Chapter 13: Of the Person of Christ and His Divine and Human Nature
Scripture referenced in this chapter 8
Q. What things are to be known and believed concerning Christ?
A. His person, his office, his actions, the benefits that come by him, and the means how we are made partakers of him and all his benefits.
Q. What is his person?
A. It is God and man united together in one person.
Q. How may it be proved that Christ is God?
A. By sundry places of Scripture, wherein he is expresly so called (Isaiah 9:6; John 1:1; Romans 9:5; Philippians 2:6; 1 John 5:20).
Q. How else?
A. Because eternity, omnipotency, omniscience, and omnipresence, which are properties peculiar to God, are all of them ascribed to Christ.
Q. How else may the Godhead of Christ be proved?
A. Because the creation of the world, the forgiveness of sins, the working of miracles, which are works that can be done by none but God, are all of them ascribed to him as the author of them; and because he is made a lawful object of divine worship.
Q. Why was it requisite that Christ our Savior should be God?
A. That he might bear the weight of God's wrath without sinking under the same, that he might overcome death, and his sufferings might be of sufficient worth and value to satisfy the infinite justice of God.
Q. Is Christ also truly partaker of the nature of man?
A. Yes, for he is frequently called man, and the Son of man, and said to be made flesh and partaker of flesh and blood.
Q. Why was it requisite that he should be man?
A. That he might suffer death for us, sanctify our nature, and that we might have access with boldness to God.
Q. But since he was God from everlasting, how came he to be man also?
A. When the fullness of time was come he became man, not after the ordinary and usual way of generation by man and woman together, but he was conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of a virgin, without a father.
Q. Since there are two natures in Christ, the divine and human, whether is Christ then two persons?
A. By no means, but one only (1 Corinthians 8:6; 1 Timothy 2:5).
Q. But is not Christ a person in respect of his Godhead?
A. Yes, the second person in the blessed Trinity.
Q. Is not another man who has the whole nature of man in him, both body and soul, a perfect person?
A. Yes, it is even so.
Q. Why then is not the human nature in Christ a distinct person?
A. Because it never had subsisting and being of itself, but in the person of the Son of God being assumed to it from the first moment of its being (Hebrews 2:16).
Q. If both the human and divine nature be in Christ, and yet Christ but one person; is then the Godhead become the manhood, and the manhood the Godhead?
A. Not so; this union of two natures in one person does not confound the two natures, nor destroy the properties of either; but these still remain unconfounded and distinct in that one person.
