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Solving a paradox against concrete-composite Christology: a modified hylomorphic proposal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2010

ANDREW LOKE
ANDREW LOKE*
Affiliation:
Department of Education & Professional Studies, King's College London, Franklin-Wilkins Building (Waterloo Bridge Wing), Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

A paradox adapted from the well-known ‘paradox of increase’ has been formulated against composite Christology in recent literature. I argue that concrete-composite Christologists can reply by denying the premise that the pre-incarnate divine nature=the Second Person of the Trinity. This denial can be made by modifying a hylomorphic theory of individuals. Using an analogy from material coinciding objects, this modified theory provides an illuminating account of how a person can gain (or lose) parts over time but remain numerically identical, and it demonstrates that concrete nature and person are not the same thing.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 493 - 502
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Richard Cross ‘Parts and properties in Christology’ in M. W. F. Stone (ed.) Reason, Faith and History: Philosophical Essays for Paul Helm (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 177–178.

2. Ibid., 178.

3. Oliver Crisp Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41, 46, 68.

4. Le Poidevin, Robin‘Identity and the composite Christ: an incarnational dilemma’, Religious Studies, 45 (2009), 167–186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Ibid., 178.

6. Robin Le Poidevin made this clear to me in private correspondence.

7. Le Poidevin ‘Identity and the composite Christ’, 178.

8. Senor, Thomas‘The compositional account of the Incarnation’, Faith and Philosophy, 24 (2007), 52–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Thomas P. Flint ‘Should concretists part with mereological models of the Incarnation?’ paper presented at the Logos Workshop in Philosophical Theology, University of Notre Dame, 2009.

10. Olson, Eric ‘The paradox of increase’, The Monist, 89 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/03/49/16/Par%20Inc.pdf, accessed 10.7.2010.

11. Le Poidevin ‘Identity and the composite Christ’, 184. Le Poidevin explains that on perdurantism, the Son and Christ are understood to be different collections of temporal parts that are intimately joined together. This allows us to say, using an ‘ordinary identity’ talk about persistence, that Christ is identical to the Son, and also that the pre-incarnate divine nature is identical to the incarnate nature. Since this ‘ordinary identity’ talk invokes a different kind of fact from the strict identity invoked by saying that ‘the Son is identical to the pre-incarnate divine nature’, the paradox is resolved. Nevertheless, Le Poidevin notes that perdurantism has the problematic consequence that the Son could have perdured as many human beings, each quite independent of each other; ibid., 182–183.

12. Ibid., 179.

13. This move is briefly considered by Le Poidevin in ibid., 180.

14. This is discussed in Ryan Wasserman ‘Material constitution’, in E. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 edn), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/material-constitution/, accessed 10.7.2010. Wasserman's worry concerning this view is that it gives up the popular idea that things like statues and lumps of clay are wholly material objects. However, this worry is not applicable for immaterial entities like divine nature and the divine Person, and it is not applicable to a mind–body dualist view of Christ (see further, n. 28 below).

15. Richard Swinburne The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 46.

16. Ibid., 46–47. Individual essence is also called haecceity, a term introduced by Duns Scotus for that in virtue of which an individual is the individual that it is: its individuating essence making it this object or person; Simon Blackburn ‘Haecceity’, in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Alvin Plantinga The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

17. Swinburne The Christian God, 47–49. Swinburne attributes the view on the ultimate reality of being to Duns Scotus, although he observes that it is disputable that Scotus held a hylomorphic theory. It should also be noted that Swinburne's idea of instantiation of the form in immaterial soul-stuff assumes substance dualism (see further, n. 28 below), but certain versions of hylomorphic theory deny this and affirm that the form just is the soul. There is disagreement among scholars concerning whether Aristotle affirmed or denied substance dualism; see the discussion and literature cited in Howard Robinson ‘Dualism’, in Zalta The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 edn), available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/dualism/, accessed 10.7.2010.

18. Swinburne The Christian God, 50.

19. I thank an anonymous referee for the journal for suggesting this analogy. It might be objected that the proposal that the divine nature has parts violate the doctrine of divine simplicity. For my reply to this objection, see the section, ‘Addressing difficulties’ below.

20. I thank Robin Le Poidevin for pointing this out to me in private correspondence.

21. In answer to Thomas Flint, who asks with respect to the strategy of utilizing the notion of coincidence to escape the paradox, ‘It's much harder to understand how the Son could be, in a world where no Incarnation occurs, coincident with a concrete substance distinct from himself. Is this substance … omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly good? If not, how could it qualify as a divine substance?’; Flint ‘Should concretists part with mereological models of the Incarnation?’, 15.

22. In answer to Flint (see previous note), who asks ‘Is this substance supposed to be a person? If not, why not?’; ibid.

23. See the discussion and the literature cited in Eric Olson ‘Personal identity’, in Zalta The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 edn), available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/identity-personal/, accessed 10.7.2010.

24. Richard Swinburne ‘The dualist theory’, in S. Shoemaker and R. Swinburne Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 3–66; William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), ch. 14. For Reid's view, see Thomas Reid ‘Of identity’, in A. D. Woozley (ed.) Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (London: Macmillan, 1941). For Butler, see Joseph Butler ‘Of personal identity’, a dissertation added to The Analogy of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897).

25. C. Stephen Evans ‘The self-emptying of love: some thoughts on kenotic Christology’, in S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O'Collins (eds) The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 270.

26. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the difficulties and the attempted solutions. See Olson ‘Personal identity’.

27. Evans ‘The self-emptying of love’, 267–271.

28. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss these reasons. For a recent account, see George Bealer and Robert Koons (eds) The Waning of Materialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially xvii–xx.

29. Michael Goulder ‘Paradox and mystification’, in idem (ed.) Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1979), 54.

30. Vallicella, William ‘Incarnation and identity’, Philo, 5 (2002), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. The second part of the difficulty is also noted by Flint, who asks that if the divine concrete particular ‘is omniscient, omnipotent, and so on, have we not added to the Trinity a fourth entity that exhibits these perfections?’; Flint, ‘Should concretists part with mereological models of the Incarnation?’, 15.

32. This is adapted from the discussion with respect to material coincident objects in Wasserman ‘Material constitution’: ‘Suppose that Lump weighs 10lbs; David will then weigh 10lbs. as well. So why don't you get a reading of 20lbs. when you place both on the scale? Answer: because the two objects share the same weight as a result of sharing the same parts. Just as calculating the weight of something by summing the weights of all its parts (e.g. weigh the bricks and the molecules of a wall) will get the wrong result (since some parts will be weighed more than once), weighing David and Lump would involve the same kind of double-counting.’

33. Olson ‘The paradox of increase’, 10–11.

34. Cf. Wasserman's question for the material-coincidence view: ‘What could account for these differences? How can two things that are exactly alike in so many ways still differ in these other respects?’ Wasserman calls this the grounding objection; Wasserman ‘Material constitution’.

35. I thank the journal's anonymous referee for helping me to clarify this point.

36. Olson ‘The paradox of increase’, 10–11.

37. Senor ‘The compositional account of the Incarnation’, 58–59.

38. Loke, Andrew‘On the coherence of the Incarnation: the divine preconscious model’, Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 51 (2009), 50–63Google Scholar.

39. I would like to thank Professor Robin Le Poidevin for his very gracious and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, the journal's anonymous referee and Professor Peter Byrne for useful suggestions, Professor Alister McGrath for supervising my work at King's College, London, Professor J. P. Moreland for his metaphysics classes at Talbot School of Theology, and Mary S. C. Lim for her kind assistance.