Sunday, March 25, 2012

Extraterrestrial


I was toying with one way to model the hypostatic union. Like all analogies it has its limitations.

One common theme in SF stories in the alien who assumes human form. A body swap. He transfers his consciousness to a human host. Takes possession of a human brain and body. (These scenarios always presuppose something akin to interactionist Cartesian dualism.)

There are two basic variants on this theme. In one case you have hostile aliens who do this as a form of espionage. It's a prelude to invasion and conquest. They want to learn how humans think, feel, and react to probe human weaknesses. 

The hostile aliens have no genuine sympathy for humans. They only assume a human viewpoint for strategic and tactical reasons.

Sometimes this backfires. Some aliens go native. Switch sides. They come to truly empathize and identify with the human experience. They may fall in love with a human man or woman. The outsider becomes an insider.

They are viewed as traitors by their loyal comrades and superiors. Hunted down.

In another case you have friendly aliens who are more like explorers and cultural anthropologists. They are genuinely curious about what it's like to be human. Understanding humans from the inside out rather than the outside in. To experience a viewpoint other than their own, as a form of intellectual enrichment.

But, in general, aliens don't cease to be alien. They retain their memories. They retain an alien indexical viewpoint intact. But they also acquire a new and different indexical viewpoint. They simultaneously experience two perspectives rather than one, in a dialectical, inside/outside relationship.

Alan Culpepper, in his Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, classifies Jesus as a static character because (according to Culpepper) Jesus never changes. And there's some truth to that. In John's Gospel, Jesus always knows who he is and what he has to do.

However, it's simplistic to say Jesus is a static character. Jesus qua God is immutable, but Jesus qua God-man is subject to "character development." In some respects that's analogous to an alien who assumes human form. He retains his divine indexical perspective intact, but acquires a human indexical perspective. Jesus qua human is a dynamic character, and Jesus qua God-man is also a dynamic character, in a qualified sense (consistent with the immutability of the divine nature). The Reformed model of the communicatio idiomatum (over against the Lutheran).

1 comment:

  1. How about the interaction we see between the Apostles and the Lord and angels and men? Clearly you point about that with demons gives me the creepies!

    For instance, just to narrow the terms down to just men, Paul at 1 Corinthians 5 and Colossians 2? "...though I am absent in body,...".

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