16 April 2011
Old Lutheran Quote of the Day
Thus the human nature in Christ (although it does not subsist by itself or alone) in a sense possesses personal attributes, because this unit or this individual unit of human nature which subsists in the person of the Logos differs from all other persons possessing a human nature in that it does not subsist in itself but in the person of the Logos and does not possess a personality of its own, since it has the person of the Logos for its hypostasis. -- Martin Chemnitz, *Two Natures in Christ* p. 35.
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2 comments:
In plain English we can say that
according to His human nature, Christ
did not fully use His divine power
in His state of humiliation.
However, in His state of exaltation
Christ has unlimited and full use
of His divine power in His human
nature.
Chemnitz is a great theologian but
sometimes it gets lost in translation to English.
While all of that is most certainly true, Anonymous, it's not what Chemnitz is talking about here. The plain English for this quote would be something along these lines: Christ's human nature doesn't have a personality distinct from the personality of His divine nature. There was never a time when Christ's human nature existed apart from His divine nature. The human nature came to be at the exact moment in time that the Logos (the Word) became flesh (John 1:14). So the human nature gets all of its personality from the divine Person of the Logos.
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