4 - Psychologizing the person: Christ as God-man, psychologically construed

Summary

No clear meaning?

A God-man can't have explanatory value without being logically or metaphysically possible. Embracing Chalcedon – the claim that in Christ there is one person but two (Divine and human) natures – medieval theologians recognized that explanations would be needed; “faith seeking understanding” shouldered the task of philosophical articulation. Already Boethius, in his theological treatises, draws on Aristotelian metaphysics to define “person” as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” Although in Cur Deus Homo Anselm recognized Incarnation to be one of the most difficult mysteries, he struggled through succeeding drafts of his Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi to offer an intelligible account that gets it (at least superficially) right. In the twelfth century, Peter Lombard took on the issue in Book III of his Sentences. Following Lombard's syllabus, the school theology of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries raised the standard of debate to a high level of philosophical sophistication, and spawned not one, but a whole family of attempts to modify Aristotelian metaphysics to accommodate the datum of a God-man. Thus, it is prima facie surprising to find 1970s Myth-of-God-Incarnate authors – most notably, John Hick, Maurice Wiles, and Don Cupitt – rendering the verdict that Christian theological tradition has never assigned the Chalcedonian definition any clear meaning.

Yet this declaration does not come out of nowhere. The way to it was paved by the previous century of British Christological thinking.