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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25945 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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I'm trying to parse that translation you offered, but it's very dense and I'm having trouble making sense of it. Could you summarize the point of view Quenstedt is offering here?

What Quenstedt is doing there is summarizing the views of Roman Catholics, on the question of what worship is due to the human nature of Christ. This is in the midst of a list of groups that he presents as disagreeing with his (the Lutheran) position on it. As to what's happening in the paragraph: he cites Thomas, Alexander of Hales, and Tanner as what seems essentially your view: Christ's human nature can be worshiped with latria, but per se, only hyperdulia. He then says that Bellarmine and Petavius disagree, in that they would not think that latria can be ascribed to Christ's human body, because latria can only be applied to things per se, not by a habitus. (At least, that's how I read it.) Then, he finishes by citing places for further reading.

My guess is he's saying Christ's humanity deserves latria ipso facto, which would be fair, I get that, I'm actually rather uncomfortable with the whole presupposition here that we can separate our worship of Christ's humanity from that of his divinity, even in thought, I'd rather not even conceive of categories here, let's just worship Christ the Incarnate Son of God.

I think Lutherans would reject the latria/dulia distinction outright, but I could be misremembering. If you want to read it for yourself, and know Latin, here it is. Pages 200-201 are what I quoted, in the midst of a larger passage. He does a nice job formatting, so it should be fairly organized. But yes, he would just say that it deserves latria. Lutherans have a more thoroughgoing view of the effects of the hypostatic union and the communicatio idiomatum, hence why they sometimes do things like ascribe ubiquity to the human nature of Christ.

I read a bunch of authors on this topic across denominations in the 17th century not too long ago, and it was funny how they were all saying that one of the problems with the positions of the other people was that they were too much like that of the Catholics, since their positions would imply something too similar to a dulia/latria distinction.

That being said, while there's clearly a strain of theological opinion here, I don't actually think there's a dogmatic definition on the matter even in Catholicism. I know of no teaching authority in the Catholic Church that focuses on this issue, though maybe one exists. More solemnly, Church councils have resisted talking about Christ's humanity and divinity separately, probably because talking about offering different worship to each hypostasis is incredibly misleading and dangerous.

This seems correct.

I think it's enough to say that Christ deserves to be worshipped as God because he is God, and also to be devoutly honored as the greatest among men because he is the greatest possible man. Delving too deep into where both things come from and how that relates to the hypostatic union and such strikes me as perhaps scholasticism delving a bit too deep into the mystery of the Incarnation in a way that could easily lead someone who's not incredibly careful into serious error. This seems like something where a non-Chalcedonian could easily say, "see, look how Chalcedon is misleading!" Let's just agree not to send this to the Oriental Orthodox, hm?

Seems reasonable.

I was on mobile when I typed my comment so I didn't see the hyperdulia reference in the Summa. Good catch! This is something that's never talked about in lay theology, I have never seen hyperdulia in reference to anyone but the Virgin Mary. It's generally treated as a gerrymandered category for her alone. But saying that Christ deserves hyperdulia with respect to his humanity makes a lot of sense, it puts it as essentially "dulia intimately connected with the incarnation of the Word."

Yup, this was essentially all that I was trying to get at with my original comment.

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