Thomas Morris has suggested two distinctions which he thinks may allow us to maintain Chalcedon’s two-nature Christology. A review of Morris’s arguments may be instructive because his defense of the traditional two-nature Christology is the most informed and sophisticated in recent scholarship in my opinion. He first points out that there is a difference between a common property of a kind K to be a property that all members of that kind K just happen to accidentally have. We usually think of essential properties of humans as those properties possessed by all humans. Morris suggests, however, that the fact that all humans possess a property does not make it an essential human property. For example, all humans have the common property of having spent some time on the earth; however, it is just possible that a human could be born on a space station and be there until death. This human would not possess the common property “having spent some time on earth” that all other humans possessed up to the point in time it ceased to be a common property. For example, until 1969 all humans possessed the common property of having never set foot on the moon; but all that changed when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Yet Armstrong was still a human, even though he possessed a unique property that no other human had ever possessed—the property of “having walked on the moon.”
Morris argues that there is no reason to count as essential human
properties any properties common to all humans which are incompatible with
divine properties, including omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality.
Morris admits that “if contingency, coming into existence, and possibly ceasing
to exist were essential human properties, the doctrine of Incarnation would
express a metaphysical, or broadly logical, impossibility.” (The Logic of
God Incarnate, 69) Morris argues in particular that there is no reason to
think that “being created,” or more accurately “being ontologically contingent,”
is an essential property of humans:
Only a few
contemporary theologians who have written on the topic [of Christology] seem to
have recognized that we can understand human nature in such a way that it can
be coexemplified with divinity in one and same subject. Herbert McCabe, for
one, has said: “A human person just is a person with a human nature, and it
makes absolutely no difference to the logical of this whether the same person
does or does not exist from eternity as divine.” (Ibid., 65)
This admission that humans may be uncreated without violation
of the logic of what it means to be human is a remarkable concession for a traditional
Christian theologian, for the ontological contingency of human existence is
necessarily true (in a sense of the necessity of the consequent) given the
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing. But if Christ
did not share out ontological status and shared with us only those properties which
are not incompatible with the properties possessed by God, it seems that Christ
shares precious little in common with us—and Morris doesn’t identify a single
essential human property which is compossible with divinity and which Christ
shared with us in his entire book! Certainly, if Morris claims that there are
such properties, he ought to identify at least some properties corresponding to
the set of common properties which he has in mind—but he doesn’t.
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes
of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001), 430-31
