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Could God Become Man?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

Richard Swinburne
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The central doctrine of Christianity is that God intervened in human history in the person of Jesus Christ in a unique way; and that quickly became understood as the doctrine that in Jesus Christ God became man. In AD 451 the Council of Chalcedon formulated that doctrine in a precise way utilizing the current philosophical terminology, which provided a standard for the orthodoxy of subsequent thought on this issue. It affirmed its belief in ‘our Lord Jesus Christ, … truly God and truly man, … in two natures … the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person’. One individual, one thing that is; and being a rational individual, one person. An individual's nature are those general properties which make it the sort of individual it is. The nature of my desk is to be a solid material object of a certain shape; the nature of the oak tree in the wood is to take in water and light, and to grow into a characteristic shape with characteristic leaves and give off oxygen. Chalcedon affirmed that the one individual Jesus Christ had a divine nature, was God that is; and it assumed that the divine nature was an essential nature.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 25 , March 1989 , pp. 53 - 70
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1989

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References

1 Translated in Bettenson, H., Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd edn, (Oxford University Press, 1967), 51.Google Scholar

2 For discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, see my ‘Could There Be More Than One God?’ Faith and Philosophy 5 (1988), 225–241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 I have spelled out my account of the divine properties, the sense in which they belong necessarily to the individual who is God, and how his having them necessarily would make God supremely worthy of worship in The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).Google Scholar I have given my grounds for believing that the God best evidenced by argument has the divine properties necessarily in The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)Google Scholar, Ch. 5. If it be allowed that the individual who is God is not so necessarily then there would seem to be little problem in God becoming man; the individual who is God could temporarily abandon his divine properties and acquire human properties instead. Something akin to this was involved in the ‘kenotic’ Christology developed in the nineteeth century. For a modern exposition by a philosopher of a semi-kenotic view see Davis, S. T., Logic and the Nature of God (Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983), Ch. 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See my The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar, part 2. (Or my contribution to the Shoemaker, S. and Swinburne, R., Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).Google Scholar

5 On the five kinds of mental event, see The Evolution of the Soul, Part 1.

6 Op.cit., Part3.

7 This is the claim made in Morris, Thomas V., Understanding Identity Statements (Aberdeen University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, Ch. 9; and developed in his The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, especially Chs. 2 and 3. Morris argues (The Logic of God Incarnate, ch. 2) that, although humanity is a natural kind and so has an underlying ‘essence’, it does not follow that every individual which is human is so essentially; an individual who is human may belong simultaneously to another natural kind, and then lose its humanity while continuing to exist as a member of that kind. Morris thus understands ‘essence’ in a looser sense than I have understood ‘essential nature’. All that follows, on Morris's understanding of ‘essence’, from an individual being human, is that its underlying human essence is what explains the human properties and powers which it possesses. I shall use ‘essence’ in Morris' sense, while using ‘essential nature’ in my sense in which an individual cannot lose its essential nature and yet continue to exist. Humanity, Chalcedon assumed and I believed was right to assume, is not an essential nature. A human could cease to be human and be transformed into a crocodile instead, and yet be the same individual in virtue of the fact that the former it is who suffers the crocodile's pains. On this see The Coherence of Theism, Ch. 13.

8 For this doctrine, see Putnam, Hilary, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ in his Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See The Evolution of the Soul, Ch. 10 and its Appendix.

10 On the separability of sensation and belief-acquisition as component parts of perception, see The Evolution of the Soul, Ch. 2.

11 ‘We know a number of things successively … but God sees everything at once’—St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.14.7. See also St Augustine, De Trinitate, 15.14.

12 Chalcedon declared that Christ had a ‘reasonable soul and body’; and by the ‘reasonable soul’ it seems to have meant an acquired ‘human soul’. But the Council could not have meant by this that there were in Christ both a divine and a human soul in my sense of ‘soul’. For that would have been to say that Christ was two individuals, a doctrine to which Chalcedon was greatly opposed. Rather in the affirmation that Christ had a ‘reasonable soul’, ‘soul’ is to be understood in a more Aristotelian sense of ‘soul’. God in Christ acquired a human way of thinking and acting, as well as his divine way.

13 See St Augustine, De Trinitate, 1.23. On this see also St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a, 9–12.

14 See The Evolution of the Soul, 23.

15 Brown, David, The Divine Trinity (London: Duckworth, 1985), 253f.Google Scholar, makes sense of Christ's suffering in terms of the Chalcedonian model by his having ‘such a total perspective on pain and its ultimate meaning’ that it has no power over him. He thinks that in a sense this makes Christ ‘impassible’.

16 For such an account of Christ's temptations, see also Moule, C. F. D., ‘The Manhood of Jesus in the New Testament’, in Sykes, S. W. and Clayton, J. P. (eds), Christ, Faith, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1972), 105f.Google Scholar

17 Antirheticus, 32. Later writers, thinking of the ‘will’ not as Gregory thought of it in this discussion, as an inclination to act, but as an actual initiation of action, taught that the human ‘will’ of Christ, i.e. what he willed through his body in virtue of his human sources of knowledge, feeling, etc., would inevitably conform to his divine will, what he willed to do other than in this way. That was because his human ignorance would be ‘topped up’ by divine knowledge and human desire was kept in place by divine dedication to the good. For there was but one who willed. Such was the teaching of Maximus the Confessor enshrined in the doctrinal decrees of the Third Council of Constantinople against monothelitism. See Tixeront, J., History of Dogmas, Vol. III (B. Herder Book Co., 2nd edn, 1926), 180–184.Google Scholar

18 Summa Theologiae, 3a.14 and 15.

19 Epistola 101.7 (PG, 37, 181).

20 On the ignorance of Christ, see for example Tixeront, op. cit., Vol. II, 287f.

21 A model of Christ's knowledge on these lines is developed in David Brown, op. cit., 260–267. The Freudian model of the divided mind has been applied to Christology quite a bit in this century, beginning with Sanday, W., Christologies Ancient and Modern (Oxford University Press, 1910).Google Scholar

22 For fuller elucidation and justification of the thesis of these last two sentences, see my Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), Ch. 2.Google Scholar

23 For analysis of different theories of the Atonement, see Responsibility and Atonement, especially Ch. 10.

24 Not merely would Christ have been incapable of actual sin (understood as wrong-doing) on the above account, but he could not have inherited any original sin. Original sin includes minimally a proneness to sin, but has also been thought of by many as including also original guilt, guilt for the sin of Adam. Christ had on the account in the text no proneness to sin. And even if the guilt of Adam is in any way inherited by his descendants, it is a guilt in respect of an action wronging God; and so, even if Christ is in a way his descendant, it could not have been transmitted to him—given that no one can wrong himself (on original sin, see Responsibility and Atonement, Ch. 9).

25 This doctrine is sometimes taken, not in the way in which I am taking it in the text, but simply as the doctrine that the human and divine attributes are predicable of the same individual, Christ. That of course I am in no way seeking to deny.

26 St John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa, 3.19, translated by Salmond, S. D. F., Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (Oxford: James Parker and Co., 1889), Vol. IX.Google Scholar The context makes fairly clear that St John is talking about the Incarnate Christ on Earth, not the post-Ascension Christ. The communicatio idiomatum goes against some earlier patristic stress, especially in the Antiochene tradition, on the separateness of the two natures. On John Damascene see Tixeront, op. cit., Vol. III, 483f.