An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology by Thomas H. McCall

Author:Thomas H. McCall [McCall, Thomas H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830899302
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

“I Am My Body, Broken for You”? Physicalist Christology as a Case Study

While the last case study showed how analytic theology informed by the tradition of Christian doctrine has the resources to respond to criticisms of the classical doctrine of the incarnation, this one takes a different tack: this case study shows how analytic theology that is informed by classical Christian orthodoxy might seek to question and correct a recent analytic proposal.

Merricks’s physicalist Christology. The doctrine of the incarnation stands at the heart of historic Christian faith. For centuries Christians have taken this to mean that the eternal Logos, the second person of the Holy Trinity, became human without ceasing to be divine. The Chalcedonian Formula provides a historic expression of this doctrine. As Brian Leftow summarizes the doctrinal claim, “Chalcedonian orthodoxy has it that this involves one person, God the Son, having two natures, divine and human.”75 Such claims raise all sorts of questions, of course, and they generate various metaphysical models of the possibility of incarnation.

One recent and very interesting proposal is this: in the incarnation, the Son is identical with the body of Jesus Christ. Trenton Merricks argues forcefully for this claim. Merricks recognizes that “compositionalist” models are “arguably the historically dominant theory,” but he dismisses them because he has a hard time seeing how the such accounts might avoid Nestorianism (because he cannot see how the individual human nature assumed by Christ could fail to be a separate person).76 As a convinced physicalist, he is certain that the incarnate Son “has a body in the same sense that you and I do” and indeed is related to his body just as all humans are related to their bodies.77 In addition to other reasons for rejecting mind-body dualism,78 he thinks that the incarnation itself “casts doubt on dualism.”79 Instead, Merricks endorses physicalist Christology: “You have a body if and only if you are identical with that body. I assume that, in the Incarnation, God the Son is related to the body of Jesus just as you and I are related to our respective bodies. So, given physicalism, God the Son, in the Incarnation, is identical with the body of Jesus. That is, in becoming a human, he became a body.”80

Being identical with the body does not entail that there are no mental properties; Merricks thinks that his version of physicalism is consistent with “property dualism.”81 Nonetheless, physicalism “makes becoming identical with (and so having) a body necessary for becoming human.”82 He concludes that “the Incarnation points us toward physicalism,” and this “gives Christians good reasons to be physicalists.”83

In what follows, I argue that Merricks’s conclusion is much too hasty. Significant theological questions remain open for the proponent of Merricksian physicalist Christology, and more work needs to be done before his conclusion is established. Although his criticisms of dualist Christology are interesting and important, I do not focus on them here.84 Instead, I raise two broad challenges for Merricks’s proposal: more needs to be done to show that

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