Biblical and Dogmatic Theology.—Only a few words can be added here to what has been already said as to dogmatic and Biblical theology, subjects on which the special headings should be consulted. There is, of course, no one theology of the Old Testament : that collection of books, belonging to different times, is constituted a unity by its record of how Hebrew monotheism gradually developed during several centuries. It describes man's groping after God, which, from the theistic point of view, is but the converse side of God's progressive revelation of Himself to man, imparting knowledge of Himself or inspiring the pursuit of religious discovery, not by over-riding human faculties but by adaptation or condescension to them. God, as a Christian Father expresses it, ever took man as he was, in order to make him what he was not. Thus was gradually reached the lofty and ethical conception of God and His relation to humanity which was presented by the great prophets. The Old Testament contains the history of God's preparation for the reception by humanity of the highest and fullest revelation of Himself in a human per sonality. The New Testament, again, contains the account of the impression produced by the life and teaching of Christ and the earliest extant interpretations of His Person. The relation of Christ to God came to be formulated in terms of the conception of incarnation; but though incarnation involves an event in "the fulness of time," the Incarnation has been by no means exclu sively regarded by Christian doctors as a complete discontinuity or as but contingent on man's need of redemption. From antiquity there have been those who regard the Incarnation, on the one hand, as the last of many stages and, on the other, as part of the eternal counsel of God. The doctrine of the Incarnation and that of the Trinity which is intimately bound up with it are the two dogmas that are most distinctive of the Christian type of theism ; and they are the two which for the first five centuries figure most prominently in the development of the Church's doctrine. In this connection it is interesting and important to observe that during this constructive period there was a considerable approach, within the Church, to that divergence as to philosophical method that has received notice in earlier sections of this article. The school of Alexandria was largely platonist in its theological conceptions; and, setting forth from the divinity of Christ as—in a sense— a priori datum or prior certainty, sought as best it could to account for Christ's human nature and to explain its union with the divine nature in one person. The school of Antioch, on the other hand, was more empirical. It pursued the scientific or historical, rather than the allegorical, method of exegesis of Scripture and, in Christology, it set out from the observed facts about Christ as man, seeking how to conceive of His deity compatibly with them. The Alexandrines cherished the metaphysical concepts of sub stance, etc., and spoke of the union of the two natures in Christ as "hypostatic"; the Antiochenes preferred to think in terms of the ethical and spoke of a "moral harmony." For better or for worse, the former school exerted the dominating influence in the final and oecumenical formulation of orthodoxy. It trans mitted doctrines expressed in terms of philosophical conceptions which the modern mind sometimes evinces a desire to discard or supersede, on the ground that they do not take account of distinctions which, once emergent, cannot be ignored, and other wise present difficulties which, unsuspected in the past, to-day are felt to be acute.
Returning to the particular dogmas of the Trinity and the Person of Christ, we may observe that in the case of the elabora tion of the former of them the search was made for a conception of the Persons of the Triune God such as should avoid the impli cation that God is a divine society of several individuals and also the implication that the Persons are merely temporal roles or modes of God. In other words, the great doctors from Tertullian to Aquinas who have expounded Trinitarian doctrine were feeling for a mode of being intermediate between what can be denoted by a noun and what can be denoted by an adjective, such as an attribute or a relation. Since human experience knows of no such mode of being and the conception of it cannot be elucidated by any analogy, these teachers have recognized that, in the last resort, they were dealing with mystery or with what transcends the limits of the human mind to comprehend or to conceive. And, shrinking more from tritheism than from modalism, they gave to the orthodox formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity a meaning which it is not easy to distinguish in essence from the rigidly monotheistic or monarchian conception of God as un differentiated, save in respect of possessing a plurality of attributes or relations that are eternal and intrinsic and not merely tem porary, as heresiarchs had asserted. On the other hand the doctrine of the Person of Christ which received the consent of the universal Church implies that in Christ, as incarnate, there was but one subject—if this term of modern psychology accurately represents what was meant—viz., the Logos or pre-existent Son, and that our Lord's human nature was "impersonal." This would seem to involve a conception of the Trinity somewhat different from that contained in the dogma as just expounded, inasmuch as the Logos is now treated as an agent or subject and yet as distinct from God or the Father. Perhaps it is owing to a sense of discrepancy in this connection that recent thought has some times manifested a tendency to interpret the Incarnation of the Logos in terms of the notion of divine immanence in a human personality. From this point of view, "God was in Christ . . ." would better express the Incarnation-doctrine than "The Word became flesh." But the translation of these two fundamental Christian doctrines into terms of conceptions such as are service able in psychology and theology at the present day has not yet been accomplished.