The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

"That Capernaitish eating of the body of Christ, as if it were rent with
the teeth and concocted as other food, which the Sacramentarians, against
the witness of their consciences, after so many protestations on our part,
maliciously feign, that they may bring our doctrine into odium." 223
viii. The Person of Christ. The handling of this great theme connects
itself closely with the Lord's Supper. The doctrine' of the person of Christ
presented in the Formula rests upon the sublimest series of inductions in
the history of Christian doctrine. In all Confessional history there is
nothing to be compared with it in the combination of exact exegesis, of
dogmatic skill, and of fidelity to historical development. Fifteen centuries of
Christian thought culminate in it. The doctrine of the "Communicatio
Idiomatum" is indeed but the repetition which Christian science in its last
maturity presents, of the truth that "the Word was made flesh." The
Apostle's Creed already has it, when it says that God's "only Son, our
Lord, was conceived, horn, suffered, was crucified, dead, buried, descended
into hell, ascended to the heavens, and sitteth at the right hand of the
Father Almighty." The "idiomata” are inseparable from the natura, the
attributes are inseparable from the nature, and if there be a
"communicatio" of natures, there must be a "communicatio" of these
attributes; that is, the nature personally assumed must, in that assumption,
be participant of the attributes of that nature to whose person it is assumed.
If an Eternal Being was actually conceived and born, if the impassible
actually suffered, if the infinite was actually fastened to the cross, if the
immortal was dead, if He whom heaven, and the heaven of heavens,
cannot contain, was hidden in a grave,--if all this be not a riddle, but a clear
direct statement of doctrine--to accept the Apostles' Creed is to accept the
presupposition which necessitates the reception of the doctrine of the
Communicatio Idiomatum. If the Apostles' Creed does not mean that Jesus
Christ is one person in whom there is an inseparable connection of the
natures, so that the one person really does all that is done, whether through
one nature or through both, and the
223 Epitome, 597-604. Solid. Declaratio. 724-760.