Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. Interesting. However, he doesn't address the root word of "individual," which denote "something that cannot be divided." I think this is a useful concept in regard to human persons, whose humanity, while "composed of body and soul," does not allow for those qualities to be separated, and also for Jesus Christ, whose human and divine natures are individual parts of His Person. "Individual" might be sort of a shorthand for "hypostatic union." :-).
"But the confession of faith in God as a person necessarily includes the acknowledgement of God as relatedness, as communicability, as fruitfulness. The unrelated, unrelatable, absolutely one could not be a person. There is no such thing as a person in the categorical singular." He then delves into the etymological origin of the word "person," "prosopon," literally meaning towards the face.
That's the most relevant passage I found on a quick lookthrough of highlighted passages. As mentioned in this article, Personhood is a quality necessary for any communion at all, not to mention the Communion between the persons of the Holy Trinity. The logic of political individualism ends up having us treat every other man as an enemy, indeed an alien never to be reconciled with us, who can only be our alliy in a temporary marriages of convenience.
Wouldn't taking literally a description of Jesus as an "individual" recapitulate the old Christological heresies? Arianism comes to mind, immediately, or some other form of subordinationism.
I doubt "individual" has so much meaning in ordinary use. "We arrested three individuals" is merely a fancy way of saying "We took in three guys".
Of course Jesus was an individual ... all historical evidence proves that he actually lived.
And besides how could he have married Mary Magdalene & produced children (whose descendants are now thought to be in France ... the Holy Grail), if he wasn't real?
My goodness.
I have found it more appropriate when using the term 'person', to mean the syntactic understanding of the object. St Thomas and Boethian definitions are probably more appropriate. The original Greek reference to a mask as used in Greek plays or 'face to face' offers some insight.