One of the classic challenges of Christology is trying to articulate how Jesus Christ is both and at once fully human and fully divine. There have been 2000 years of debate on this issue, and much effort was expended especially in the early church to preserve the truth of this seeming contradiction. One of the classic definitions of the Christian faith came at the ecumenical council of Chalcedon in 451, with the affirmation of the "hypostatic union," wherein it was upheld that the one person Jesus Christ fully maintained a divine nature and a human nature. Since that declaration, theologians and philosophers have been trying to metaphysically explain this reality. And some have been more convincing than others.
Marc A. Hight and Joshua Bohannon are two contemporary philosophers who claim that the metaphysical philosophy of the immaterialist George Berkley (an 18th century Anglican bishop) is the best way to explain the nature of reality and the nature of the Incarnation. (Immaterialsim claims that there are no material things; everything is immaterial, consisting of ideas.) However, they offer, in my estimation at
least, a curious rationale for their study and adoption of an immaterialist ontology. In their
article, “The Son More Visible: Immaterialism and the Incarnation,” they aim to
employ Berkeley’s immaterialist framework to offer a “more reasonable way” to
explain the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Doing so, they claim, will show that,
“there are strong reasons for thinking that if one wants to be a Christian one
ought to be an immaterialist.”[1] I find their rationale curious because
they want to affirm the mystery that is inherently necessary to the Christian
faith, but they insist on guarding against any hint of absurdity (i.e. anything
that is contrary to reason).
Immaterialism, they argue, provides enough reason to explain the mystery
of the Incarnation (and by extension the Christian faith), while leaving enough
of the mystery intact for faith to fill the gap. Just what constitutes “enough” reason and “enough” mystery
to be palatable is not explicated.
And I find this curious (if not unsatisfactory).
I
am much more sympathetic to an understanding of the Incarnation that is willing
to fully embrace the mystery of, in the phrasing of Chalcedon, the hypostatic
union. That Jesus Christ is fully
human and fully divine is indeed perplexing, and there is certainly room for
reasonable debate about how this mysterious union could come about. But this union is a mystery which no
amount of reasoning can satisfy. I
certainly am not advocating for abandoning the theological, historical, and
philosophical task of investigating the mysteries of the Incarnation, but I
want to be careful to remember that they are first and foremost mysteries. In this sense, I find a theologian like
Dietrich Bonhoeffer helpful. His
“Lectures on Christology,”[2]
delivered in the summer semester of 1933 at the University of Berlin, are
careful to affirm the mystery of the hypostatic union while offering compelling
(and reasonable) explanation and critique of pertinent historical and
philosophical issues.
So I return to the question of finding the balance between the mystery and the reasonableness of, specifically, the Incarnation. Both Hight and Bohannon and Bonhoeffer operate within an internal threshold of what is appropriately reasonable and what should be left to mystery in the Christian faith generally, and the Incarnation specifically. Both offer thoughtful and coherent arguments, and both offer something productive to the present conversation on models of the hypostatic union. Just how convincing their arguments are, I suppose, are left to how much mystery I can stomach. The issues that Hight and Bohannon present really come down to identifying one's level of commitment to reason and mystery as governing principles. Hight and Bohannon offer important (and largely cohesive and coherent) inner arguments in favor of immaterialism, but I believe their argument is flawed from the beginning because of their assumption that the hypostatic union as traditionally conceived is "absurd." Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, makes as his starting point the "incomprehensibility" of the Incarnation. He searches and strives to understand the comprehensible, always knowing that it is most reasonable to grant mystery the upper hand. In a very real sense, Hight and Bohannon (following Berkeley) are most interested in the "how" question of the Incarnation. However, if we take our cue from Bonhoeffer, we keep our focus on the "who" question, and that which is absurd and incomprehensible becomes not only reasonable, but alive and at work in the reality of our world here and now.
