Logical Proof of the Incarnation

The Metaphysics of Incarnation - ed. Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill, 2011

Incarnation is a central doctrine to Christianity: believers hold that Jesus was, in some way, identical with God whilst also being fully human. This doctrine raises a number of philosophical problems. This chapter gives an overview of some of these problems and the different ways in which Christian thinkers have sought to overcome them.

Faith and Philosophy, 1989

Hight and Bohannon have recently argued that an immaterialist ontology is more consonant with the doctrine of the Incarnation. I argue that their proposal is insufficiently motivated, as their objections to a substance dualist account of the incarnation are not compelling. I defend a concrete-parts Christology, which allows for materiality and immateriality to be exemplified by Christ in two different respects. I show how immaterialist and materialist objections that dualism cannot adequately account for the unity of the incarnate Christ can be overcome.

Asian Journal of Philosophy. Themes from Beall, 2023

In this paper, I respond to what I have called an epistemological objection to a dialetheist approach to the doctrine of the Incarnation, of which one example is Beall’s contradictory Christ. I discuss Anderson's book Paradox in Christian Theology, in which the author claims to account for the rationality of the doctrine of the Incarnation as a merely apparently contradictory doctrine, and I present my model, based on Anderson’s model, according to which the doctrine has the possibility to be rational by understanding it as genuinely contradictory. I show that this model fits perfectly well with the criteria that, according to Anderson, any model for the rationality of a paradoxical doctrine should meet. Beall does not address the problem of the rationality of the doctrine in his works about the contradictory Christ, and he asserts that he is not interested in it. However, I think that if he wants to make his theory more robust, less suspicious, and more convincing for theologians, philosophers, and ordinary people, he should consider this problem.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2023

This article aims to provide an elucidation of the doctrine of the Incarnation. A new 'reduplication strategy' and 'compositional model' is formulated through the utilisation of certain concepts and theses from contemporary metaphysics, which will enable the doctrine of the Incarnation to be explicated in a clear and consistent manner, and the oft-raised objections against it being fully dealt with.

An invited talk delivered at the Logos Institute of Analytic Theology at the University of St Andrews. The topic was on the coherence of the doctrine of the Incarnation. I sought to introduce my solution to the logical challenge against the doctrine of the incarnation and also my own metaphysical model of the incarnation (called the transformational model). This talk summarises my article on this topic published previously in IJPR (termed 'On the metaphysics of the incarnation'). Handouts for the talk are included in the file.

Verbum Vitae, 2021

The paper presents the latest achievements of analytic philosophers of religion in Christology. My goal is to defend the literal/metaphysical reading of the Chalcedonian dogma of the hypostatic union. Some of the contemporary Christian thinkers claim that the doctrine of Jesus Christ as both perfectly divine and perfectly human is self-contradictory (I present this point of view on the example of John Hick) and, therefore, it should be understood metaphorically. In order to defend the consistency of the conciliar theology, I refer to the work of, among others, Eleonore Stump, William Hasker, Peter Geach and Kevin Sharpe. As a result, I conclude that recent findings in analytic metaphysics provide an ontological scaffolding that explains away the objection of the incompatibility of the doctrine of the hypostatic union. In order to confirm this conclusion such metaphysical topics as properties attribution (what it means for an object to have a property), relation of identity (what it means for an object x to be identical with object y), and essentialism and kind membership (what it means for an object to belong necessarily to a kind) are scrutinized in detail.

The characteristic claim of Christianity, as codified at Chalcedon, is that God the Son, the second person ofthe Trinity, is numerically the same person as Jesus of Nazareth. This article raises three questions that appear to threaten the coherence of orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalism. First, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible natures? Second, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible non-nature properties? Third, how can there be one person if the concept of incarnation implies that one person incarnates himself as another person? The attempts of C. S. Lewis and T. V. Morris to deal with these difficulties are examined and found inconclusive. THE PROBLEM According to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, Christians believe that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, at a certain historical moment assumed human nature in Jesus of Nazareth, and did so without forsaking his divine nature. Orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalism (hereafter, OCI) implies an identity thesis: the person who is the Son or Logos (Word) is (identically) the person who is Jesus of Nazareth. The Logos is believed to be one person existing in two distinct natures, the one divine, the other human. But this poses a problem, or more precisely, a trinity of tightly interconnected problems: Pl) How can one person, hence one individual, exemplify seemingly incompatible natures? P2) How can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible non-nature properties? P3) How can there be only one person or hypostasis if, as is arguable, the very concept of Incarnation implies that one person incarnates himself in, and as, another person? The problems are distinct. (PI) would be solved ifit were shown that the divine and human natures are compossible, that is, possibly such as to be

The Heythrop Journal, 2007

JETS 68.1, 2025

Traditional accounts of the incarnation, accounts which maintain the true divinity and true humanity of Christ, have faced numerous criticisms across the history of the church, criticisms that have never entirely been resolved. What if the problem is not the claim of dual "natures" but rather the philosophical paradigm within which "nature" has been interpreted? In this article, it is argued that significant issues caused by the traditional dual-nature paradigm can be resolved through a conceptualist account of "nature." It is proposed that two things are said to share a nature, to be ontologically identical (the same sort of thing), when they share enough similarity that members of a sociolinguistic community will recognize them as the same sort of thing, that is, when the same mental act (signified by a universal term) will supposit for them both. After introducing the classic paradigm and the problems associated with it, conceptualism is proposed as a plausible solution to the problems of natural and personal identity and, as a result, a strong framework within which to tackle the classic problems associated with the incarnation. At the very least, the plausibility of conceptualism as an answer to pressing issues in the doctrine of the incarnation suggests that the problems are found not in the God-man claim but in a particular construal of the meaning of that claim.