God Has no Body?

[drforjc]

David,
Jesus is a divine **person ** who possesses both a human nature and a divine nature. Remember, He is one person with two natures. A person is the subject of the dying, not the nature. Perhaps another way to put it would be that Jesus who is God has a body by virtue of his possessing a human nature (which is hypostatically united to his divine nature.)

 

[JimG]

davidv:

I don’t understand why you say “Jesus is not a human person”. This seems to be counter to that the material that you pointed us to in the newadvent link. If I believe the gospels (John 1:14), I have to believe that Jesus was human. If he wasn’t, he could not have died. His spiritual nature could not die, only his human nature could. Could you explain?

This is a difficult concept. Anyone who walked with Jesus on this earth knew that he was human. Eventually, they realized he was something more than human.

By “person” I mean, that within me which can say “I”. (A rock could not say this, for example.) The personhood of Jesus–that within him which said “I”, was the 2nd Person of the Trinity. So he was a divine Person, not a human person. But he was a human being as well as a divine being. (Because he had a human nature as well as a divine nature.)

For Jesus, it looks like this:

Who = Second Person of the Trinity
What = God
What = Human being

JimG

 

[davidv]

My understandings is that Jesus, while being divine, in nature and person, is also human, in nature and person. The hypostatic union joins not only the nature but the person as well.
John proclaims that the “Word” became “flesh”, God became man in nature and person.
Accord to the Catholic Catechism:

627 Christ’s death was a real death in that it put an end to his earthly human existence. But because of the union his body retained with the person of the Son, his was not a mortal corpse like others, for “divine power preserved Christ’s body from corruption.” (St. Thomas Aquinas)

Therefore Jesus is fully divine and fully human.

 

[otm]

So, Jesus is not the Second Person of the Trinity. The Word is the Second person of the Trinity (John 1). Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity Incarnate. Jesus is God made man. Jesus had the body. He was also God incarnate. God didn’t have the body, Jesus did. Prior to the Incarnation, Jesus didn’t exist. God existed. The Second Person of the Trinity existed. But not Jesus. Jesus was a human being Who had two natures; man and God. He walked, ate, sweated, passed gas, just like any other human being. But unlike any other human being, He and the Father were (are) One. It is a mystery that the Church has been reflecting on for 2000 years. Jesus now has a glorified body; it is different, yet the same. He passed into rooms with locked doors; He appeared in different geographical locations at or near the same time; He appeared to those who knew him, and they did not recognize Him until he spoke, or broke bread… But the body is the body of Jesus glorified. It is not God’s body, but Jesus’ body. and He is the Second Person of the Trinity, Incarnate.

 

[drforjc]

David,

Christ is one, not two persons. There are not two persons to be joined. Yes, his human and divine natures are joined hypostatically, but Christ remains one divine person.

According to Dr. Ludwig Ott in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma
“The dogma asserts that there is in Christ a person, who is the Divine Person of the Logos, and two natures, which belong to the One Divine Person.”
(p. 144)

The technical term for the initial question of this thread is the communicatio idiomatum.
There is an entry at New Advent for this as well. The concept is complex, but it does support the technical correctness of the assertion that God has a body.

 

[drforjc]

OTM,

no offense intended, but you need to get your theology books dusted off. “Jesus is not the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.” Huh?