The subject which now calls for consideration is most solemn, and demands the clearest evidence, not only because one is bound to beware of exaggeration, but because the society concerned are here extremely unwilling to face the facts which condemn them. They refer to the opening words of Mr. Irving's preface to the Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord's Human Nature (London, 1830). “It is necessary to inform the reader, that whenever I attribute sinful properties and dispositions and inclinations to our Lord's human nature, I am speaking of it considered as apart from Him, in itself; I am defining the qualities of that nature which He took upon Him, and demonstrating it to be the very same substance with that which we possess. To understand the work which He did, you must understand the materials with which He did it. The work which He did was, to reconcile, sanctify, quicken, and glorify this nature of ours,” &c.
Now no one subject to God's word could agree to this, but must reject it as wholly unscriptural. For we read of “reconciling the world,” “you... hath He reconciled,” “we were reconciled,” “reconcile both unto God.” We read also of “reconciling all things,” looking onward to the day of glory; but never, nowhere, and in no sense of reconciling human nature. Mr. I.'s idea is unknown to scripture, and the source of manifold error. If sinful flesh were in Christ, clearly it had to be reconciled to God; and this accordingly Mr. I. teaches habitually and resolutely.
Clearly therefore it is not humanity apart from Christ that is in question, as to which no sober Christian could hesitate. The horror inspired by this able but misguided man, and not least in the treatise to which we are referred, and by his sermons on Incarnation and in short all his writings on the subject to the last, was through his doctrine on the human nature in Christ's person here below.
Some extracts, spread over the work, will prove it distinctly to a believer or even an upright man. “If then Christ was made under the law, He must serving Jehovah. Lastly, in ver. 23, 24, He spreads before Jehovah His own strength weakened and His days shortened, and begs not to be taken away in the midst of them, while owning that Jehovah's years are throughout all generations. Thereon follows the glorious answer to the self-emptied and suffering Son: “Of old didst Thou lay the foundation,” &c. “They shall be changed, but Thou art the same,” &c.
It is Jehovah from above Who thus answers Jehovah below in the midst of His entire submission to sorrow and humiliation, “crucified in weakness.” Jehovah will arise and build up Zion; and when He does, He will appear in His glory; but Zion shall not be without her humbled and afflicted Messiah, whatever the weakness He bowed under for the glory of God and the deliverance of His people; for the Son is as truly Jehovah as the Father. “Hear, O Israel, Jehovah thy Elohim is one Jehovah.” Such is the meaning of Psa. 102, as interpreted by one no less inspired than he who wrote the Psalm. Without Heb. 1 we might not have found it out; with it we at once see that no other interpretation gives adequate meaning to the Psalm. But what a proof of Christ's supreme deity, and this grounded on His possession of the ineffable Name from Him Who has it confessedly! The divine glory of Christ is the answer to all appearances and every dilemma.
If it be argued that the word, “Lord” (κύπιε) in the LXX., has no counterpart in the Hebrew, the answer is that the truth meant in no way depends on the insertion of that word, but on the attributes of creative and judicial glory, as well as divine unchangeableness in His changing all creation, ascribed to the Messiah by Jehovah. He was man, and crushed to the uttermost, as must be if He made good the errand of grace on which He came—righteously vindicating God in the face of sin and delivering the people on whom lay indignation and wrath; and this He did in suffering weakness, not in power, but is owned in that suffering as ever the same, the Eternal: not only as having an everlasting kingdom, but as the One Who was and Who is and Who is to come, the Ancient of days albeit Son of man, as John testifies in Rev. 1.
The contrast of perishable creation with the permanence of Christ (really Jehovah) deserves to be weighed. For the assumed perpetuity of the world is a root principle of infidelity, and never more than in the matter worship of modern philosophers, the revival of ancient heathenism. Scripture on the contrary insists on the certainty of a God of judgment, and not less physically than morally. All depends on His sovereign and holy will. It is not only that science is obliged to confess divine intervention in creating and destroying (I say not annihilating, for this is false) the earth many times and through many periods, ever so long between its original call into being and its being made the dwelling of man. But since Adam's children lived on it, a judgment both moral and physical has borne witness, however scorners may be willingly ignorant, that God is not indifferent to wickedness breaking through creature bounds; for the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished; as it will surely meet with a more signal doom, being reserved against the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. Now all judgment is committed to the Son. He has executed it, as He will execute it.
Nor is it only that these or those subordinate parts of creation shall perish. But as the earth and the heavens were the works of the Son's hands (John 1:33All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:3)), so they all shall wax old as a garment. Nor is it from creature's defectibility but from the Creator's righteous will: “as a mantle shalt Thou roll them up.” The unchangeableness of the heavens and of all that is visible or invisible in them is no more true than that of the earth and of all in it that men aver to continue as they were. The astronomers, the geologists, the chemists, the physicists, the physiologists, to speak of no more, are apt to swamp all recognition of the true God in sole occupation with His works, and thus sink into an atheism so much the more guilty, because it is apostasy from the only true Light that revealed Him. Yet not more truly are they to die than they must rise. For the resurrection of Christ gives the pledge of clearance from judgment, yea, of present justification to His own, and of sure judgment to follow for all who despise him. Christ's resurrection proves the succession of cause and effect to be in fact under God's absolute control; as is true of every real miracle: There will be a grand change to inaugurate Christ's coming; a complete and final one as the result when the kingdom gives place to all things made new for eternity.
This series of quotations closes with words taken from the opening of Psa. 110, which is again Jehovah's utterance to Messiah on His rejection.
“But unto which of the angels hath He said at any time, Sit at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies a footstool of thy feet? Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to do service for the sake of those that shall inherit salvation?” (ver. 13, 14.)
Psa. 110 is the more striking as immediately following the Psalm which describes the son of perdition, Messiah's betrayer. Here the rejected of Israel and of man is bid to take His seat at God's right hand, a fact alluded to or quoted throughout the N. T. perhaps more than any other Ο.Τ. statement, unless it be to His sacrifice or His kingdom. Nor need we wonder at this. Christ's present glory is asserted therein. it gives occasion to the bringing in of “the mystery of Christ.” It is the starting-point of the gospel in its heavenly character. It explains the enigma of Christ exalted above, whilst rejected outwardly and having nothing of His rights as yet here below. It equally falls in with the mystery of Israel's eclipse while unbelieving.
No angel was ever invited as He is to sit on that throne. Indeed, though the saints are to sit with have been made by His human nature liable to, yea, and inclined to all those things which the law interdicted” (p. 10)! It is vain to attempt unsaying this by the plea that he speaks of His human nature in itself. No one charges Mr. I. with meaning that Christ yielded to sin. It is not humanity in the abstract. He means, as he continually speaks of, His fallen or sinful humanity. Hence this fundamental error drove him from the truth of atonement to the falsehood of atonement. For Irving like other heterodox men confounded it with reconciliation and poured contempt even to blasphemy on the cross and sufferings of Christ for our sins. This consequence of sinful humanity was inevitable; for how could a blemished creature be a sacrifice to God? and what could be more so than fallen manhood, even by Mr. I.'s own description as we shall see?
“And in the face of all these certainties, if a man will say that His flesh was not sinful flesh as ours is, with the same dispositions and propensities and wants and afflictions, then, I say, God hath sent that man strong delusion that he should believe a lie” (p. 23)! “Now if there had not been in Christ's nature appetites, ambition, and spiritual darkenings, how, I ask, could the devil have addressed these several temptations to His will?” (p. 24.) It is sorrowful to report such enormities, but truth must be vindicated.
“If His human nature differed, by however little, from ours, in its alienation and guiltiness, then the work of reducing it into eternal harmony with God hath no bearing whatever upon our nature, with which it is not the same” (p. 88). Here again it is the evident consequence of a false start—that atonement means a fallen nature brought into reconciliation with God, by overcoming all its inherent propensities: a different gospel, which is not another, and what is worse, not the Christ of God, but an antichrist.
“Was He conscious, then, to the motions of the flesh, and of the fleshly mind? In so far as any regenerate man, when under the operation of the Holy Ghost, is conscious of them (!). Yea, verily, He knew the evil law of that nature He was clothed with (O; He knew every point and passage of it (!), and at every point and passage of it He met it with the Spirit, and drave it back and put bonds upon it, and let it forth again tamed and reclaimed(!); a servant, of itself an unwilling servant, and still in all things a servant of God. I hold it to be the surrender of the whole question to say that He was not conscious of, engaged with, and troubled by, every evil disposition which inhereth in the fallen manhood (!), which overpowereth every man that is not born of God; which overpowered not Christ, only because He was born or generated of God; the Son of God that day begotten in flesh when He was conceived of the Virgin” (p. 111). This is bold speaking. Three words of God put it all to shame: He “knew no sin.”
There is if possible worse and more blasphemous still. “This is the human nature which every man is clothed upon withal, which the Son of man was clothed upon withal, bristling thick and strong with sin like the hairs of the porcupine. . . I stand forth and say that the teeming fountain of the heart's vileness was opened on Him; and the Augean stable of human wickedness was given Him to cleanse, and the furious wild beasts of human passions were appointed Him to tame. . . I believe it to be most orthodox, and of the substance and essence of the orthodox faith, to hold that Christ could say until His resurrection, Not, I, but sin that tempteth Me in My flesh(!); just as after the resurrection He could say, ‘I am separate from sinners'“ (pp. 126, 127).
It is unnecessary, after such copious and varied extracts from the later treatise to do more than refer briefly to Mr. Irving's earlier sermons in 1828, the first vol. of the three being devoted to the Incarnation. But there too, though not yet so developed, is the same plague-spot. “I shall proceed to open, in the second part of this sermon, how God by uniting the person of His Son to fallen flesh doth thereby reconcile the whole lump of fallen humanity into Himself,” &c., (140) i. “That the Son of God...should join Himself unto fallen creation, and take up into His own eternal personality the human nature, after it had fallen, and become obnoxious to all the powers of sin and infirmity and rebellion. . . That Christ took our fallen nature is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take...I believe therefore...that Christ took unto Himself a true body and a reasonable soul, and that the flesh of Christ, like my flesh was in its proper nature mortal and corruptible,” &c., 2. (160) 3. At the same time his testimony to Christ's vicarious sufferings was far simpler and clearer than afterward, though even here atonement was confounded with reconciliation, and both with Incarnation, which last is misunderstood and perverted, being made a question of human reasoning instead of faith in the word of God. “The human nature is thoroughly fallen; and without a thorough communication, inhabitation, and empowering of a divine substance, it cannot again be brought. up pure and holy. The mere apprehension of it by the Son does not make it holy” (140) 13.
Every simple and sound believer will own that this denies the Incarnation of scripture, yea of the creed of Christendom, inferior as this is and must be to God's word. For there it is owing to the action of the Holy Ghost, and to the power of the Highest, that the Holy thing was to be born of the Virgin and as such called the Son of God. The anointing of the Spirit of God afterward was for power in service. He was the Holy One even in His humanity from first to last: there could be no question of the divine nature. Had there been sin (no one says sins) in His humanity, Immanuel as to flesh would have been no longer holy. Thus the evil doctrine divides as well as defiles the person necessarily; and the flesh of the Lord Jesus was represented, not as so united as to form one person, but as a fallen thing surrounding Him like a garment or a pit (Mr. I.'s own illustrations), from which flesh His life was one series of conflicts to liberate itself victoriously, as an example to us who are really what is here falsely said of Christ. It will be seen too that, as Christ's person is overthrown by unbelief in the true Incarnation, so atonement according to God is denied; and Mr. I. goes so far as to say that “atonement and redemption have no reference to God (1); they are the names for the bearing of Christ's work on the sinner!! and have no respect to its bearing upon the Godhead”!!! This would satisfy an Arian or even a Unitarian. There are statements quite inconsistent with this fundamental falsehood. But there it is; and no lie is of the truth.
In the preliminary discourse to Ben-Ezra (the copy now before me being a gift to an elder of the Caledonian church “with the tender affections of Edward Irving”) Mr. I. spoke after a far more orthodox sort. “Between Him and His people there is no difference in respect to that which is observable; while there is the utmost difference in respect to the principle and cause: in the Son of man the cause was the imputation of the sins of the people, in our case it is indwelling sin, and the sin which is around us” (p. 114.). So (in p. 126.) he says “the Word of God took flesh of the Virgin Mary, passive humanity He took, obnoxious to every temptation, and begirt with every sinless infirmity.” One need not insinuate a fault; but the statement would have been correct, had he predicated sinlessness of every temptation as well as of everything else. This at any rate is done with emphasis and jealousy in Heb. 4:1515For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15), Christ apart from sin, 10. χ. ἁμ.: in Him, not only by Him, was none. But Mr. I. probably so believed at that time (1826) without a jibe at “imputation,” or contempt for “stock-jobbing theology": this followed his heterodoxy. As yet Christ's person and work were unassailed.
No unsophisticated child of God could read such statements without both rejecting and resenting them as an insult to Christ and the truth. The Incarnation is subverted, the person of Christ belied. What room is left by this unholy and destructive system for the wondrous message, “That holy thing which shall be born [of thee] shall be called the Son of God”? What has the new birth in our case to do with the wholly exceptional action of the Godhead in the birth of Christ? Beyond doubt the believer is quickened by faith; he has life in the Son. What has this in common with the Son's taking humanity into union with His Deity, That Holy Thing by the power of the Holy Spirit to be born of Mary? When a man is born of God, is his human nature born again? The Irvingite fabric is shattered by the merest touch of scripture. The language about Christ's birth is wholly inapplicable to any other. How could it be otherwise if He is the Savior and we the saved, He a divine person, however truly deigning to become man and by redemption bring glory to God even where sin was and abounded, impossible in any other way?
In keeping with this defamation of Christ, it is not Irvingites only who misapprehend temptation as spoken of the Christ of God. Mr. I. repeatedly in this treatise misquotes Heb. 4:1515For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15) by leaving out the last words, which are essential to the truth. He and all who judge of Christ from themselves, from human nature as it is in us, did not understand its bearing. Christ has been tempted in all things in like manner with us, sin excepted. The sense is not merely that He never sinned when tempted, but that He had been thus similarly tempted in all points “apart from sin,” and not merely without sinning. In Him was no sin; in us there is. This characteristic and peculiar difference is here pointed out as an exception of the utmost magnitude qualifying His temptations in contrast with ours. In Him even what was born of His mother was holy, whilst we, the regenerate, no less than others, were shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin. He therefore did not know sin, and never had a lust or passion from fallen humanity. His temptations were exclusively those of a holy being, and full of suffering to Him, because He felt always according to God when the enemy thus tried but found nothing in Him—alas! how much in us, even in the regenerate. Flesh yields to evil temptation and is gratified, instead of suffering.
They talk indeed as if it was necessary to sympathy with us, that Christ should know our unholy temptations, as in Jam. 1:14, 15. But this is most superficial as well as false. He sympathizes with us so much the more, because we have an inward traitor which He had not, while He suffering perfectly in keeping out the enemy is undistractedly and perfectly free to feel for us in every trial. In fact, if their principle were at all sound, it ought to go farther; for it would involve His failing under temptation, in order to comfort adequately those bitterly conscious of their failures. But the principle is false and evil. The believer abhors the notion of Christ's sympathy with his evil thoughts, feelings or ways. He hates them all and judges himself for them, and finds the true answer to sin in Christ a sacrifice for it. He seeks and obtains Christ's sympathy with the new man in loathing every evil within, and comes not in vain and even with boldness to the throne of grace, to receive mercy and find grace for seasonable help. What he needs for his sins, I repeat, is that propitiation and substitution of Christ which Mr. L's heterodoxy taught him to despise. Christ died for our sins. This was what was required by God for us—not sympathy, but infinite suffering in atonement; and by that one offering they are effaced, and we are purged for God's presence, condemnation having already been executed on their root, sin in the flesh, when He became a sacrifice for sin (Rom. 8:2, 32For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. 3For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: (Romans 8:2‑3)).
To this end God sent His Son, not in “flesh of sin” as this horrible doctrine presumes, but “in the likeness” of it, being born of woman, and thus more fully man than Adam unfallen, but by the power of the Highest born “holy,” as no man ever was. Born in sin would have unfitted Him for communion as well as for sacrifice. Likeness of flesh would have been unavailing and useless; but “in the likeness of flesh of sin” was just what was wanted for the divine glory, as well as for our salvation. And thus in the cross was God glorified even as to sin, as Christ had glorified the Father as the obedient man, most holy alike in life and death, holy from first to last in all His being, as in all He did and suffered, He only.
It will be argued, however, that in all this dark antagonism to the truth of Christ's person and atonement it is a question of Mr. Irving, rather than of the Catholic Apostolic body. But these are facts: that Mr. I. was incomparably the most influential teacher they ever had; that no tenet is more characteristic of their one joint organ (the Morning Watch) throughout its seven volumes and by many if not all its contributors; and nowhere more acrimoniously than in the last vol. Thus it is in vain to represent their first angel as an exception instead of being the most prominent and active leader in doctrine. Indeed it is to his credit that none can impute underhandedness or bringing in things privily, the almost unfailing reproach of false prophets. He at least was outspoken; which did not please more prudent men well aware of the umbrage given far and wide to Christians by language on this subject so vehement, unmeasured, and profane. Incarnation was not at all that action which works in the regenerate, as he alleged, but peculiar to Christ; while no one doubts the power of the Spirit in which He invariably walked.
Another plea, by no means candid, is that Irving preached the sinful humanity of Christ before the ordinances, as they call the setting up of apostles, &c. They all know he preached it no less when he was ordained angel by the pillar of the apostles.
But the truth is, as another has acutely observed, that his preaching that Christ took flesh of sin has so much the greater weight because it preceded the gifts and authorities. For, as they alleged, “the power” sealed its truth. No fact is more certain. Mr. Irving himself wrote on April 21st, 1832, to Mr. Baxter, who had testified his unsoundness on the Lord's humanity, on imputing righteousness, and on holiness in the flesh (for the same error asserted sin in Christ's flesh and the possibility of its absence from ours). In that letter Mr. I. adhered to the evil, and distinctly reported that the spirit in Miss. E. C. laid down that Mr. B. “had been snared by departing from the word and the testimony,” and that L had maintained the truth, and the Lord was well pleased with him for it; that in some words he had erred, and that the word by the spirit in B. was therefore true; that if I. waited on the Lord, He would show this by His Spirit, but that He had forgiven it, because He knew his heart was right before Him; that I. had maintained the truth and must not draw back from maintaining it. They then joined in prayer, among the rest for Mr. Baxter's deliverance from the snare concerning the flesh of Christ and the holiness of the believer. Mrs. I. advised leaving it to the Lord, but Mrs. C. gave an utterance in power that Mr. B. had stumbled greatly, dwelling most on the doctrine of perfect holiness. A third utterance from Miss E. C. taught Mr. Irving that Satan sought to overthrow his confidence in the truth, and to bring him into a snare, but that he was called upon to maintain it more firmly than ever.
In the same letter Mr. I. warns Mr. B. that now he is “brought to oppose that very doctrine which alone can bring the chosen to be meet for her Bridegroom—that as He was holy in the flesh, so are we, through the grace of regeneration, brought to be holy—planted in a holy standing—the flesh dead to sin, as His flesh was dead to sin—and that by the baptism of the Holy Ghost we are brought into the fellowship of His power and fullness, to do the works which He also did, and greater works than these.” Mr. I. read his report to his wife, as well as to the two prophetesses, who said it was a full and exact account. He also reiterated that not the motions of the flesh but the law of the flesh was all present in Christ, only in Him by a holy life put down; and that thus ought we to be and shall be, when the flesh becometh the sackcloth covering. (Mrs. C. had prophesied that the baptism by fire would burn out the carnal mind.) Narrative, pp. 103-108.
Who can wonder that on this rose a doubt in Mr. B.'s mind whether the whole work were not of Satan (Narrative, pp. 116, 117). And it is perfectly clear that it was not only the heterodoxy of Mr. Irving before the alleged restoration of the Comforter, but the spirit, which built up the entire Catholic-Apostolic structure, stands fully committed to Mr. I.'s doctrine in substance, save some unguarded expressions. Just so Mr. I. stated. previously that “The way for the coming of the Comforter had to be prepared by the preaching of the full coming of Christ in our flesh and His coming again in glory, the two great divisions of Christian doctrine which had gone down in the earth, out of sight and out of mind, and which must be revived by preaching, before the Holy Spirit could have anything to witness unto.”
We have now amply seen by his own words what Mr. I. meant by the coming of Christ in “our” flesh; and the spirit which the Catholic Apostolics acknowledged as the voice of God sealed that lie against the Lord, contrary to the faith of God's elect in every age, land and tongue, contrary to every creed of Greek, Oriental or Roman, as well as the articles of faith of all Protestants. But one rests, as all ought, on the unfailing standard of God's word, and cannot but pronounce it an antichrist. On this evil foundation rests the Irvingite body, as surely as the witnesses produced are irrefragable. Nor can they purge themselves from their original error, any more than Papists, who adhere to their dogma of infallibility. So no less but rather more are the Catholic Apostolic adherents bound by most unhappy lot to the sanction of that spirit they own as divine. To judge it a lying spirit means their dissolution; and hence every effort to hide, evade, and explain away, so characteristic of the party.