Re: a question for monists

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Bill Dozier wrote:

> How does the Incarnation fit with the monist position?

  The Incarnation is a central mystery of the faith, with no easy
explanation under ANY view of what it means to be a human being. I don't
think dualism does any better than monism here.
  Suppose, for example, one imagined something like this: A normal human
being is a material human body with an integrated nonmaterial human soul;
the Incarnate Christ was a material human body with a divine
second-person-of-the-Trinity immaterial soul. But in this picture, Christ
is not fully human; instead, Christ is some mixture -- part human, part
divine. The church fathers explicitly considered and rejected those sorts
of pictures, insisting that Christ was both fully human and fully divine.
  So to do justice to that teaching under dualism, one should picture the
Incarnate Christ as having a material human body with an integrated
nonmaterial human soul, who is nevertheless also fully divine. Is that
really any less of a mystery than a monist picture of the Incarnation?

Loren Haarsma
Received on Fri Mar 25 14:15:27 2005