A web discussion I was just in made me think of a few follow-up observations on my post of a week or two ago when I was discussing “logic” as a necessary attribute of God.
Lewis says somewhere that courage is not so much a separate virtue as it is the testing point of all the virtues. In a similar way, logic is not so much a separate attribute of God as it is foundational for all the attributes. Unless we affirm that A is A, and that A is cannot be not A, and that there is no middle ground between A and not A, we are all of us lost in our sins. And why?
Because unless we are assuming these “laws” of thought, we can have no attributes of God whatever. Unless A stays put, God can be holy and unholy both, God can exist and not exist, and God can be three Persons in one essences and 38 Persons in 3 essences. If you have a problem with this, you must be trapped in your Aristotelean categories.
Unfortunately, there are some who take the mysteries that surround doctrines like the hypostatic union and perichoresis and try to turn these mysteries into nonsense. But as Lewis (again) says somewhere, nonsense doesn’t cease to be nonsense simply because you preface it with the words “God can.”
The Person of Christ we confess is Jesus of Nazareth. The eternal Word of God was the one who was going to become a man. But the second Person of the Trinity was not from Nazareth before there was a Nazareth to be from. Jesus had a mother in 500 A.D. and the one who was to become Jesus did not have a mother in 500 B.C. In other words, the hypostatic union happened at a point in time. We cannot take this “happening” as a basis for arguing that it was always the case, and therefore didn’t need to happen. If we do, we are arguing for A and not A. When people do that, it makes it easier for those of us who have problems with their approach, because this means we can accept and reject them simultaneously. Tremendeously liberating, which is, as I suspect, the whole point.
The Person who “resulted” from the hypostatic union did not exist before that union. To argue that He did is to argue that the union accomplished nothing, and it is also to smuggle our poor crumpled up humanity into the realms of pre-creation eternality, a place where we have no business, and more than a little trouble breathing. The oldest temptation still has a barbed hook waiting for us under the bait of theological sophistication — ye shall be as God — and calling it something fancy like theosis doesn’t help. I would prefer to call that glorification, but I am actually okay with the higher octane language — but only so long as we always confess that for us men Arianism will always be true. There was a time when we were not. But we should keep a weather eye on those who want us to love using the term theosis. They might want to make it work retroactively, in order to ascend the holy mountain, and then before you know it, we have corrupted wisdom by reason of our brightness, and wham, down we go.
The sad fact is that there is now a subjectivist reservoir of relativism in the broader Christian Church, and a destructive and inexplicable openness to pomo thought, and in my view a great deal of this is caused by this handwaving and shoulder shrugging over the Trinity and Christology. Heady theology has a tendency to go to the heads of some. But how can we be partakers of the divine nature when we keep muddling our terms up like this? We should keep theosis on a short leash until after we are done with theological equivocation.
So when we are discussing these high matters, we should be careful to do two things. First, we should clothe ourselves with humility. We are like June bugs trying to understand the theory of special relativity, and it is slow going. The second thing we must do, if we want to make any progress at all, ever, is repent of changing definitions in the middle of our arguments. Person means Person, three means three, union means union, Creator means Creator, creature means creature, and Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t there before Jesus was born — and the eternal Word was.
Our salvation hinges on it.