Dionysus on a Bike

John 12:44-50 – 7/11/2026

John has perhaps the highest Christology of any of the New Testament texts. In other words, in John’s Gospel we find the clearest expression that Jesus is both God and human in one person. This expression of the idea that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human while maintaining the unity of a single person leads to the Trinitarian understanding of God agreed on at the Council of Nicaea, the affirmation of the fullness of Christ’s divinity at the council of Ephesus, and the definition of orthodox Christology at the Council of Chalcedon.

Here I want to focus on one aspect of this Christology affirmed in the ancient councils, the so-called “communication of properties” or in Latin the communicatio idiomatum. This understanding of Christ begins with the doctrines affirmed in the early church councils, namely that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is fully God and fully human, having the natures of both. Jesus is a single person, a true unity, with two natures that are fully united with one another in that person. According to the communication of properties this means that any attribute of the divine can be applied to Jesus, and any attribute of humanity can also be applied to Jesus. Furthermore, any attribute that can be applied to Jesus can be applied to God since Jesus is fully God. In other words, Jesus’s human predicates can be “communicated” to God. This means that it is correct to call Mary the Mother of God or Theotokos since she gave birth to Jesus. It is correct to say that God died since Jesus died. It is correct to say that God suffered, since Jesus suffered, etc.

This astounding idea that human qualities can be applied to God because of Jesus has many philosophical and theological consequences. I want to focus on just one of these consequences here. God is distant in God’s very nature, neither a being like us nor an abstract entity of pure thought. God’s transcendence means that God is obscure for us, outside of our categories of existing and thinking. It is difficult, therefore, for us to know God at all, one who is so wholly other. It is via the communication of properties that something we are familiar with, ourselves and our own human nature, gives us insight into the nature of the divine. We know who Jesus is and what he is like because we know what it is to be human. Jesus also being completely divine, truly God, means that those things we know about Jesus’s humanity give us knowledge of Jesus’s divinity and therefore of God himself. Jesus is the bridge through which we come to understand what it is to be God. This means that God is radically different than most people understand God. This is a God who can die, a God of doubts, a God who defecates and eats and drinks and has bad days. The impassible God of the Greeks and the completely transcendent incorporeal deity of the Hebrew Scriptures are both incomplete pictures of God when God is also human. This is one of the distinctive features of Trinitarian theology, a God who complicates God by also being not-God.

This understanding of God that allows us to know the wholly other beyond beings is not without its mystery. This is knowledge that raises as many questions as it supposedly answers. As I have returned to the life of the church after years away, one of the many things that is different about my faith this time around is this faith’s embrace of partial answers, mystery, a multitude of possible answers, uncertainty, and difference, as well as a rejection of certainty, dogmatism, and the belief in a single correct way of understanding. Doctrines like the Chalcedon definition of Jesus and the communicatio idiomatum are fascinating, deep, and worth pursing not because they offer a certain, clear picture of the way the world is but because they produce questions and ways of thinking that are capable of changing lives, both for the better and the worse. Even as Christians admit that humans are weak and incapable of curing themselves of what destroys them, we also admit that we can evade responsibility for how we live our lives. A life lived in open questioning is the better life. Some doctrines of the historic church get in the way of that life and are rightfully rejected, but others, like the communicatio idiomatum that arises out of understanding Christ as fully human and fully God, create conditions where life can be affirmed and lived well in the service of love according to the commands and example of Jesus, the God-man.

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 7/11/2026:
Isaiah 52:1-6
John 12:44-50
Psalm 65:9-13

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis