Philosophy and Psychical Research by Thakur Shivesh C.;

Author:Thakur, Shivesh C.; [Thakur, Shivesh C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Psychical Research and Christology

It is, of course, an orthodox Christian belief that Christ was God. This is something which many people, myself included, find very difficult to accept. For one thing, God is supposed to have many attributes which Christ did not have, and vice versa. God is omnipotent, but Christ was not; Christ could walk, but God cannot. It is, however, a commonplace that those who say that Christ was God are simply putting in a paradoxical way some truth which they find very difficult to express satisfactorily otherwise. But what could this truth be? It may be that the mind of Christ stood in some especially intimate relation to the mind of God. God, because he is omniscient, must have known everything about Christ's thoughts, feelings and volitions, presumably without inferring them. Christ must, if the stories in the gospels and what he himself said are both true, have known a great deal about God's mind without inference. Furthermore, there is not the usual reason, in the case of God and Christ—namely, that they are associated with different bodies—for wishing to draw a clear-cut distinction between God's mind and Christ's; though Christ had a body, God does not, or not in any straightforward sense. If we also assume that there was a direct nonphysical causal connection between God's mind and Christ's (which there might have to be, since God does not have a body), and that one reason for wanting to say that a mental process of which we are not conscious is our own unconscious mental process, is that it has a direct effect on our own conscious mental processes, then there is perhaps some reason for thinking that the borderline between Christ's mind and God's was not clearly delineated. Hence there may be some reason for thinking that the question, ‘Were there two minds, or one?’ is not a clear question. It may follow from this that the question, ‘Were there two persons, or only one?’ is also not a clear question.

This suggestion has the difficulty that it must apply to everyone, not simply to Christ, in some degree, since God knows without inference the mental processes of everybody, and can never causally affect these mental processes via the manipulation of their owner's body when their owner has not got one.

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