(Concluded.)

I have said that Mr. Russell teaches that our Lord has passed through two forms of being. I have noticed his conception of His person in the first form. I shall now give his conception of His person in the second form. We have seen what kind of a being He is considered to have been before He became incarnate; we shall now see what kind of a being He is thought to have been during the time of His tabernacling among men. It will be made clear by our quotations from Mr. Russell's writings that he teaches that our Lord, on becoming incarnate, ceased to be the kind of being He was before, became a being of another order, and that the change from the one to the other was so complete that in the new order He ceased entirely to have the nature He had in the old. Strange doctrine this! It is not the doctrine of a divine person humbling Himself, with which Scripture has familiarized us, but that of a being really ceasing to be; and a different, a new being, being formed. One wonders how identity is maintained, for of this no explanation is given.

On page 179 he says:"When Jesus was in the flesh, he was a perfect human being; previous to that, he was a perfect spiritual being; and since his resurrection, he is a perfect spiritual being of the highest, or divine, order." On page 180 we read:" Thus we see that in Jesus there was no mixture of natures, but that twice he experienced a change of nature ; first, from spiritual to human ;afterward, from human to the highest order of spiritual nature, the divine; and in each case the one was given up for the other."So, then, when the Son of God became incarnate, He ceased to be the being He was before. He was no longer of the same order of being (a spiritual being), but only a human being! On page 179 he says:'' Neither was Jesus a combination of the two natures, human and spiritual."Then He was not what Scripture calls Him, "Emmanuel"- God with us; and Jesus Himself must have borne false testimony when He said, '' Before Abraham was, I am."He claims to be the same person, the same being, since assuming humanity, as before. If the Lord ceased to be what He was before He was born into the world, then He did not come into the world as coming from God, as He represents He did. He says:"For I proceeded forth and came from God " (John 8:42).If He ceased to be what He was before incarnation, a new being was formed who was only a human creature. How our adorable Lord is blasphemed how shockingly degraded!

Mr. Russell quotes, or rather refers to, Heb. 2:16 in support of his view. He says of this text:" And Paul tells us that he took not the nature of angels, one step lower than his own, but that he came down two steps and took the nature of men-he became a man; he was 'made flesh'" (page 178).But the passage really says nothing about one nature being exchanged for another. Mr. Russell often talks about Hebrew and Greek. Does he not know that the words in italics in this verse, "the nature of," have nothing to represent them in the Greek ? The Revised Version puts it:" For verily, not of angels doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham." It was not the need of angels He undertook to meet, but the need of men. True, to meet the need of men, He assumed manhood-became man; but He could do that without ceasing to be God. He was both God and man-"Emmanuel -God with us."

But according to Mr. Russell's view of the atonement, it required only a perfect man to pay "the ransom, or corresponding price," needed for the redemption of men. If an angel paid it, it would be overpayment. If a divine person paid it, it would be more than a " corresponding price." Justice required only the death of a perfect man. Hence the Redeemer must be only a man. With Mr. Russell the penalty of sin, as we have seen in a previous paper, is merely physical death; and this, again, is extinction of being. The Redeemer-the One who pays the "corresponding price," must be one capable of extinction. The exigencies of his view of atonement require this degradation of the person of the Son of God. The invention of his idea of the person of Christ is the natural outgrowth of his understanding of the work of the Cross. But real atonement and a true Redeemer are both lost.

But we must follow him a little further. We have seen that he brings down the Son of God from a rank of being higher than the angels, yet lower than God, to the rank of men. We have seen, too, that when He was in the rank of men He is regarded as not having the spiritual nature; 1:e., He was only human. Now, in resurrection, according to this teaching, He is exalted not only to be in a rank above the angels, but to a higher rank than the one He was in before He became incarnate. He becomes a spiritual being again; and, in addition to this, He is given to have the divine nature; and thus He has become immortal, since Mr. Russell says that "immortality may be used as a synonym for divinity" (page 208).Consistently with this, he says, on page 211, "We learn that Jehovah, who alone possessed immortality originally, has highly exalted his Son, our Lord Jesus, to the same divine, immortal nature; hence he is now the express image of the Father's person (Heb. i:3).So we read, ' As the Father hath life in himself [God's definition of immortality-life in himself-not drawn from other sources, nor dependent on circumstances, but independent, inherent life], so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself ' (John 5 :26).Since the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, then, two beings are immortal."But this is a misapplication of John 5:26. The Lord is there claiming to have life in Himself as a man on earth. He had it then. He is not speaking about getting it in resurrection.

Again, this exalted rank in which Mr. Russell places the risen Lord is not a rank to which He has a right by virtue of what He is in His person, but it is a reward for His faithfulness and obedience, and is of the favor of God. On page 189 he says:" It is purely of God's favor that angels are by nature a little higher than men; and it is also of God's favor that the Lord Jesus and his bride become partakers of the divine nature."Then the Lord Jesus is still a mere creature, a creature who once occupied an exalted rank, above the angels, but lower than God; who gave up that rank, ceased to be what He was when He was in it, and became a mere man, though a perfect man; and now has been finally exalted, ceasing to be a man and becoming a spiritual being again, and occupying a rank higher than His original rank, where He has the divine nature, not essentially, but as conferred upon Him; where He has immortality, not intrinsically, but as a gift from God.

On page 179 we read:" The human nature had to be consecrated to death before he could receive even the pledge of the divine nature " (and this, he tells us just above, was at His baptism).He goes on to say:"And not until that consecration was actually carried out and he had actually sacrificed the human nature, even unto death, did our Lord Jesus become a full partaker of the divine nature."Hence His exaltation was not the exaltation of His manhood, as Scripture represents it to be, but the changing of a human being or person into a divine being-the conferring of divinity as a reward for His fidelity to His consecration vows. Were such an exaltation possible, how far short of the glory that essentially belongs to our Lord! When our Lord says,"Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone " (John 12:24), is He not claiming that in virtue of the rights of His own person He was entitled to be exalted without dying ? Being still as a man on earth the divine person He was before He came into the world, He had a right to go back where He was before. When He did go back, after He had accomplished His sacrificial work, it was not any exaltation of His divinity, though it was of His humanity. It was no conferring upon Him of the divine nature.

In the second volume of " Millennial Dawn " (50th thousand, but year not given), on page 107, Mr. Russell says, speaking of our Lord as in His present exalted position:'' We must bear in mind also that our Lord is no longer a human being." Again, in the same paragraph:"He is no longer human in any sense or degree." Clearly, we have not misrepresented him in saying that he teaches that our Lord is not now a man. But Scripture says positively that He is a man now. " But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7:55, 56). Did the Holy Spirit in Stephen deceive him ? If not, he saw a man. "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (i Tim. 2:5). Here, again, Jesus our Lord, exalted in heaven, is declared to be a man.

In denying that since His resurrection the Lord is a human being, Mr. Russell naturally also denies the resurrection of our Lord's body. On page 129 of the above volume quoted from, he says, "We have no more reason to suppose that our Lord's spirit-body since His resurrection is a human body than we have for supposing that His spirit-body prior to His incarnation was human." Then in the next paragraph he writes, '' Our Lord's human body was, however, supernaturally removed from the tomb; because had it remained there it would have been an insurmountable obstacle to the faith of the disciples, who were not yet instructed in spiritual things-for 'the Spirit was not yet given' (John 7 :39). We know nothing about what became of it, except that it did not decay or corrupt. (Acts 2:27, 31). Whether it was dissolved into gases or whether it is still preserved somewhere as the grand memorial of God's love, of Christ's obedience, and of our redemption, no one knows."

All this flatly contradicts the Lord's own words to Thomas in John 20:27, "Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My side:and be not faithless, but believing." Here the Lord is proving to Thomas that He stands there before him with the same body that had been in the grave, and pierced upon the cross. He is actually asserting the identity of the body He has in resurrection with the body that laid in the tomb. Further it was with that body -the body that came out of the grave-that He ascended to heaven; and it will be with that identical body He will return, as it is written, "This same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." (Acts i:9, 11). Mr. Russell's denial of the resurrection of the Lord's body is not the truth of Scripture, and is therefore invalid as proof that the Lord does not now have a human body-is not now a veritable man.

Mr. Russell's Christ is not the Christ of God-not the Christ of the Scriptures. The Christ of Mr. Russell is an imaginary Christ. All who trust him have not a true Saviour. No doubt hundreds have been ensnared, and by "enticing words of man's wisdom " have been led to believe in a system that is blasphemous in its character and destructive of the foundations on which Christianity, as revealed of God, rests. For the deluded, one may pray that may be undeceived and delivered from the blindness that keeps them under the power of a system so derogatory to God's blessed Son; but for the system itself there can be nothing but holy abhorrence on the part of those who know the Christ of God. C. Crain