Master 273: Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, Part 4

In his contribution to the volume, Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, Garrett J. DeWeese offers helpful suggestions about how to think about the two natures of Jesus Christ.  That Jesus had two natures (divine and human) is something that Christians affirm on the basis of strong evidence and support, but that does not mean that how this can be is clearly understood.  In "One Person, Two Natures: Two Metaphysical Models of the Incarnation," DeWeese looks specifically at how to think about the mind and will of Jesus Christ, in light of his having two natures.

When subjected to certain scientific experiments, light exhibits wave properties.  When subjected to other scientific experiments, light exhibits particle properties.  The wave properties of light are used to explain certain phenomena while the particle properties of light are used to explain other phenomena, but how any single "entity" (say, light or an electron) can exhibit both of these properties remains unclear.  Still, the fact that we cannot explain why or how light can exhibit these distinct (and some might think, incompatible) sets of properties does not show that there is something incoherent about ascribing both sets of properties to the entities in question.  It just shows that our models and ways of understanding those entities fall short of adequately capturing their complete and true character.

A similar concession is called for when we try to wrap our minds around the two natures of Jesus Christ.  On good evidence, Christians affirm that Jesus Christ is fully divine--God, the Son, the second person of the Trinity.  Simultaneously, and on good evidence, Christians affirm that Jesus Christ is fully human.  That Jesus is both fully divine and fully human is essential for the work that He came to earth to accomplish, but how any single "entity" can be both divine and human remains unclear.  Still, the fact that we cannot explain why or how Jesus can be both divine and human does not show that there is something incoherent about ascribing both natures to Him.  It just shows that our models and ways of understanding Jesus fall short of adequately capturing His complete and true character.

Granting that, it's still perfectly legitimate and appropriate for Christians to pursue a deeper and more adequate understanding of Jesus Christ's nature(s), just as it is perfectly legitimate and appropriate for scientists to pursue a deeper and more adequate understanding of the nature(s) of elementary particles.  Even if we cannot make things perfectly clear, we can get clearer or at least clearer-in-a-way-that's-helpful-for-various-purposes.  What does it mean, then, to say that Jesus had (and has) two natures?  How can one person have two natures--and as radically different as the human and divine?  Is that idea even coherent?

Now you might wonder, Why do we even bother with such obscure-sounding questions?  All this talk of 'natures' and 'persons' might seem so far removed from anything we might care about.  But it's actually just a way of helping us to grapple with the character of Christ.  If you study the New Testament writings you'll find that they point to two "somethings" in Jesus.  He was human, but He was not just human, for He did things that no mere human could do.  He did things that only God could do, but He was not just God, for the particular kind of salvation that He came to offer or enact was one that required Him to be able to do things like die a human death.  The weight of the evidence pushes us to confess that there are clearly two "somethings" in Jesus.  But what are those "somethings"?  Were there two persons in Jesus?  Was there a divine person and a human person inhabiting the body of Jesus?  For various reasons (I'll leave you to explore that on your own) that understanding of the "two-ness" of Christ was rejected.  This picture of Jesus makes Him out to be something schizophrenic.  The New Testament writers indicate that there was a unity to Jesus that would be lacking if two distinct "persons" were inhabiting His one body.  Could it be that there was really only one "something" in Christ that blended the divine and human into something new and different from either of those?  For other reasons, that view was also rejected.  How then can we make sense of the "two-ness" in Christ while preserving the unit (or "one-ness") in Christ.  It must be that in some respects, Jesus is "two," and in other respects, Jesus is "one."  The church adopted the vocabulary of "nature" and "person" to refer to those respects in which Jesus is "two" and "one."  Jesus is one person with two natures.  Light exhibits wave properties and particle properties.

If you wish, you can leave that at that.  But the philosophically-minded (like the scientifically-minded) person at least wants to try to understand how these things ("two natures" and "one person," "wave properties" and "particle properties") fit together.  And there's also the important task of responding to the skeptic who asserts that the notion of two natures and one person is flatly incoherent.  The theologian may not be able to show how two natures and one person do fit together, but he or she can attempt to show that their connection is not flatly incoherent.

DeWeese addresses himself to this kind of task as it pertains, particularly, to Jesus' will.  As he tells the history, the Eutychians were concerned to preserve, in their thinking about Christ, His unity (the "one-ness" and thus rejected the two-nature language of Chalcedon and held that Christ had just one nature.  (Partially) motivating this concern may have been the thought that to affirm two natures in Christ entailed affirming two persons in Christ--a divine person who willed to endure suffering and a human person who resisted such suffering.  (Such a view sometimes seems to be operating implicitly behind the way people talk about Jesus' distress in the Garden of Gethsemane.)  Ultimately the Eutychian view was anathematized but there remained the question of how to preserve, conceptually, the unity of purpose and will in Jesus when there are also these two "somethings" in Jesus.

DeWeese writes, "The opinion that prevailed at Constantinople [III, A.D. 680] was that a will properly belongs to a nature.  Since Chalcedon made clear that Jesus had two natures, it followed that he had two wills.  To deny this was essentially to deny the incarnation.  In support of this line of reasoning, the bishops of the sixth council, following the soteriological maxim of Gregory of Nazianzus, "The unassumed is unhealed," argued that Christ must have a human will, or else our wills could not be redeemed.  To safeguard against the impious suggestion that Jesus might have been internally conflicted by his two wills, the council explained that the human will was always subordinate to the divine will." (124)

I won't go into the details of his argument.  (Go read his essay yourself.  It's great!)  DeWeese rejects this two-wills picture/model.  In response, he suggests that the will (along with mind and consciousness) is a feature of "persons" and not of "natures."  So the will belongs to what Christ is one of rather than what He has two of.  In this way, he can affirm that Christ had only one will without undermining the idea that Christ had fully divine and fully human natures.  Neither nature was lacking in anything with respect to the will because the will is not a feature of a nature.

DeWeese goes on to lay out the details of his view, defend it against objections (including the hypothetical objection of heresy), and present some of its practical implications.  He does not answer all the questions that might be raised by his view.  One big question, for instance, has to do with understanding how the mind of Christ could simultaneously operate in a manner consistent with His divine and human natures.  It is part of God's nature that He is omniscient.  But it seems to be essential to human nature that any (and every) person is NOT omniscient.

DeWeese does say something about this particular point.  "[T]he contemporary model explains the "self-emptying" (Phil 2:5) as Christ's voluntary self-limitation to exercise his personhood through his human nature, gaining information about the world through the perceptual faculties of his human body, learning and storing memories through the instrumentality of his human brain, living a perfect human life by his perfect obedience and complete dependence on the Holy Spirit.

"Certainly it becomes difficult to press an explanation of the relationship of the divine and the human in Christ much further, but this difficulty is shared equally, as we have seen, by the dyothelite [i.e. two-will] model.  On the contemporary model, we could still meaningfully speak about the "human mind" of Christ, but we would not be referring to a faculty or entity, and we would no longer be tempted to think of it as another person.  The "human mind" of Christ refers to the mode of operation of the mind of the Logos functioning within the constraints of (voluntarily limited by) Jesus' human nature and the organs of a human body.  At the same time, the mind of the Logos, functioning gloriously and perfectly according to the divine nature, never sleeps, never ceases to be omniscient.  But rather than constituting two minds, we should understand the human mind as sort of a limited subset of the divine mind." (146)

This is one of the main sections where I'm tempted to disagree with DeWeese or at least to point out that much more needs to be said.  DeWeese doesn't actually say (in this essay) what's essential to human nature.  Obviously one can't cover everything in a single essay, but I raise this point for the following reason.  Certainly there are limitations and infirmities that are essential to human nature.  But there are also limitations and infirmities that we have and experience because of our fallen and sinful condition.  Now Jesus took to Himself a fully human nature, but He did not take to Himself a sinful human nature.  Often people will assert that certain exercises of Jesus divine power would be incompatible with His human nature--but I want to question whether they would be incompatible with a human nature as such or just with a sinful human nature.  To what extent are we in a position, fallen as we are, to judge what is or is not compatible with a human nature?  That the divine person could be united with a human nature, that a human person could be adopted as a son of God, that the human body could serve as a temple of the Holy Spirit--these ideas rocked the conceptual world of the first-century believers.  Our thinking about Christ's human nature, I think, should take this into account.  (In fact, if anyone is in a position to serve as the model or paradigm of human nature, it's Jesus.)

This last section takes us beyond the material that DeWeese covers in his own chapter.  As preparation for these further explorations, look at his essay.

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God is in this place,

And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.