The attributes of God the son are shared with the human nature continually and yet somehow the human nature remains ontologically human. A short example of hermeneutics gone wrong from a recent paper I wrote on confessional materiels in the Lutheran church. There is a failure here to realize that if a certain understanding of a passage leads you to strained reasoning about the natures of Christ, it might be better to go back and re-look at other possibilities for your exegesis.
Here is the segment:
The Lutheran case is much more subtle. There is much to commend about it. They are determined to the hold to the unity of the two persons of Christ. I appreciate their commitment to the term Theotokos, that is, Mary was the God-bearer. Further, I appreciate their commitment to the fact that the Son of God suffered in the flesh. This, of course, should be tempered by an understanding that this suffering is not ontological, but relational.
The great problem is in their understanding of the communicato idiomatum. The communicatio idiomatum is the sharing of the attributes of the persons with one another. In this way, the Son can exercise the omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence of God. They are careful, however, to say that this is limited. They reject that the human nature is present everywhere in the same way the divine nature is present. But they affirm shared attributes. God the Son shares his attributes with his human nature in a static, undefined way. Part of the source of this problem is that the Lutherans want a unity in the nature of Christ; that somehow the divine nature in the Son of God became human flesh. It would be better to say, the person of the Son of God took on human flesh.
They also misunderstand the reformed understanding of the communication idiomatum. The reformed do believe that the divine nature shares attributes with the human nature. This is, however, done through the Spirit. Thus attributes are given are given to the son at certain points during his life, so that he can discern the minds of men and be aware of the future, but they are not shared in a static continual sense.
The Lutheran understanding, though thankfully not changing the essence of the son, seems to affirm the static, continual sense of the communication idiomatum. In this way, the Lutherans do not leave room for a maturing Jesus. They also end up with an apparent contradiction.The attributes of God the son are shared with the human nature continually and yet somehow the human nature remains ontologically human.
The ultimate problem, however, lies with the source of this document. The Lutherans want to affirm the physical presence of Christ at the table because of his words, “This is my body.” If this were a necessary interpretation of that phrase, the Lutherans would be right to come to their convoluted understanding of the natures of Christ. We would have to affirm that there is something mysterious going on here. If, however, there were an alternate understanding of that text that did not lead to the strained reasoning they have in this passage, it might be better to take that understanding. This would lead to an understanding of the two natures that would be less prone to losing the real humanity Christ, even as he rules in heaven today. What goes on at the Lord’s Supper is still a mystery, of course. How does the Spirit cause us to ascend into the throne room of Christ? What does it mean that we eat of Christ’s flesh? With a spiritual understanding of “This is my body” we can admit this mystery, and further, the mystery of the incarnation, without losing sight of the full humanity of Christ.