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

of ALL THINGS to Jesus according to His human nature, are not to be
deprived of the very fullest significance, becomes yet more clear when we
look at the passages which specify in detail what are some of the things,:
“ALL" of which the Father has delivered to Him. Our blessed Lord says,
for example (Matt. xxviii. 18): "ALL POWER is given unto me in heaven
and on earth." Now mark of whom this affirmation is made. It is made of
One who stood before them confessedly a true man, coming with the step
of man, speaking through the lips of man, with the voice of man, and
saying: "All power is given unto me." Surely, if He had meant that His
human nature was to be excluded from this personality He would have
told His disciples so, for nothing could seem more clear than that the
undivided Christ, the man as well as the God, affirmed this of Himself. But
it is furthermore manifest that what Christ here says, He says by
preeminence of the human side of His person, for He says: “All power is
given unto me," but to His divine nature, in its essence, nothing could be
given. In virtue of that essence, it was necessarily omnipotent. Supreme
power, therefore, was conferred on the Mediator as to His human nature.
And yet there could not be two omnipotences in the person of Christ, the
one belonging to His divinity, the other to His humanity. The divine did
not part with its omnipotence to the human, so that the divine now ceased
to be omnipotent, and the human became in its own essence omnipotent.
This would involve that the Godhead really ceased to be divine, and the
human became essentially divine--both of which are absurd. As the
Godhead, therefore, retains its essential omnipotence, and yet the human
receives omnipotence as a gift, the result is inevitable. The one
omnipotence pertains to the whole person--the divine possessing it
essentially and of necessity, and in itself; the human having a communion
or participation in it, in virtue of its personal union with the divine.
Omnipotence becomes no essential attribute of the human nature of Christ,
but inheres forever in the divine, and is exercised by the human only
because it is taken into the one person of the divine.