Concluding Remarks

Abstract

This chapter suggests that part of the early seventeenth-century debate between the theologians of Tübingen and the theologians of Giessen on the question of the communicatio idiomatum represents the conflicting structures of Brenzian and Chemnitzian accounts of the hypostatic union. At issue was the human nature’s possession of divine attributes during Christ’s earthly life, affirmed by the Tübingen theologians and denied by the Giessen ones. The 1624 Decisio saxonica ruled in favour of Giessen, and thus in effect against Brenzian understandings of Christ’s kenosis. Lutheran orthodoxy requires that some (and not all) divine attributes are communicated to the human nature. It concludes with puzzles about the way in which the genus maiestaticum might be possible at all, given the denial of any distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies.