Daily Reading for August 18 • William Porcher DuBose, Priest, 1918
DuBose urges that Jesus’ humanity was not merely the humanity of an individual man, but rather “the common and universal nature of us all.” Therefore Jesus’ human holiness, righteousness, and life possess a “universal” significance. Accordingly, Jesus “can be nothing less than God our holiness, our righteousness, our life.” Jesus was no mere sample or example of human salvation: “it was not one man but humanity that He was.”
The universality of Jesus’ human nature is significant for our salvation. Jesus “included all selves in Himself, and suffers, and is crucified and put to shame, or lives anew, rejoices, and is glorified in the whole body and in every member of the humanity that is Himself and His own.” Jesus “is present in us every one; and operative unto salvation in every one of us who believes and realizes His presence.” The universality of the Incarnation is a distinctive feature of DuBose’s Christology. In the Incarnation, humanity is saved through Jesus who “is the human, but the divine-human, conqueror and destroyer of sin and of death.” Jesus “brought with Him something into our nature and life which was not there before, and raised them into something which was not themselves or their own, and to which they could attain only in and through Him. Jesus’ divine-human accomplishment is exceptional, unique, and beyond unaided human possibility.”
From The Theology of William Porcher DuBose: Life, Movement, and Being by Robert Boak Slocum (University of South Carolina Press, 2000).