to light in the history of the pre-Christian

economy.

Whilst the account in Genesis of the original goodness of man and of the beginning of his apostasy is essential and valid, it is by the Christian student to be regarded as only a partial exhibition of both. The righteous life of Jesus, the last Adam, and the bitter enmity brought to light by His life of love, furnish the final complement. Genesis is to be studied in the light shed upon it by the New Testament. The Second Man illumines the first man; the temptation in the wilderness illumines the purpose of the first temptation. The Devil bringing ruin upon man must be studied in the light of Man destroying the works of the Devil.'

If we pursue our anthropological studies guided both by the final and the primary stage of human history, we may develop a correct conception of the Adamic race.

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The constitution of man is twofold, and occupies a twofold relation; being directly connected on the one side with nature and on the other with God.

1. Connected with nature and with the whole natural creation, the Adamic man possesses a mundane life. He lives according to a mundane law and a mundane mode of existence. Connected with God and the spiritual world. he possesses a spiritual and god-like life. He lives

'Heb. ii. 14, 15.