@slimboyfat
It’s not like "dividing" Scripture arbitrarily into strictly human or strictly divine statements, Jesus does not alternate “back and forth” between two isolated natures as though He were two separate beings, one human and one divine. This would be Nestorianism, do you know the essential difference between Nestorianism and Chalcedonism? The core principle of orthodox Christology is precisely that Jesus is always one Person acting in and through two natures simultaneously. When Christ speaks or acts, He does so as the one eternal Logos who fully and personally possesses both the divine and the human nature, united without confusion in one hypostasis or person. Hence, every action and every statement made by Jesus can be properly attributed to the Person of the Son, yet some of these acts and statements express truths that pertain particularly to His divinity, others to His humanity, and some express the reality of both natures at once.
By the way, this is where the concept of communicatio idiomatum comes into play, which also establishes Mary's title of Theotokos. That is why there is a saying that the Theotokos is the refuter of all (Christological) heresies, since whoever understands it correctly, understands what hypostatic unity is, what communicatio idiomatum is. Although of course, if someone doesn't understand communicatio idiomatum, the question is how they can explain biblical passages like Luke 1:43, Acts 3:15, Acts 20:28, 1 Corinthians 2:8. In fact, guided by Thomistic metaphysical logic, Chalcedonian Trinitarianism is the only pure monotheistic view of all religions. Look at my arguments written to Muslim apologists about the Trinity vs. "Shirk".
In John 10:18, Christ’s assertion, "I have authority to lay down my life, and I have authority to take it up again," does not require one to arbitrarily divide the verse into a human or divine "speaker." Rather, it reveals precisely the profound unity of His Person: the divine Son, who became incarnate, possesses divine authority inherently (by His eternal divine nature) but also exercises it concretely through His humanity, having willingly taken flesh. The very fact that He speaks of receiving a command from the Father does not diminish this inherent divine authority but emphasizes that His human will is perfectly united to the divine will. Thus, He freely and willingly accepts the Father’s will as His own—not out of inferiority or ontological subordination, but out of the harmony and order intrinsic to the divine persons and revealed concretely in the incarnation.
Your objection rests on a misunderstanding of the Christological doctrines as if they imply some sort of competing dualism. The incarnate Logos is always acting as one Person, whose divine authority is not obliterated or reduced by His humanity, nor is His human obedience negated by His divinity. Instead, the two natures coexist in a single subject, the Son of God, without mixing or confusion. When Jesus expresses His obedience to the Father, this is a genuinely human act flowing from His human nature, yet it is also fully personal to the divine Son. Similarly, when He speaks of possessing divine authority to raise Himself, this authority is fundamentally rooted in His divine nature and is perfectly integrated with His human obedience. These realities are complementary, not contradictory.
The mistake Arians make—and the one reflected implicitly in your argument—is the assumption that the presence of genuine human obedience necessarily excludes genuine divine authority. But such an assumption only makes sense if one already presupposes a unitarian framework in which there is only one layer of being, either human or divine, but never both simultaneously united in one Person. The Chalcedonian understanding explicitly denies that assumption. Christ’s human obedience is the freely chosen expression, within time, of the eternal Son’s divine will—manifested through human acts in the economy of salvation. The very fact that Christ can speak both of His authority and of receiving a command without contradiction underscores precisely the mystery and the profundity of the incarnation: the eternal Son, who is fully divine, is also authentically human. His human obedience is a concrete manifestation of His divine Sonship, perfectly expressing within human history His eternal relationship with the Father.
Christ always acts as a single Divine Person, whose actions authentically manifest both His divinity and His humanity. In John 10:18, Jesus’ statement reveals this profound unity: the Son who eternally receives the divine nature from the Father also perfectly and freely obeys the Father in His human nature. The incarnational reality is neither contradictory nor confusing—it is precisely the profound truth of who Jesus is: the eternal Word made flesh.
