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Here's the thread. I learned Christology first through the Reformation-era debates over the Eucharist/Lord's Supper. These debates, as anyone familiar with them knows, is extremely complex and it's not always clear where the disagreements really lie. https://twitter.com/jdmoser20/status/1351157766564446208
One consequence of that debate is the grammar of persons and natures it bequeathed to Protestant dogmatics. Persons act, natures grant persons powers to act in certain ways; but the whole point of the Reformation debate was to make sense of how Christ was present *now*.
This lead brilliant Lutheran thinkers like Martin Chemnitz back to the sources, where he found what he thought was support for the view that Christ's human *nature* had acquired divine/incommunicable powers in virtue of which Christ was present on the altar.
As time went on, however, especially in the 19th-20th centuries, Protestants began to read the patristic and medieval sources thru the lens of Lutheran/Reformed questions. What powers did Christ as a human being have? How could he do what God alone could do?
One answer was the genus maiestaticum: Christ received omnipotence, omnipresence, and the power to give life *as a human being.* What powers belong to Christ's human nature? The answers to this question produced some confusion over what persons/natures are.
Are natures in communion? Are they entities that intersect/overlap? What powers are given to Christ's humanity and which ones are withheld?
The goal of the article was to recover the patristic inheritance Thomas Aquinas synthesized and to which he contributed. You won't find the category of the genus maiestaticum in his works. I wanted to know how he accounted for the NT and Jesus's 'divine deeds'
He was resolutely focused on the thought Christ is one person, and he thought Scripture's modus loquendi should govern how we answer the question. Reduplicative propositions help articulate and clarify what we should say about Christ healing the leper, for example.
Some might wonder why I didn't engage recent analytic literature on reduplication. I find it an interesting debate, tracing back to the putative problem of contradictory predicates raised by Thomas V. Morris in his *The Logic of God Incarnate.*
But I don't think the medievals developed semantic analysis of reduplicative propositions in Christology to answer this problem. They were after something different; for Aquinas, at least, it was a given that "contradictory predicates can be predicated of the same thing...
...but not in the same respect." That's not to say the debate is useless, but I don't think the scholastic theologians of that period were interested in the problem, and they wouldn't have appealed to reduplication to solve it, if they were.
Anyhow, I hope you find this article useful!
