Translated by Gerhard F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau
Printed in: Gerhard F. Bente et al., ed.,
Concordia Triglotta
(St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1921), 1105-49
171] Although it is known and undeniable that the Godhead, together with its divine majesty, is not to be locally circumscribed by the flesh, as though it were enclosed in a vessel, as Athanasius, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and others correctly wrote, and as also the Book of Concord [p. 1019] expressly rejects as an error the teaching that the humanity of Christ has been locally expanded into all places, or that, by the personal union, the human nature in Christ has been transformed into an infinite essence, -- nevertheless, since the divine and human natures are personally and inseparably united in Christ, the Holy Scriptures and the holy fathers testify that wherever Christ is, there is not half His person, or only one half, or only a part of His person, for instance, the divinity alone, separate and bare, minus and without His assumed humanity personally united thereto or separated from it, and outside of the personal union with the humanity; but that His entire person, namely, as God and man, according to the mode of the personal union with the humanity, which is an inscrutable mystery, is everywhere present in a way and measure which is known to God.
172] Eph. 4,10: He ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things. This Oecumenius explains thus: "For, indeed, He long ago filled all things with His bare divinity; and having become incarnate, that He might fill all things with His flesh, He descended and ascended."
173] And THEOPHYLACT, on the same passage (Comment. in Eph., p. 535, ed. Lond., 1636): "In order that He might fill all things with His dominion and working, and that, in the flesh, since even before He filled all things with His divinity. These things, however, are against Paul of Samosata and Nestorius."
174] LEO, Epist. 10 (Ep. 24, cap. 5, p. 245, and in Serm., f. 121, ed. cit.): "The Church Catholic lives and advances in this faith, that in Christ Jesus there is believed neither the humanity without the true divinity nor the divinity without the true humanity."
175] The same, in Discourse 3, On the Passion: "This the catholic faith teaches, this it requires, that we know that in our Redeemer two natures have united, and that, while their properties remained, such a union of both substances has occurred that, from the time in which the Word became flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, we are not to think of God without this, that He is man; nor of the man without this, that He is God."
176] In the same place: "Each nature, by distinct operations, declares its genuineness, but neither separates itself from connection with the other; here nothing belonging to the one is lacking to the other; but God assumed the entire man, and so united Himself to man and man to Himself, that each nature is in the other, and neither passed into the other with the loss of its own attributes."
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