HUMANITY OF CHRIST

Humanity of Christ
The true humanity of Jesus Christ was denied even in the earliest ages of the Church. The Docetist Marcion and the Priscillianists grant to Jesus only an apparent body; the Valentinians, a body brought down from Heaven. The followers of Apollinaris deny either that Jesus had any human soul at all, or that He possessed the higher part of the human soul, they maintain that the Word supplies either the whole soul in Christ, or at least its higher faculties. In more recent times it is not so much Christ's true humanity as His real manhood that is denied.

According to Kant the Christian creed deals with the ideal, not with the historical Jesus; according to Jacobi, it worships Jesus not as an historical person, but as a religious ideal; according to Fichte there exists an absolute unity between God and man, and Jesus was the first to see and teach it; according to Schelling, the incarnation is an eternal fact, which happened to reach in Jesus its highest point, according to Hegel, Christ is not the actual incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth but the symbol of God's incarnation in humanity at large.

Finally, certain recent Catholic writers distinguish between the Christ of history and the Christ of faith, thus destroying in the Christ of faith His historical reality. The New Syllabus (Proposit, 29 sq.) and the Encyclical "Pascendi dominici gregis" may be consulted on these errors.



(The scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes copied the text from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14597a.htm)