Note 13 — THE DOGMATIC IMPORT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

The Reformed Church did not go thus far with the Lutherans in their doctrine of the person of Christ, for they did not admit the last and boldest consequence drawn by the latter from the union of the manhood and Godhead—the communicatio idiomatum, or communication of properties. The Lutherans themselves did not hold that the properties of the human nature were communicated to the divine, nor that all the properties of the divine nature, eternity for example, could be communicated to the human;13 and this gave occasion on the part of the Reformed Church, to the following objection: the communication of properties must be reciprocal and complete, or it is none at all; moreover, by the communication of the properties of an infinite nature to a finite one, the latter is not less annihilated as to its essence than an infinite nature would be, were it to receive the properties of a finite one.14 When the Lutherans sought shelter in the position, that the properties of the one nature were only so far shared by the other, as according to its character is possible, uti per suam indolem potest,15 they in fact did away altogether with the communicatio idiomatum; and indeed this doctrine has been explicitly given up even by orthodox theologians since Reinhard.