This program discusses article eight of the Formula of Concord in which the relationship between the divine and the human natures in Christ is discussed. This program covers the debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the communication of majesty.
Just and Sinner Podcast
The Communication of Attributes (FC VIII)
[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to the Justin Center Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Jordan Cooper. Thank you so much for joining me once again on the program today. And I just want to give you all a quick reminder that Justin Center as an organization is supported by donors. So we would ask that if you have benefited from the things that we do, that you would find ways to contribute through our donate page. You can either sign up monthly through an online giving platform via Patreon or donor box, or you can just do it straight through PayPal if you want to do that. We have a place that you can send checks to. We have a PO box here if you want to do that. And if you want to support us in other ways, just by getting the word out, that's always very helpful. We ask that you time it for our newsletter. We can do that on JustinCenter.org. We have some PDFs you can print out or send along to people who may be interested. They give a vision of what our mission is and what kind of goals that we have accomplished and what kind of goals we have for the future, as well as book catalog to show what kind of books that we are currently putting out. So we today on the program are going to be looking at the formula of Concord as we have been continuing to walk through this last of the Lutheran Confessions that were written. Now, I know I don't have a jacket on today. I know everybody's going to comment on it. It's unusual for me, I know, but it's hot today. So just for the heat, I'm not wearing one at the moment. And I think you'll all survive, but if that is too jarring for you, you can turn off the video. I do like to have jackets in my videos, but once it gets to the summer, I'm not wearing them as much. So, but though most of my programs for the summer are actually recorded before the summer. So, okay. Well, we're going to be looking at article eight. So last time we had just looked at the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord's Supper. And we looked at a number of issues related to controversies surrounding the Lord's Supper. And those controversies were both between the Lutherans and the Reformed, as well as between different groups of Lutherans. And so you had the Ganesia Lutherans we've been talking about who are those kind of more dogmatically strict Lutherans. And then we have the Philippists who are more scholars, more oriented towards unity, sometimes at the expense of strong doctrinal unity, commitments like external unity, willing to compromise to some degree on doctrines for the sake of unity. To some degree, some of those Philippists were moving away from Lutheran distinctives and compromising on certain Reformed issues. They were much more willing to work with the Reformed. And so once we get to this article, we are looking at something that was related to the divides between these various groups. So that is the Confessional Lutherans versus the Reformed, as well as these kind of inter Lutheran debates. And this is the doctrine of the person of Christ. Why is it that this particular issue was raised? And if you've watched my Christology series, you'll know this if you wanted to do a deep dive into this topic. I have a whole series of lectures on Christology that spends a lot of time on this issue. And all in all sorts of other Christological issues, not just this issue. And I forget how many. I think I've got like 25 videos. I think it's about 25 videos in that Christology series there. But one of the major issues in these debates between the Lutherans and the Reformed on the Lord's Supper is this disagreement over the nature of the presence of the human nature of Jesus. And so Zwingli's really primary argument against Luther's contention for the real presence of Christ in the sacrament was based upon his understanding of the ascension. And Zwingli's understanding of the ascension of Christ is that in the ascension, the human nature of Christ ascends into heaven. Now, to some degree, obviously we all believe that's true. We call it the ascension. So it does ascend into heaven with his body, not just yet, but he ascends into heaven. And Zwingli's understanding of that though, is that this ascension is a shift in the locale of Jesus' human nature as a whole. And not just in one sense. So you could confess that in one sense, Jesus' human nature, like a localized kind of sense is in one locale. However, there's another sense in which his human nature is present and a broader way here. Zwingli limits presence to one particular mode of presence. Just like my physical body can only be in one place. Like, I don't have the power of by location. As, you know, like, supposedly St. Padre Pio did something, you know. But Jesus, in Zwingli's view, is limited in the way that like my body is limited so that he can't be in more than one place at a time. So he has a physical locale that I do. And that means he has all of the limitations of human nature even after his exaltation. So that means that Jesus, according to his human nature, his body is only present in one place, and that is in heaven. And so heaven is for Zwingli not... There's a difference in understanding of heaven between Zwingli and the Lutherans. Zwingli thinks of heaven more as a kind of realm, a separate realm that Jesus actually enters into, that is kind of in some way maybe divorced from this world. And I don't want to portray him inaccurately here. But this isn't really even parsed out until early after Zwingli. So going off of what I've read of Zwingli on these things. Luther's response to that is that heaven is not just this kind of separate place, you know, up there somewhere where Jesus' body is limited in its location on a physical, literal throne only. Instead, Luther has this understanding of heaven as another kind of reality that stands behind our reality. So more than just heaven being this place that you could actually, you know, say you could view, went up high enough and took a spaceship up into the sky. You could reach this kind of planet called heaven. Not that Zwingli says exactly that, but it's not that. Instead, it is this kind of other reality or dimension underneath everything that's going on here. So it's intimately, the heavenly realm is intimately tied to the earthly realm. And this is why, you know, when you have that vision of Elijah where you have the seeing, the opening up of the eyes to the angelic armies when the Israelites seem totally outmatched. And you see this like a vision of, you see all these angelic armies all over. This is a picture of heaven to say that there is this heavenly reality that is intertwined intimately with our daily reality in this world. And so when we're thinking of heaven, for Luther, it's not so much a separate place as it is another element of reality underneath what we experience day today. And so when we think about Jesus' ascension from a Lutheran approach, we tend to think about not him kind of going away, but he does certainly go up, obviously, but a feeling in some other sense of the world with himself, with his human nature, but with this whole person. And so that he fills all things. So Paul says in Ephesians that he who descended is the one who ascended and now fills all things. So that the person of Christ, both nature's fills all, all of reality. Now, of course, we have that kind of up and down language that we use in Scripture to refer to the place of God versus the place of like hell. So we have this, and we use this language all the time of hell being beneath us, heaven being above us. And that's symbolic language. And this is why we have these instances throughout Scripture of high places, mountains being the location of God. And so Moses, where does he commune with God? Where does he receive the Ten Commandments on a mountain, Mount Sinai? So there is this ascending into the realm of God and then taking that the law of God and the divine glory as it's radiating on his face, descending down the mountain to the people, the presence of God being brought from on high down into the realm of the people. Moses becomes this Christological image here. He's this messianic image of Christ coming down from the heavens into this earth, shining forth with the divine glory as the incarnate logos. So Moses is this great image of that. So we do have this, heaven is up, realm of God is up kind of picture, but that's what it is, is a picture because we're using up to describe transcendental greatness. Ontological superiority, we're talking about God being infinitely above everything that we are as limited human creatures and that infinite, divinely ever-glorious God enters into the human world. So we have that language of him coming down of the image of him coming down because this earth is below his being. It's not, this earth is not transcendent as God is transcendent. It's not ontologically infinite, it's finite. And so it's below him in that sense. And so the up and down images or images to display something that is a distinctive theological reality about the divisions between God and man. Follow that being sad then, the ascension is again, another just image of this going up, ascending to the realm of God. But we don't have to take that in this literal spatiotemporal kind of sense. As if Jesus ascended into the clouds and then just kept going up and up and up into outer space until he reaches heaven. You know, when you're talking about space, there isn't really an up and down anyway. We only speak about that kind of directionality from our own subjective experience of things around us on the earth. And what's up to me is not up to somebody on the other side of the earth at any given moment. All right, unless you're a flat earther, but. Okay, so that means that when Luther understands the ascension and Christology, he's not limited in the way viewing Christ as Zwingli is. So for Zwingli, the human nature of Christ is only in this place that is at the right hand of the Father, that means therefore that his human body cannot be present in the sacrament of the altar. And so it is an actual ontological or metaphysical impossibility that the body of Jesus is present here on earth on any altar in any church, let alone every altar in every church that is observing the Eucharist at the same time all across the world. So that's a significant difference between these two. So this then leads to this major debate over how it is that the two natures of Christ relate to one another. And so what is a Eucharistic difference really shows a bigger difference, which is a Christological difference. So a different understanding of how it is that the human and divine natures in Christ are united. And so for Zwingli, the human nature of Christ, even through the incarnation, has the same limitations as an ordinary human nature. Just as I cannot be present in many places at once, Jesus cannot be present in many places at once. Luther says that the incarnation creates this unique union between the divine and human natures and in the singular person. Such that the attributes of divinity can do exercise themselves through the humanity. And so because of this singular hypothesis, the human nature of Jesus can do things that a normal human nature would not be able to do because of the intimacy of this union, this kind of transformative effect of the divine on human nature. You know, think about this transformative effect just in light of what I mentioned earlier with this example of Moses. And I go to that text a lot. I know I do. You probably hear me go to this text a million times if you listen to me talk enough. But I think there's a reason I go to that text because I think it is so powerful and illustrative of a lot of things. And St. Paul draws on this talk about the nature of our sanctification. But Moses has something divine about his countenance. There's this glory that shines forth in Moses that is not ordinary human nature. And he reflects the divine glory. The divine glory is transformative of Moses is very person in some real sense. If Moses, a sinful man, can be so transformed physically by the divine glory shining upon him on Mount Sinai, how much more transformative is the divine glory upon the human nature which it assumes and to its own person. And the hypostatic union is far more intimate a union than any human has. Human person has with the divine nature. Wouldn't we expect something radically transformative to happen to Jesus that goes far beyond human limitations? We don't say that Moses lost his human nature when he participated in the divine glory of the divine nature. And neither do we have to say that Jesus lost his human nature to say that the glories of the divine nature transform the human nature in some real way while also retaining its fundamental humanity. That's the basic discussion that we're having here. With all of that, the basics being laid out, we're going to look at the specifics of what does the article, article eight of the formulative concord say regarding all of this, how this communication of attributes between the divine and human nature functions theologically. Okay, I'm going to read some of the, this is some of the most basic early points here where there is a number of points laid out of we believe teaching confessed this to make clarifications, Christologically. I won't read all of them, but I'll read a couple of these. Point, this is point two, but it's in part seven here. These two natures can never more be separated nor mixed together with each other nor can one be transformed into the other. Rather, each remains in its own nature into essence within the person of Christ for all eternity. And so the accusation of the Zwinglians is going to be that Lutherans have essentially said that the divine nature overtakes the human nature and the human nature essentially is just gone and that you've essentially denied the humanity of Christ. This, the accusations here are of eutichianism and Eutichis was an ancient writer who spoke about the divine and human natures in relation to each other, who used the imagery of oil and water to describe how the natures work. And Eutichis would say that picture the ocean as the divine nature, it's kind of this limitless, yeah, the ocean technically is limits, it's an image, okay? It's got this limitless, vast pool. And then you have a little drop of oil that's the limited human nature. If you drop that little bit of oil into the vast ocean, it basically is, technically it's still there, but it's kind of absorbed into the vastness of the waters of the ocean. And so there is a kind of absorbing of humanity into divinity so that it's almost as if the humanity of Christ really doesn't exist. It just kind of is taken up into the divinity and they become kind of one, essentially one thing. And so this, the formula here is rejecting Eutichianism to say, that's how we're saying. There is no transformation of one into the other. The humanity is transformed, but it's not transformed into divinity, it is still humanity, though it partakes of divinity in some profound way. Okay, so each remains its own nature in essence. So as human nature remains, a human nature, his divine nature remains a divine nature. Then we also believe, teaching confess, that these two natures remain unmixed in their nature in essence and never cease to exist. Each therefore also retains its natural essential characteristics and will not lay them aside, ever, in all eternity. Nor will the essential characteristics of either nature ever become the essential characteristics of the other nature. Okay, some important qualifications here. First thing that's being pointed out here is that this is not, it's not that you had these two natures at the moment of incarnation, and then at the exaltation, now you've got a fusion of natures. That's not what's being said. This distinction between the human and divine natures is an eternal distinction. So that Christ always will have his human nature. The human nature of Jesus has never, never taken away. The incarnation brings the human nature into, into the Godhead forever. And this is why in the book of Revelation, the saints still worship before Jesus with a body. And he's even got the nail marks at his hands. He's still the the anthropos, the divine man, the God man. The second qualification that's important to point out here is that the characteristics of the divinity, though they are communicated to the humanity, they never become the essential characteristics of the humanity. In other words, it's not that if the human nature becomes omnipresent through communication of the divine nature, it never becomes an essential element of the human nature. It is instead the working or gifting of the divinity through the humanity, rather than something essentially belonging exclusively to the humanity itself. Because if the humanity essentially has some kind of infinitude in it, it is no longer humanity. If it has it essentially, if the divinity is working through the humanity, through this communication, so that there is an infinity that is gifted to the humanity in some way that retains the nature of the humanity as humanity without transforming it into something else because it is not essential to that nature, but it is gifted to that nature through the other nature to which infinity is proper. Some other distinctions here in 11, Christ is not two distinct persons, but one single person just to clarify not that this was something that had been really an accusation of Lutherans. If anything, Lutherans accuse Zwingli of this, but this is just to reaffirm and reiterate we reject Nestorianism. Nestorianism, which is the idea that there are two persons in Christ, that there is a divine person that assumes a human person. And instead, we say that there is a divine person that assumes a human nature. So there is an impersonality of the human, or yeah, the human nature of Christ, because you get some issues, if you say there's a human person and a divine person, you don't really have an incarnation at that point. All right, then let's talk about what, how that assumed nature works in relation to the divine nature in 12. We also believe teaching confessed that the assumed human nature in Christ not only has and retains its natural essential characteristics, but also that through the personal union with the deity and afterward through the exaltation of glorification, this nature was elevated to the right hand of majesty, power, and might over all things that can be named not only in this world, but also in the world to come. And so there is this elevation of that human nature of Christ that does profoundly change it and change how it functions in relation to the world. Citation here from Ephesians 1, 2021. Christ did not receive this majesty to which he was exalted according to his humanity only after he rose from the dead and sent it into heaven, but he received it already when he was conceived in his mother's womb and became a human being, and the divine and human natures were united personally with each other. Okay, now here there is a debate among Lutherans, and I've got a video in that Christology series or a podcast in that Christology series that goes through this whole debate, if you want to look into that debate about how this functions. But there is on the one hand at the very act of the incarnation itself, at the conception of Christ, the initiation of the hypostatic union, the divinity is united to the humanity so that there is a personal hypostatic union. And what that means is that it has always been the possibility that the divinity can work through the humanity of Christ. There is not some fundamental change, in other words, in the nature of the incarnation before and after the ascension. However, in Jesus's life of humiliation, there is a lack of using that, those divine attributes in the human nature. In other words, we have a number of texts that say things like, you know, Jesus grew in wisdom. Well, he already has all wisdom, according to his divinity. So why does it need to grow in wisdom? He already has all wisdom. Jesus exhibits human weakness. So there is a non-exercising of those divine majestic attributes in and through the human nature, in the state of humiliation. Now, there are exceptions to that. So this isn't universal. And we see this in a couple places. One is, if we look at the transfiguration, we see this clear glory of the divinity of Christ being shown visibly that is usually veiled throughout Jesus' incarnate life. That's the most obvious one. But then we also just have his miraculous works. And so Jesus' miraculous works are proofs of his divine nature. And, you know, there's a view that says it's only the Holy Spirit that is working through Jesus in the way that the Spirit works to like the prophets, the Old Testament. But I think there's far more to it than that. And there's evidence of that. And again, I'm just gonna point you down. I'm sorry I'm doing this. I'm just gonna point you to other podcasts I've done, just 'cause I have like, this is broad overview of these doctrines in these series. I can't get a depth about all of it 'cause I never get done. I'd be talking for 10 hours. But it is the divinity being revealed and working through the humanity when Jesus performs these acts, these miraculous acts, which is why at times he uses those to testify clearly to his divinity, like his ability to forgive sins, for example. And so if that is the case then that he's using and drawing upon his own divine nature there to perform the miraculous works at his transfiguration, he can exercise those attributes. But he doesn't, in its fullness, and we see that 'cause Jesus has human weaknesses in various ways. He shares in our weaknesses. The author of Hebrews is very clear about that. This is not the same as what is the conodic view. Now the conodic view says that Jesus essentially gives up those divine attributes at the moment of incarnation so that he no longer has them at all really. And you find this with God named Gottfried Tomazius, Christi Persund Unverk. He has a book where he explores this. And he was a Lutheran theologian. And quite a capable one in many ways. But this idea of the conodic divestment of divine attributes is certainly not a historic one. And it leads to a number of pretty significant issues. But it is an attempt to grapple with the biblical reality that somehow he's both, he's divine, but he also has these significant limitations. He doesn't know the day or the hour of his return. Well, how is that possible if he has these divine attributes? These are difficult and paradoxical questions that Christians have wrestled with forever. So the conodicists answered in that way. But the way that traditionally, which is what I'm talking about here, this has been interpreted, is that it's really more of a veiling or not using of those attributes in his human nature. There is no actual change to the divine nature itself. There, no divestment of divinity of something of what it is. That's not possible according to the divine nature. And even if that were to be, if you were to make that case, you'd have to fundamentally alter how it is that you understand the divine nature, because now you'd have this divine essence that can be divorced from these separable attributes. And that leads to, again, a number of other issues with how we understand the attributes of God. All right, so at the ascension, Jesus now has this kind of more full exercise of those attributes. So it's not a change in the divinity. It's not a change that he's like now more incarnate than he was or something like that. Instead, it is a change in the use of these various divine attributes, according to his human nature. First, in section 17 here, the divine human natures in the person of Christ are so united that they have genuine communion with each other by which the natures are not mixed into one essence but one person. And then we have this illustration that is the go-to illustration of how this works. And that is the illustration of a fire and an iron. And so this is, again, these are earthly illustrations. Anytime we are using illustrations of something in the world to refer to God, it's never going to be exactly completely analogous to how the divine nature works. It's why, yeah, I'm gonna say analogous. It is an analogy, but no analogy has a perfect one-to-one correlation with how the divine nature works. In other words, our language is not univocal. It's not identifying exactly what God is or who God is in himself. But using analogies is literally the only way we can talk about God, so that's just what we're stuck with. You can pick any of them apart. Okay, so what is that analogy? Fire and iron. So think of the iron as like the humanity of Christ and think of fire as the divinity of Christ. If you place iron into fire, the iron doesn't essentially become something else, doesn't become a different essence, it doesn't turn into fire. However, the iron takes upon itself attributes of fire. It gets very hot and it is more malleable. It is bright as a fire is. And analogies particularly helpful 'cause God uses fire to refer to himself. This is an image that God commonly uses. And even the Greek philosophers used fire to speak about God, look at the Heraclitus. So this analogy seeks to demonstrate that you can have an essence remaining what it is while being profoundly changed by something that comes into contact with. And how much more powerful is a divine nature and transformative is the divine nature and the divine glory than fire as an element on this earth. And so if we even have earthly examples of things like this where something can be profoundly transformed but still retain its essence through its union with something else, then this is simply what we're saying with the relationship between the two natures in Christ. The union between the divine and human nature and the person of Christ is a much different, higher, indescribable communion. Because of this union and communion, God is a human being and a human being is God. That doesn't mean divinity is humanity or humanity is divinity. That's important to make that distinction because we're not saying that one nature is the other nature but we are saying one person is either nature. So a human being is God because the person that is the human being is also a divine person and is God and the one who is God is also a human person. So we can speak in kind of fullness of how it is that we were attributing things to Christ and we're speaking about his person. He is God and he is man. Because of this personal union without which this kind of true communion of natures is unthinkable or impossible, not only the bare human nature which possesses the characteristics of suffering and dying suffered for the sins of the world but the son of God himself suffered. According to the assumed human nature and according to our simple Christian creed truly died although the divine nature can neither suffer nor die. This is an issue of immense discussion and debate in the church, especially since the rise of the kind of social Trinitarian approach is that you find in someone like a Jurgen Moltmann in his book, The Crucified God who shapes a lot of the conversations around this today. And I have a program on that at Microstology series if you wanna see more on Moltmann's work there but what he's saying here and what the authors of the formula are saying here is that in the death of Jesus properly speaking, it is the human nature that is capable of death and suffering and all of and change and all of that. The divine nature is not capable of that. However, we don't just speak in such a way that we abstractify these natures so that we say, well, a human nature died on the cross or a divine nature did this. You don't go through the acts of Jesus's life and to pick them apart and say, this was the human nature, this was the divine nature. It's not how this works. It's the person that does these things. And while the person does these things, it may be one nature that is that which experiences something or contributes something to Jesus's actions. But that doesn't mean that the nature is performing the action. So the way that this is expressed here in the death of Christ is not that the divine nature in itself suffers. That's what you get with the Jurgen Moltmann to the point that he even at times identifies the suffering of the divine nature or even if the human nature is creating the Trinitarian bond between father and son. It's kind of a Hegelian kind of move that is going on of this divine negation of the son creates the bond of union between the father and son. But it's not the way that Lutherans historically speak and certainly not the way that scripture speaks. But it says here that the son did suffer according to the human nature. So the son actually suffered. We can say the son of God suffered. The second person of the Trinity suffered. The eternal Logos suffered. All of that is accurate and right and good theological language. But that suffering is according to the human nature. So apart from the human nature, there is no capability of suffering because that is an impossibility for the divine nature, but that doesn't negate the reality of the suffering of Christ. All right. So let's see here. There is, there's a lot that we can talk about here. There's some talk in like, I'm looking at like 26 through 30. We've got questions about kind of what is heaven? What does it mean that Jesus ascended and how does that relate to his body? I already touched on all of that at the very beginning. So I'm not going to cover any of that again here. And if you want to see more specifics again of that, I've got other talks on it. Well, what I'm going to move to now in looking at this is the three Genera of the communication of attributes. So we've talked so far about the general theological background, the general ideas theologically of what it means that the two natures are united and how you can be united and the human nature can be transformed so that it could be in more than one place at a time because of this fire and iron kind of union where there's this transformative impact of the divine nature on the human nature that transforms it. So now it's not limited in the way that normal human bodies are limited. So we've got the basic groundwork there, but now we've got the particular theological distinctions that develop in order to explain this more. And this idea as it's developed here is only developed in the precision that it is because it has to be because of the pushback. And I think these distinctions that you get probably would not have been distinctions if they didn't need to be made clear. But when the reforms continue to challenge this idea of the communicati odeomatum, which means the communication of attributes here. If the reform hadn't continued to challenge it, the Lutherans wouldn't have had to create all of these categories to explain themselves or defend themselves. But because of this continued challenge, then had to be done. So we've got this distinction in communication of attributes between three different ways of speaking about the communication of attributes from the divine to the human nature. And to be clear, communication of attributes in the fullest sense, at least, is only from the divine to the human nature, not the other way around. So that the human nature does not make the divine nature capable of suffering or capable of death. It's the other way around. It's the divine that transforms the humanity. The divinity itself is not changed by the humanity. Okay, so this communication of attributes is broken up into three distinctive categories. Okay, so the first of these is what's called the gayness idiomaticum. First, because in Christ, there are two, there are and remain two distinct natures unchanged and unmixed in their natural essences and characteristics. And because these two natures exist, only as one single person, therefore, the characteristic of each individual nature is not ascribed to that nature alone, as if it were separated from the person, but it is ascribed to the whole person, which is simultaneously God and human, whether he is called God or human being. Okay, what this is saying is what I was talking about before, that when we communicate about the son, we can speak without significant qualification in dividing up the natures. And so when we say, we can say the son of God died, as I mentioned, this language is scriptural. They crucified the Lord of glory. Well, the Lord of glory is a divine name. And so how can they crucify God? God is not capable of crucifixion. Technically, it's really only his human nature that's actually crucified. Well, no, that's the biblical language. Does it make these tiny little distinctions all the time? It doesn't do that, it just speaks of the person. So we could say, there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus was not only man, he's also God. And his mediatorial work is not only through his humanity, it's also through his divinity. The authors of the New Testament don't pick apart things like that. So there is a freedom in the way that we communicate about Jesus, that we can kind of interchange, when we're talking about his person, we can interchange divine human titles. So if you say things like the son of God or the son of man, even the son of man being drawn from Daniel seven really has a lot to say about the divine nature of Christ as kind of strange as that is. But what you're referring to as the person Jesus, the eternal son, the logos, all of these different words or terms that you used to refer to him, we don't have to divide up names and titles based on what action it is and what nature we've attributed that action to. And every action of Jesus is an action of a person and that means that no action of Jesus is divorced from one of the natures. So never does Jesus act in such a way that he's only doing something according to one nature or not the other. What he contributes through each nature may be distinct, but it's one person acting, not an abstracted nature acting. And this is what we see here in the second of the three, Genera, which is the gayness, Apotelismaticum. Apotelismaticum, it's a fun word. Second, concerning the discharge of Christ's office, the person acts and does its work not in with through according to one nature alone, but in according to with and through both natures. And so we could talk about the threefold office of Christ in this way. And those are mentioned along with a couple others here, but the threefold office of Christ, when we speak about Christ's work, generally there's a division, this does come from Calvin and Lutherans use this. So it's okay, we could take some things from Calvin. But he uses this, and it's actually funny 'cause there are some Lutherans who try to say, this didn't actually come from Calvin. It came from this other certain Calvin 'cause they just don't wanna acknowledge the Dickinson from Calvin, which is kind of funny. But the threefold office of prophets, priests, and king. In that roughly divides up the work of Christ, I think there's a lot more that can be said than just those things, they're not, they're not represented to have the whole. I think one significant element of that is missing, and I have an essay on this in our book on Justification to the Widener Institute, which is, Jesus also just fulfills the role of Israel, which doesn't neatly fit into prophet, priest, and king. Those are roles within the nation of Israel, but often he's portrayed as fulfilling the peoples beyond those distinct offices. But the prophetic work, his teaching work, his priestly work, which would be his offering himself as a sacrifice for sins as well as his intercession. And then the kingly work, he is the reigning king, and will come again to return as king. All of those, the elements of Jesus' life can roughly be placed under those categories. But any of that that Jesus does in any of those offices, all of his redemptive activity, is activity of a person who has two natures, rather than a nature alone. So take, for example, what I mentioned earlier of the suffering of Christ. And so the suffering of Jesus is, in some sense, according to his human nature, because the divine nature's incapable of suffering, what does that mean? Does that mean that the divine nature of Christ is inactive in his suffering? No, that's not the case. You see in, for example, St. N. Sam's argument in Crede's homo, why the God-man, where he gives this extensive philosophical arguments for why it is necessary that the son gave himself, and it became incarnate, but also gave himself up on the cross. Why did that need to happen? And, and so, 'cause a long answer to this, but part of that answer is that he needed a human nature in order to satisfy the demands of divine honor, as we have dishonored God, and the human needs to restore that honor. But the divine nature contributes infinity to that, because we have offended an infinite God, and we need something infinite to restore the divine honor that we have broken, or that we speak usually in language of, you know, justice, things like that. But what the divine nature contributes is that infinity to his work. And so, why can Christ's death cover an infinite number of human sins if he is a finite human nature? Because he isn't also an infinite being. He is the infinite son who has taken upon himself the divine nature. So, the divine nature is still active in all that the human nature does. It is not merely an act of a person. Okay, so that's the Guinness Avotelismaticum. Now we move on to the third of these. And this is really the point of debate. It's really all surrounding this. Because the Reformed, by and large, and Zwingli is worse than most of the Reformed on these issues, he does tend toward a more Nestorian view on certain things. Calvin doesn't do that in the ways of Wengli does at least. So, the third of these is the debate one. This is the Guinness Myostatical, or the Genius of Majesty. Third, it is, however, an entirely different matter when the question is asked, discussed or treated is whether the natures in the personal union in Christ have nothing else or nothing more than their own natural essential characteristics for that they haven't retained them has been affirmed above. Now, concerning the divine nature in Christ, and this is very important for the Kinotic view. And the Kinotics, again, are those who argue that the divine nature somehow changes at the incarnation. Concerning the divine nature in Christ, because in God, there is no change, James 117, nothing was added or taken away from his divine nature in its essence or characteristics through the incarnation. So, nothing in the divine nature changes through the incarnation. And there's, people ask about this, well, isn't it different? 'Cause before the divine nature had no assumed human nature, and now the divine nature hasn't assumed human nature. It's not a change in the divine nature. It's not a change in the divine nature in its own essence. It's a change in only in the humanity of the human nature's relation to the divine nature. So, the divine nature itself is not in any way changed through even the assumption of the human nature itself. Okay. Some have wanted to argue that even in the personal union with deity, the human nature has nothing else or more than only its natural essential characteristics, which are common to all other human beings. And so, this is Wang Li's view, as we've been talking about, that there is, that his essential attributes, the sun are the same as any other human. Of course, mind is sinlessness. So, Jesus is a sinless person, which is not insignificant, but according to his human nature, that's really the only thing that differentiates us from him in his human nature. And even sinlessness, the glorified humanity, even sinful humanity, when glorified, is going to also be sinless. So, okay. So, that's Wang Li's view, that's going to be rejected here. Here's another qualification that's being made by some of the Reformed at this point that cited. However, they now argue and contend that the human nature in Christ is endowed and adorned only with those created gifts or Finite qualitatis, which is finite qualities, as are found in the saints. And so, this is a way that, especially post Zwingli, Zwingli dies very young, doesn't battle. And Zwingli didn't really have the chance to expound upon his beliefs in a broader system, in a way that someone like Calvin did. Had he lived longer, he may have been able to do that, and he may have qualified or clarified things. But after Zwingli, the Reformed are now, now are not as blunt about, as Zwingli, about the lack of power in the exalted human nature. But now there is talk of these kind of created gifts being exercised through the ascended Christ, rather than there being an actual communication of anything from the divine to the human nature. So they're separable gifts that are like the same kinds of gifts that you would receive in your glorified, in your glorified body, glorified nature in some way. Well, let's look at some of the things in scripture that are cited here to prove that there are things that are indeed divine, that are communicated to the human nature. In 54, what I said about the created gifts that have been given and a part to the human nature in Christ is correct and true, namely that it possesses these gifts in and of itself. However, these do not attain the majesty that scripture and the ancient fathers on the basis of scripture ascribe to the assumed human nature in Christ. And so we're saying that scripture has a number of things, or ways that it describes the humanity of human nature of Christ that go beyond what would be kind of created supernatural gifts. In 55, for the ability to give life, to execute all judgment, to possess all power in heaven and on earth, to have all things in his hand, to have everything subjected to him under his feet, declines people from sins, et cetera, are not created gifts, but divine infinite characteristics. And this is a clear argument, I think, for this perspective. And this is one of the things that really compelled me to be a Lutheran, was this issue. And when I started studying the Christological issues, and this is reading through French, paper scripts and dogmatics, which is fantastic on this issue, it's the best section of that book. It's the best is three volume systematics, dogmatics, that treatment of Christology, I think is the best thing that he offers, is very long and detailed. The scripture just seems clear about these things. And I have a very difficult time seeing these kinds of gifts that are clearly exercised in the human nature, as something that is not exclusively or explicitly divine. So there are a number of texts that are cited in the formula here, John 5, 21, 27, John 639, Matthew 2818, Daniel 7, 14, John 3, 31, 35, and John 13, 3, Matthew 11, 27, Ephesians 1, 22, Hebrews, 28, 1st, Corinthians 15, 27, John 1, 3, and 10. Okay, you can look all those up. Obviously don't have time to go through all of those, but there are a number of texts that speak about this, this divine authority that is exercised through the human nature. There are three strong irrefutable arguments that prove that the communication of these characteristics is to be understood, not perfrasen out modum loquendi, that is only semantically, that is of the person simply according to the divine nature, but also according to the assumed human nature. First, it is a clear rule shared by the entire ancient Orthodox church that whatever Christ received in time, according to a scripture, he received not according to the divine nature, but that he received in time. Okay, so this, there are certain things that are received by Jesus. He is exalted to this great status. And unless you go the canonical route to say that Jesus divested himself of his divinity, and then say, but now he's regaining something according to his divinity, you have to say that this is about his humanity. What else would it be talking about? When scripture says that Christ now fills all things, is that talking about his divinity? Didn't he always fill all things according to his divinity? It has to be talking about his humanity. So if there's a change, it has to be according to assumed nature. And if you believe it's according to his divine nature, well, then you have to reject divine immutability that this notion that God does not change, which is affirmed and reiterated a number of places in the text of scripture. So then you have a changeable God. And well, that's a position you can take. People do take that position. But I think the majority of Orthodox Christians would not want to go to that position. So you have to affirm that this is a change according to the human nature. Second part of the argument. Scripture clearly testifies John 521 and 27 and 639 that the power to make alive and to exercise judgment was given to Christ because he is the Son of man and as such has flesh and blood. So you've got these divine prerogatives that are given to Jesus in current one in time, which means they have to be given to the human nature if the first principle here is correct. Third, scripture says this not only in general regarding the person of the Son of man, but it refers specifically to the assumed human nature. Verse John 1, 7, the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin, refers not only to the merit achieved in the cross ones for all, rather John states in this very place that in the work or action of justification, not only divine nature in Christ, but also his blood cleanses us from all sin. That's according to John 6, the flesh of Christ is a food that gives us life. On this basis, the Council of Ephesus also concluded that the flesh of Christ has the power to give life. Concerning this article, many other glorious testimonies from ancient Orthodox Church are cited elsewhere. And this is, we have this in what's called the catalog of testimonies that contains ancient patristic sources speaking about this very issue. All right, so if there really is this giving of life that is through the person, including the human nature, and that is a divine prerogative, and there is a change in the giving of this authority, that has to be divine authority granted to the human nature. So that's the essence of the argument here. And we can look at this argument in a number of different contexts, because when we're talking about this communication of attributes, it's not just authority that we're speaking about. We're talking about all sorts of things, where this practically comes up, as we've talked about, is in the question of the Eucharist, the body of blood of Christ being present. And so it's more an issue of omnipresence than it is divine authority, but this is just giving the broader principle that we see elsewhere in scripture. Okay, I'm gonna read in 62 here. Such a communication or imparting did not take place through an essential or natural outpouring of the characteristics of the divine nature into the human in such a way that the humanity of Christ has them of itself and apart from the divine essence, nor in such a way that the human nature in Christ had completely set aside its natural essential characteristics and had either been transformed into the deity or had become in and of itself equal to the deity by means of these imparted characteristics. And this is just to clarify some of the mischaracterizations that were quite common among the Reformed of the Lutheran view. And these same mischaracterizations are quite common today. And so it's not that the divine nature has these separable attributes, which can be removed from the divine nature and then just given to the humanity who then and then the humanity just accepts them and says, this is now part of my nature. The divine nature is not a divisible nature, but the works of God are divisible in the one that is receiving those works or the one who is affected by them. So even though God's essence is simple, God's essence is not divisible, God's actions in the world to some degree are divisible. Because of the world itself being divisible. And so the same is therefore true about the humanity of Christ. And so it's more than it is these kind of separable attributes we're speaking analogically. Given to the human nature, it's that the divine power and nature works through the human nature in particular ways that we are referring to as these kind of separable attributes of omnipresence or divine authority or omnipotence, whatever it might be. Okay. 66, there is and remains in Christ one single divine omnipotence, power, majesty and glory. This is making that point that this is all singular, we're not denying divine simplicity here. They are characteristics only of the divine nature. They shine forth, reveal and show themselves fully but spontaneously in, with and through the exalted assumed human nature in Christ. Just as in glowing iron, there are not two kinds of power to shine and to burn, but the power to shine and burn is the characteristic of the fire. Nevertheless, because the fire has been united with the iron, it demonstrates and reveals its power to shine and burn in with and through the glowing iron in such a way that even the glowing iron on the basis of this union has the power to shine and burn without any transformation of the essence and natural characteristics of fire and iron. Okay, let's more qualification here, I'm just reading a lot, I know. Okay, however, we do not in any way believe the teacher confess a kind of outpouring of the majesty of God and all of its characteristics into the human nature of Christ, through which the divine nature will be weakened or surrendered to another entity, something that belonged to it without retaining it for itself. Nor do we believe that in its substance and essence, the human nature allegedly received this majesty, apart from or distinguish from the nature and essence of the Son of God, as in wire, water, wine or oil is poured from one container to another for the human nature like every other creature in heaven or on earth, is not capable of bearing God's omnipotence such a way that in itself it would become an omnipotent essence or would possess the characteristic of omnipotence in and of itself. Through such teaching, the human nature and Christ would be denied completely transformed into deity, that is contrary to our Christian faith in the teaching of all the prophets and the apostles. Okay, well, let's see here, there's plenty more to say, I know I'm running up on my time here. Well, I don't think I have to go then through the entirety of this and there's some more left. There's a lot of, this is the most detailed article in the most complex article of the entire, well, all of the entire book of Concord, because this is the place where theology gets perhaps a little bit abstract. And this is an issue that I understand people get very lost in. And it is an issue that I probably wouldn't preach a sermon on explicitly on a Sunday morning, not at least not in that language. So though, of course, when the issue comes up, you talk about it, but probably not in these precise categories in a sermon when I've preached on Ascension, I will talk about the nature of what that means. This isn't a Jesus going away. He's still in some sense present with us according to both natures, because he says, I am building with you always, even to the end of the age. But then I don't go into the qualifications of the distinction of modes of presence that also goes along with all of this. But the reason that this really comes up is not just this abstract theologizing, and I know this issue can seem that way a lot, but it really comes up because of an attack on this idea being the reason why Christ's presence for us in the sacrament is denied. And that's not to say that this doctrine isn't important anyway, but it can be difficult. It can be difficult. We're dealing with lots of mysteries here when we're speaking about the union of a divine and human nature, because we are talking essentially about the infinite God uniting himself to finitude in some way without the divine essence being changed, and that's paradoxical, it's mysterious, and that's the beauty of it, I think. But it's not something that we can really comprehend in its fullness, and we are using our human language to grasp it things in the best way we can't. We're trying, but we can't understand this in its fullness, and that's okay. And as I said, I think that's the beauty of it, really. Well, I hope you found this helpful as we have continued exploring the formula of concord, and we finished article eight. We've only got a few left here, nine, 10, 11, and one of those is pretty short. So we'll see if we do two in one program next time, which I may do, I'm not sure exactly what I wanna do. And we'll see you in the next one. God bless. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]