Appendix Two: Forsyth on the Incarnation
Unity of being need not be denied [Chalcedon], but it will be approached and construed on those ethical lines which alone consist with personal relation and explain it. The Church has worked long on the old lines which were laid down by pagan thought rather than by final revelation in a person: perhaps, when we have worked in this new and living way as long, then we may expect results for which we are not yet prepared but which we can already forefeel along the line of the true method. The moral and experimental method in theology will give us, from its congeniality with the source of our revelation in a personal Saviour, results as great and commanding in their sphere as did the application of the other experimental method of induction so appropriate to natural science.
Taking this moral method we seem shut up to one of two theories. If the incarnation was the result rather than the cause of Christ’s moral action then it was the result either of a great and creative moral decision of his before he entered the world—which preserves his pre-existence, and seems to require some form of kenosis. Or else it was the result of the continuous and ascending moral action in his historic life, wherein his moral growth, always in unbroken union with God, gave but growing effect to God’s indwelling; while the final and absolute union took place when his perfect self-sacrifice in death completed his personal development, and finally identified him with God. . . .
In either of these cases everything turns on moral action (either in the world or before it), whose historic consummation was in the cross and its redemption. Either the cross was the nadir of that self-limitation which flowed from the supramundane self-emptying of the Son, or it was the zenith of that moral exaltation which had been mounting throughout the long sacrifice of his earthly life, it was the consummation of the progressive union of his soul with God. I do not see why we may not combine the two movements, as I shall hope to show. But in either case the supreme moral act of the cross is the key to the nature of the process. There the new moral value was really introduced into Humanity, and if the incarnation did not take place for that purpose it has no sense or end. The new element was introduced, it was not evolved. An evolutionary incarnation is none; it is but blossom. The element of miracle must be there.
Emeritus Professor of Religion Point Loma Nazarene University San Diego, California April 7, 2014 By Chalcedon Forsyth is referring to the Nicene Creed—“very man, very God.” Forsyth, Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 231-232. A. M. Hunter, P. T. Forsyth (1974), briefly discusses this on pages 79-80. The criticism brought against Forsyth that his Christology was that it “confronts us with a paradox no less tremendous than that of the Chalcedonian formula about the two natures. How can we have united in one historic personality absolute God and relative man?” Hunter comments that “let it therefore be granted that Forsyth does not remove the paradox. Yet let it also be claimed that as he states it in moral and personal terms and grounds it on evangelical experience of Christ, it is a once more faithful to the New Testament and much more intelligible to modern man.”
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