The answer would seem to be, “Yes”. We’ve lost our ability to say that Christ was man and God in one divine Person just because we use the word ‘person’ to refer to each instantiation of a human being. One of these two possibilities is true:
- Jesus of Nazareth was born a human person. If united with God in some way, there was a confusion of persons or else a mutilation of the human being of Jesus of Nazareth by loss of the properties of human person-hood.
- Jesus was born as a human body united with a divine Person but in that case He was different from other human beings who are born as human persons and are inherently persons from beginning to end of their mortal lives. He would have only been a puppet, missing this human person-hood which modern claims assumes to exist from conception or birth or somewhere between.
By sheer sloppiness and lack of concern for the importance of words, we’ve lost the ability to speak in an orthodox manner. We’ve put ourselves into the position of the ancient Monophysites, as some historians tell the story. Those heretical Christians were not willfully heretical but they spoke a language which didn’t properly differentiate between nature and person. The tradtional Christian formula, “Jesus had a divine and human nature in one divine Person” would translate as either “Jesus had a divine and human nature in one divine nature” or else “Jesus had a divine and human person in one divine person”.
We modern Christians seem to be in a similar position. Using our day-to-day language, we are forced to think of Jesus Christ as not being truly man because He wasn’t a human person or else to think of Jesus Christ as being a confused mixture of human person and divine Person. In such a case, the divine Person would be so overwhelming that the human person would disappear. But maybe we tend to simply stop thinking of Jesus Christ as being truly God.