While controversy over the relation of natures in the person of Christ marked the late ancient and early medieval church, we do not get off the hook as easily as we might wish.  The question of the relation of the natures in Christ bedevils several theological questions still, though the alternatives are now clearer.

First, there is the question of impeccability or the ability of Christ to sin.  God, of course, cannot sin, nor can he be tempted with evil.  Jesus was God.  Yet Jesus was tempted, and though victorious, the picture given to us in the Gospels is that there was a real struggle.  There are four alternatives:  1)  He was not able not to sin, 2) He was able to sin (usually with the implication that he didn’t), 3) He was able not to sin (usually with the implication that he did), and 4) He was not able to sin.  How you decide rests largely on how you conceive of the relation of the deity to the humanity of Christ.  The first option is not acceptable, nor is the third as usually understood, but how do you decide between the other two?

There are some parallel issues.  One of them is death.  God is immortal and cannot die; He is in fact the source of life.  Yet the Scripture is emphatic that Jesus did die; there is no atonement without that.  Another is Luke’s statement that the boy Jesus grew in wisdom and knowledge.  God is not subject to learning (He knows all things immediately), and Jesus was God, so how can this be true?  How is it possible for Him not to know the time of His return?  Yet, He explicitly said He didn’t (Mark 13:32).

Theologically, this problem is known as the communicatio idiomatum, or the communication of attributes or properties.  Because of the personal union of natures, orthodoxy affirms that what is properly true of only one or the other nature can be predicated of the whole person.  Thus, although God cannot die, he can experience death in the person of Jesus because he is united to a true human nature that can die.  The same applies to temptation.  (But not to the necessity of sinning because sin is not necessary to true humanity.)

An interesting historical example of this problem is the different conceptions of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper.  Luther argued that he can be physically present because since God is omnipresent, the flesh of Christ is therefore everywhere.  The Reformed, on the other hand, argued that the flesh of Christ is locally present in heaven and Christ is present in the supper only spiritually.  If Luther’s position is correct, how could Jesus be spatially limited to a manger or a cross?  Was it just an illusion?  (See the earlier article on “Docetism.”)

Phil Meade, Dana Arledge, Kevin Farmer