IN THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST.

apart from individual things and apart from their subjects in our mind, as are whiteness, justice, fortitude, wisdom; and in this controversy, humanity, divinity, human nature, divine nature. Concrete are words by which we comprehend the forms of things not nakedly but in a subject, that is, subsisting and adhering in the individual things themselves, and signify them through adjective words, as are: white, just, strong; or through appellatives, such as these: God, man, Son of God, Son of man. This distinction is not to be despised. Therefore Luther said that it was done "by divine providence that in grammar the words of concrete and abstract were discovered."

A property is what is in one alone and cannot be transferred or communicated; as the essential property of the Deity is to be spirit, to be from eternity, to be omnipotent, to be omnipresent. The properties of humanity or human nature are: to be created, to be finite, to be able to be seen, touched, wounded, to die.

The distinct particles that we employ to signify abstracts or natures, when it pleases to speak of them specifically, are: "according to," "insofar as," "inasmuch as."

Since, therefore, these things are the properties of the divine nature—to be infinite, to be everywhere, to fill all things, to be from eternity, infinite wisdom and power, to create all things, to give life, light, justice, eternal joy, etc.—and the properties of the human are to be finite, to be circumscribed by essence, to be contained in a certain place, to be created, or to have its origin at a certain time through generation, to need food, drink, sleep, to be passible, to be mortal: the properties of each nature are rightly and truly said of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, of his person. Rightly also, by a concrete word signifying the person of Christ, it is said of the divine nature: God has suffered, God redeemed the Church with his blood, as Paul speaks Acts 20:28. The Jews crucified God, Mary bore God; namely, that God suffered according to his human nature, or, as Peter says, in the flesh 1 Peter 3:18.