The Christian’s Highest Good. Douglas Vickers
put it in his discussion of “The Unipersonality of Christ,” “The Logos assumed a human nature that was not personalized, that did not exist by itself.”51 The divine Second Person of the Godhead, in voluntary condescension as agreed in the predeterminate council of the Godhead, took into union with his divine nature a human nature with all the properties of humanness, “in true body and reasonable soul.”52 Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, that is, possessed the full faculties of human soul, intellect, affections, and will. And it was that human soul that, on the cross, he committed to the Father in his statement: “Into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). It follows as an important point of christological confession, that in the Person of Christ there were two minds, a divine and a human, two capacities for affection, a divine and a human, and both a divine and a human will. When we ask who it was that walked the dusty roads of Galilee, who healed the sick and raised the dead and opened the eyes of the blind, we say that it was the eternal Son of God in human nature. Charles Wesley grasped the reality clearly in his well-known verse: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity.”53
The late nineteenth-century Reformed theologian at Union Theological Seminary, W. G. T. Shedd, observed in that connection: “When these two natures are united in one theanthropic person, as they are in the incarnation, the divine determines and controls the human, not the human the divine.”54 Shedd had previously stated that “it is the divine nature, not the human nature, which is the base of Christ’s person.”55 Further, “the divine nature constantly supports the human nature under all the temptations to sin that are presented to it. . . . It deserts the humanity so that it may suffer for the atonement of sin, but it never deserts the humanity so that it may fall into sin itself.”56 We shall return to the important matter of the presence and function of the Holy Spirit in the act of atonement that Christ performed on the cross. But it can be said in anticipation at this point that as it was in his human nature, not his divine nature, that Christ passed through eternal death on our behalf, in his doing so he was supported by the Holy Spirit.
The humanity and the divinity of Christ are declared by our Lord himself in his statement to Mary Magdalene immediately following his resurrection: “Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17, italics added). In his commentary on Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, Charles Hodge observes that “Jesus Christ is a designation of the . . . historical person . . . to whom God stood in the relation at once of God and Father. Our Lord had a dependent [human] nature to which God stood in the relation of God, and a divine nature to which He stood in the relation of Father.”57 As to our Lord’s relation to the Father in his divine nature, the focus of Hodge’s well-taken point is on the fact that the relation between the Father and the Son is unique, and is uniquely different from that between the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not the Son of the Father. The Spirit and the Son exist in distinguishable Personhood.
The confusion on these highly important points in the evangelical and even in the purportedly Reformed literature might be instanced by a single reference to the work of Robert Peterson. In the first edition of his Calvin’s Doctrine of the Atonement Peterson observed properly that “God Became a Man for our Salvation.”58 But in his second edition, published under the title Calvin and the Atonement,” that reference was changed to read “God became a Human Being for our Salvation.”59 But it is to be held to the contrary that Jesus Christ was not a human being, or a human person. He was a divine being. Jesus Christ, as the pericope in Philippians 2:6–8 eloquently asserts, was God and man, fully man in all human faculties and in imputed covenantal responsibilities. But he was not a human person.
The question we have raised, therefore, is to be understood as referable to twofold levels: first, the eternal Son of God came into the world for the reasons and purposes that have been indicated; and second, the human nature that he assumed came into the world by the Holy Spirit’s miraculous act of impregnation. Jesus Christ was therefore without sin, so that by his being made “perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10) he was qualified to offer himself as the substitute for sinners in the discharge of his priestly office on the cross. As to the matter of his qualification, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes has summarized the issue in his valuable commentary by saying: “It is fitting that our Redeemer should have been made perfect through suffering: first, because his completely victorious suffering of temptation of every kind (Heb 4:15) was essential to his achievement of that perfection which qualified him to offer himself on the cross as the spotless Lamb of God in the place of sinners (1 Pet 1:18f.; 3:18); second, because his suffering and death at Calvary annulled the power of Satan and set free the ‘many sons’ who were destined for glory; and third, because his own experience of human suffering in the body he assumed has enabled him, as a compassionate high priest to aid and strengthen at all times those who are afflicted with trials and temptations.”60
The Priestly Office of Christ
The redemptive office of Christ expands its meaning to exhibit Christ as our prophet, priest, and king. Those offices, as they are clearly observable in the Old Testament record, are understandable as anticipations of the status and office that Christ would occupy in God’s redemptive plan. He came as the antitype of the types that had pointed to him. He came as the second Adam (1 Cor 15:45, 47) of which our first parent, Adam, was “the figure [type] of him that was to come” (Rom 5:14). And similarly, the high priest under the earlier form of administration of God’s covenant of grace, and the prophets in their office of communicating the will of God to the people, were types of Christ. The prophets represented God to the people; and the priests represented the people to God.61 Those two important representations are combined in the Person and work of Christ.62
Christ, the greater son of David, fulfills the office of king of which David was the type and anticipator. In that earlier administration of God’s covenant, Israel was both the nation and the church, “the church in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38). The church in that age, designated by God “a kingdom of priests,” was a “holy nation” (Exod 19:6), and now, since God’s redemptive purpose has been fulfilled in the coming of Christ, the church is in itself the “holy nation” (1 Pet 2:9) of which Christ is the head. And in his kingship over the church, which is now distinct from the nations of the world, he is the antitype of those earlier kings. He has inherited the throne of David, as it was said of old that “the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32). The promise that God had given to Nathan the prophet regarding David was now realized: “I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever . . . and thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever” (2 Sam 7:13–16). When Christ came, the promise was fulfilled: “But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Heb 1:8).
Regarding the priestly office of Christ the catechism states that “Christ executes the office of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, and reconcile us to God, and in making continual intercession for us.”63 Two aspects of his discharge of that office are immediately important. First, Christ, as the antitype of the priests of old, was, in his offering “to satisfy divine justice,” both the offering and the priest who made the offering. He was himself “the lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). “The blood of goats and calves” could not definitively take away sin, “but by his own blood he [Christ] entered once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Heb 9:12). “Ye were not redeemed with corruptible things . . . but with the precious blood of Christ . . . who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times” (1 Pet 1:18–20).
The substitutionary aspect of the death of Christ in dealing with sin is explained in terms of the imputation of guilt and righteousness that was involved. We encountered the concept and doctrine of imputation at an earlier stage, when we observed that it is a serious fault of the doctrines promulgated by the New Perspective on Paul that, as Wright in particular clearly stated, to speak of the imputation that we now have in view as in no sense tenable.64 But the issue calls for careful attention and is a vital part of the transactions between the Father and the Son in the accomplishment of redemption.
The nub of the issue is that in his substitutionary atonement the guilt of the sins