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Harnack says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is essentially docetic that is, apparential because the process of the divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom?
As M. Reville observes, "if the doctrine of the Logos were really to be applied to the person of Jesus, it was necessary to remodel the evangelical history." Tradition must be moulded so as to fit the dogma, but the dogma must be restrained by tradition from running into Docetic extravagance.
Nevertheless this hypothesis supplanted all others. Two causes may be suggested. The pressure of the Docetic controversy, which insisted that Jesus had never been a real man of flesh and blood, but a spirit appearing in human form, made the Church attach greater weight to the reality of his flesh and blood, even after the resurrection.
Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from the Gospels all that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleed and suffer and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows of man. Christ is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from the Gospels His Virgin Birth and His Resurrection!
Often, surely, a strange "bewilderment" must have beset the Redeemer's soul, of which the external token was the sigh, the groan, the tears, which shewed Him to be so truly Man. We all hold, in full doctrinal orthodoxy, that the Lord's sufferings, both of soul and body, were no "docetic" semblance but a deep and infinitely pathetic reality.
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