Tuesday, May 03, 2022

The Communicatio Idiomatum and the person of Christ

The Communicatio Idiomatum helps inform us how predication works between the two natures of Christ, and the one person of Christ. Every other person has one nature, so there is no precedent for a person having two natures. Jesus Christ is sui generis in this regard. The Reformed version of the Commincatio makes predication in the direction of the natures to the person. What is true of the natures is true of the one person. The Lutheran version on the other hand asserts that there is a sharing between the two natures, thus the humanity of Christ can be ubiquitous allowing for the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation with the body of Christ being 'in, with, and under' the elements of the Lord's Supper.

The Communicatio is by and large a philosophical concept derived from centuries of trying to explain how the God-man. However, it is present in seed form in Acts 20:28, where the Church of God is obtained with God's own blood. But we know God is spirit and has no blood, so the only way to understand this is to predicate the divine nature here as true of the one person. Along this line, Jesus is both mutable and immutable, both passible and impassible, both glorious forever, and yet not glorious during His incarnation.

As what is true of the natures is predicated of the one person, it is clear that we can say things about the one person of Christ that we cannot say of God. Jesus hungered, Jesus thirst, Jesus prayed to the Father. While it is in the human nature that at least the first two is true, it is also true that it is the one person who did this. It is contrary to Reformed orthodoxy, and contrary to common sense, to claim that the human nature has agency to so something which the one person does not. In fact, it is fundamentally Nestorian to assert that the human nature has an agency that the "one person" does not, because it means that the human nature is a separate human person. This makes Jesus into two persons: one divine, one human, and that is contrary to Chalcedonian orthodoxy.

Classical Theists are more than welcome to argue for their case. However, being over-zealous to the point of rejecting Chalcedon certainly shows the inbalance on the side of many of these new Thomists. Put is simply, it is never right to be more Thomstic than Thomas, and more "orthodox" than Chalcedon. The minute you ascribe agency to the human nature that is not that of the one person, you have lost it, period.

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