Saturday, July 15, 2023

Blake Ostler on the logical problems of conventional Christologies

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