Re: a question for monists

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 14:14:43 -0500 (EST) Loren Haarsma
<lhaarsma@calvin.edu> writes:
>
>
> 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
>
>
Anything involving the biblical deity is going to involve mystery, for we
do not control or comprehend the infinite. Nevertheless, we are given
information as God revealed himself that allows us to understand
something about his nature and being. On this basis I hold that God is
spirit, and that somehow human beings "possess" spirits (don't have an
adequate explanation for that, either). I understand that, just as matter
can mingle with matter, so spirit can mingle with spirit. There is a
serious problem here, for in Jesus Christ one spirit is infinite and the
other finite. However, the bible teaches that the infinite spirit emptied
himself to become incarnate as a servant. This is not a full explanation,
but gives us something to go on. I suspect that a proper explanation
would be totally incomprehensible to us--worse than string theory to a
two-year-old.

In contrast to this, I do not see any way to combine a function with a
substance, as required by monism. Substances have functions under various
conditions. Mechanisms, made of substances, may be combined to have
cooperative or sequential functions. But it is the mechanisms that
combine, and function follows. I cannot say that contemporary theistic
monists have not faced the problem squarely or have no answers, for I
have not read all the literature. But my impression is that they approach
problems with "Don't let on."
Dave
Received on Fri Mar 25 16:36:57 2005