Christian Doctrines II
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Christian Doctrines II
The Incarnation
The Person of Christ is the bankruptcy of logic.
H. Maurice Relton, A Study in Christology
In the course of thinking about the Incarnation for some years now, I have come to see that a few simple metaphysical distinctions and a solid dose of logical care will suffice to explicate and defend the doctrine against all extant criticisms of a philosophical nature.
Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate
1—Introduction
The New Testament affirms both the humanity and deity of Jesus Christ. As a human being Jesus was born (Lk 2:7, 11), experienced physical and mental limitations (Lk 2:52; cf. Mt 4:2; Mk 4:38; 13:32; Jn 4:6), was tempted (Mt 4:1-11), increased in moral perfection through suffering (Heb 5:7-10), and was tortured and executed (Mk 15:15). Nevertheless, the New Testament authors affirm that Jesus was God (Jn 1:1-3, 14, 18; 20:26-29; Rom 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb 1:8; 2 Pet 1:1) and describe him as the fullness of deity in bodily form (Col 1:15-20; 2:9; Phil 2:5-8). The New Testament church called him kyrios (Lord), the same word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament in place of Yahweh, and applied to Jesus Old Testament passages concerning Yahweh (1 Cor 16:22; Rom 10:8, 13).
But if anything appears to be a contradiction, surely this is it! How can Jesus be both God and man, infinite and finite, Creator and creature? How can we unite in a single person both omniscience and ignorance, omnipotence and weakness, moral perfection, and moral perfectibility? The attributes of deity seem to drive out the attributes of humanity, so that it seems logically inconsistent to affirm with the historic Christian church that Jesus is truly God and truly man (vere Deus/vere homo).
2—The Christological Controversies
As a result of the trinitarian controversy culminating in the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), the full deity of Christ, along with his humanity, was declared nonnegotiable. With the final formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in place, the christological controversies of the fourth through the seventh centuries opened a new chapter in the intellectual history of the church. The central question of this new epoch was how we should understand the affirmation that Jesus Christ is both human and divine.
Two broad schools of christological thought emerged among the church fathers. Often labeled Logos-flesh versus Logos-man Christology or Alexandrian versus Antiochene Christology, these competing schools are perhaps best seen as a struggle between one-nature (monophysite) versus two-nature (dyophysite) Christology. The presupposition of both schools is that members of natural kinds of things do have natures, or essential properties that make the things what they are (see chap. 10). Thus there is such a thing as human nature, and this differs from the divine nature. According to Aristotle the nature of man is that he is a rational animal, so that being truly human involves having both an intellectual soul and a physical body, and the church fathers seem to have accepted this view. At the same time, they believed that God possesses certain essential attributes, such as omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, moral perfection, and so forth. The question was how to understand the incarnation of the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity, in the man Jesus of Nazareth. The fathers were unanimous in thinking that the incarnation did not involve the Logos’s divesting himself of certain divine attributes in order to turn himself into a human being. Such a conception would be akin to pagan, mythological ideas, such as Zeus’s transforming himself into a bull or swan. The notion of the incarnation was not that the Logos turned himself into a human being, thereby ceasing to be God, but that Jesus Christ was both God and man simultaneously. Since the divine nature was not abandoned by the Logos, the incarnation could only be conceived of as the acquisition by the Logos of the additional, essential properties of human nature. The question was how this acquisition of a human nature by the Logos is to be understood.
Advocates of a one-nature Christology held that after the incarnation the Logos possessed a single divine-human nature. Some understood the incarnation to be the Logos’s clothing himself in flesh, assuming as his own a human body. Christ’s flesh was sometimes taken to be deified in virtue of its union with the Logos. By contrast, proponents of a two-nature Christology emphasized that in the incarnation the Logos took on not merely human flesh but a complete human nature, and therefore a rational soul and body. The Logos was joined at conception to the human being borne by Mary the mother of Christ. The incarnation thus involved the existence of a complete human being and a complete divine being.
One of the most creative christological thinkers, and a seminal influence throughout the christological controversies, was Apollinarius (d. ca. 390), bishop of Laodicea during the mid-fourth century. Apollinarius argued that it is impossible that Christ should have both a complete divine nature and a complete human nature, for that would amount to a mere indwelling of God in a human being, which falls short of a true incarnation (Fragments). If, in addition to the divine intellect of the Logos, there was in Christ a human intellect, then the Logos did not achieve a full incarnation. The key to Apollinarius’s ingenious solution to the problem of achieving a true incarnation lay in his anthropology. Each human being consists of a body (sōma), an animal soul (psychē) and a rational soul (nous). The nous was conceived to be the seat of the sinful instincts. In Jesus, the divine Logos took the place of the human nous and thus became embodied. As a result, in Christ God was constitutionally conjoined with man. Just as the soul and the body are essentially different but in man are combined in one human nature, so also in Christ there exists one nature composed of a part coessential with God and another part coessential with human flesh. The Logos came to experience the world through his flesh and to act through the flesh as his instrument. Having only a single intellect and will belonging properly to the Logos, Christ was without sinful desires and incapable of sin.
In advocating such an understanding of the incarnation, Apollinarius stood in the train of the great Alexandrian theologians. Athanasius always spoke of the Logos’s taking on flesh and never referred to the human soul of Jesus. Athanasius typically affirms: “In nature the Word himself is impassible, and yet because of that flesh which He put on, these things are ascribed to Him, since they belong to the flesh, and the body itself belongs to the savior” (Orations Against the Arians 34). Apollinarianism achieved a genuine incarnation that, given anthropological dualism, is no more inherently implausible than the soul’s union with the body. It combated Arianism’s fallible Christ, it ensured the unity of his person, and it explained how God through the assumption of a body could participate in suffering.
Nevertheless, Apollinarianism was inadequate as it stood. Two deficiencies of Apollinarian Christology seemed especially serious. First, a body without a mind is a truncation of human nature. By merely clothing himself with flesh, the Logos did not truly become a man. For essential to human nature is a rational soul, which Christ lacked. He was like us only with respect to his flesh, which is a mere animal nature. Gregory of Nyssa thus charged that Apollinarius had reduced the incarnation to God’s becoming an animal! Apollinarianism is thus unacceptable, since it denies the true humanity of Christ. Second, if Christ lacked a human mind, then he did not redeem the human mind. This inference was based on the fundamental principle that underlay the doctrine of the incarnation: that which is not assumed is not saved (quod non est assumptum non est sanatum). Apart from the truth of this principle, there is no rationale for the incarnation at all. Thus Apollinarius’s Christology undermined Christian soteriology. Because of these deficiencies, Apollinarianism was condemned as heretical at a synod in Rome in 377.
The Antiochene theologians who opposed Apollinarius insisted on Christ’s possession of two complete natures, human and divine. Such a doctrine implied that Christ possessed all the elements essential to a complete human nature, including a soul and a body. Theodore of Mopsuestia, the most prominent of these thinkers, conceived of the incarnation as a special sort of indwelling by means of which the Logos attached himself to the man Jesus at the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb (On the Incarnation 7, fragments 2-3). Because he is omnipresent and provident, God is present according to his essence to all things in their existence and operation, but by his good pleasure he chooses to be more intimately related to some things than to others. In Christ, God was pleased to dwell as in a Son. Theodore affirmed that there is but one person in Christ, but he also held that each nature considered in itself is complete and has its own hypostasis. Moreover, he thought of the union of the Logos with the man Jesus in terms of a functional unity of will and mutual love, so that they constitute a person in the sense that they present a functionally unified “face” (prosōpon) to the world. Thus his affirmation that there is in Christ one person was viewed with suspicion by his detractors. However, it was Nestorius, who became patriarch of Constantinople in 428, whose name came to be associated with the view that there are two persons in Christ. Nestorius affirmed that in Christ there are two complete natures. He objected to Mary’s being called theotokos (“bearer,” or “mother,” “of God”), since Mary bore only the man Jesus, not the divine Logos. What was formed in her womb, crucified, and buried was not God; but the one assumed in the womb is called God because of the divinity of the One who assumed him (First Sermon Against the Theotokos).
The Alexandrian theologians believed that Nestorius was committed to the view that there are in Christ two persons or Sons, despite his protestations to the contrary. It is easy to see why they thought so. If each of Christ’s two natures is complete, each having its full complement of rational faculties, then it is difficult to see why, indeed, one does not have two persons, two Sons. Alexandrians, now forced by the condemnation of Apollinarius to admit the existence of a human soul in Christ, could not supply a solution to the dilemma, but they were certain that the Bible does not teach two Sons. Cyril of Alexandria insisted, “When he was made flesh, we do not define the indwelling in him in precisely the same manner as that in which one speaks of an indwelling in the saints; but being united by nature and not changed into flesh, he effected such an indwelling as the soul of man might be said to have in its own body” (Second Letter to Nestorius). The problem of the analogy is apparent: it either supports Apollinarianism (the soul being equivalent to the Logos and the body to Jesus’ body) or Nestorianism itself (the Son assumes a whole person, body and soul). Condemned at Ephesus in 431, Nestorianism is fundamentally flawed in positing no real union of God and man in Christ but simply an ontological juxtaposition, or at best an indwelling. But if the concept of personhood is bound up with that of a complete human nature, then it seems very difficult, given the rejection of Apollinarianism, to affirm two natures in Christ while avoiding Nestorianism.
In 451 the emperor Marcion convened the Council of Chalcedon at the request of Pope Leo the Great. Heavily dependent on the Tome of Leo (449), in which the pope following the lead of Tertullian (Against Praxeas) declared Christ to be one person having two natures, the settlement marked the zenith of the early church’s christological speculations. Formulated in the light of the numerous controversies over the person of Christ, the Chalcedonian statement carefully charts a middle course between the competing schools preceding it:
We . . . confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial [homoousios] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial [homoousios] with us according to the manhood, like us in all things except sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God [theotokos], according to the manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-Begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person [prosōpon] and one Subsistence [hypostasis], not divided or separated into two Persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ.
The settlement is a ringing endorsement of dyophysite Christology. Christ is declared to exist in two natures, whose distinction remains real even in their union in Christ. Moreover, Apollinarianism is implicitly rejected in the statement that Christ is not only perfect in his deity and truly God but also perfect in his humanity and truly man, having both a rational soul and body. At the same time, however, in agreement with monophysite Christology, the settlement insists on there being only one person, one Son, in Christ. Thus the excesses of Nestorianism are proscribed. Person and hypostasis are taken as having the same referent, so that the incarnation becomes a sort of mirror image of the Trinity. Just as in the Trinity there are multiple persons in one nature, so in Christ there are multiple natures in one person. The famous series of the four adjectives asynchytōs, atreptōs, adiairetōs, achōristōs (without confusion, without change, without division, without separation) serves as a reminder that the two natures of Christ must be kept distinct and that the unity of his person must not be compromised. The first two adjectives are aimed at the Alexandrian tendency to blend the two natures together as a result of the incarnation; the last two are directed at the Antiochene failure to achieve a real union of the two natures so that they are “divided or separated into two Persons.” As a result of Chalcedon, it has become an imperative of orthodox Christology that we must “neither confuse the natures nor divide the person” of Christ.
The Chalcedonian formula itself does not tell us how to do this. It does not seek to explain the incarnation but sets up, as it were, channel markers for legitimate christological speculation; any theory of Christ’s person must be one in which the distinctness of both natures is preserved and both meet in one person, one Son, in Christ. It admirably fulfilled the purpose for which it was drawn up; namely, to exclude two possible but unacceptable explanations of the incarnation and to provide a convenient summary of essential facts that must be borne in mind by all those who attempt to penetrate further into the mystery.
Although the apex of christological formulation was reached at Chalcedon, two more councils were yet needed to refine more closely the limits of christological speculation: in 553, the Second Council of Constantinople moderated the Chalcedonian stance against monophysitism by condemning certain Nestorian tendencies; however, in 680 the Third Council of Constantinople condemned both monophysitism and monotheletism. The Council of Chalcedon had alienated a multitude of Greek-speaking Christians sympathetic to Alexandria. Their disquietude with the notion of two complete natures in Christ arose from a quite legitimate concern. How does one have two complete natures without two persons? The Second Council of Constantinople did not answer the question; the council merely anathematized anyone who does not confess that “the ineffable union took place without confusion, neither the Word being changed into the nature of the flesh, nor the flesh transferred into the nature of the Word—for each remains what it was by nature, even when the union by hypostasis has taken place” (The Anathemas of the Second Council of Constantinople).
The question troubling monophysites became even more acute in the controversy over the will of Christ. Monothelites contended that he possessed one will, that of his unique person. But the Third Council of Constantinople held that each nature, to be complete, must have a will of its own. It declared, “We proclaim two natural willings or wills in him and two natural operations . . . not contrary [to each other], God forbid, . . . but his human will following, and not resisting or opposing, but rather subject to his divine and all-powerful will” (The Statement of Faith of the Third Council of Constantinople). But no explanation is given of how one can have two separate wills and operations without two persons. By condemning monotheletism, the church seemed in danger of dividing the person of Christ.
3—Later Christological Controversies
3.1 Lutheran Christology
During the Protestant Reformation the old dispute between Alexandria and Antioch was replayed in the debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians, especially in their interpretation of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Luther himself found the traditional doctrine of two distinct natures united in one person in Christ entirely congenial. But Luther also insisted that Christ’s human nature was filled and permeated by the Godhead. Like the Alexandrian theologians, he compared this union with that of the body and soul or an iron glowing with heat. Luther notes that the Bible “often so interchanges the words that both are attributed to each nature because of the personal union. This they call communicationem idiomatem (communication of the attributes). Thus one may say: The man Christ is God’s eternal Son. . . . On the other hand, this, too, may be said: Christ, God’s Son (that is, the Person who is true God), was conceived and born by the Virgin Mary.” This communication is not a verbal exchange only, however; Luther believed that actual attributes of deity were communicated to Christ’s humanity. This conviction is most clearly evident in his discussion of the ubiquity (omnipresence) of Christ’s body and thus its real presence in the Lord’s Supper. Luther explained it by appeal to the Scholastic notion of the three ways in which a thing may be in place. In the first sense, called localiter or circumscriptive, the place and the body correspond exactly, occupying the same space, as, for example, in the case of the volume displaced by an object submerged in water. The second sense is definitive, wherein a thing occupies space, but illocally, as, for example, in the case of an angel who may be in a house or a nutshell. The third sense is repletive, in which a thing fills all places but is contained by none; this sense belongs to God alone. Now it was Luther’s contention that all three senses are applicable to the body of Christ simultaneously. The first was evident “when He went about bodily on earth, when, according to His size, He occupied and vacated space.” The second manner of presence is that in which his body neither occupies nor vacates space but “penetrates all creatures, wherever He pleases, just as light and heat penetrate and are in air, water, and the like, and also do not occupy space.” In this manner, his body is present in the Lord’s Supper and is masticated by the communicant. Finally, he is present in the third sense in that all creation does not circumscribe or comprehend him, but rather he circumscribes and comprehends it, so that everything is present before him.
Lutheran Christology through its doctrine of the communication of the attributes seems to violate Chalcedon’s prohibition of confusing the two natures of Christ and thus threatens the reality of Christ’s humanity. While Lutheran theologians were zealous to maintain the distinctness of the two natures, it is very difficult to see how a human nature can really share all the attributes of deity without actually being deity. Moreover, it is not explained how such a communication is possible. The illustration of the fire and the iron, wielded with enthusiasm by Lutheran divines, is in the end unhelpful because the fire may communicate to the iron only such properties as are consistent with the iron’s nature, such as heat and light; in the same way, deity may communicate to humanity only those attributes that are consistent with the nature of humanity. But this is merely to restate the very problem of the incarnation: how is it that the infinite and the finite, the absolute and the relative, can be one?
3.2 Reformed Christology
In 1581, the Reformed church published its views on the person of Christ in a doctrinal statement designed to reply to the Lutheran Formula of Concord. In the Reformed statement, the traditional view of the two natures and one person is set forth, the hypostatic union of the natures being declared more intimate than that of the soul and body. But in this union each nature retains its essential properties, even to the extent of there being a twofold mind in Christ, one knowing all things in an eternal intuition, the other possessing limited, discursive knowledge. There is also a twofold will and operation, the human following the divine. Predicates addressed to Christ are true of his undivided person with respect to both natures or to one alone. As for attributes belonging to the divine nature, such as omniscience or omnipresence, Christ did not manifest these properties openly during his state of humiliation (from conception to ascension), but they were hidden. In his state of exaltation, these are openly disclosed and his humanity is perfected with its infirmities being left behind.
Unlike the Lutheran doctrine, such a Christology preserves clearly the humanity of Christ. But the most marked problem of Reformed Christology is that it tends toward Nestorianism. When one speaks of two minds, two wills, and two operations in Christ, how is it that one does not wind up with two persons, a human person subordinate to a divine person? One might also ask what is meant by the “hiddenness” of the divine attributes in Christ. The emptying of the incarnation was not an actual abandonment of the attributes, but an occultatio, a concealment of them, much as clouds obscure the sun. But if Christ actually possessed such attributes in his incarnate state, then how is it that as a man he did not in fact possess them? This problem seems to exacerbate the charge of Nestorianism, for it seems as though we are left again with two individuals, one possessing attributes of deity and the other merely human, bolted together like two pieces of wood.
3.3 Kenotic Christology
During the nineteenth century a radical, new school of Christology emerged: kenotic Christology (from the Greek word kenōsis used in Phil 2:5 to characterize Christ’s incarnation as an “emptying”). Kenoticism can be thought of as an extension of either Lutheran or Reformed Christology: it is on the one hand simply a reversal of the Lutheran doctrine of communicatio idiomatum in which human attributes are now communicated to the divine nature; on the other hand, it is the heightening of the Reformed doctrine of occultatio into a real and positive emptying of the divine nature. We may define kenoticism as that christological view that contends that in the incarnation Christ ceased to possess certain attributes of deity so that he might become truly human. Of course, this view raises several questions concerning the extent of the kenosis, the relationship between the Logos and the man Jesus, and the status of the divine attributes. A. B. Bruce identifies four main schools of kenotic Christology that emerged in answer to these questions, each represented by a prominent exponent: Thomasius, Gess, Ebrard, and Martensen.
Thomasius argued that unless the Son of God truly limited himself, there could be no incarnation; there would only be the divine Logos hovering over the human Jesus. The Son of God must, therefore, enter into human finitude, becoming subject to the limits of space, time, and human development. This is a self-limitation, and the essence of deity is not destroyed nor are the two natures confused. The Son of God becomes a divine-human ego, and he continues to be himself. But he is human as well, for he has a reasonable soul and body; his ego has a human consciousness as well as a divine. He has merely stripped away those attributes not essential to deity—omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. These are only relational attributes of the Creator to the world. Essential attributes, such as absolute truth, holiness, and love, are retained.
Gess conceived of the kenosis as a loss of the eternal self-consciousness on the part of Jesus, only to be gradually regained, and as a cessation of the flow of life from the Father into the Son so that the Son was no longer self-sufficient. The Logos is metamorphosed into a human soul. He did not assume a human soul; rather, he became a human soul. The only difference between a human soul and the Logos is that he became one by kenosis, whereas the other is the result of a creative act. As a result, he was capable of sinning; he had lost his eternal holiness. If asked how God can thus all but extinguish himself, Gess would say simply because he is God—he would not be omnipotent if he did not have power over himself. The theory involves four consequences for the Trinity: (1) Only the Father has aseity and the Son does not experience its “overflow” during kenosis, (2) during kenosis, the Spirit cannot proceed from the Son, (3) during kenosis, the Son no longer upholds the universe, and (4) in glorification a man is taken up into the Trinity.
Ebrard agrees with Gess in giving the Logos the place of the human soul. But this is not a loss of divinity; rather, it is a disguise. The kenosis consisted in an exchange of an eternal mode of being for a temporal. Omniscience, omnipotence, and so forth are not surrendered but are now capable of being expressed only in a way consistent with space and time, that is, toward particular objects. For example, omnipotence remained in an applied form in Christ’s ability to perform miracles. Ebrard accepted the doctrine of two natures, but only as abstract ways of viewing the one divine-human person. The divine person has become subject to the spacetime world, and his attributes are displayed in the powers of his humanity, not contrary to them, in the applied form. Nevertheless, he believed that Christ could actually sin. He also seemed to believe that this kenosis was a decision to renounce permanently the eternal mode of being.
Martensen held to a real but relative kenosis. The preexistent Logos did not cease to be the sustainer and ground of the universe when he limited himself to become a man. In Jesus we see God revealed in humanity in the form of human consciousness. Thus the Logos lives a double life: he at the same time upholds the universe and enters into our finitude. But Martensen never attempts to explain the relationship between these roles of the Logos, nor how such a duality is possible.
Kenoticism represents a distinctively non-Chalcedonian approach to Christology, since it holds that the Logos in becoming incarnate changed in his nature. This fact raises the question as to whether kenoticism does not in fact amount to a denial of the deity of the incarnate Christ. D. M. Baillie demands,
Does Christianity, then, teach that God changed into a Man? . . . That at a certain point of time, God . . . was transformed into a human being for a period of about thirty years? It is hardly necessary to say that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation means nothing like that. . . . It would be grotesque to suggest that the Incarnation has anything in common with the metamorphoses of ancient pagan mythology. . . . The deity and humanity of Christ are not merely successive stages . . . as if He had first been God, then Man, then after the days of His flesh were past, God again, with manhood left behind.
The incarnation is the doctrine that Christ is both God and man simultaneously. But Baillie charges that kenoticists, while affirming that the Son of God keeps his personal identity in becoming the subject of the human attributes he assumes, nevertheless hold that he has divested himself of the distinctively divine attributes, so that in becoming human he ceased to be divine. If Jesus is in every sense human, then the kenotic theologian is in the position of saying that God has turned himself into a human being, which seems absurd.
The question raised by kenotic Christology is the content of the divine nature, that is to say, which properties are essential to deity. Baillie holds that any change in God is a substantial change from deity. But it is exactly at this point that kenoticists question the traditional doctrine, for they argue that many of God’s most prominent attributes are, in fact, merely contingent properties of God and therefore that he may yield up these nonessential properties and yet continue to be God. We have already argued that not every change in God is a substantial change, that God may change in certain accidental ways while remaining unchanged in his essence or nature (chap. 28). The decisive question, then, will be whether so profound a change as kenoticists envision is a merely accidental change compatible with God’s nature.
4—A Proposed Christology
Having reviewed briefly some high points of the history of doctrine with respect to the incarnation, we believe that from these precedents one may formulate a rational doctrine of the person of Christ. Before we present such a Christology, let us remind ourselves that we are attempting to provide a possible model of the incarnation. We cannot presume to dogmatize; but if we can expound a plausible model of the incarnation, then objections to the coherence of that doctrine will have been defeated.
1. We postulate with Chalcedon that in Christ there is one person who exemplifies two distinct and complete natures, one human and one divine. In one sense the Alexandrian theologians were right in postulating a single nature in Christ, in the sense, that is, of an individual essence that serves to designate the unique individual who is Jesus Christ. But when the framers of Chalcedon affirmed two natures in Christ, they were not talking about abstract individual essences, but kind essences or natures that serve to demarcate certain natural kinds of things. For example, according to Aristotle, every human being belongs to the natural kind designated “rational animal.” In affirming that the incarnate Christ had two natures, the church fathers were stating that Christ exemplified all the properties that constitute humanity and all the properties that make up deity. In that sense, he had two natures and so belonged to two natural kinds, man and God. These natures are distinct in that they do not combine to make up a single “theanthropic” essence belonging to Christ, for that would make the incarnation essential to the second person of the Trinity, which we know to be false, since the Logos preexisted as a member of the Trinity in incorporeal form. Only the divine nature belongs essentially to the Logos, and in the incarnation he assumed contingently a human nature as well. Thus Christ’s individual essence, while including some of the properties that serve to constitute humanity (for example, rationality), does not include all of them (for example, animality), for any property that he might lack cannot belong to his individual essence. The Logos possesses his human nature only contingently.
Our first point entails a rejection of any form of kenotic Christology, which suggests that in the incarnation the Logos surrendered various attributes belonging to the divine nature. For if Christ divested himself of any attribute essential to divinity, then he thereby ceased to be God, which is incompatible with the biblical data and therefore unacceptable as a Christian doctrine of the incarnation. On such kenotic views the Logos would be the same person after kenosis as before, but that person would no longer be God, since it is one’s nature, not one’s person, that determines one’s deity. Hence, if the Logos’s nature were changed, his deity would change and he would no longer be divine. Moreover, typical members of natural kinds are plausibly taken to be essentially members of that kind. Thus, if an individual undergoes a substantial change (that is, a change of substance or essence), it ceases to exist as that individual and becomes something else. For example, a man who is cremated and ground to dust has undergone a substantial change and so is no longer a human being. Although Christ is not a typical member of the natural kind “man,” he is a typical member of the kind “deity” and therefore cannot cease to be God without ceasing to exist. (Of course, God cannot cease to exist, since he is necessary and eternal.) Therefore Christ could not have ceased to be God. Should the kenoticist assert that to not grant Christ this prerogative is to limit his omnipotence, we should reply that this is no more a limitation on God’s omnipotence than denying that God can make a stone heavier than he can lift. These are logical absurdities, and to appeal to God’s omnipotence in such instances is to fail to understand that attribute.
Now the kenoticist might avert the above problems by denying that attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and so on are essential to deity and therefore argue that the Logos could have abandoned them without thereby ceasing to be God. Such a Christology, however, entails a concept of God that might strike one as far too thin to be acceptable. We have seen that various theistic arguments imply that a being exists which is necessary in a broadly logical sense, as well as omniscient and wholly good. Moreover, it seems theologically untenable to think that a being could lack such properties and be God. On kenotic theology there is a possible world in which a being exists that is no more powerful, no more intelligent, no less limited spatially, no less logically contingent than an ordinary human being (like Jesus of Nazareth), and yet that being is God and is worthy of worship. That seems incredible.
Some contemporary kenoticists have tried to avert this objection by claiming that God, while lacking the essential properties of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and so on, does have essential properties like being-omniscient-except-when-kenotically-incarnate, which he never surrenders and which are sufficient for deity. This answer, however, seems to be explanatorily vacuous. In answer to the question, How can God remain God if he gives up omniscience? we are told that it is because he retains the essential property of being-omniscient-unless-he-gives-up-omniscience! Imagine a case in which a human being is said to have abandoned all properties incompatible with becoming an ant and yet to have remained a human being. If we objected that rationality is essential to being human and that therefore he had ceased to be human, would it be a satisfactory answer to be told that only rationality-except-when-kenotically-an-ant is essential to being human and that he retains this property? Such an answer merely reasserts the problem. Ontologically speaking, it is not clear that there even are such properties as being-omniscient-except-when-kenotically-incarnate. These contrived properties are not attributes in the sense of capacities or qualities but are really statements masquerading as attributes. They are really assertions like “Christ remains divine even if he temporarily gives up omniscience”—which is precisely the issue under dispute.
Moreover, it is not clear that the problem of the incarnation is solved even by postulating such gerrymandered properties of Christ. For it seems that certain divine attributes cannot be temporarily divested in the way envisioned by kenoticists. For example, it seems incoherent to say that Christ had the essential property being-omnipotent-except-when-kenotically-incarnate, for if, having relinquished omnipotence, he retained the power to get omnipotence back again, then he never in fact ceased to be omnipotent, since omnipotence is a modal property concerning what one can do. But if he lacked the power to get omnipotence back again, then how is it that he was only temporarily not omnipotent? Or consider the divine attributes of necessity, aseity and eternality. It makes no sense to say that these were given up temporarily, for by their very nature if one has such properties, one has them permanently. But then how could Christ die unless these were given up? One seems forced to say that Christ died only in his human nature, while these attributes are preserved in the divine nature—but then why not say the same for the other divine attributes as well? Christ can be omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and so on in his divine nature but not in his human nature—which is to revert to Chalcedonian orthodoxy.
2. We postulate with Apollinarius that the Logos was the rational soul of Jesus of Nazareth. What Apollinarius correctly discerned was that if we are to avoid a duality of persons in Christ, the man Jesus of Nazareth and the divine Logos must share some common constituent that unites their two individual natures. Chalcedon states that there is a single hypostasis that exemplifies the human and divine natures. That hypostasis is identified as the person Christ is. The question is how to make sense of this. If there exists a complete, individual human nature in Christ and a complete, individual divine nature who is the Logos, then how can there not be two persons? Apollinarius proposed that the Logos replaced the human mind of Jesus, so that there was in Christ a single person, the Logos, who was united with a human body, much as the soul is united with a body in an ordinary human being. On Apollinarius’s view, it is easy to see how a single hypostasis can exemplify the properties proper to each nature.
Unfortunately, Apollinarius’s view was radically defective as it stood. For a complete human nature involves more than a hominid body, so that on Apollinarius’s view the incarnation was really a matter of the Logos’s assuming, not humanity, but mere animality. Moreover, Apollinarius’s opponents rightly charged that such a view undercut Christ’s work as well as his person, since Christ did not have a truly human nature, but only an animal nature, and so could not have redeemed humanity.
But are these defects irremediable? Can we appropriate Apollinarius’s insight without falling into his errors? Let us see. Apollinarius may have been misunderstood when his critics charged him with giving Christ a truncated human nature. When Apollinarius argued that the Logos was not only the image of God but also the archetypal man and in this latter sense already possessed human nature in his preexistent form, his opponents like Gregory of Nazianzus understood him to mean that the flesh of Christ was preexistent. Apollinarius may have been more subtle than this; what he may have meant is that the Logos contained perfect human personhood archetypically in his own nature. The result was that in assuming a hominid body the Logos brought to Christ’s animal nature just those properties that would serve to make it a complete human nature. Thus the human nature of Christ was complete precisely in virtue of the union of his flesh with the Logos. As a result of the union Christ did, indeed, possess a complete, individual human nature composed of body and soul; for that nature was made complete by the union of the flesh with the Logos, the archetype of humanity.
Such an interpretation of the incarnation draws strong support from the doctrine of man as created in the image of God (imago Dei). Human beings do not bear God’s image in virtue of their animal bodies, which they have in common with other members of the biosphere. Rather, in being persons they uniquely reflect God’s nature. God himself is personal, and inasmuch as we are persons we resemble him. Thus God already possesses the properties necessary for human personhood even prior to the incarnation, lacking only corporeality. The Logos already possessed in his preincarnate state all the properties necessary for being a human self. In assuming a hominid body, he brought to it all that was necessary for a complete human nature. For this reason, in Christ the one self-conscious subject who is the Logos possessed divine and human natures that were both complete.
This reformulation (or rehabilitation!) of Apollinarius’s insight nullifies the traditional objections lodged against his original formulation of it. For on our view Christ is both fully God and fully man; that is to say, he is all that God is and all that man ought to be. He has two complete natures, human and divine. All he lacks is sin, since his individual human nature, like Adam’s, is uncorrupted by sin. Because Christ has a complete human nature and has thus fully identified with our humanity, his atoning work on our behalf is efficacious. Our proposed Christology thus lies safely within the boundaries of orthodoxy marked out at Chalcedon.
This second point of our Christology illuminates a doctrine implicit in the Chalcedonian formula and that later came to be called enhypostasia. Developed by Leontius of Byzantium (485–543), the doctrine states that Christ’s individual human nature, that body-soul composite that was the man Jesus of Nazareth, did not have its own hypostasis; that is to say, it did not subsist on its own but became hypostatic only in its union with the Logos. Monophysites argued that if Christ had two individual natures, then each would have its own proper hypostasis, thereby destroying the unity of Christ’s person. Leontius agreed with the monophysites that an individual nature without a hypostasis (anhypostasia) is impossible, but he escaped the Nestorian conclusion of two hypostaseis by postulating in Christ a human nature which is enhypostatic, that is, a nature which receives subsistence from another. In the case of Christ, the hypostasis of the divine Logos already exists prior to the incarnation and then comes to possess the human nature as well. Hence, the individual human nature of Christ supervenes on the individual divine nature of the Logos. The two natures of Christ do not possess two separate hypostaseis, but they share one common hypostasis. The hypostasis of the human nature is identical with the divine person. Thus neither of the individual natures is without a hypostasis, nor does each possess a hypostasis peculiar to it, but they have one and the same hypostasis that belongs properly to the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity.
When enhypostasia is combined with our christological proposal, we have an illuminating explanation of how Christ can have a fully human nature and a fully divine nature and yet be one person. For the Logos is both the hypostasis that serves as the subsistent property-bearer for each abstract kind-nature and the person who is the self-conscious ego of both individual natures. The reason Christ’s human nature is enhypostatic is that it is incomplete apart from its union with the Logos. Apart from this insight, the doctrine of enhypostasia remains mysterious and perhaps incoherent. On the present proposal the Logos completes the individual human nature of Christ by furnishing it with a rational soul, which is the Logos himself. The considerable theological advantage to be gained from this is that it aborts the suggestion that the Logos could have assumed just any human nature, so that Ronald Reagan or even J. P. Moreland could have been the Son of God. The individual human nature that is the man Jesus of Nazareth could not have existed apart from its union with the Logos, and were the Logos to be united with the body of, say, J. P. Moreland, the resultant person would not have been J. P. Moreland but someone else who merely looked like him.
The principal difficulty with our christological proposal as described thus far is that it seems to founder on the human limitations evinced by Jesus of Nazareth according to the Gospel accounts. The church has typically dealt with the problem of Christ’s evident limitations by means of the device of reduplicative predication, that is to say, by predicating certain properties of the person of Christ with respect to one nature or the other. Thus, for example, Christ is said to be omniscient with respect to his divine nature but limited in knowledge with respect to his human nature, to have been omnipotent with regard to his divine nature but limited in power with regard to his human nature, and so on. Such a device seems to work well with respect to certain properties like omnipotence and necessity. It is easy to see how Christ could have limited strength and mortality relative to his humanity in virtue of his having an ordinary human body, though he is omnipotent and imperishable in his divine nature. But for other attributes, reduplicative predication, especially on our proposed scheme, does not seem to work so well. How could Christ be omniscient and yet limited in knowledge if there is a single conscious subject in Christ? How could he be impeccable (incapable of sin) with respect to his divine nature and yet peccable in his humanity? Regarding Apollinarianism, A. B. Bruce objects, “There is no human nous, no freedom, no struggle; . . . the so-called temptations and struggles recorded in the Gospels are reduced to a show and a sham, and a cheap virtue results, devoid of all human interest, and scarcely deserving the name.” If one stops with the model as thus far described, then Bruce’s objection will surely prove decisive. But as we shall see, the model can be enhanced in such a way as to turn back this criticism.
3. We postulate that the divine aspects of Jesus’ personality were largely subliminal during his state of humiliation. We suggest that what William James called the “subliminal self ” is the primary locus of the superhuman elements in the consciousness of the incarnate Logos. Thus Jesus possessed a normal human conscious experience. But the human consciousness of Jesus was underlain, as it were, by a divine subconsciousness. This understanding of Christ’s personal experience draws on the insight of depth psychology that there is vastly more to a person than waking consciousness. The whole project of psychoanalysis is based on the conviction that some of our behaviors have deep springs of action of which we are only dimly, if at all, aware. Multiple personality disorders furnish a particularly striking example of the eruption of subliminal facets of a single person’s mind into distinct conscious personalities. In some cases there is even a dominant personality who is aware of all the others and who knows what each of them knows but who remains unknown by them. Hypnotism also furnishes a vivid demonstration of the reality of the subliminal. As Charles Harris explains, a person under hypnosis may be informed of certain facts and then instructed to forget them when he “awakens,” but
the knowledge is truly in his mind, and shows itself in unmistakable ways, especially by causing him to perform . . . certain actions, which, but for the possession of this knowledge, he would not have performed. . . . What is still more extraordinary, a sensitive hypnotic subject may be made both to see and not to see the same object at the same moment. For example, he may be told not to see a lamppost, whereupon he becomes (in the ordinary sense) quite unable to see it. Nevertheless, he does see it, because he avoids it and cannot be induced to precipitate himself against it.
Similarly, in the incarnation—at least during his state of humiliation—the Logos allowed only those facets of his person to be part of Christ’s waking consciousness that were compatible with typical human experience, while the bulk of his knowledge and other cognitive perfections, like an iceberg beneath the water’s surface, lay submerged in his subconscious. On the model we propose, Christ is thus one person, but in that person conscious and subconscious elements are differentiated in a theologically significant way. Unlike Nestorianism our view does not imply that there are two persons, anymore than the conscious aspects of one’s life and the subconscious aspects of one’s life constitute two persons.
The model here proposed implies monotheletism, since the Logos, as the mind of Jesus of Nazareth, has but a single will. The subliminal facets of a person’s personality do not possess a distinct faculty of the will, even though those subconscious aspects of one’s personality may, indeed, powerfully influence what one wills in ways that one does not suspect. This implication of the model is in our view unobjectionable, since dyotheletism, despite its conciliar support, finds no warrant in Scripture. Passages in the Gospels usually used as prooftexts of this doctrine—such as Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, “Yet, not my will but yours be done” (Lk 22:42)—do not contemplate a struggle of Jesus’ human will with his divine will (he is not, after all, talking to himself!), but have reference to the interaction between Jesus’ will (“my will”) and the Father’s will (“yours”). Possessing a typical human consciousness, Jesus had to struggle against fear, weakness, and temptation in order to align his will with that of his heavenly Father. The will of the Logos had in virtue of the incarnation become the will of the man Jesus of Nazareth. This implication of the model is, in our view, one of its advantages, since it is extraordinarily difficult to preserve the unity of Christ’s person once distinct wills are ascribed to the Logos and to the individual human nature of Christ.
Such a model provides a satisfying account of the Jesus we see in the Gospels. In his conscious experience, Jesus grew in knowledge and wisdom, just as a human child does. One does not have the monstrosity of the baby Jesus lying in the manger possessing the full divine consciousness. In his conscious experience, we see Jesus genuinely tempted, even though he is, in fact, impeccable. The enticements of sin were really felt and could not be blown away like smoke; resisting temptation required spiritual discipline and moral resoluteness on Jesus’ part. In his waking consciousness, Jesus is actually ignorant of certain facts, though kept from error and often supernaturally illumined by the divine subliminal. Even though the Logos possesses all knowledge about the world from quantum mechanics to auto mechanics, there is no reason to think that Jesus of Nazareth would have been able to answer questions about such subjects, so low had he stooped in condescending to take on the human condition. Moreover, in his conscious life, Jesus knew the whole gamut of human anxieties and felt physical hurt and fatigue. The model also preserves the integrity and sincerity of Jesus’ prayer life, and it explains why Jesus was capable of being perfected through suffering. He, like us, needed to be dependent on his Father moment by moment in order to live victoriously in a fallen world and to carry out successfully the mission with which he had been charged. The agonies in Gethsemane were no mere show but represented the genuine struggle of the incarnate Logos in his waking consciousness. All the traditional objections against the Logos’s being the mind of Christ melt away before this understanding of the incarnation, for here we have Jesus who is not only divine but truly shares the human condition as well.
Some Christian philosophers, such as Thomas Morris, have postulated an independent conscious life for the incarnate Logos in addition to the conscious life of Jesus of Nazareth, what Morris calls a “two minds” view of the incarnation. He provides a number of intriguing analogies in which asymmetrical accessing relations exist between a subsystem and an encompassing system, such that the overarching system can access information acquired through the subsystem but not vice versa. He gives a psychological analogy of dreams in which the sleeper is himself a person in the dream, and yet the sleeper has an awareness that everything that he is experiencing as reality is in fact merely a dream. Morris proposes that the conscious mind of Jesus of Nazareth be conceived as a subsystem of a wider mind which is the mind of the Logos. Such an understanding of the consciousness of the Logos stands in the tradition of Reformed theologians like Zwingli, who held that the Logos continued to operate outside the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The main difficulty of this view is that it threatens to lapse into Nestorianism, since it is very difficult to see why two self-conscious minds would not constitute two persons.
If the model here proposed makes sense, then it serves to show that the classic doctrine of the incarnation of Christ is coherent and plausible. It also serves religiously to elicit praise to God for his self-emptying act of humiliation in taking on our human condition with all its struggles and limitations for our sakes and for our salvation. The Christian philosopher’s heart rejoices with the words of Charles Wesley:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see!
Hail the incarnate deity!
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus our Emmanuel!
Hark! The herald angels sing,
“Glory to the new-born King!”
Chapter Summary
In response to the biblical data affirming both Christ’s true humanity and true deity, the church fathers came to confess that in Christ there is one person who possesses two natures. They insisted that one must neither confuse the natures nor divide the person of Christ. This traditional doctrine is coherent if we differentiate between kind natures or essences and individual essences and affirm that Christ contingently exemplified two kind natures. Kenotic theology represents an unnecessary and, in the end, unsuccessful alternative to the classical view that Christ retained in his divine nature the traditional attributes of God. A plausible model of the incarnation affirms that the mind of the incarnate Christ was the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. The individual human nature of Christ would be incomplete apart from its possession by the Logos, so that the individual Jesus of Nazareth could not have existed apart from the incarnation. The Logos’s acquisition of a hominid body brings the human nature of Christ to completion, since the Logos already possesses in his preexistent form the properties of personhood. Thus Christ’s human nature is enhypostatic, finding its subsistence in the person of the Logos. Such a Christology implies monotheletism. If we conceive of the superhuman facets of Christ’s person as largely subliminal, we achieve a plausible portrait of the historical Jesus that is faithful to the biblical record.
Checklist of Basic Terms and Concepts
accidental change
Alexandrian Christology
animal soul
anthropology
Antiochene Christology
Apollinarianism
archetypal man
Arianism
body
christological controversies
communication of the attributes
confuse the natures
Council of Chalcedon
divide the person
divine nature
dyophysite Christology
enhypostasia
functional unity
human nature
hypostatic union
image of God
impeccable
incarnation
individual essence
individual human nature
indwelling
kenotic Christology
kind essence
Logos-flesh Christology
Logos-man Christology
Lutheran Christology
monophysite Christology
monophysitism
monotheletism
natural kinds
natures
Nestorianism
one person having two natures
Protestant Reformation
rational soul
Reformed Christology
real presence
reduplicative predication
state of exaltation
state of humiliation
subliminal self
substantial change
theotokos
two natures of Christ
typical member of a natural kind
ubiquity of Christ’s body
union
unity of Christ’s person
without confusion, without change, without division, without separation