Tag: analytic theology

Doctrine

A Paper on Nestorian Christology

Alex Renner

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*This is a paper I recently submitted for an Analytic Theology class I am currently taking, dealing with the “two-minds view” of the incarnation propounded by the philosophers Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne. I hope you enjoy!*

A Double-Minded Christ? An Assessment of the “Two-Minds” View of the Hypostatic Union

            The relation of the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ was the locus around which virtually all the Christian ecumenical councils of the first millennium of the Church rotated. The principal question has always been: how is the Eternal Son of God, the Second Divine Person of the Trinity, related to the human man Jesus – and in such a way as to make coherent the biblical narrative and what we know about the nature of divine being? The Reformed Scholastic theologian Francis Turretin describes one particular error–Nestorianism, named after its chief proponent–thus: “He [Nestorius] [believed]… that Christ was not God, but only a man possessed by God… Thus he made two Christs – one of whom was crucified by the Jews; the other… who was not” (1994, 318). The chief error, then, propounded by Nestorius, was the separation of the natures of Christ in such a way as to make what orthodox Christology sees as the one person of the Eternal Son, taken on flesh, as consisting of two persons: one human, one divine. Against this, the orthodox theologians of Chalcedon expounded a model of the hypostatic union that maintained the unity of the singular person whilst insisting that he exists in two different modes: one divine, one human.

Thomas V. Morris, in his book The Logic of God Incarnate, explicates what he calls the “two minds” understanding of the hypostatic union. Such a view, prima facie, seems to emphasize the distinction between the natures rather than their inseparable unity, and could lead some theologians to the conclusion that it bears a resemblance to Nestorian Christology. In fact, this is precisely what has been levelled against the position from theologians such as Eleonore Stump. Morris himself explicitly denies the charge of heresy, listing off and negating all the relevant ancient heresies that might be associated with his position (1986, 103). The question to be considered is: Does Morris’s “two-minds” view of the Incarnation avoid the heresy of Nestorianism?

            First, I will explain the two-minds view and outline Morris’s conceptual groundwork. Then, I will consider the objections from Stump before offering my conclusion about its “orthodoxy-value” – i.e., if it avoids what the Christian Church has shown constitutes a heretical view of Christ.

Morris’s Two-Minds View

Morris sets the stage for his position by eschewing as contradictory what he calls the “reduplicative strategy” for defending the doctrine. This strategy consists of assigning what he considers opposing attributes to the same subject. The problem he mentions goes like this: “x as A is N and x as B is not N” (1986, 48). The problem, he ends up concluding, is that this strategy assigns N and not N to the same subject, which, whatever way you consider it, involves a contradiction (1986, 49). He then goes on to overcome this defensive strategy by reconceiving what counts as essential to human nature, and by reference to a firm distinction between “common properties” and “kind-essences” (1986, 72). Stump summarizes his eventual conclusion: “Morris argues that there is no reason for Christians to count as essential human properties any properties common to human beings which are incompatible with divine properties” (1989, 220). This then allows orthodox theologians to say that when human properties previously judged to be essential to humanity are shown to be incompatible with divine being, they should be assigned to the category of common properties (1986, 72). The solution? To claim that though Christ was fully human, he was not merely human.

This starting point leads to the need for the construal of the doctrine Morris proposes, what he calls the “two-minds view” of the incarnation. He says, “in the case of God Incarnate, we must recognize something like two distinct ranges of consciousness” (1986, 102). What does this mean? His primary analogy is that of two computer programs: one containing but not contained by the other (1986, 103). The earthly mind of Jesus can be completely open and accessible to the divine mind of the Logos, but the earthly mind of Jesus is only able to make the reverse move when the Logos allows it, and only in a limited capacity (1986, 103). The phrase Morris uses to capture this conceptual mechanism is “asymmetric accessing relation.” The divine and human minds have an asymmetric accessing relation to each other, asymmetric because of the superior and dominant access of the former over the latter. Oliver Crisp aptly describes the relation: “In short, the divine mind contains, but is not contained by, Christ’s human mind” (2009, 158).

            He also appeals to psychology to make the point that it is possible for a singular person to “have different levels or ranges of mentality” (1986, 105). He recognizes that in some cases of multiple personality, there exists an analogous relation to the two-minds view of one dominant overarching personality having full and complete interior access to the subordinate or lesser personality, i.e., as constituted by an asymmetric accessing relation (1986, 106). Such a view, Morris is convinced, helps theologians and philosophers to see that “there seems to be no obstacle in principle to the acceptability of the widespread Christian assumption that it is possible that it is rational to believe Jesus to be God Incarnate” (1986, 204). The two minds view is meant as a philosophical defense of the incarnation and helps us see it as rationally coherent.

Nestorianism, Updated?

            Ascriptions of Nestorianism to Morris’s position come from a variety of directions, only one of which we will deal with here. It is good to note that Morris himself was fully aware of the danger and addressed it (1986, 154-162). We will now consider the charges of Nestorianism labelled against his account from Eleonore Stump, before finally considering if the charge genuinely applies in Morris’s case.

            Stump suggests that Morris’s model necessarily leads to a Nestorian Christology. She writes, “The account Morris gives of the two natures of Christ will seem to some theologians to eviscerate the Chalcedonian doctrine” (1989, 220). What I will now argue, however, is that each of her critiques amounts to a surface level ascription of a bifurcated subject which equally applies to other orthodox teachings on the meaning of the doctrine. Morris says, related to this, that it is no more difficult to deal with the question of two minds in Christ than it is to deal with two natures in Christ (1986, 162). If you have a problem with two minds in Christ, it is likely you also have problems with two natures in Him, too.

            Stump’s critiques of the two-minds model is cutting, to be sure, but none of her critiques amount to a genuine demonstration of a Nestorian Christology. Stump’s questions, “How can there be one person who has two minds? Where there are two minds, won’t there be two persons?” (1989, 221) is surely concerning. Yet, Morris answers such questions roundly. The problem is resolved in his treatment of Aquinas, who demonstrates that not every instantiation of a nature is said to roundly explain the whole reality of which it is a part (1986, 156-157). Morris writes, “Among mere humans, the individuation of two minds at any one time will suffice for the identification of two persons. But this leaves open the possibility that outside that context, there is no such one-one correlation” (1986, 157). The reality of Christ is such an exception; to Morris, when the conjoining of body and soul includes some other mind or reality of which it is part, then those two elements are not enough to individuate a person, per Aquinas’s logic (1986, 157). It is only as within the divine mind – or included in the larger computer program, to use Morris’s metaphor – that the humanity of Jesus – the inferior program – can find its reality. Stump is unimpressed with Morris’s use of Aquinas because the latter relies on “medieval metaphysics about substances” (1989, 221), which she finds unacceptable. A cursory reading of his treatment of Aquinas (1986, 154-158), however, shows that Morris’s utilization of Aquinas does not constitute some break with the metaphysical makeup of the project as a whole. Here Stump appears to commit the genetic fallacy to dismiss the soundness of Morris’s argumentation.

            Stump’s other critique is similar. She asks, “How are the two minds of Christ welded together into one person?” (1989, 221). The same question could be asked of the natures, and the same answer can be given: It is the person that secures the unity of the natures and therefore minds. In Christ there are two natures – with two minds and two wills – existing in a singular person: “For Jesus was the same person as God the Son. Thus, the personal cognitive and causal powers operative in the case of Jesus’ earthly mind were just none other than the cognitive and causal powers of God the Son” (1986, 162). In other words, the human mind of Christ is hypostatically united to the divine mind in a way not shared by other human minds (2009, 158).  The same problem with the ascription of two minds to Christ could equally apply to the ascription of two natures to Christ, something Stump herself realizes though is not convinced by (1989, 221). 

            These questions answered, Morris adequately presents a model of the incarnation that avoids Nestorianism. Correctly understood, Morris’s position may be seen as a fuller elucidation of the thought that the two natures are complete and total considered in themselves, yet really and truly united in the person of Jesus. If the view is taken in the way Morris defines, as positing two analogous modalities in the one person of Christ, then the two-minds view of the hypostatic union is perfectly orthodox. That is, if and only if a mind is not constitutive of the person and the divine Son’s “ownership” of the human mind of Jesus is to be acceptable as a conceptual explanation, then Morris avoids charges of Nestorianism, even if on other counts – like on the charge of Monothelitism – it fails (1990, 146). 

Conclusion

            Morris’s two-minds view of Christ claims that in the person of Jesus there exists two minds, the divine mind of which exists in an asymmetric accessing relation to the human mind. He proposes his view because he finds the traditional Christian strategy of defending the incarnation inadequate, philosophically speaking. His critic, Eleonore Stump, charges him with a Nestorian final picture, which he denies applies to the model he outlines. Stump asks how two minds can exist in one person, and how a singular person can be welded together from two minds. Morris effectively and preemptively provides answers to each question by appeal to Aquinas to show how instantiations of human nature need not constitute personhood in the case of Christ, since though Christ was fully man he was not merely man; and by simple declaration that in the same way two natures exist because of the unity of the person, so do two minds. 

The primary concern over Nestorianism with relation to the two-minds view of Christ has to do with how to understand the relationship between mind and person. His reliance upon medieval metaphysics is beside the point. Morris does an excellent job avoiding a bifurcated Christological subject and securing a model of the incarnation which makes possible the God-Man whom Christians meet in the scriptures and who is put forward by the orthodox Christian tradition. Though Morris’s model may not escape other criticisms – related to his thoughts on the essence of humanity, his assumption that divine and human properties could be incompatible, and his Monothelite descriptions – his work deserves special commendation. A fitting quote from Morris aptly terminates this study: “There is one person with two natures and two ranges of consciousness. He is not the theological equivalent of a centaur, half God and half man. He is fully human, but not merely human. He is also fully divine” (1986, 204). 

Works Cited

Crisp, Oliver. (2009) God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Flannery, Kevin L. (1990) “A Critical Note on Thomas Morris’s The Logic of God Incarnate,” in Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 54(1), pp. 141-149.

Morris, Thomas V. (1986) The Logic of God Incarnate. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Stump, Eleonore. (1989) “Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate,” in Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 6(2), pp. 218-223.

Turretin, Francis. (1994) Institutes of Elenctic Theology: Volume 2, Eleventh Through Seventeenth Topics. Philipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing.

Soli Deo Gloria

book-review

Theology After Wittgenstein by Fergus Kerr

Alex Renner

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The two philosophers who most captured my imagination during my sophomore and junior years of college were Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Heidegger held a sort of demonic allure for me, if I’m honest, captivating me to go nose-to-nose with death unending and bid me keep staring. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, held a certain mystical aura around him that smelt of thick wisdom, his philosophizing yielding constant insights, myself sighing sighs of relief following hard-earned wrestling with his texts. Reading Wittgenstein was a rather different experience than reading Heidegger, whose works gave the reader the sense that they were being further pushed into the nothingness of Dasein.

Wittgenstein produced the most out-going living in me, too, if it can be put like that. His philosophy helped me see the sobriety that comes with submitting to my own intellectual and physical limitations, and in so doing freed me for them. His later philosophy invited me to a level-headed engagement with the language games and forms of life which define reality for me, and helped me see them from the proper perspective; i.e., from within them.

Fergus Kerr has written the definitive work on Wittgenstein’s relationship to the theological task in Theology after Wittgenstein.

I have a distinct memory of walking through a decrepit old used bookstore during a trip I took in college and finding an old book, published in the 70s, geared towards a theological analysis of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. After finishing it, however (it was a rather small book), I couldn’t shake the feeling that its treatment just didn’t do justice to the breadth of Wittgenstein’s significance for theology. That little book was called Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Bearing of His Philosophy Upon Religious Belief. Upon finishing Kerr’s book, I found corroboration for the feeling I had upon putting that old book down.

The Myth of the Wordless (and World-less) Self

Before starting Theology After Wittgenstein, I imagined I would be reading a good deal about Wittgenstein’s influence, and not so much a treatment of his philosophy proper. This expectation was quickly undermined. Theology After Wittgenstein is primarily concerned to introduce the theological student to Wittgenstein’s corpus and major contributions, only secondarily applying such insights of his to the Christian framework. Of course, this feature does not therefore lessen the theological applicability of its insights, but was simply something I did not expect.

The first section attempts a bob and weave maneuver through Wittgenstein’s deconstruction of the “metaphysical myth” of Descartes’s philosophy of mind. In particular, Kerr focuses on how Wittgenstein can be used to help cure the Tradition’s tendency to posit a non-linguistic, un-mediated experience of God. In both ancient and modern forms, Kerr says, the Church has tended to hold out this experience as not only possible but preferable as the form of communion with God containing the most reality. The ancient understanding of bodily existence tended to see human bodies as an obstacle to a true and living faith, as something that must be purged and transcended. How some ancient theologians described the beautific vision hinted at a sort of ontological change that supposedly turns the blessed into beings not quite still human. In the modern world, the experience of the divine comes when the universal religious impulse, which is a decidedly psychological muscle, is tapped into; it is only through this stirring of the religious affections – a language-less activity – that God can be really reached. Here, too, one must transcend one’s boundedness in history so as to get in touch with “the really real,” i.e., the experience of religious ecstasy. What both epochs held can be summed up in the proposition: Who you really are is located somewhere behind or within your physical, world-bound existence.

The irony of the modern understanding of the self is that it looks strikingly similar to how the ancients characterized God (at least when describing his numerous “attributes”). Kerr writes, “The self who is free to survey the world from no point of view within the world often turns out to be the self who is totally impenetrable to anyone else – in this being once again rather like the hidden God of classical theism.”[1] Funny enough, and in line with contemporary theologians’ characterization of the Enlightenment’s effect on man’s self-understanding, Kerr claims that the modern man is just the Christian God without benevolence or love.

Continuing to diagnose, Kerr then says, “In the modern case, it is the natural universe that is to be represented as independently as possible of all human interpretation. In the ancient case, the self wants to lose itself in dispassionate contemplation of the reality that subsists in itself. In both cases, however, the subject is required to transcend human emotions, cultural and historical particularity, and the like, in order to encounter bare, that which is truly important.”[2] This is remarkably insightful.

The Limits of Our Language

In league with this conversation is the related discussion about the centrality of language. Part of Wittgenstein’s allure, especially when it comes to his later writings, is his teaching on the public nature of the Lebensformen, the forms of life, and the linguistic-constitution of humanity’s being-in-the-world (if I may use that term). Kerr writes, “Language is the conversation that is interwoven with the characteristic activities of human life.”[3]

In short: Wittgenstein’s contribution is to point out that it is a falsehood to think of language as the means whereby we pick things out in the world. Language is not the tool that exists between ourselves to communicate what we would otherwise communicate in some immediate way. Rather, language is what allows us to experience things at all. Language is the waters in which we swim; it is our constitution. To quote him directly, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”; meaning, know your place, human. You are not a god; you are bound by language.

Kerr says, “Wittgenstein’s wry… remarks are intended to provoke us into reflecting on the limits of our knowledge, and why we find these limits so chafing and restrictive. Why do we have to, or want to, devalue human ways of knowing in comparison with the unmediated knowledge that a god must presumably have? In questioning the validity of this (often hidden) object of comparison, Wittgenstein invites us to remember ourselves as we really are. Once and for all, that is to say, we need to give up comparing ourselves with ethereal beings that enjoy unmediated communion with one another.”[4] And this is not a bad thing to hear, especially for theologians.

Kerr continues on this point, this time in a theological key, that “a metaphysically generated concept of the human body, derived from the thought of the immateriality and invisibility of the soul, displaces our experience of the whole living man or woman. This picture of the body gets in the way of our conversation with one another… Behavior as such is supposed to lack significance, in such a way that when it does appear significant it has to be because it is the outwardly observable effect of certain internal mental goings-on. The mind retreats from the face, just as the immaterial soul once disappeared behind the body.”[5] In other words, Kerr writes, the idea of the Metaphysical self has kept us alienated from the acceptance of the face-value truth of our own physical, historical, and linguistic limitations. We have been stuck in a metaphysical prison of our own making, one which has disallowed the materiality of our beings to come to the fore. It is in our refusal to accept this that we have become mistaken about who we are, and what are our capabilities.

“What if despising signs for their inert and inorganic materiality is to collude, however unwittingly, in centuries of discrimination against the mundane realities of how human beings live in community with one another?”[6] Absolute. Fire.

Fergus Kerr a Catholic Theologian?

Perhaps my one confusion about the book is really with the author. Fergus Kerr is one of the most prominent Dominican (meaning, Roman Catholic) theologians of the last fifty years. Perhaps this will betray a misunderstanding on my part, but does not the Catholic tradition stand as the arbiter and defender of the very conceptions Kerr uses Wittgenstein to dismantle? I may require a deeper reading of the Catholic Catechism to make this claim with more grounding, but it seems to me that the dualistic metaphysical world Wittgenstein seeks to tear down is precisely the one held up by many Catholic theologians (at least the ones who are committed to the Neoplatonism of some of its ancient thinkers). On the other hand, of course, Catholicism does a much better job of emphasizing the role of the body’s truth in relation to the whole of Christian life than Protestantism does, but Descartes was not a Lutheran. Just a thought.

I highly recommend you purchase and ponder Theology After Wittgenstein.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 18.

[2] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 25-26.

[3] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 30.

[4] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 45.

[5] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 46.

[6] Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 48.

Uncategorized

Barth on Theology

Alex Renner

From Church Dogmatics II/2: here Barth gives a few preliminary remarks before expounding his unique (and revolutionary) take on the Reformed doctrine of Election.

“Theology must begin with Jesus Christ, and not with general principles, however better, or, at any rate, more relevant and illuminating, they may appear to be: as though He were a continuation of the knowledge and Word of God, and not its root and origin, not indeed the very Word of God itself. Theology must also end with Him, and not with supposedly self-evident general conclusions from what is particularly enclosed and disclosed in Him: as though the fruits could be shaken from this tree; as though in the things of God there were anything general which we could know and designate in addition to and even independently of this particular. The obscurities and ambiguities of our way were illuminated in the measure that we held fast to that name and in the measure that we let Him be the first and the last, according to the testimony of Holy Scripture. Against all the imaginations and errors in which we seem to be so hopelessly entangled when we try to speak of God, God will indeed maintain Himself if we will only allow the name of Jesus Christ to be maintained in our thinking as the beginning and the end of all our thoughts…”[1]

If Christological and Trinitarian Theology do not function as the central paradigms through which all other Christian doctrines are seen and interpreted, Barth says, the Christian theological project is doomed from the start. Since, for Barth, Jesus Christ is the unique and perfect and fully-revealing event of God’s-revealing-of-Self, to speak and presuppose (as the rest of the Western theological tradition does) that there can be true, substantial, or good things said about God apart from what is revealed in Jesus Christ – like what is propounded in so called “natural revelation” – is to take the wheels off the theological vehicle at the very beginning of the race. While Barth definitely aligns himself more with the Eastern Christian spirit of theologizing in this regard, his relegation of God’s-revealing exclusively to the Logos of God (Jesus Christ) even further separates him from the wider Christian tradition. Nevertheless, Barth is correct (albeit with a few caveats as to the locus of where Christ is to be found and subsequently interpreted).

The way Barth distinguishes himself from most all other theological methodologies is by refusing to subject his theological reflection to the “general principles” of philosophy and the analytic tradition’s conceptual structures, generally. Theologians would do well to see that the general direction of theological reflection today – a decidedly “post-metaphysical” direction – is not (surprise!) the spawn of Satan, but in fact should be seen as the heart of the task of the first-millennium-Church’s enterprise. Post-metaphysical theology, though it is admittedly being interpreted and applied in harmful and unbiblical ways, presents a better and more promising direction for the theologians who would uphold the absolute validity and infallibility of the Scriptures (all of which speak of Jesus Christ). Karl Barth points us towards where theology should be heading all the time: Christ, Christ, Christ! Any conceptual or philosophical shackles that would keep Christ caged should be done away with, destroyed, and left to the ashes of history.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 4-11.