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chapter_five.docxChapter Five
PLURALISM AND THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS CHRIST
John Hick recognizes the importance of the orthodox Christian understanding of Jesus Christ to the pluralism-exclusivism debate. He writes, “If Jesus was literally God incarnate, and if it is by his death alone that men can be saved, and by their response to him alone that they can appropriate that salvation, then the only doorway to eternal life is Christian faith. It would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved.” 1 If Jesus really is God and if his atonement is the only ground of human salvation, then pluralism must be false.
Hick contends that
There is a direct line of logical entailment from the premise that Jesus was God, in the sense that he was God the Son, the Second Person of the divine Trinity, living in a human life, to the conclusion that Christianity, and Christianity alone, was founded by God in person; and from this to the further conclusion that God must want all his human children to be related to him through his religion which he has himself founded for us. 2
Hick here uses a well-known form of logical reasoning that assumes the following form:
If A, then B
A Therefore, B
Whenever the first clause ( A) of a true hypothetical statement is true, then the second clause ( B) must be true. 3 For example, consider the true hypothetical statement, “If Pierre is guillotined, then Pierre will be dead.” If the first clause is true, then the second is also true and Pierre is in deep trouble. Consider now a different hypothetical statement: “If the historic Christian understanding of the person and work of Christ is true, then human salvation depends upon a proper relationship to Jesus Christ.” If the first clause of our new hypothetical statement is true, then pluralism is in deep trouble.
Hick recognizes that he has no choice. He must do everything possible to attack the truth of the first clause (concerning the person and work of Christ). He must use every weapon at his disposal to deny such Christian doctrines as the deity of Christ, the Incarnation, and the Trinity.
In this chapter we will examine the major steps in Hick’s attempt to destroy Christian confidence in the high view of Jesus that has characterized historical and orthodox Christianity from its inception. I will lay out, largely without comment, Hick’s theories about what Jesus said and believed about himself, about how the church supposedly deified Jesus over a long period of time, about why the doctrine of the Incarnation is nothing but a myth, and about the alleged uniqueness of Christ and Christianity. There will be little critical response to Hick in these sections, for two reasons. First, astute readers will quickly realize that Hick provides little or no argumentation for his positions. Second, Hick’s claims depend on outdated New Testament scholarship. What Hick presents is often pure speculation or mere dogmatism.
In the last two sections we finally uncover Hick’s putative reasons for his positions. One line of Hick’s argument flows from certain claims he makes as to the historical unreliability of the New Testament documents. If what Christians think they know about Jesus is actually unsupported by trustworthy historical evidence, then many essential Christian beliefs about him—including the Incarnation—will suffer irreparable damage. Hick’s second line of argument attacks the Christian belief that Jesus Christ possesses two natures (divine and human) in one person. The last part of the chapter reviews Hick’s challenges to essential Christian beliefs about the person and work of Jesus Christ.
THE INCARNATION AS MYTH
John Hick holds that the early Christian belief that Jesus Christ is God incarnate is a myth. By “myth” Hick means a story or image that is not literally true. But while myths are never literally true, they may be practically true. The practical truth becomes apparent when the myth is applied appropriately to some object or person. 4
Hick develops a clever analogy in defense of his view of myth: He tells the story of a man in love who declares that his Helen is the sweetest and prettiest girl in the whole world. While such an exaggeration cannot be literally true, it may still be mythically true if it expresses an appropriate attitude of the lover toward the person he loves. In a similar way, early Christians took the simple expression “Jesus is my Lord and Savior,” a psychological statement, and transformed it into a metaphysical claim: “Jesus is the only Lord and Savior.” Hick wishes people would stop thinking of the Incarnation as a metaphysical “truth” and regard it as an “imaginative reconstruction” that expresses “the Christian’s devotion to Jesus as the one who has made the heavenly Father real to him.” 5 Jesus is not the Savior; he is only my savior, Hick contends.
Reducing the Incarnation to the status of myth sets up Hick’s interpretation of the Atonement and the Resurrection. In Hick’s view, no one is saved by Jesus. The nature of the Christian experience of forgiveness and reconciliation led naturally to thinking about Jesus’ death as somehow connected with this forgiveness, and this led in turn to the idea of atonement. There is no special way in which Jesus is unique in the matter of salvation; God’s salvation is available through other religions and other “saviors.”
Hick also rejects any view that Jesus’ alleged resurrection sets him apart from all other supposed “saviors” and provides a reason to believe in his deity. 6 Hick acknowledges the likelihood that the disciples of the Gospels had experiences of Jesus after his death. But Hick claims we do not know what this event was, nor does it really matter—the disciples never connected any “resurrection-event” with Christ’s supposed deity. Not surprisingly, Hick ignores Romans 1:4: “who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Whatever we make of the resurrection-event, Hick continues, all it shows is that Jesus “had a special place within God’s providence; but this was not equivalent to seeing him as literally divine. For Jesus is not said to have risen in virtue of a divine nature he himself possessed but to have been raised by God.” 7 So, for Hick, the bottom line in all this is that (1) he doubts that a physical resurrection really occurred, and (2) even if it did, it would not prove that Jesus is God.
WHAT DID JESUS BELIEVE AND CLAIM ABOUT HIMSELF?
Hick denies that Jesus was either conscious of being God or claimed to be God. Hick’s reasoning on this is that (1) Jesus was not and is not God, but (2) if he thought he was God, then Jesus was severely handicapped psychologically, and therefore, (3) if he claimed to be God and knew it was not so, then Jesus was morally deficient. Hick the pluralist has no interest in destroying the reputation of the man Jesus, only the supposedly divine Jesus. Hence the importance of trying to show that Jesus himself never believed he was God. 8
Further, Hick states, although Jesus may have been conscious of a special calling from God, he was not conscious of being God. 9 He aways knew that he was just a human being.
I see the Nazarene, then, as intensely and overwhelmingly conscious of the reality of God. He was a man of God, living in the unseen presence of God, and addressing God as abba, father. His spirit was open to God and his life a continuous response to the divine love as both utterly gracious and demanding. He was so powerfully God conscious that his life vibrated, as it were, to the divine life; and as a result his hands could heal the sick, and the “poor in spirit” were kindled to new life in his presence…Thus in Jesus’ presence, we should have felt that we are in the presence of God—not in the sense that the man Jesus literally is God, but in the sense that he was so totally conscious of God that we could catch something of that consciousness by spiritual contagion. 10
There is nothing new, of course, in Hick’s portrait of Jesus. Many unitarians have said the same things.
According to Hick, then, Jesus was simply a human being who managed to attain a special awareness of God and God’s love:
Now we want to say of Jesus that he was so vividly conscious of God as the loving heavenly Father, and so startlingly open to God and so fully his servant and instrument, that the divine love was expressed, and in that sense incarnated, in his life. This was not a matter (as it is in official Christian doctrine) of Jesus having two complete natures, one human and the other divine. He was wholly human; but whenever self-giving love in response to the love of God is lived out in a human life, to that extent the divine love has become incarnate on earth. 11
Two points are worth making here. First, why should not the church’s early response to Jesus, which Hick suggests resulted in an unwarranted apotheosis, be permitted as itself an authentic response to his persona? Does it not conform to Hick’s own criterion? 12 Second, there is justification for thinking that Hick is toying with the word “incarnate,” seeking to retain the term because of its historic significance but totally stripping it of its historic meaning.
All this leads to the conclusion that Jesus possessed no consciousness of his own deity. Rather, Jesus was so conscious of God’s presence around and within him that he could not help but have a profound impact on those in his presence. Being in Jesus’ presence produced an effect like being in God’s presence.
HOW THE CHURCH TURNED JESUS INTO GOD
Hick contends that through a long, gradual process the Christian church deified Jesus—a predictable testimony to the powerful psychological impact Jesus had on people. But this impact was not a result of Christ’s actual deity; rather, it was a consequence of the powerful presence of God’s love in Jesus’ life. It was understandable that many would find it difficult to distinguish Jesus from the God whose presence they felt so powerfully when they were near the Teacher. These experiences of Jesus over time were part of the process that led eventually to a declaration of his deity at the Council of Nicea ( A.D. 325). 13 A similar transformation over a long period of time occurred in the case of the title “Son of God.” Hick repeats every liberal theory offered about this expression. Some cultures of the first century, he suggests, commonly thought some humans had been elevated to the status of gods. At other times the prevailing culture supposedly contained examples of deity existing in human form. Both claims rest on a faulty understanding of the so-called mystery religions of the Hellenistic World. 14
Hick’s most common tactic is to cite the Old Testament application of the expression “Son of God” to King David (Ps. 2:7), which makes it a metaphor. The Old Testament supposedly established its metaphorical nature, and it is easy to see how the early church came to apply the same metaphor to Jesus, who was thought to be a descendent of David. But the original term carried no connotation of deity, Hick contends, so the early church may have thought of Jesus as a “Son of God” in a nonliteral, metaphorical sense. The damage was created when, over several centuries, the church slowly transposed “Son of God” to “God the Son.” In fact, Hick believes that such a view is already apparent in the fourth gospel, which he regards as a late contribution to the New Testament. 15
ARE JESUS AND CHRISTIANITY UNIQUE?
Christians make the uniqueness of Christ a fundamental element of Christian belief. To call something unique is to affirm that it is the only one of its kind. To apply this line of thinking to Jesus is to declare that he is the one and only mediator between God and man, the one and only Savior. Not surprisingly, Hick disagrees. Hick and Paul Knitter begin their book The Myth of Christian Uniqueness by explaining that
We are calling “Christian uniqueness” a “myth,” not because we think that talk of the uniqueness of Christianity is purely and simply false, and so to be discarded. Rather, we feel that such talk, like all mythic language, must be understood carefully; it must be interpreted; its “truth” lies not on its literal surface but within its ever-changing historical and personal meaning. 16
These thinkers dislike the idea that “the uniqueness of Christianity” has assumed “a larger mythological meaning. It has come to signify the unique definitiveness, absoluteness, normativeness, superiority of Christianity in comparison with other religions of the world.” 17 Hick and Knitter reject this sense of the term. The only way Christianity is unique for pluralists is the way any religion is unique: only one of its kind exists and nothing else is exactly like it. But this watered-down sense of uniqueness has nothing to do with absoluteness or superiority.
Hick handles the supposed uniqueness of Jesus in a similar way. While he views Jesus as the unique founder of Christianity, the claim is trivial, because when any religion has only one founder, that person is “unique” for that religion. But outside the bounds of Christian faith, there is nothing at all unique about Jesus. Other religions are equally acceptable paths to God. Hence, the founders of these other religions are as unique in their way as Jesus is in his. Jesus’ uniqueness is relative, not absolute.
THE DEPENDABILITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
I believe that Hick’s claims as we have reviewed them here function more as examples of how pluralists hope to counter historic Christian thinking about Jesus with alternative ways of thinking. Before any of Hick’s claims can command respect, it will be necessary—sooner or later—for him to go beyond making dogmatic assertions to forging real arguments. We have now come upon the first of those arguments: he attacks the documents that Christians use to ground their belief in a divine Christ.
Hick believes that attempts to speak informatively about Jesus on the basis of solid information encounter great confusion and uncertainty in the biblical sources. In his view, “New Testament scholarship has shown how fragmentary and ambiguous are the data available to us as we try to look back across nineteen and a half centuries, and at the same time how large and how variable is the contribution of the imagination to our ‘pictures’ of Jesus.” 18
Hick’s Historical Skepticism
Hick falls back on a number of old and outdated attacks on the reliability and integrity of the New Testament documents. He alleges that the data Christians appeal to are incomplete and indecisive as we look back over two millennia of history at the “largely unknown man of Nazareth.” 19
This adoption of historical criticism is understandable, given Hick’s objectives. If he can present a halfway plausible case that the historical Jesus is unknown or even unknowable, perhaps he can make it appear that the Christian doctrines he dislikes can be separated from any foundation in historical truth. Yet he is surprisingly silent about the New Testament scholars whom he enlists in support of his skepticism about the historical Jesus. Our not knowing exactly whom he has in mind makes any evaluation of his claim rather difficult. If Hick really were knowledgeable about New Testament scholarship, he would probably be less dogmatic on the subject, for serious biblical scholars are deeply divided on the issues that promote his skepticism. It would appear, however, that he has in view either proponents of the form-critical approach to the New Testament or proponents of the method known as redaction-criticism. While both schools of thought have fueled skepticism about the historical Jesus, they both also have tended to fade from center stage. This fact certainly makes it appear as though Hick’s position is based on outdated scholarship. Even more ironic is the fact that neither of these two methodologies entails Hick’s kind of skepticism apart from considerable reliance on questionable presuppositions.
Form-Criticism
Proponents of form-criticism viewed the Gospels as the products of a long and complex process by which an original collection of oral traditions about Jesus came to be preserved because of their practical relevance for the church at a time some distance removed from eyewitness testimony. Form-critics emphasized the role of the Gospels as interpretations of Jesus’ life and teaching. They deemphasized any search for objective, dispassionate, eyewitness reports of what the church believed about Jesus at the time the events supposedly occurred. The extent to which the Gospels were reliable sources of information about the historical Jesus became a question to which form-critics gave different, often conflicting answers.
While “New Testament scholarship”—a term Hick uses repeatedly—has moved well beyond form-criticism, the method had some positive value. As a neutral method, it helped produce some valuable insights. 20 Its more debatable side became apparent when the neutral method became mixed with negative, destructive presuppositions. The historical skepticism that Hick may have picked up from some form-critics was not a conclusion mandated by the method but a presupposition linked to the method by theological liberals already inclined toward such a view.
By itself, form-criticism does not oblige anyone to conclude that the early church invented its stories about Jesus. The method has been adopted by people who believe the stories were accurate recollections of what Jesus did and said and so were preserved because of their relevance for some later life-situation in the church. Historian A. N. Sherwin-White comments, “It is astonishing that while Graeco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century study of the Gospel narratives, starting from no less promising material, has taken so gloomy a turn in the development of form-criticism that the more advanced exponents of it apparently maintain…that the historical Christ is unknowable and the history of his mission cannot be written.” 21
The real problem in all this is not with form-criticism per se, but with the undefended assumption that the Gospels witness primarily to the life-situation of the church at some later stage of its history and only secondarily to the historical Jesus. But surely it is consistent with the form-critical method to recognize both the role that a later life-situation might have had in preserving a tradition and the reality of the historical events to which the tradition points.
Instead of assuming that the early church fabricated stories about Jesus to help it deal with its problems, it makes better sense to assume that practical relevance led the church to preserve statements originally made by Jesus. D. M. Baillie, for one, complains that it seldom seemed to occur to some form-critics “that the story may have been handed on simply or primarily because it was true, because the incident had actually taken place in the ministry of Jesus, and was therefore of great interest to his followers, even if they sometimes failed to understand it.” 22
It is one thing to note that the Gospel writers selected from the material available to them and applied it to practical uses. It is quite another to suggest that they felt no constraints against inventing new traditions if doing so suited some practical purpose. Selectivity does not entail creativity.
A pivotal issue in the debate is where to place the burden of proof. Skeptics argue that the burden of proof rests on those who regard the biblical sources as authentic. But why should it not be the skeptic who has the burden of proof? Why not presume that if anything is to be proved, it must be the inauthenticity of Jesus’ sayings? I could go on in regard to this widely repudiated theory, 23 but it should be obvious that the assured results of “New Testament scholarship” of this kind provides extremely weak grounds for Hick’s historical skepticism. But perhaps he draws his skepticism from the second school we have mentioned, redaction-criticism.
Redaction-Criticism
While form-critics concentrated on smaller independent units of material within the Gospels, redaction-critics were more interested in the Gospels as literary wholes. They viewed the Gospel writers as more than mere compilers and arrangers; rather, they were theologians whose arrangement of material was affected by their theological interests and their intentions.
But why should this lead us to assume that the Gospel writers invented any of their material? It need not. Although it is easy to identify theological interests at work in the Gospels, it requires a whole set of additional presuppositions to conclude that the Evangelists produced only imaginative interpretations of Jesus with loose or even nonexistent historical ties.
As with form-criticism, a detailed account of redaction-criticism would take us far afield from the study at hand. Our discussion should make it clear that form-criticism and redaction-criticism are not necessarily incompatible with either a high view of Scripture or the conviction that the New Testament picture of Jesus is grounded on trustworthy historical data. Hick’s appeal to “New Testament scholarship”—as though this single expression somehow legitimizes one of his basic claims against New Testament Christology—does more than paper over his begging the question. It also shows how inadequate Hick’s grasp of New Testament scholarship really is, a fact that will become even more evident as we continue the discussion about Christology.
“Behold How Much the Skeptic Knoweth”
There is an ironic twist in the way Hick builds his case for skepticism about the Jesus of history. If we take Hick at his word, the New Testament is profoundly unreliable as a source of historical information about Jesus. But it is important to link this skepticism with all that Hick himself claims to know about the historical Jesus.
Early in 1993, R. Douglas Geivett attended a lecture given by Hick in Indianapolis. Hick pointed to Jesus as a powerful example of a person who holds Hick’s own view of salvation. It occurred to Geivett that “Hick’s moderately high view of Jesus as a paradigmatic saint depends upon our having reliable historical data. In other words, the authentic Jesus must be discernible in the Gospel record if Hick is entitled to regard him with the kind of respect he does.” 24
Geivett recognized that someone should ask Hick about his criterion for selecting which biblical data are authentic and which are not. His exchange with Hick proves to be quite illuminating.
Geivett observed that the biblical record shows Jesus saying and doing things that many people would regard as incompatible with Hick’s allegedly saintly Jesus. Hick asked for an example or two. As Geivett relates it,
I referred to places where it is alleged that Jesus drove the money-changers from the temple with a whip and confronted the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his day in very strong terms (calling them “whitewashed tombs”). Hick’s reply was twofold. First, he said he was prepared to identify these reports as gradual additions to the tradition. Second, he indicated that if Jesus really did act in the way described in these instances, then “he was appallingly anti-Semitic.” 25
It appears that Hick suffers from a blind spot or two. As Geivett observes, “Clearly, Hick’s own moral intuitions have become a control on what he is willing to acknowledge as an authentic account of what Jesus said and did. Never mind the historical and manuscript evidence, and the difficulty of picking and choosing among pericopes.” 26 And never mind about consistency within Hick’s own system of thought! It appears that Hick’s only criterion for distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic biblical material is compatibility with his own position.
Hick’s Claims About the Evolution of Early Christian Belief
Hick contends that the church’s understanding of Jesus evolved from an early commitment to him as a powerful person in whom they sensed the presence of God into increasingly complex theological constructions about Jesus as Son of God, then as God the Son, and finally as the Second Person of the Trinity. Although these kinds of claims were popular decades ago, scholars have more recently declared such theories untenable. 27
First, British scholar C. F. D. Moule has found some weaknesses in Hick’s views, especially in the claim that neither Jesus nor his early followers regarded him as divine. Moule disputes Hick’s idea—that the evolutionary course of Christology borrowed significantly from beliefs outside of Christianity—as being inconsistent with the New Testament. Moule argues instead that the early Christian recognition of Jesus as divine reflected a pattern in which “the various estimates of Jesus reflected in the New Testament [are], in essence, only attempts to describe what was already there from the beginning. They are not successive additions of something new, but only the drawing out and articulating of what is there.” 28 From the very start, Moule insists, Jesus was someone who could be appropriately described in the very ways he came to be described during the years in which the New Testament was written, that is, as “Lord” and “God.” 29
Second, German New Testament scholar Martin Hengel provides evidence for the claim that the early church called Jesus the “Son of God” during the years between A.D. 30 and 50. 30
It seems clear that Hick will have to present a much stronger case than he has set forth so far if he hopes to persuade evangelicals that the deity of Christ is a metaphysical theory constructed late in the first century. 31
The Positive Evidence That Hick Ignores
Sir Norman Anderson faults Hick for greatly exaggerating “the paucity of positive evidence we have about the one to whom he refers as the ‘largely unknown man of Nazareth.’” 32 Hick ignores Jesus’ own statements about his coming death, as attested by the Synoptic writers (Matt. 20:17 – 19; 26:12f.; Mark 10:33f.; Luke 18:31 – 34). He ignores Jesus’ act of forgiving sins, an act in which Jesus acted as God (Mark 2:8 – 12). When Jesus forgave people, he went beyond what any mere human is able to do. Any of us can forgive people for the things they do to us. Jesus did that, of course; but he also forgave people for the sins they had committed against others! In all these cases, Jesus acted as though the sins against other humans were violations of his holy law and thus sins against him as well.
Paul’s earliest letters, usually dated to about two decades after the Resurrection, reveal the existence of a developed Christology. This shows that the high view of Christ to which Hick objects can be found in documents that many scholars consider the earliest of all New Testament writings. 33 In 2 Corinthians 13:14 Paul affirms Jesus’ standing as God (as part of the Trinity). In Philippians 2:5 – 11 he claims Jesus’ equality with God. In 1 Thessalonians 1:10 he presents Jesus as God’s only medium of deliverance. It is impossible to explain away such statements as late-first-century theorizing.
Nor should anyone overlook the contradictions in Hick’s position, a point already noted. After asserting his skepticism about the historical Jesus, Hick fills his writings with numerous claims about how this largely unknown Jesus still manages to disclose God’s presence and love. Hick amazes us with all that he knows about the “unknown Nazarene.”
Hick and the Fourth Gospel
Hick’s dislike for the fourth gospel is understandable, given its strong and unequivocal support for the deity of Christ (John 10:30; 14:6, 9). If Jesus really said the things attributed to him in the fourth gospel, Hick’s efforts to attack the high Christology that grounds exclusivism would be doomed. According to Hick, Christology must not and cannot be based on the supposition that the historical Jesus really said what John’s gospel attributes to him.
But Hick’s claim that the fourth gospel rewrites Jesus’ teaching is groundless. As C. F. D. Moule has shown, a supernatural Christology is clearly present in the Synoptic Gospels. 34 Even if Hick could get rid of the fourth gospel, his problems would remain.
All this shows the extent to which Hick’s attack on the church’s Christology depends on his question-begging appeal to certain unnamed New Testament scholars whose positions are at the very least contradicted by scholars of equal reputation. But Hick ignores any New Testament authority who disagrees with his prejudices. Anyone consulting the New Testament scholars cited in my notes will quickly discover how badly outdated both Hick and his authorities are. The rest of his assertions noted earlier in this chapter are pure speculation and exercises in liberal dogmatism with no credibility. 35
HICK’S ATTACK ON THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST
One final issue must be examined, even though it will entail a long and somewhat technical discussion. That issue is Hick’s attack on the doctrine of Christ’s two natures, human and divine.
Christians use the word Incarnation to express their belief that the birth of Jesus Christ marked the entrance of the eternal and divine Son of God into the human race. The Incarnation is an essential Christian belief. If this doctrine is false, the Christian faith is false. Correct thinking about Jesus Christ diminishes neither his full and complete humanity nor his full and complete deity. Jesus Christ is God—let there be no mistake about this. But he is also human. Any wavering on either claim results in a defective Christology and a heretical faith.
We are not surprised, then, when opponents of the historic Christian faith take aim at this core doctrine. The Incarnation is an inviting target, not only because it is a central belief, but also because it seems susceptible to the charge that this is one point where Christians believe a logical contradiction. Hick echoes this charge when he states that claims that Jesus is both God and man are as self-contradictory and meaningless as statements that a drawn figure is a square circle. 36 To him, the doctrine of Christ’s two natures is clearly a logical contradiction and hence necessarily false.
The general line of Hick’s thought goes as follows: The Christian God has attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, incorporeality, and sinlessness. God also exists necessarily, which means, among other things, that there can be neither beginning nor end to his existence. Moreover, these properties belong to God essentially or necessarily, which is to say that if God were to lose any of these essential properties, he would cease to be God. A being cannot be God if he lacks omnipotence, omniscience, and the like.
But when we reflect on the nature of humanness, we encounter creatures with precisely the opposite properties. Human beings are not omnipotent, omniscient, incorporeal, or sinless. Nor do we exist necessarily. Our existence is contingent—that is, dependent on many things other than ourselves. Given these seemingly obvious incompatibilities between God and man, how could any being possibly be both God and man?
This is a serious difficulty. Developing an appropriate response to Hick’s challenge will require hard thinking about complex issues. Thomas Morris, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, has sought a solution to the problem that leaves the two-natures doctrine intact. 37 Morris’s argument has two parts. First, he attempts to show that the two-natures doctrine does not entail a logical contradiction. Second, he presents a theory that he hopes will make the doctrine easier to understand.
Some scholars question the second part of Morris’s argument as verging on an ancient heresy known as Nestorianism. 38 Because of these reservations, I will not deal with that second argument in this book.
The fact is, if Morris succeeds in the first part, it does not matter what happens in the second. A successful defense of the two-natures doctrine from the charge of logical inconsistency will stand on its own. It is one thing for a doctrine about the eternal God to surpass human understanding (Rom. 11:33 – 35; Job 11:7 – 8; Isa. 55:8 – 9); it is quite another for that belief to lack logical coherence. Just because something is above reason, it does not follow that it is against reason. Morris’s defense of the logical coherence of the two-natures doctrine succeeds even if his more ambitious attempt to explain the doctrine may not.
According to Morris, we can work our way out of the logical problem if we first understand and then properly apply three philosophical distinctions, namely,
1.The distinction between essential and nonessential properties;
2.The distinction between essential and common properties; and
3.The distinction between being fully human and merely human.
Essential and Nonessential Properties
A property is a feature or characteristic of something. We can identify many of the properties of Socrates simply by filling in the blank in the following sentence: “Socrates is __________.” All these terms denote properties or traits of Socrates: “bald,” “citizen of Athens,” “honorable,” “short,” “the husband of Xanthippe.” Everything has properties, and one way we refer to those properties is by using them as predicates applied to a given subject.
Next, we must recognize that properties come in two types, essential and nonessential. Consider a red ball. The color of the object is nonessential in the sense that if we somehow changed the color to yellow or green, the object would still be a ball. But with a ball, the property of roundness is an essential property. We cannot have a ball that is not round. 39 If we change this feature of our object, it is no longer a ball.
Put in its simplest terms, an essential property is one that cannot be changed or lost without the object in question ceasing to be the kind of thing it is. Roundness is an essential property of being a ball. When an object that once was a member of the class of all balls loses its roundness, it also loses its membership in that class.
A number of properties are essential to the being of God, including at least the following: necessary existence, omnipotence, omniscience, and sinlessness. Any being lacking these and the other essential properties of deity could not be God. Obviously, then, when Christians affirm that Jesus is God, they are also affirming that Jesus possesses eternally and necessarily all the essential properties of God. That much is easy.
Matters become more difficult when we try to identify the essential properties of a human being. Aristotle thought that rationality (thinking and reasoning) was an essential property of humans. Rationality certainly seems to be one property among others that make up the essence of a human being, that set humans apart from other creatures on our planet.
In his criticism of the Incarnation, Hick makes a crucial error in believing that such properties as lacking omnipotence, lacking omniscience, and lacking sinlessness are also essential in some way to humanness. But to proceed further with our argument we must first introduce the distinction between essential properties and common properties.
Essential Properties and Common Properties
What Morris calls common properties are often mistaken for essential properties. This error is the basis for believing that the doctrine of the Incarnation entails a contradiction. A common property is any property that human beings typically possess without also being essential. Morris gives the example of having ten fingers. Because almost every human has ten fingers, it is a common human property. But clearly, having ten fingers is not essential to being a human being. A person can lose one or more fingers and still be a human being. Therefore the common human property of having ten fingers is not an essential property.
Likewise, we could say that living on earth is a common human property. But it is conceivable that at some time in the future, some people will be born and live out their entire lives on other planets. So once again, a property that we have found common to all people turns out not to be essential.
Now, we could say that all of us—each human being apart from Jesus—are characterized by properties that are the counterparts of such divine properties as omnipotence and omniscience. But on what basis can we say that these limitations are somehow essential to our humanness? These limitations are possibly only common human properties, not essential ones.
Being Fully Human and Being Merely Human
Morris explains that “An individual is fully human [in any case where] that individual has all essential human properties, all the properties composing basic human nature. An individual is merely human if he has all those properties plus some additional limitation properties as well, properties such as that of lacking omnipotence, that of lacking omniscience, and so on.” 40
Orthodox Christians, Morris adds, insist on the claim that “Jesus was fully human without being merely human.” 41 This means two things: (1) Jesus possessed all the properties that are essential to being a human being, and (2) Jesus also possessed all the properties that are essential to deity. Morris suggests that the properties Hick makes so much of and insists are essential to humanity (such as lacking omniscience) are simply being confused with common properties.
Once Christians understand these distinctions about properties they are equipped to counter challenges such as those of John Hick that orthodox Christology is self-contradictory. The orthodox understanding of the Incarnation expresses the claims that (1) Jesus Christ is fully God—that is, he possesses all the essential properties of God, (2) Jesus Christ is also fully human—that is, he possesses all the essential properties of a human being, none of which turn out to be limiting properties, and (3) Jesus Christ was not merely human—that is, he did not possess any of the limiting properties that are in fact complements of the divine attributes. In the face of these distinctions, the contradiction Hick is concerned about disappears.
Hick’s Response to Morris
John Hick apparently saw the strength in Morris’s rebuttal to the charge that the doctrine of the Incarnation is logically incoherent and responded to it in 1989 in a very long review article. 42 Just as Morris’s argument had two parts, so Hick’s response has two distinct sections. It is noteworthy that almost eighty percent of Hick’s article deals with Morris’s less than satisfactory efforts to explain the Incarnation. But many Christians themselves are not interested in defending this second part of Morris’s argument because of its tendencies toward Nestorianism.
What is ironic about Hick’s long critique of Morris’s second argument is the way it mirrors ancient orthodox attacks on Nestorianism. This leaves us with a situation in which Hick echoes the thinking of ancient orthodox Christians but mistakenly believes these arguments advance his attack on the Incarnation. Therefore a traditional or conservative Christian could readily agree with the last eleven pages of Hick’s article without accepting Hick’s conclusion. 43 But no matter how instructive and interesting that discussion may be, it seems to be irrelevant to the claim that the two-natures doctrine is logically inconsistent.
So this leaves us with Hick’s four-page treatment of the first part of Morris’s argument. But what Hick regards as a refutation of Morris is hardly a model of clarity or persuasiveness. It is at best an attempt to “muddy the waters.” Hick does this by trying to counter Morris’s distinctions (such as that between common and essential properties) with some puzzling examples (such as being fully human and being fully an alligator). This avails little since Hick himself admits that Morris can escape his challenge in a variety of ways 44 —which leaves us wondering why Hick goes to the trouble. We are left with a two-part reply to Morris in which part one is by Hick’s own admission inconclusive and in which part two is irrelevant.
Christians can safely conclude, then, that even though they cannot understand everything about the Incarnation and the relationship between Christ’s human and divine natures, the doctrines are logically coherent and Hick’s attempted rebuttal fails.
SUMMARY
This is not the case with Hick’s two major arguments, namely, his skepticism about the historical dependability of the New Testament and his allegation that the Incarnation involves Christians in a logically contradictory theory. My response to the first argument is that Hick relies on outdated critical theories and doubtful sources to make his case; my response to the second argument is that his failure to make adequate distinctions about the properties of humanness dooms his charge that the Incarnation is a self-contradictory and logically incoherent doctrine. I conclude that Hick’s assault on the historical and orthodox Christian understanding of Jesus Christ fails.
