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

nature, but they were wrought by the human nature. Through His divine
omnipotence sight was given to the blind, but His divine omnipotence
wrought it by His human touch. Jesus Christ died according to His human
nature, but His death was the death of a divine person. Through His
human infirmity He was crucified, but that human weakness wrought by
His divine majesty an infinite sacrifice. Godhead cannot bleed, but the
Church is purchased by the blood of God; for He who bleeds is in one
inseparable person, God as well as man, and His blood has efficacy, not
because of the properties of the nature according to which He bleeds, but
because of the attributes of His whole person, which is divine. Had not He
who bled been personally God as well as man, His blood would not have
availed. Jesus Christ is essentially and necessarily omnipresent according
to the divine nature, but His human nature not of its own essence, or by a
necessity resulting from its own attributes, but because the divine has taken
it into personal union with itself, is rendered present through the divine.
The divine neither loses nor imparts any essential attribute, nor does the
human lose any essential attribute of its own, nor receive any essential
attribute of the divine; but the divine, omnipresent of itself, renders present
the human which has been taken into its own person. The doctrine on
which this rests is known in theological technology as the "Communicatio
idiomatum," that is, the common participation of properties, the doctrine
that the properties of the divine and human natures are actually the
properties of the whole person of Christ, and actually exercised by Him in
the unity of His person. We Lutherans affirm that there is a real common
participation of the whole person in the properties of both natures. The
Reformed deny it, and say that there is no real common participation, but
that each nature is isolated from the other in its attributes, and that the
person of Christ has only the common participation in the names of the
two sets of attributes, the human and divine. In other words, the question
which divides us is between a communicatio idiomatum, and a
communicatio nominum, the question whether the two natures enjoy a
common participation of properties in the one person, or merely