The Two Natures of Christ

I wrote a paper my second semester at Multnomah (in one of my favorite classes yet--Advanced Writing with Professor Domani Pothen) regarding the philosophical and theological history of the doctrine of the two natures. The paper was long (too long) and as such it will not be reproduced here. But I thought I would share some of my conclusions regarding the direction of theological work on the concept of the two natures of Christ. In lieu of writing an actual post, I thought I would do it in the style of "thesis," to attempt to ease the burden of writing coherently in paragraphs (you'll notice that some of these line up with the theses on Predestination and Free will). These are going to be short as I just feel like posting something, but not a long post. So ask questions and critique away!

1.) God is Trinity. "God" describes the relationships of the Three Persons, who constitute the primal reality that is God. "To say that the Son [and mutatis mutandis the Spirit] belongs to God's substance implies that substance almost by definition has a relational character." (Zizioulas, Being as Communion p.84) To speak of God's "attributes," like Infinity, or Omnipotence, are to characterize the life that is the perichoresis amongst the Three Persons. "God is not by definition soliary, but to the contrary, relational and communal--the oneness of the Godhead is not threatened but constituted by the interrelationships and reciprocity of the three in their plurality. Each person is distinctive and unique, yet they have all things in common and find their unity through dynamic mutuality and interaction." (Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, p.199). The Father would not be Father without the Son, the Son would not be Himself without the Father, and both are themselves only in relation to their Spirit.

2.) God is Truly Infinite and as such "becoming man," cannot mean that God "empties" Himself of Divinity, that the Son must become "not-God" to become man, nor that man must give way to God, or that man must become the "hyperanthropos" or beyond-man of Monophyitism so as to touch God. "The infinite that is merely a negation of the finite is not yet truly seen as the Infinite...for it is defined by delimitation from something else, i.e. the finite. Viewed in this way the Infinite is a something in distinction from something else, and it is thus finite. The infinite is truly infinite only when it transcends its own antithesis to the finite...we have to think of the Infinite as negation, as the opposite of the finite, but also that it comprehends this antithesis to itself." (Pannenberg ST 1.397-400). God's Infinity and man's finiteness are not distant from one another by a quantitative spectrum, so that God's Infinity is merely an infinite aggregate of power. There is no such spectrum where one side must give way for the other. Infinity constitutes and places the finite.

3.) Combining 1 and 2, God's Infinity is nothing other than a description of the relationships between the Trinitarian persons. "What Father, Son, and Spirit have from each other to be three identities of God, and what characterizes their mutual action as God, is limitlessness. What happens among them accepts no boundaries; nothing can hinder what they enact." (Robert Jenson ST 1.216)

4.) Following the logic of 1, that Jesus the man is the Trinitarian Son, means that He is the identity whereby the Father affirms Himself as Father in His Spirit. This means, conversely, that Jesus is the Son precisely in His relation to the Father through the Spirit, and is decidedly NOT the Son of God due to His relationship to the Logos. As Pannenberg writes, "One cannot properly understand Jesus' Sonship without taking his relation to God the Father as the point of departure. The question of the unity of the man Jesus with the eternal Son of God cannot be put and answered directly. That is the common mistake of all theories that attempt to concieve the unity of God and man in Jesus on the basis of the concept of the incarnation of the Logos. This concept is certainly an appropriate and indispensable expression for that unity, but it gives no help in understanding the inner structure and how it came to be. The unity of the man Jesus with the eternal Son of God results rather only by the way of a detour...It is a detour by way of Jesus' relation to the 'Father,' i.e. to the God of Israel whom he called Father. Only the personal community of Jesus with the Father shows that he is himself identical with the Son of this Father." (Jesus: God and Man p.335) And later Pannenberg observes "In dedication to the Father, Jesus lives his personality as Son. If this statement is correct, Jesus' divinity is not a second 'substance' in the man Jesus in addition to his humanity. Then precisely as this man, Jesus is the Son of God and thus Himself God. Consequently he is not to be thought of as a synthesis of the divine and human...Precisely in his particular humanity Jesus is the Son of God (342). All of this might simply be summarized thus: "What is surely required is to recognize that 'humanity' and...'deity' must be communal concepts. That Christ has the divine nature means that he is one of the three whose mutuality is the divine life, who live the history that God is. That Christ has human nature means that he is one of the many whose mutuality is human life, who live the history that humanity is" (Jenson ST 1.138).

5.) Following all of the above, we might conclude, then, that asking e.g. "was the human Jesus omniscient?" as understanding the nature of the question wrong. The basic spectrum presupposed by the question is problematic. If one answers "no," which definitely seems to be the case in several instances (e.g. the infamous Mk. 13:32 and parallels) then it seems to question the full unity of God and man in Jesus, and hence question Jesus' divinity. If we answer "yes," then the individuality, the particularity, and the time boundaries of being human appear to be comprimised for Jesus to be a "real" human. But what is "omniscience," or "omnipotence," or "omnipresence?" They are, like "infinity" (and indeed, they are just permutations of the concept of infinity, in relation to knowledge, power, and space) descriptions of the relations between the three persons. The Father is not self-omnipotent and is not the "autobasileus" or "king himself" in isolation from the other two Personages, but rather through those relationships. Here then we can deny omnipresence to Jesus without thereby denying the divine "attribute." Jesus quae Jesus might not be "omnipresent," in the sense of himself and his body distending to all reaches and regions of space (as some Lutheran proponents of the communicatio idiomatum take it to be) or even being present in a repletive fulfilling way, but as an identity of the Trinitarian Godhead, who "each" are what they are for and from the others: Jesus participates in the presence of the Spirit and the Rule of the Father. Or, stated the opposite way, that the Son is the man Jesus is a supreme expression of the omnipotence of God to actualize Himself as wholly Himself in relation to the other. The "truly infinite" God that does not just stand opposed to the finite, but takes it up into itself, is not merely an abstract or speculative solution; God is present with the creature in its own place and under the conditions of its existence. In the self-distinction of the Son from the Father (if I am to wax Pannenbergian for a moment) the Son takes the place of the creature and becomes man so as to overcome the ssertion of the creatures independence in the place of the creature itself. The Spirit liberates the Son for the Father, and just so raises Jesus from the dead and allows Him to fulfill His mission. "Eternity is the inexhaustability of the Son's life" (Jenson ST 2.219). I would go more into the metaphysics of this, but Halden recently posted an excellent topic on the metaphysics of God's self-determination that did a lot of ground work that I have little need to repeat here (though I am still leery of some of MacDonald's ideas, but that is for another time).