Hello, Hedrick!
There is a difference between the ubiquity of Christ’s body and miracles of other kinds. There’s no question that God can raise the dead, or heal. There’s no logical problem with someone being healed. If it was a miracle (and not a normal function of resurrected bodies) there’s also no problem with God making Jesus’ body go through walls. I think, however, that there is a logical problem with God making Jesus’ body be omnipresent. It’s not a question of whether God has the power to do it, but of whether the thing makes any sense. It’s like asking whether God has the power to make square triangles.
OK. Once you exclude the laws of physics and you do not make Jesus' transfigured spirit body confined to space and you allow the spirit body to overlap with other objects (like Jesus' body passing through a wall), then naturally the body could be omnipresent.
Remember, in Genesis God walked in Eden, and Moses saw God's feet on Sinai. God is omnipresent, yet in some sense he can have or show visible feet. This can be because he has a spirit body.
What exactly is the problem with conceiving of omnipresence? It's because of the restrictions of the "ordinary laws of nature", as Calvin himself said. They normally prevent a body from doing things like being in two places at once or passing through a wall. Once those restrictions go away and ordinary laws of nature don't apply and bodies and spirit objects can overlap, then there is no problem conceiving of a transformed spirit body being omnipresent.
In the case of a square triangle, it's important to remember the gospel teaching that "all things are possible with God." At face value, a square triangle does not sound possible, because we normally think of this in the second dimension of shapes. But once we add dimensions to things, other possibilities may open up. A shape that from one angle appears a triangle may from another angle appear a square.
This cool 3D shape can be projected along three orthogonal axes resulting in a perfect square, a perfect circle and a perfect triangle. George Hart made this solid with a 3D printer... http:// curiosamathematica.tumblr. com /post/96525017825/
this-cool-3d-shape-can-be-projected-along-three
Likewise, if we accept that Jesus is in a transfigured spirit body, add in ideas like dimensions, then we can see that our ordinary understanding of natural laws may not apply so strictly. This would allow the possibility for Jesus' body to do things like ascend, appear in more than one place at once, or pass through walls, regardless of Calvin's demand that Jesus' body obey the "ordinary laws of nature".
One could imagine that after death there’s no body. We’re all some kind of spirit, and we all intermingle with each other. But both Lutherans and Reformed seem to agree that after death we have something like bodies which have boundaries and are separated from each other.
Perhaps Lutherans are not so rigid about this though, and don't rule out that at times the spirit bodies could intersect? Two shapes can intersect with eachother. So can two objects. Once physical intersectionality is allowed and bodies are not confined to space as per the "ordinary laws of nature", the body could be conceived of as intersecting or passing through another like light, ghosts, angels, and Jesus' body are conceived of as passing through walls.
It doesn’t make sense for something that is defined as having boundaries to be omnipresent.
Christ could, of course, be omnipresent in a different form. There’s no reason that he should be limited to a body.
There are numerous ways to solve this seeming problem.
Christ's human body could differ from normal human bodies in that he has the hypostatic union, which according to Leo's Tome from Chalcedon allows Christ's body to act in seeming contradiction to his human nature. So even if human bodies must always retain boundaries, perhaps Christ's does not.
How does it make sense for something that has boundaries to pass through walls like Christ's body did? One must answer this by saying that Christ's fleshly body can pass through solid objects or materialize ex-nihilio right in the middle of a physical mass of air particles, despite the "boundaries" of his body. It must be again that neither ordinary laws nor objects' boundaries restrict his body.
It might also be that resurrected bodies don’t have boundaries, although I question whether at that point they would be close enough to what we think of as a body for that word to be a useful designation.
But Lutherans never claimed any of this, because they agreed that Jesus’ human nature wouldn’t of itself be ubiquitous.
Yes, the human nature need not be ubiquitous, just as Chalcedon explains that it was not the human nature that performed miracles, became weightless when Jesus walked on water, etc. Christ-God "died in the flesh", but not in his "divine nature", according to Chalcedon. The two natures, properties, or categories of being, occasionally do not have the same statuses or actions.
So the claim that the body is ubiquitous says that he has a body that has boundaries that doesn’t have boundaries. That’s a square triangle.
This is like objecting to Christ-God's death because God is immortal and cannot die, or objecting that Christ cannot ransom his brethren because he is a man and the Psalms say that "no man can ransom his brother".
Chalcedon solves seeming contradictions by applying one action or property to only one of the two natures. If God's body has no boundaries but human bodies do, then perhaps Christ's transformed spirit body could change between or at times share these two states of being, thereby being in more than one place at once.
Christ's spirit is in heaven on a throne, and yet it could also descend to earth, thereby being in two places at once. Since Christ has a transformed body and people claim seeing him on earth and interacting with him physically, this is conceivable about his body too.
My position on things like God making a square triangle is that God may well be able to do things that we can’t describe, but he can’t do things that are properly described by a contradiction, because contradictory descriptions don’t mean anything. Thus I claim that a ubiquitous body is a meaningless term. Christ might well be ubiquitous. He might well both have a body and also be ubiquitous. But to say that he has a ubiquitous body is to make a statement with no meaning.
These are the kinds of objections that skeptics and other nonChristians commonly make against Christianity. They object that Christ, as man cannot ransom sinners, that God cannot have a body, die, change, etc. Chalcedon resolves these problems by saying that he incarnated, his body transformed so that he can be in opposite states of being (visible vs. invisible, etc.), and by ascribing one state of being or action to one nature and not the other.
It doesn't rise to the level of being false. It may however be suggestive, and be true as something like a metaphor. My sense is that the Lutheran language is not literal, and that its actual meaning is the same as Calvin's. That seems to be what Calvin thought.
It sounds like it was Luther who argued that the Reformed were too literal when they restricted Jesus' body in "place and time":
As to the other text concerning Christ’s ascension, Luther argues that Zwingli is too literal in his understanding of “right hand of God.” It refers not to some place in heaven but to God’s “almighty power” which makes it possible for Christ’s body to be present anywhere he chooses. Zwingli’s argument concerning the necessity of a body to be circumscribed by place and time Luther rejects as an offspring of that harlot, Reason. (http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/1984/issue4/408.html)
I don't like Luther's use of the word "harlot", but it does look to me like the Reformed judge religion based on Enlightenment "Reason" when it comes to the Eucharist and to miracle-working relics.
This is mostly not an argument against actual Lutherans, but against some of what I'm seeing here. Most Lutheran writers qualify statements about Christ's ubiquity, saying that it doesn't mean that he is locally present everywhere or some such.
I am rather skeptical because Luther sounds clear on this, but offhand I suppose you could be right - Look at how PCUSA's Catechism now says that Christ's body shares in the bread, which sounds rather Lutheran as I think you noted. There seems to be increased occasional sharing of ideas between mainstream Protestants.
Peace.
