A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation

Andrew Ter Ern Loke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317187714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Christianisme

The Incarnation, traditionally understood as the metaphysical union between true divinity and true humanity in the one person of Jesus Christ, is one of the central doctrines for Christians over the centuries. Nevertheless, many scholars have objected that the Scriptural account of the Incarnation is incoherent. Being divine seems to entail being omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, but the New Testament portrays Jesus as having human properties such as being apparently limited in knowledge, power, and presence. It seems logically impossible that any single individual could possess such mutually exclusive sets of properties, and this leads to scepticism concerning the occurrence of the Incarnation in history. A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation aims to provide a critical reflection of various attempts to answer these challenges and to offer a compelling response integrating aspects from analytic philosophy of religion, systematic theology, and historical-critical studies. Loke develops a new Kryptic model of the Incarnation, drawing from the Greek word Krypsis meaning 'hiding', and proposing that in a certain sense Christ's supernatural properties were concealed during the Incarnation.

Chapter 1
‘Veiled in Flesh the Godhead See’? Thinking Critically about the Incarnation

1.1. Problems Concerning the Incarnation

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see

Hail the incarnate Deity

Pleased as man with man to dwell

Jesus, our Emmanuel

Hark! The herald angels sing

‘Glory to the newborn King!’

These verses, taken from a carol by Charles Wesley and set to the glorious music of Felix Mendelssohn, contain some of the most familiar words sung by millions every Christmas. The carol tells the beautiful Nativity story, the story of God who loves humankind so much that he was willing to dwell with them as a human and to reconcile them to himself so that they might live eternally with him. The story concerns the Incarnation of the Son of God, one of the central doctrines of Christianity.¹ The Incarnation is traditionally understood as the union between true divinity and true humanity in the one person of Jesus Christ (O’Collins 2002b, 1–7). However, throughout the centuries many sceptics from various traditions (Jewish, Islamic etc.) have failed to see the possibility of ‘Godhead veiled in flesh’ that Wesley wrote about, for being divine seems to entail being infinite, necessarily existent, eternal, immutable, incorruptible, impassible, without parts, incorporeal, a-spatial, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, sovereign, untemptable, impeccable, immortal and absolutely sacred. On the other hand, being human seems to entail being finite, contingent, temporal, changeable, corruptible, passible, composed of parts, partly or wholly physical, spatially determined, limited in power, knowledge, and presence, subordinate, able to be tempted and to die, involved in activities which humans have in common with animals (e.g. urination, defecation) and, according to the Jewish religious tradition to which Jesus belonged, defiled by blood at birth and by other ceremonially unclean things later in life.² Significantly, the New Testament portrays Jesus as having human properties such as those listed above: being born (Gal. 4:4) and hence contingent; growing in time (Luke 2:40) and hence finite and changeable; corruptible and passible (Heb. 5:7–8); having bodily parts which exemplify physicality (Mark 15:19); apparently limited in power (John 4:3–6), knowledge (Mark 13:32) and presence (i.e. having to travel from place to place – e.g. John 4:3–6); being subordinate to God (Phil. 2:8); able to be tempted (Heb. 4:15) and to die (Mark 15:37). It seems logically impossible that any single individual could possess such mutually exclusive sets of properties as being divine and human.

This book is a critical reflection on the challenges confronting the coherence of the traditional account of the Incarnation. In this introductory chapter, I shall spell out the motivation and methodological assumptions of the project. It should be noted that this chapter is not intended to offer an exhaustive treatment of the assumptions which I adopt, as this is beyond the scope of this monograph. Rather, this chapter will only briefly indicate some reasons why these assumptions are chosen and why they are defensible;³ more detailed justification of these assumptions can be found in the literature cited in the following sections.

1.2. The Motivation for Addressing the Challenge Concerning the Traditional View of the Incarnation

Why address the challenges concerning the coherence of the traditional view of the Incarnation? Why not simply give up the traditional view? After all, throughout the history of Christianity there have been those who deny that Christ was one person who was truly human and truly divine, by affirming that Christ was truly divine but not human (Docetism);⁴ or truly human but not divine (Ebionitism);⁵ or truly human but quasi-divine (Arianism,⁶ some form of Adoptionism);⁷ or quasi-human but truly divine (Apollinarianism);⁸ or quasi-human and quasi-divine/neither human nor divine (i.e. a tertium quid);⁹ or truly divine and truly human but two separate persons (Nestorianism).¹⁰ In recent centuries, non-incarnational Christologies have been proposed by a number of theologians who express interest in the historical Jesus, such as the Liberal Jesus of A.B. Ritschl (1900), the eschatological prophet of Albert Schweitzer (1910), the Hasid (Jewish holy man) of Géza Vermès (1984, 1993, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2008), the Religious Mystic of Marcus Borg (1991, 2006), and the Social Revolutionary of John Dominic Crossan (1991) (A. McGrath 1994; Powell 1999). Non-traditional views of the Incarnation have also been proposed; for example, John Knox understands the Incarnation as ‘the Word became, in a unique and supremely significant way, active and manifest within the life of “man”’ (Knox 1967, 65–7). Some have also argued that the Incarnational claims from the New Testament and such subsequent Christian confessions as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 should be understood as ‘myth’, in the sense of being merely a non-historical, religious truth about ourselves which has been communicated under the form of talk about a divine being coming among us (O’Collins 2002b, 1; Evans 1996, 43–4, 51, 73–4, citing D.F. Strauss and Joseph Campbell among others).

Historical-critical methodologies have often been seen, and indeed have been used, as a weapon against the traditional view. However, in recent years a number of distinguished New Testament scholars (e.g. N.T. Wright 1996, 1998, 2003; Martin Hengel 1995, 2007), philosophers of religion (e.g. Richard Swinburne 1994, 2003; William Lane Craig 2008a), and systematic theologians (e.g. Wolfhart Pannenberg 1968, 1991; Gerald O’Collins 1995) have argued that a historical-critical methodology that does not hold an unwarranted anti-supernaturalistic presupposition yields evidences for the traditional view. Among other things, a number of them have argued that there are historical evidences which indicate that Jesus understood himself as truly divine¹¹ and that he was bodily resurrected, the latter serving as a divine vindication of Jesus’ claims. These arguments imply that there are historical evidences for thinking that Jesus was not merely truly human but also truly divine.

With respect to the terms ‘divine’ and ‘God’, it should be noted that up to the fourth century many theologians made distinctions between being ‘God’ and being ‘true God’, such that there was no clear distinction between the words ‘God’ and creation (a looser sense of ‘God’ might include creatures such as human figures and angels) (Ayres 2004, 4–14). Nevertheless, New Testament scholars of the so-called ‘New Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’ (Hurtado 2003, 11) – which include Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, N.T. Wright and the late Martin Hengel – would argue that the highest Christology of the later New Testament writings (e.g. Gospel of John) and the creedal formulations of the early church fathers in the fourth century, with their explicit affirmations of the pre-existence and the true ontological divinity of Christ, are not so much a development in essence but a development in understanding and explication of what was already essentially there at the beginning of the Christian movement. These scholars are well aware that there are differences between the language, formulation and thought patterns of the later Greek creedal statements and those of the New Testament (Brown 1994, 171). Nevertheless, they have argued that their case is justified on the basis of exegeses of early Christian texts such as 1 Cor 8:6¹² and Phil 2:6–11 as well as other passages indicating the devotional practices offered to Jesus in corporate liturgical gatherings (especially references to ‘calling upon’ Jesus [1 Cor 1:2])¹³ and the relationship between believers and Jesus.¹⁴ As Bauckham (2008a, x) memorably puts it, ‘The earliest Christology was already the highest Christology’. This conclusion implies that the earliest Christians would not have disagreed with pro-Nicene’s ‘highest Christology’, i.e. the Son and the Father are ‘of equal ontological standing’ (Ayres 2004, 236), even though they did not use the same terminology.

While a number of proponents of non-traditional views have argued that the Hebrew biblical authors espoused a functional Christology against an ontological Christology (i.e. arguing that Jesus was only given some divine functions by God the Father but did not have a divine nature), other scholars have argued that the New Testament authors did have an idea of ontology. To give a brief example, commentators have noted that the phrase

in Phil. 2:6 expresses an ontological idea (even though the idea is not exactly the same as the ontological concepts of later patristic discussions). Gordon Fee takes it to be referring to Christ as having that which characterizes the reality of him being God. He explains that

was the right word for the dual usage of characterizing both the reality (his being God) and the metaphor (

, ‘form of a slave’ Phil. 2:7) for humanity. In his earthly existence he took on the ‘essential quality’ of what it meant to be a slave (Fee 2007, 377–8, 383–5). ‘Having that which characterizes’, ‘reality’, ‘being’ and ‘essential quality’ are all expressions of ontology. Likewise, Reginald Fuller argues that, while much of New Testament Christology is functional, it is not just a quirk of the Greek mind but a universal human apperception that action implies prior being, and that ontic reflection about Yahweh is found even in the Old Testament (e.g. in the ‘I AM’ of Exodus and ‘Deutero-Isaiah’) (Fuller 1965, 247–9).

The assessment of the debate concerning whether there are historical evidences for the traditional view of the Incarnation as well as the debate between scholars of the New Religionsgeschichtliche Schule and their critics (e.g. Casey 1991, 1996, 1999; Dunn 1980, 1998, 2003, 2008, 2010; and a number of essays in Capes et al. 2008) is too large and complex to be dealt with here, and I have addressed some aspects of it elsewhere (for the resurrection of Jesus, see Loke 2009b; see also Wright 2003; Swinburne 2003; Habermas and Licona 2004; Craig 2008a; McGrew and McGrew 2009; Licona 2010). Suffice it to note here that the traditional view has not been refuted. In this book, I shall assume that there are defensible grounds – historical or otherwise¹⁵ – for accepting the traditional view of the Incarnation, and I shall focus on the issue of whether a coherent understanding of this view is possible. In this book, the words ‘God’ and ‘divine’ are used in the strict sense, that is, I shall take the word ‘God’ to be synonymous with ‘true God’ and ‘divine’ to be synonymous with ‘true divinity’ unless otherwise indicated.

1.3. The Need for a Coherent Model

How should the problems concerning the coherence of the Incarnation be addressed? One might attempt to rebut the sceptic by arguing that the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ humanity which give rise to those tensions with the divine nature – such as the account in Mark 13:32, which suggest ignorance – are unhistorical. However, since it is arguable that the early Christians did believe that Jesus was divine (see Section 1.2), such details which give rise to tensions with Jesus’ divinity would have been embarrassing for their case, and therefore they are likely authentic. A number of the early church fathers interpret these texts as saying that Jesus was unwilling to reveal his knowledge (Madigan 2007, ch.3–4), but without further justification the exegeses seem unconvincing.

Many theologians would address the problem by saying that Jesus was ignorant qua human but omniscient qua divine. This is the reduplication strategy widely used by medieval school theologians (Adams 2006, ch.5). The problem with this strategy is that it is in itself inadequate, for it does not demonstrate in what sense Jesus was ignorant qua human but omniscient qua divine (did he have a divine mind apart from his ignorant human mind?). Marmodoro and Hill point out that:

An important advance in recent work on the Incarnation has been the recognition that the reduplicative strategy, in itself, operates only at the linguistic level … It is a way of avoiding ascribing explicitly inconsistent properties to Christ. It is not, in itself, a metaphysical strategy. It does not tell us how or why Christ avoids having inconsistent properties, or how this is compatible with his being fully divine and fully human. To do that, the defender of the reduplicative strategy must go beyond mere reduplication and into metaphysics, to show why the use of this language is legitimate. (Marmodoro and Hill 2011, 5–6)

A few scholars have appealed to the notion of relative identity (Van Inwagen 1994),¹⁶ but the problem with this approach is that the notion of relative identity is widely regarded as spurious (Moreland and Craig 2003, 592; Cross 2008a, 458).

More common is the appeal to the notion of divine mystery (e.g. Oden 1989, 172),¹⁷ paradox (e.g. Baillie 1948; Anderson 2007) or the limitation of human reason and understanding. On the last option, Dietrich Bonhoeffer vividly brushes aside issues concerning the coherence of the Incarnation by asserting that Christ is the Anti-Logos whose existence means the end of the human Logos (Bonhoeffer and Robertson 1978, Introduction). As such, it is inappropriate to ask how the Incarnation could be possible; rather, the right question that should be asked is ‘who he is’. The inadequacy with such approaches is that, since the Christian wants to make meaningful statements by affirming, as the Scriptures do, that God’s understanding is unlimited (e.g. Ps. 147:5) and that Jesus apparently denied knowing the day and hour of his second coming (e.g. Mark 13:32), he/she must demonstrate what is meant (or what could possibly be meant) by these statements and to ensure that the explications of these statements do not result in contradictions; it is not enough to appeal to the concepts of mystery, paradox etc. and leave it at that. Note that I am not saying that the Incarnation is not in some sense a mystery; nor am I denying the limitation of human reason – rather, I am saying that appealing to these is not enough in the present context. In relation to this point, Islamic apologists have long complained that Christian sects use terms that carry no meaning when they explain their beliefs concerning the Incarnation (e.g. Thomas 2002, 231).

With respect to Bonhoeffer, it needs to be pointed out that, to affirm that God’s knowledge is unlimited and that Jesus was apparently limited in knowledge, as the Scriptures do, is precisely to give content to the answer to the question ‘who Jesus is’. Thus, to ignore what is meant (or what could possibly be meant) by these statements would be to ignore the right question. Neither is it enough merely to claim that these statements contain ‘implicit meanings’, are ‘partial and approximate’ and ‘analogical’, as James Anderson (2007, 297–306) does in a recent publication defending the notion of the Incarnation as paradox. These statements may indeed be so, but the challenge is to spell out at least some of their contents (i.e. in what sense are they ‘partial and approximate’, and in what respects the analogical terms are similar) without ending up in contradictions. Anderson (2007, 300–302) suggests that the meaningfulness of a particular claim can be assessed by considering the extent to which we can draw both implications and applications from it. But this still does not answer the question ‘what are the contents of the claims’ that lead to these implications and applications. One does not need to spell out the contents fully, but one does need to spell out at least some of them.

The problem with asserting that one can make contradictory statements about Jesus, such as ‘Jesus has complete awareness of everything and complete unawareness of everything simultaneously’, is that the person who makes such contradictory statements is not affirming anything about Jesus. To see this, one could ask the proponent what he is trying to affirm when he makes the statement ‘Jesus has complete awareness of everything and complete unawareness of everything simultaneously’. It turns out that he is not affirming anything about Jesus, for he will not be able to say what it is about Jesus that he is affirming. This does not mean that the statement is gibberish, for (unlike gibberish) the statement is syntactically well formed,¹⁸ and the individual words ‘awareness’, ‘unawareness’ etc. do have meanings of their own (that is why such statements can be conceived of in a p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 ‘Veiled in Flesh the Godhead See’? Thinking Critically about the Incarnation
• 2 Problems Concerning Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence
• 3 The Need for a New Solution to Problems Concerning Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence
• 4 A New Kryptic Christology: The Divine Preconscious Model
• 5 Addressing the Problems Concerning Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence
• 6 Addressing the Difficulties Facing the New Kryptic Christology
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index