Casen:
Robert or Michael,
OK, help me out then. Please explain the Bible verses I quoted. I’m particularly interested in John 17:11 and John 20:17. I’m not trying to be combative; I’ve just never heard a good explanation from the standpoint of the Trinitarian doctrine.
Read this and see if you still have questions on how to reconcile these passages with historic Trinitarian theology:
…The key to making the reality our own lies in the distinction between person and nature. The nature anything has decides what it is—to take the example closest to us, we who possess a human nature, a union of spiritual soul and matter, are men. But nature, though it answers the question what, does not answer the question
who. In every rational nature there is a mysterious something which says
I—
that is the person (and this is true not only for man but for angels, and, as we have seen, for God himself). That which says
I is the person, is the answer to the question
who any rational being is.
There is a further distinction. Nature decides what a being can do; but the person does it. My soul and body make all sorts of actions possible to me, but I do them. Whatever is done, suffered, experienced in a rational nature is done, experienced, suffered by the person whose nature it is.
Left to ourselves, we might simply assume that each person has one nature, each nature (if it happens to be rational) has one person. We have already seen how wrong we should be if we made that assumption; it is simply one more way of treating man as the measure of all. In God there is one nature totally possessed by three distinct persons. This plurality of persons over nature is reversed in Christ our Lord, for in him the person is one, the natures are two.
Because Christ our Lord, uniquely, had two natures, he could give two answers to the question “What are you?”—for nature decides what a person is. And he had two distinct principles—sources we may say—of action. By the one nature he could do all that goes with being God—he could read the heart of man for instance, he could raise Lazarus to life; by the other he could do all that goes with being man—he could be born of a mother, could hunger and thirst, could suffer, could die.
Every single action of Christ was the action of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and this includes every action done by him in his human nature. For natures are sources of action-, but not doers. It is always the person who does them, and in his human nature there was but one single person, and that person was God. There was no human person, for that would have made him two people, each with his own distinct nature. His human nature was complete, but it was united to a divine person, not a human person…
source:
catholic.com/thisrock/2003/0312clas.asp
By the way, it should be noted that Christ has two intellects as a consequence of his two natures. One intellect is perfect/divine, the other is human, capable of gaining experiential knowledge yet also capable of being enlightened by the divine as needed.
I concur! 