iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 135 



cannot understand it, we are not driven to explanations 

 that shock our moral sense or our rational intelligence 1 . 



1 In this connection it will not be oat of place to quote the 

 weighed words of a recent writer to whom we have had occasion 

 to refer more than once; "This, however, brings up the question 

 whether the Son Incarnate can ever have known Himself to be 

 divine. Was the Kenosis such that it annulled even the conscious- 

 ness of a higher relationship ? Some writers have contended that 

 to the end Christ remained unaware of His being God in flesh, 

 urging that on no other terms can we assert the genuinely human 

 character of His experience. In particular, it has been held that 

 while sin was an impossibility for Jesus, we may conceive this 

 impossibility as having been hidden from Himself, so that He 

 faced each new conflict with that reality of effort, that refusal to 

 count the issue a foregone conclusion which is vitally character- 

 istic of moral life. And from this it might seem to follow that His 

 primary descent into the sphere of finitude had veiled in nescience 

 His eternal relationship with the Father. Yet we need not en- 

 tangle the two positions with each other. It can only have been 

 in mature manhood and perhaps intermittently that Christ be- 

 came aware of His divinity which must have remained for Him 

 an object of faith to the very end. Now, if incarnation means 

 divine self-subjection to the conditions of our life, it does appear 

 that even such a discovery on Christ's part of His own essential 

 sonship must inevitably suggest to Him the total impossibility of 

 moral failure. But while His assurance of victory can never have 

 been mechanical, or such as to dispense Him from vigilance, or 

 effort, or seasons of depression, it was none the less real and com- 

 manding. There is no reason why His consciousness of unique 

 intimacy with the Father, and of the crucial importance of Hi 

 mission, should not have imparted to Jesus, in each temptation, 

 a firmly-based confidence of victory, though He knew not in 

 advance how, or how soon, the final triumph would be vouch- 

 safed. 



In any case, it is only by degrees that the full meaning of His 

 relationship to the Father, with its eternal implicates, can have 

 broken on Jesus' mind. The self-sacrifice in which His earthly life 

 originated drew a veil over these ultimate realities." (Mackintosh, 

 op. cit. pp. 480-481.) 





