Christ the Heart of Creation

the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus is more than just a coexistence of two self-subsisting agents (which would lead to the opposite heresy to monophysitism, the ‘Nestorian’ view of incarnation as two subsistent agents bound together in a single outward form in history).

when we speak theologically of the divine Word, we do not and cannot speak simply of this eternal subject; we speak of what the divine Word has actually done in this world and of how we have learned to identify the divine Word in action within human history.

everything done by God is done inseparably by the Trinity; but what that action brings about is a state of affairs in which human nature is related to the Person of the Son – not to the divine nature in general.

Gilbert, in essence, locates the crucial aspect of the union at the level of what makes the Word to be the Word or Son, the proprietas personalis: this – because it is not the same as the definition of the divine essence – is communicable to and in finite agency, and when so communicated, without reserve or interruption, constitutes a finite agent

The Word’s eternal ‘way of being God’, as God the Son, structures and actualizes the agency of this real finite substance; nothing is changed in the Word’s way of being God, and nothing changes in respect of the essence of God.

Aquinas keeps two things firmly in view here – the necessity of affirming that the sonship of the Word is eternally and intrinsically an aspect of divine life; and the essential importance of understanding that the Persons of the Godhead are one in action.

is indeed the Word that makes the humanity what it is, in the sense that it makes it to be the way it actively is (not in the sense that it makes it to be the sort of thing it is, a human individual in the abstract).

human words, even words of pain or doubt or rebellion, are adopted as his in order that they can be transformed; and in an analogous way the Word is the persona of Jesus, taking on, becoming ‘answerable’ for, the human words, acts and sufferings of Jesus.

finitude and infinity are ‘exclusive’ in the sense that infinity is the absence of actual contingent limitation; but precisely because of this we have the paradox that the infinite cannot be ‘excluded’ from the finite in virtue of any specific property that is incompatible with some other specific property.