Consider the following
(A) God is essential omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent and uncreated;
(B) Jesus Christ was and is fully God;
(C) Jesus Christ was and is fully human;
(D) Necessarily, no human is omnipotent or
omniscient or omnipresent or uncreated.
Give the foregoing premises, there is an inconsistency in asserting
that each of these premises is true. The affirmation of any three of these
premises entails the denial of the fourth—at least if premises (B) and (C) are
understood as identity statements. Do not the affirmation of (A), (B), and (D) entail
Docetism or the assertion that Jesus is not human? Do not (A) and (D) entail Arianism
in the sense that God is not fully God? Do not the affirmation of (B), (C), and
(D) entail that God is not omnipotent or omnipresent and thus not really God?
Do not (A), (B) and (C) entail that humans are omnipotent and omnipresent—a claim
so obviously absurd that no one has seriously promoted it?
The logical problem is, of course, compounded if we add to
the divine properties those attributed to God in the absolutist tradition including
timelessness, immutability, impassibility and simplicity. It is at least
logically possible that a human be very powerful or very knowledgeable, but how
can one coherently speak o fa human not within any temporal interval or having
no extension or parts? It is no wonder that John Hick regards the doctrine that
Jesus was “very God and very man” as “devoid of meaning as to say that a circle
is also a square.” Similarly, Don Cupitt has described the doctrine that Jesus
was God as “simply the making of a contradictory assertion.” Certainly the
Christian would hope for more than a central belief that either cannot be given
any meaning or that, when carefully spelled out, can be shown to be positively incoherent.
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes
of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001), 420-21
