Word of God dwelt in Jesus? No, because then Jesus would be not the Word, but only the dwelling-place of the Word. The Holy Ghost dwells in us;[1] what man dares say that he is the Holy Ghost? But Christ is "God above all, blessed for ever."[2] So there is one Christ, God and man, having Godhead and manhood in one, joined in one, with no division or separation.
Can one go too far in this direction? Is there any conceivable limit to the close unity of our Lord's Godhead and manhood? Yes; however closely joined they are, we must not conceive these two as fused by a kind of amalgamation into one new substance; because then both, or at least one, would cease to exist. If you combine oxygen and hydrogen to make water, what results is neither oxygen nor hydrogen but a new substance, water. So our Lord's divinity and humanity both would cease to be, forming some new impossible thing that is neither divinity nor humanity. Instead of having both, he would have neither; he would be neither God nor man. The Monophysite rather conceived one as absorbed, not both. The divinity in this idea remained unchanged, but the humanity was absorbed into it, the human nature was, so to speak, swamped, lost in the infinite ocean of divinity. Then our Lord would have no true humanity; he would not be really man. All his human life, his birth, pain, death, would be a mere appearance, an illusion, a fraud—as the old Docetes had imagined. No; both divinity and humanity remain real, essentially different, though joined so closely in one Jesus Christ. We come, then, exactly to the faith of Chalcedon: "one and the same Christ, the only-begotten Lord, in two natures unconfused, unchanged, undivided, inseparable … keeping the property of each nature in one person."[3] In other words, if our Lord is really God and man, he is one person (one single individual) in two natures, that of God and that of man. Is this the prejudice of a modern person who is anxious to avoid the pitfalls of Nestorius and Eutyches? I cannot conceive how it is possible to describe otherwise that Jesus Christ is God and man. It seems (supposing that one does not refuse to discuss the question altogether) the only possible way of saying it; and just this is the
