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

Lutheran need not fear to attribute too much to his adorable Saviour when
God himself gives to Him "all things."
2. In these words of John is implied that Christ, ACCORDING TO
HIS HUMAN NATURE, has all things. The name JESUS is not a name
drawn from His divine nature, but was given to Him in His individuality
after His incarnation. The text says, moreover, that the Father had GIVEN
all things into His hand. Now, according to the divine nature of Christ,
God can give Him nothing, for that divine nature in its own essence has all
things absolutely. Hence, here, and everywhere that God is said to give
Christ anything, or Christ is said to receive anything, it is given to Him
according to His human nature, and received by Him according to His
human nature. Christ, then, has received according to the one nature, to
wit, the human, what He intrinsically possessed in the other, to wit, in the
divine, or, as it has been expressed, Whatever Christ has in the one nature
by essence, He partakes of in the other by grace--and this is the doctrine of
our Church.
3. The whole point of John's antithesis, indeed, turns upon this view
of the person of Christ; for his vein of thought is evidently this--that Jesus
performed this act of touching lowliness, the washing of His disciples' feet,
the act of a servant, not in forgetfulness of His glorious majesty, and of the
plenitude of His gifts, but fully conscious of them. Though He knew His
own supreme glory as the one to whom the Father had given ALL
THINGS, He yet girded Himself, and bent to wash the feet of His loved
ones. Now, if He had ALL THINGS only according to the divine nature,
there was no humiliation involved, for according to the nature which had
the glory, He did not wash their feet--but as, confessedly, it was according
to His human nature, bending His human form, and using His human
hands to wash their feet, so must it have been according to that nature that
He here humiliated Himself; and the point is, that though as a man He had
given into His hands ALL THINGS, and was thus as man infinitely
glorious, yet as man, and in full consciousness of the glory which He
shared as man, He humbled Himself to wash His disciples' feet.
II. Jesus is omnipotent according to His human nature.
Matt. xxviii. 18.
That the expressions which attribute the plenary possession