Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 71:281 (Jan 1914)
Article: The Full Divinity Of Christ
Author: Charles Caverno

BSac 71:281 (Jan 1914) p. 145

The Full Divinity Of Christ

C. Caverno.

Lombard, Illinois.

I wish to be understood as holding to a theistic element in Christ which has never elsewhere been manifested or expressed. In brief outline, I will try to set forth how and why I have and hold this conviction. I am convinced of the existence of God. This conviction comes to me from two sources — religion and science. I believe God presides over and in and through matter and its forces, and in mind in its potencies. I am certain of his presence and action in physics and psychics. Science gives testimony to that fact in the mathematics of matter and force; religion, in the phenomena of ethics. God, then, presides over both realms — the physical and the psychical.

If God would make revelation of himself in and to humanity, to me it would be a strange conclusion that he would appear in one of these realms to the exclusion of the other. Such half revelation is, to me, irrational. If he has made a being that can somewhat understand him in each of these realms and one who has to make adjustment in both, it seems to me he would wish to set forth the unity of both which exists in himself.

Wordsworth says: —

“Strange then not less than monstrous might be deemed
The failure if the Almighty ....
Liberal and undistinguishing

“in one realm

“Should hide excellencies”

in the other.

It makes no difference in which realm you start, you would expect expression of one mastery over the whole. That has

BSac 71:281 (Jan 1914) p. 146

been the common expectation of mankind. It was an expectation which met Jesus at every turn. He respected it. Over and over again he asserted his mastery in both departments. “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” Questioned as to his authority in the field of psychics, he said: “But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, . . . I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.” This command the sick of the palsy executed, and the multitudes “were all amazed, and glorified God, saying, We never saw it on this fashion” (Mark 2:3–12). That multitude did not seem to doubt that they had seen theistic control from Jesus in) the domain of physics.

Over and over Jesus appealed to what he did in physics as confirming what he said in psychics. “If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin; but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father” (John 15:24). Here is ...