The Confusing Incarnation

[Kishkumen]

You might have a clear grasp of a famously confusing point of Greek grammar concerning whether or not the Word in John "was God" or only "was a god" or "was divine": as you may well know well, the original line is "En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos" with the definite article before the theon but not before the theos. The standard line is that context or construction or something somehow makes the reading "God" definite in this case for the theos, and "a god" wrong, but I've never understood why. If it's not really that unambiguous then this might represent a transitional text with Jesus not yet quite considered God but on his way. Otherwise, this would seem to be the start of the Christian doctrine, with the declaration that God is not so simple after all because there is this Word that can both "be with God" and "be God".

Yes, here I would say that the word is “a god,” although the point is made that by the end of the text Jesus is declared to be God. I think it is fair to say that, having been raised in heretical Christianity, I find Arianism and other non Triune theologies to be more sensible, appealing, and attractive than the Nicene Creed and subsequent creeds, which look like post hoc shoehorning of Christianity into a Neoplatonic or Hermetic mold that doesn’t really work.

[Physics Guy]

While historically of course Jesus's movement came before any Christian theology, within the logic of Christian theology the Trinity did not start with Jesus, but it was the other way round: the Word existed before all worlds and at one point decided to incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. The formula about the being of God being identical with God's attributes seems opaque to me; I can only understand it as saying that God is unique, such that there is no way of having God's attributes without actually being God. But this doesn't really seem to me to say much about how simple or complex God is.

Anyway I'm not really sure how important divine simplicity is to Christian theology. The Trinity is definitely important to it, so insofar as simplicity is inconsistent with Trinity, Christian theology will deny simplicity.

I think there's a practical reason why such a difficult doctrine as the Trinity turned out to be popular. It kind of absorbs three basic kinds of God that people have wanted, and claims to offer them all, perhaps in not too different a way from the way that ancient pagan religions absorbed neighbouring deities into their pantheons or even merged then with other gods.

People want a god who creates the universe and generally governs things too big for humans to manage, like the seasons or weather or the course of history. People have also wanted gods who are about ecstatic experiences and strong emotions. And people have wanted to attribute something like divinity to wisdom and ethical principles.

I'm not saying that's an exhaustive set or that the three categories are perfectly non-overlapping, but it does seem to me that these are distinct ecological niches for deities in the human psyche. A deity who specialises in one of these roles is going to have a hard time carrying the others. The big god who does all the things that are much bigger than humans is just going to seem weird and awkward taking an interest in daily household problems. A god of visions and passions is going to have a hard time speaking in the register of moral principles.

So three gods in a mini-pantheon could nicely cover all those bases at once. But having to have multiple gods is also a defect because then each of your gods is going to be a lesser god than a monotheist's One God. That's too bad. But then boom: Christianity was first to market with the insight that all you have to do to make a pantheon monotheistic is just assert that they're One. Nobody can prove you're wrong about that, because nobody knows what it even means for a God to be One. So then you've really got everything covered. As a theological product it's a tough bundle to beat.

Anyway, once you've got a logos in your unified pantheon, you've got a divine figure who by the definition of their role is bound to resemble a human mind. It's really not that big a step to imagine this divine Word figure, who by definition is this wise teacher who could tell you a bunch of awesome ideas, actually sitting there in a human body and telling you things. You can still insist that this incarnate Word is One with the whole of the unified Godhead, because still nobody can really say what that means.

I'm not saying it's all logically necessary or anything. I just think that it works, for a religion, in the way that an idea of plot and setting and characters can work for a film or a novel. And I'm pretty sure that the attempt to rationalise it all in Christian theology, such as it was and is, is really an attempt at induction from Christian religious practice and experience, rather than a prior set of principles from which Christian religious practice is logically deduced.

[DrStakhanovite]

I still can't get my head around the Hypostatic Union, where Jesus Christ is both 100% Divine and 100% Human. That gives me more of a pause than the metaphysics of a single substance with three separate personalities that are co-eternal and co-equal.

[Physics Guy]

I can't say how my own take is related to any historical theologies, if it is at all, but for what it's worth my thought is that the question, "Are you God?" is not a "What are you?" but a "Who are you?"

I can maybe add that it seems to be common in Christian theology to resolve questions by settling on formulas, in kind of the way that a corporation may settle on a mission statement. The mission statement has to have a specific and concrete enough meaning that it can guide your decisions, such that you can choose Plan A over Plan B because it will be more likely to achieve your mission. It doesn't have to be any more specific than that, though, and it usually isn't.

Sometimes the formulas that resolved theological issues were only indirectly related to the issues themselves. The classic example that springs to mind is the decision that Mary can indeed be called theotokos, the Mother of God. It wasn't actually about Mary at all, but was a way of expressing the sense in which Jesus was God. He was namely God enough that it made sense to call his mother the mother of God, rather than only acknowledging her as the mother of God's physical body or something like that. So the title for Mary was really a kind of test case for Christology.

In the case of the Hypostatic Union I've always had the impression that "hypostasis" was a deliberately vaguely defined term, a placeholder noun in the formula, and not really any kind of explanation for how someone could be both God and human. The formula worked, well enough at least for people to give up looking for anything better.

[huckelberry]

I still can't get my head around the Hypostatic Union, where Jesus Christ is both 100% Divine and 100% Human. That gives me more of a pause than the metaphysics of a single substance with three separate personalities that are co-eternal and co-equal.

DrStakhanovite, I think it is possible that introducing percentages may confuse the matter.

the original council statement:
"We all teach harmoniously [that he is] the same perfect in godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a reasonable soul and body; homoousios with the Father in godhead, and the same homoousios with us in manhood ... acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.[4]"
(copy from Wikipedia)
I think the question of what percent of the whole is human is not considered here at all.
Of course this may not be the matter of your concern at all.

[Kishkumen]

While historically of course Jesus's movement came before any Christian theology, within the logic of Christian theology the Trinity did not start with Jesus, but it was the other way round: the Word existed before all worlds and at one point decided to incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. The formula about the being of God being identical with God's attributes seems opaque to me; I can only understand it as saying that God is unique, such that there is no way of having God's attributes without actually being God. But this doesn't really seem to me to say much about how simple or complex God is.

Yeah, sure! Very true. If you buy into the theology, then it underlies everything that is. I am speaking from a historical perspective, of course, and as one who does not assume that the theology is true but needs to be persuaded of its truth. And, I am not persuaded.

Anyway I'm not really sure how important divine simplicity is to Christian theology. The Trinity is definitely important to it, so insofar as simplicity is inconsistent with Trinity, Christian theology will deny simplicity.

Yes! And I think there are abstract ways of thinking about the Trinity that are interesting and appealing. It is when we approach the specificity of the historical Jesus that I start scratching my head. The general idea of incarnation as God's involvement in the physical world is about as much as I can handle. The idea that this specific person named Jesus was the ONLY incarnated Word of God is just too much for me.

I think there's a practical reason why such a difficult doctrine as the Trinity turned out to be popular. It kind of absorbs three basic kinds of God that people have wanted, and claims to offer them all, perhaps in not too different a way from the way that ancient pagan religions absorbed neighbouring deities into their pantheons or even merged then with other gods.

People want a god who creates the universe and generally governs things too big for humans to manage, like the seasons or weather or the course of history. People have also wanted gods who are about ecstatic experiences and strong emotions. And people have wanted to attribute something like divinity to wisdom and ethical principles.

I'm not saying that's an exhaustive set or that the three categories are perfectly non-overlapping, but it does seem to me that these are distinct ecological niches for deities in the human psyche. A deity who specialises in one of these roles is going to have a hard time carrying the others. The big god who does all the things that are much bigger than humans is just going to seem weird and awkward taking an interest in daily household problems. A god of visions and passions is going to have a hard time speaking in the register of moral principles.

So three gods in a mini-pantheon could nicely cover all those bases at once. But having to have multiple gods is also a defect because then each of your gods is going to be a lesser god than a monotheist's One God. That's too bad. But then boom: Christianity was first to market with the insight that all you have to do to make a pantheon monotheistic is just assert that they're One. Nobody can prove you're wrong about that, because nobody knows what it even means for a God to be One. So then you've really got everything covered. As a theological product it's a tough bundle to beat.

Anyway, once you've got a logos in your unified pantheon, you've got a divine figure who by the definition of their role is bound to resemble a human mind. It's really not that big a step to imagine this divine Word figure, who by definition is this wise teacher who could tell you a bunch of awesome ideas, actually sitting there in a human body and telling you things. You can still insist that this incarnate Word is One with the whole of the unified Godhead, because still nobody can really say what that means.

I'm not saying it's all logically necessary or anything. I just think that it works, for a religion, in the way that an idea of plot and setting and characters can work for a film or a novel. And I'm pretty sure that the attempt to rationalise it all in Christian theology, such as it was and is, is really an attempt at induction from Christian religious practice and experience, rather than a prior set of principles from which Christian religious practice is logically deduced.

I am totally with you here. At the end of the day, it either appeals to you or it does not. Everything you say above makes perfect sense, and I even learned a thing or two from it. As a heuristic system, we want religion to do certain things for us, but no religion will be ironclad perfect in every way. These days people seem to be going eclectic, increasingly, and so they are abandoning the more restrictive playgrounds of the major churches, mosques, and synagogues.

[Kishkumen]

I still can't get my head around the Hypostatic Union, where Jesus Christ is both 100% Divine and 100% Human. That gives me more of a pause than the metaphysics of a single substance with three separate personalities that are co-eternal and co-equal.

Yes! I think of that as the further problem, but that is mostly because I know very little and am thinking through them as they are encountered.

[Kishkumen]

DrStakhanovite, I think it is possible that introducing percentages may confuse the matter.

the original council statement:
"We all teach harmoniously [that he is] the same perfect in godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a reasonable soul and body; homoousios with the Father in godhead, and the same homoousios with us in manhood ... acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.[4]"
(copy from Wikipedia)
I think the question of what percent of the whole is human is not considered here at all.
Of course this may not be the matter of your concern at all.

Very interesting, huckleberry! I think Stak is reworking the language of "fully divine" and "fully human," but you are right that expressing it in percentages really does change how one thinks of it and may do violence to the original expression.

[Kishkumen]

I can't say how my own take is related to any historical theologies, if it is at all, but for what it's worth my thought is that the question, "Are you God?" is not a "What are you?" but a "Who are you?"

I can maybe add that it seems to be common in Christian theology to resolve questions by settling on formulas, in kind of the way that a corporation may settle on a mission statement. The mission statement has to have a specific and concrete enough meaning that it can guide your decisions, such that you can choose Plan A over Plan B because it will be more likely to achieve your mission. It doesn't have to be any more specific than that, though, and it usually isn't.

Sometimes the formulas that resolved theological issues were only indirectly related to the issues themselves. The classic example that springs to mind is the decision that Mary can indeed be called theotokos, the Mother of God. It wasn't actually about Mary at all, but was a way of expressing the sense in which Jesus was God. He was namely God enough that it made sense to call his mother the mother of God, rather than only acknowledging her as the mother of God's physical body or something like that. So the title for Mary was really a kind of test case for Christology.

In the case of the Hypostatic Union I've always had the impression that "hypostasis" was a deliberately vaguely defined term, a placeholder noun in the formula, and not really any kind of explanation for how someone could be both God and human. The formula worked, well enough at least for people to give up looking for anything better.

Thank you for these insights. I like the idea of placeholders. What gets me though is the idea that such formulas and placeholders could be the basis upon which people shed blood to enforce a particular point of view. The less certainty there is on a subject that is too big for the human mind in the first place, the more likely people are to get anxious to the point of striking out against others who make them uncomfortable over it.

[Physics Guy]

It's a problem if the formulas become battle cries, all right. Potentially they can also be peacemakers, though, if they offer something on which everyone can agree—and thereby agree to bury any unresolved differences under the remaining ambiguity, which all agree to accept.