d; He wondered, suffered, wept, and grew weary. He
confessed His ignorance of some things and declared Himself to have no
concern with others; it is even doubtful how far He was prepared to
receive the homage of those about Him. If there be one thing which
becomes indisputable from the reading of the gospel narratives it is
that Jesus possessed a true human consciousness, limited like our own,
and, like our own, subject to the ordinary ills of life. Once again
everybody knows this after a fashion. The most determined of so-called
orthodox controversialists would hardly try to maintain that the
consciousness of Jesus was at once limited and unlimited. To do so
would be an impossible feat; if Jesus was the Deity, He certainly was
not the _whole_ of the Deity during His residence on earth, whatever He
may be now. But, it may be objected, in His earthly life He was the
Deity self-limited: "He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant,"
etc. Quite so, but see where this statement leads. The New Theology
can consistently make it, but it is difficult to see how that newer
theology which calls itself orthodoxy manages to do so. Does the
self-limitation of Jesus mean that the Deity was lessened in any way
during the incarnation? Why, of course not, we should all say; the
Deity continued with infinite fulness unimpaired above and beyond the
consciousness of Jesus. Then are we to understand that this
self-limitation of Jesus meant that the eternal Son, or second person
in the Trinity, the Word by whom the worlds were made, quitted the
throne of His glory and lived for thirty-three years as a Jewish
peasant? I think the dogmatic theologian would have some hesitation in
giving an unqualified affirmative to this question, for the
difficulties implied in it are practically insurmountable. Was the
full consciousness of the eternal Word present in the babe of
Bethlehem, for instance? If not, where was it? Questions like these
cannot be answered on the lines of the conventional Christology. The
plain and simple answer to all of them is to admit that the Jesus of
history did not possess the consciousness of Deity during His life on
earth. His consciousness was as purely human as our own. Any special
insight which He possessed into the true relations of God and man was
due to the moral perfection of His nature and not to His metaphysical
status. He was God manifest in the flesh because His life was a
consistent expres