I consider the fundamental philosophical problem for Christology: how can one and the same person, the Second Person of the Trinity, be both God and man. For being God implies having certain attributes, perhaps immutability, or impassibility, whereas being human implies having apparently inconsistent attributes. This problem is especially vexing for the proponent of Conciliar Christology – the Christology taught in the Ecumenical Councils – since those councils affirm that Christ is both mutable and immutable, both passible and impassible, etc. (...) Many extant solutions to this problem approach it by claiming that the predicates are incompatible when said of the same thing without qualification, but that once the appropriate qualification is added, compatibility is achieved. I provide a different approach. Here I argued that the predicates can be understood so that they are compatible. I then work out the logical relations between the predicates, so understood, showing that no contradiction follows from understanding them in the way I suggest. After that, I consider some of the motivations we have for believing the purportedly incompatible pairs to be, in fact, incompatible, and argue that, on the view offered here, we can salvage most of our intuitions that motivate taking the predicates as incompatible. Finally, I consider three objections. (shrink)

The Luck Problem has existed in one form or another since David Hume, at least. It is perhaps as old as Stoic objections to the Epicurean swerve. Although the general issue admits of different formulations with subtly different emphases, the characterization of it that will serve as my target focuses on “cross-worlds” luck, a kind of luck that arises when the decision-making of agents is indeterministic.

The characteristic claim of Christianity, as codified at Chalcedon, is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, is numerically the same person as Jesus of Nazareth. This article raises three questions that appear to threaten the coherence of orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalism. First, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible natures? Second, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible non-nature properties? Third, how can there be one person if the concept of incarnation implies that one person incarnates himself (...) as another person? The attempts of C. S. Lewis and T. V. Morris to deal with these difficulties are examined and found inconclusive. (shrink)

The traditional view of heaven holds that the redeemed in heaven both have free will and are no longer capable of sinning. A number of philosophers have argued that the traditional view is problematic. How can someone be free and yet incapable of sinning? If the redeemed are kept from sinning, their wills must be reined in. And if their wills are reined in, it doesn’t seem right to say that they are free. Following James Sennett, we call this objection (...) to the traditional view of heaven ‘the Problem of Heavenly Freedom’. In this paper, we discuss and criticize four attempts to respond to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom. We then offer our own response to this problem which both preserves the traditional view of heaven and avoids the objections which beset the other attempts. (shrink)

In an earlier paper, I argued for an account of the metaphysics of grace which was libertarian in nature but also non-Pelagian. My goal in the present paper is to broaden my focus on how the human and divine wills relate in graced activities. While there is widespread agreement in Christian theology that the two do interact in an important way, what’s less clear is how the wills of two agents can be united in one of them performing a particular (...) action via a kind of joint or unitive willing. Insofar as the goal in these unitive willings is to have the human will and the divine will operating together in the human bringing about a particular action, I refer to this kind of volition as ”cooperative agency’. I explore two different models -- an identificationist model and an incarnation model -- regarding how the human agent is aligned with God in cooperative agency. I then argue that there are significant reasons for preferring the incarnational model over the identificationist model. (shrink)

According to Eric Funkhouser, omnipotence and necessary moral perfection (what Funkhouser calls "impeccability") are not compatible. Funkhouser gives two arguments for this claim. In this paper, I argue that neither of Funkhouser's arguments is sound. The traditional theist can reasonably claim that, contra Funkhouser, (i) there is no possible being who possesses all of God's attributes sans impeccability, and (ii) the fact that there are things that God cannot do does not entail that God lacks omnipotence. Armed with (i) and (...) (ii), the theist has all that is needed to refute Funkhouser's arguments. (shrink)

In this essay I present what is, I contend, the free-will problem properly thought through, or at least presented in a form in which it is possible to think about it without being constantly led astray by bad terminology and confused ideas. Bad terminology and confused ideas are not uncommon in current discussions of the problem. The worst such pieces of terminology are "libertarian free will" and "compatibilist free will." The essay consists partly of a defense of the thesis that (...) the use of these phrases by writers on the problem of free will can only generate conceptual confusion and partly of a formulation of the problem that does not make use of them. I contend that this formulation is neutral with respect to the historically important positions on free will (e. g., compatibilism and incompatibilism). (shrink)

In a recent issue of Faith and Philosophy, Steven Cowan calls into question our success in responding to what we called the “Problem of Heavenly Free- dom” in our earlier “Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will in Heaven.” In this reply, we defend our view against Cowan’s criticisms.

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of realism in various areas of philosophy, including metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, and this trend has continued in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In philosophy of religion this led to explorations of the philosophical coherence of orthodox doctrines, such as the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In metaphysics, there was renewed interest in debates concerning persistence, composition, the relation between mind and body, time (...) and necessity, among others. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the links between these two strands of realist inquiry, focusing on some metaphysical issues raised by the Incarnation. It ends with some suggestions as to how recent developments in metaphysical debate might inform our understanding of this most central of Christian beliefs. (shrink)

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of realism in various areas of philosophy, including metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, and this trend has continued in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. In philosophy of religion this led to explorations of the philosophical coherence of orthodox doctrines, such as the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In metaphysics, there was renewed interest in debates concerning persistence, composition, the relation between mind and body, time (...) and necessity, among others. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the links between these two strands of realist inquiry, focusing on some metaphysical issues raised by the Incarnation. It ends with some suggestions as to how recent developments in metaphysical debate might inform our understanding of this most central of Christian beliefs. (shrink)

Call the claim, common to many in the Christian intellectual tradition, that Christ, in virtue of his created human intellect, had certain, infallible, exhaustive foreknowledge the Foreknowledge Thesis. Now consider what I will call the Conditional: if the Foreknowledge Thesis is true, then Christ's created human will was not free. In so far as many, perhaps all, of the people who affirm the Foreknowledge Thesis also wish to affirm the freedom of Christ's human will, the truth of the Conditional would (...) be most unwelcome to them. I consider an argument in support of the Conditional; I argue that it is not successful. (shrink)

Call the claim, common to many in the Christian intellectual tradition, that Christ, in virtue of his created human intellect, had certain, infallible exhaustive foreknowledge the Foreknowledge Thesis. Now consider what I will call the Conditional: If the Foreknowledge Thesis is true, then Christ’s created human will lacked an important sort of freedom that we mere humans have. Insofar as many, perhaps all, of the people who affirm the Foreknowledge Thesis also wish to affirm the robust freedom of Christ’s human (...) will, the truth of the Conditional would be most unwelcome to them. I consider an argument in support of the Conditional from the necessary conditions for deliberation, arguing that the argument fails. (shrink)

Prima facie, there is an incompatibility between God’s alleged omnipotence and impeccability. I argue that this incompat- ibility is more than prima facie. Attempts to avoid this appearance of incompatibility by allowing that there are commonplace states of affairs that an omnipotent being cannot bring about are unsuc- cessful. Instead, we should accept that God is not omnipotent. This is acceptable since it is a mistake to hold that omnipotence is a perfection. God’s moral perfection should be privileged over God’s (...) potency properties—and the same is true of human beings as well. (shrink)

In “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment” Angela Smith defends her nonvoluntarist theory of moral responsibility against the charge that any such view is shallow because it cannot capture the depth of judgments of responsibility. Only voluntarist positions can do this since only voluntarist positions allow for control. I argue that Smith is able to deflect the voluntarists’ criticism, but only with further resources. As a voluntarist, I also concede that Smith’s thesis has force, and I close with a compromise position, (...) one that allows for direct moral responsibility for the nonvoluntary, but also incorporates a reasonable control condition. (shrink)

It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the (...) first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (shrink)

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 parts over time but remain numerically (...) identical, and it demonstrates that concrete nature and person are not the same thing. (shrink)

Many skeptics throughout the centuries have accused the New Testament characterization of the incarnation as being incoherent. The reason is that it appears impossible that any person can exemplify human properties such as ignorance, fatigability, and spatial limitation, as the New Testament testifies of Jesus, while possessing divine properties such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence at the same time. This paper proposes a possible model which asserts that at the incarnation, the Logo's mind was divided into conscious and preconscious, and (...) the divine properties were transferred from the conscious into the preconscious, which became part A of Jesus' preconscious. Simultaneously, the conscious acquired newly created human properties, while a human preconscious which would become part B of Jesus' preconscious and a human body were also created. It is demonstrated that this model does not suffer from the problems that beset other models such as Apollinarianism, two-consciousness Christology, and ontological Kenoticism, and that based on this model the full attributes of divinity and humanity of Jesus as testified by the Scriptures could have simultaneously coexisted in one person without contradiction. (shrink)

One central claim of orthodox Christianity is that in Jesus of Nazareth, God became man. On Chalcedonian orthodoxy, this involves one person, God the Son, having two natures, divine and human. If He does, one person has two properties, deity and humanity. But the Incarnation also involves concrete objects, God the Son (GS), Jesus’s human body (B) and—I will assume—Jesus’s human soul (S). If God becomes human, GS, B and S somehow become one thing. It would be good to have (...) a metaphysical account of their oneness. I have suggested one. Thomas Senor has criticized my suggestion. I now reply to his case. (shrink)

The ‘perfection account’ of atonement is discussed,under which Christ, on the cross,completed the perfection of human nature,establishing the full perfection of loving filial obedience, offering to the Father a perfected humanity, where these features were fundamental to the atonement. A basic perfection account is first set out. Two additional elements of the perfection account are then discussed: first, that Christ established a perfect victory over evil in our humanity; second, that on the cross Christ put to death the pull to (...) the self-life in our humanity. Reparation is then discussed. Finally,some critical questions are addressed. (shrink)

In this essay I present what is, I contend, the free-will problem properly thought through, or at least presented in a form in which it is possible to think about it without being constantly led astray by bad terminology and confused ideas. Bad terminology and confused ideas are not uncommon in current discussions of the problem. The worst such pieces of terminology are “libertarian free will” and “compatibilist free will.” The essay consists partly of a defense of the thesis that (...) the use of these phrases by writers on the problem of free will can only generate conceptual confusion and partly of a formulation of the problem that does not make use of them. I contend that this formulation is neutral with respect to the historically important positions on free will (e.g., compatibilism and incompatibilism). (shrink)

Christian tradition holds not simply that, in Christ, God became human, but that at the end of his earthly career Christ became exalted (possessing andexercising the divine attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience), and yet remained perpetually human. In this paper I consider several models ofthe incarnation in the light of these requirements. In particular, I contrast models that adopt a temporalist understanding of divine eternity with those that adopt an atemporalist one. I conclude that temporalist models struggle to accommodate (...) the doctrines of Christ’s exaltation and perpetual humanity, and that the only viable atemporalist models are compositionalist ones. (shrink)

This is a critique of Thomas Morris’s proposal in The Logic of God Incarnate (1986) that the idea of divine incarnation can be understood on the model of two minds, a human mind enclosed within a divine mind, with the latter having full cognitive access to the former but the former only occasional access to the latter. The critique, which suggests the failure of Morris’s attempt to render a Chalcedonian-type dogma intelligible, claims that cognitive access is not sufficient to constitute (...) incarnation, and that Morris is unable to explain how, since two wills are also required, Jesus was genuinely free to sin and yet necessarily sinless. (shrink)

According to the orthodox Christian belief expressed most famously at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Jesus Christ is one person who is both divine and human. Not surprisingly, many have wondered at this, for it seems impossible for one person to have both divine and human characteristics. There are different versions of this difficulty, which correspond to different human and divine characteristics. In this article, I will defend traditional Christology against an argument that bases itself on one particular difficulty. (...) The argument contends that Christ's omniscience and non-omniscience mean that he cannot be one person; it contends, in short, that Chalcedon is self-undermining. I will begin by making some preliminary remarks. In the second section of the paper, I will show that the anti-Chalcedonian argument cannot simply be avoided or ignored. In the third section, I will examine the argument itself. (shrink)

The traditional claim that Christ is one person who is both divine and human might seem inconsistent with classical conceptions of understanding divinity and humanity. For example, the classical understanding of divinity would seem to require us to hold that divine beings are immaterial, while the classical understanding of humanity would seem to require us to hold that human beings are material, leaving us unable to speak consistently of one person who is divine and human both. This paper argues that (...) revised versions of classical theism and classical anthropology can be developed, versions that avoid these problems. (shrink)

Many theists of a traditional bent have been bothered by the apparent tension between God's essential omnipotence and his essential moral goodness. Nelson Pike draws attention to the conflict between these two attributes in his article ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, and there have been many attempts to respond to it since that time. Most of these responses argue that the essential omnipotence and essential goodness of God are not logically incompatible, so that the traditional conception of God is (...) not incoherent; I think the arguments have been largely successful. However, some theists have found the typical responses to Pike less than convincing, and are tempted to surrender the claim that God has moral perfection essentially in favour of the more modest claim that God is morally perfect in the actual world though in some possible worlds God is morally defective. I argue in this paper that this fall-back position is incoherent. More accurately, I argue that a necessary being who is essentially omniscient and essentially omnipotent cannot be contingently morally perfect or contingently morally defective. Any such being is either essentially good or essentially evil. Since the latter alternative seems unattractive, I argue that theists should embrace the essential moral perfection of God. (shrink)

This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as he (...) does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

Traditional Christians face a puzzle concerning the freedom and perfection of Christ. Jesus the man, it seems, must have possessed significant freedom forhim to serve as a moral example for us and for his death to have been truly meritorious. Yet Jesus the Son of God must be incapable of sinning if he is trulydivine. So if Jesus is both human and divine, one of these two attributes - significant freedom or moral perfection - apparently needs to be surrendered. In (...) thisessay, it is argued that if (and perhaps only if) a Molinist approach to divine providence is embraced, one can plausibly affirm both the freedom of the manand the impeccability of the Son. (shrink)

In the Christian tradition it has generally been claimed that God, being perfectly good, has the attribute not only of impeccantia but also of impeccabilitas. Thus, for example, Aquinas held that ‘God is unable to will anything evil. Hence it is evident that God cannot sin’; and according to the Westminster Confession, ‘God,…being holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin’.

In the Christian tradition it has generally been claimed that God, being perfectly good, has the attribute not only of impeccantia but also of impeccabilitas . Thus, for example, Aquinas held that ‘God is unable to will anything evil. Hence it is evident that God cannot sin’; and according to the Westminster Confession, ‘God,…being holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin’.

Medieval theologians discussed the logical structure of reduplicative propositions in the midst of their discussions of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Aquinas has the usual medieval analyzes of reduplicative propositions: the specificative and the strictly reduplicative. But neither analysis resolves successfully the problems of the consistency of the statements about God while avoiding making the Trinity or the Incarnation a merely accidental feature of Him. However, Scotus introduces another analysis: abstractive. I shall conclude that Scotus’s view of reduplication, one, if (...) not invented by him, as least stressed and developed by him, offers a better solution of the consistency of the Incarnation and the Trinity than that of Aquinas. (shrink)

In this article I canvas the options available to a proponent of the traditional doctrine of the incarnation against a charge of incoherence. In particular, I consider the charge of incoherence due to incompatible predications both being true of the same one person, the God-man Jesus Christ. For instance, one might think that any- thing divine has to have certain attributes – perhaps omnipotence, or impassibility. But, the charge continues, nothing human can be omnipotent or impassible. And so nothing can (...) be divine and human. So Christ is not both God and man, contrary to the traditional doctrine of the incarnation. To do so, first, in Section II, I will present the problem as a deductively valid argument. I then, in that section, go on to show that the proponent of traditional Christology should grant all but one premise of the argument. In the remaining sections I will canvas possible solutions to the problem. In Section III I discuss three ways to deny Premise 3 of the forthcoming argument. These ways include a Kenotic response, qua-modification (in four versions), and finally a response that accepts the compatibility of the allegedly incompatible predicates. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will motivated by a desire to reconcile a non-determinist view of free will with modern science as well as with recent developments in philosophy. A view of free will of the kind I defend did not exist in a developed form before the 1980s, but is now discussed in the philosophical literature as one of three chief options an incompatibilist or libertarian view of free will might (...) take. As such, this view has been the subject of much recent discussion. In this paper, I explain and defend my view of free will, and answer recent criticisms of it. Some of these criticisms are made by Robert Allen in his paper “Self-forming Actions,” a contribution to the seminar of which the present paper is a part. I also respond to Katherin Rogers’ contribution to this seminar “Libertarianism in Kane and Anselm.” Her book, Anselm on Freedom, argues that Anselm defended a unique libertarian view of free will, avoiding both Pelagianism and Augustine’s later compatibilism, a view that she argues has affinities to my view of free will. I also discuss these affinities to Anselm in my paper and their theological and well as philosophical implications. (shrink)