not least in the support it gives to the belief that a man can never become a disembodied spirit. His future immortality is to be clothed in a new, though inexplicable body, or sensuous nature.[1] A belief in a unity of the physical and psychical lies also behind the account of the birth of Jesus as it is contained in the infancy sections of Matthew and Luke, and even more clearly in the noble conception of the writer of the Fourth Gospel, "the word became flesh and tented among us."[2] In each of these cases we have a very early formulation of the philosophy of the incarnation, and one that may very well be taken as representative of the teachings of Jesus himself.
It certainly, therefore, is not too much to say that in the thought of Jesus, the individual man is a unity, which is the outcome of the organic combination of two complementary elements, body and soul. Humanity in its unit is thus a union.
III.
One essential characteristic of this physico-psychical being is its capacity to merge its life with that of similar beings — that is, its capacity for social life. The ideal human life, as Jesus conceives of it, consists in transcending the limits of an egoistic individuality. By this it is not meant to maintain that Jesus taught a pantheism or a generic humanity that is a sort of scholastic mélange. Sociability does not mean the extinction of individuality. It simply means that in the conception of Jesus the self is altruistic as well as selfish—social as well as individualistic.[3] There are attracting and correlating powers of the personality that reach out to others and form, much like chemi-
- ↑ Compare the opinion of Rabbi Judah the Holy, "God will reunite soul and body, and judge them both as one together." Here again contemporary—or somewhat later—Jewish thought illustrates Christian.
- ↑ John I:14.
- ↑ See Bax, The Ethics of Socialism. Whatever one may hold as to many positions taken in this essay, it is at least worthy of notice that apparently from a purely non-scriptural, and to some extent anti-scriptural, position the author has occasionally arrived at conclusions which are but a paraphrase of the teachings of Jesus.
