The Presence Of Christ Is Not To Be Idly Inquired After

"The shepherds hasten; they desire to see with all the fervour of their intellect the advent of the Christ whom they have understood. For the presence of Christ is not to be idly inquired after. And for that reason, perhaps some who inquire after it do not deserve to find it, because they seek Christ indolently." (Bede, Calvin Kendall and Faith Wallis, translators and editors, Bede: Commentary On The Gospel Of Luke [Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2023], 159)

Christmas Resources 2022

I've written an article about how to concisely argue for a traditional Christian view of the childhood of Jesus. That's a good starting point for studying issues related to Christmas. After familiarizing yourself with the general principles discussed there, it would be useful to read an article I wrote about how Jesus viewed himself as the king of Isaiah 9:1-7 and framed his public ministry around that identity.

We've addressed many other Christmas issues over the years, and here are some examples:

All These Things Accrued To Us Through His Poverty

"Then he proceeds afterwards to the head and crown of his persuasion. 'For ye know the grace of our Lord, that though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that we through His poverty might become rich.' [2 Corinthians 8:9] 'For have in mind,' says he, 'ponder and consider the grace of God and do not lightly pass it by, but aim at realizing the greatness of it both as to extent and nature, and thou wilt grudge nothing of thine. He emptied Himself of His glory that ye, not through His riches but through His poverty, might be rich. If thou believest not that poverty is productive of riches, have in mind thy Lord and thou wilt doubt no longer. For had He not become poor, thou wouldest not have become rich. For this is the marvel, that poverty hath made riches rich.' And by riches here he meaneth the knowledge of godliness, the cleansing away of sins, justification, sanctification, the countless good things which He bestowed upon us and purposeth to bestow. And all these things accrued to us through His poverty. What poverty? Through His taking flesh on Him and becoming man and suffering what He suffered. And yet He owed not this, but thou dost owe to Him." (John Chrysostom, Homilies On Second Corinthians, 17:1)

The Greatness Of The Gospel

How we view the gospel affects our relationship with God, our relationships with other people, our priorities, our objectives, the sense of urgency we have, and many other aspects of life. It should be a foundational motivating factor every day of our lives. It's important that we have a high view of the gospel and think about it often, deeply, and in a multifaceted way. Here are some examples of authors down through the centuries commenting on certain portions of the gospel:

Faith Alone
He Gives Himself
The Incarnation
Gethsemane
Put On Trial
The Cross
The Tomb
The Resurrection
The Defeat Of Satan
Imputed Righteousness
The Benefits Of The Gospel

"An idea has long possessed the public mind, that a religious man can scarcely be a wise man. It has been the custom to talk of infidels, atheists, and deists, as men of deep thought and comprehensive intellect; and to tremble for the Christian controversialist, as if he must surely fall by the hand of his enemy. But this is purely a mistake; for the gospel is the sum of wisdom; an epitome of knowledge; a treasure-house of truth; and a revelation of mysterious secrets. In it we see how justice and mercy may be married; here we behold inexorable law entirely satisfied, and sovereign love bearing away the sinner in triumph. Our meditation upon it enlarges the mind; and as it opens to our soul in successive flashes of glory, we stand astonished at the profound wisdom manifest in it. Ah, dear friends! if ye seek wisdom, ye shall see it displayed in all its greatness; not in the balancing of the clouds, nor the firmness of earth's foundations; not in the measured march of the armies of the sky, nor in the perpetual motions of the waves of the sea; not in vegetation with all its fairy forms of beauty; nor in the animal with its marvellous tissue of nerve, and vein, and sinew: nor even in man, that last and loftiest work of the Creator. But turn aside and see this great sight!—an incarnate God upon the cross; a substitute atoning for mortal guilt; a sacrifice satisfying the vengeance of Heaven, and delivering the rebellious sinner. Here is essential wisdom; enthroned, crowned, glorified. Admire, ye men of earth, if ye be not blind; and ye who glory in your learning bend your heads in reverence, and own that all your skill could not have devised a gospel at once so just to God, so safe to man." (Charles Spurgeon, The C.H. Spurgeon Collection [Albany, Oregon: AGES Software, 1998], The Park Street Pulpit, Vol. 1, pp. 113-14)

That's just your interpretation!

A highly agitated performance by apostate Randal Rauser

https://randalrauser.com/2020/05/what-is-progressive-christianity-and-why-does-alisia-childers-think-its-so-dangerous/

1. Throughout the video, Rauser plays his dogeared hand about how conservative Christians collapse their interpretation of scripture into scripture itself. Yet his application of that distinction is totally one-sided inasmuch as he exempts his progressive interpretation from the distinction he urges on conservative Christians. The conservative understanding is just their interpretation whereas his progressive interpretation is true. 

2. He says the OT prophets had a false understanding of God because they didn't believe in the Incarnation or the possibility of an Incarnation. But that fails to distinguish between lacking belief in something, due to ignorance, and denying something. For instance, they didn't know that Jesus would be the messiah. That doesn't mean they disaffirmed the messiahship of Jesus. They just had no idea who Jesus was. They didn't know who the messiah was going to be at that level of biographical detail. But that hardly implies that they'd be opposed to Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic prophecy.

Notice how radical Rauser's position is. The messiahship of Jesus requires OT validation. Yet Rauser says OT prophets had a false concept of the messiah. Evidently he interprets the OT in unitarian terms. 

The question at issue isn't whether OT prophets were consciously Trinitarian but whether OT theism is consistent with or open to the revelation of the Trinity and Incarnation. 

In addition, while the OT witness of the Trinity is oblique, the OT contains many passages that dovetail with the more explicit witness to the Trinity. This isn't a reversal of OT theism.

A fundamental purpose of the OT is to correct false views of God. Pagan views. Not to substitute a different false view of God.

3. He also attacks the imprecatory psalms as expressing false views of God. That's another hobby horse of his. 

He says we should use Jesus as our standard of comparison to correct the OT. But that's duplicitous because, as he's expressed elsewhere, he regards Jesus as a fallible, timebound, culturally-conditioned teacher, based on Rauser's Kenotic Christology. Rauser's yardstick isn't Jesus but Rauser's moral intuitions. 

If possible, let this cup pass from me

As I've remarked on more than one occasion, our ignorance of the future cuts both ways. On the one hand, if we knew the future, we'd make different decisions. In that sense, the future we knew was a counterfactual future. 

Suppose, though, we couldn't change the future we knew because we only knew what was going to happen, but not where, when and how. Then our foreknowledge of heartbreaking things that await us would shadow us from our youth, robbing us of the ability to enjoy the present. 

The reaction of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is a formidable example. As God Incarnate, Jesus doesn't have the luxury of ignorance regarding the future. He doesn't have that buffer. He knows what awaits him. From the time he was old enough to be capable of fully comprehending the prospect, he knew what lay in store for him down to the last literally excruciating detail. 

This also illustrates the way in which the two natures intertwine. His divine nature is the source of his foreknowledge. His divine nature informs his human nature. But he suffers in his human nature. 

My Lord and my God

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2020/05/responding-to-kermit-zarley-on-john-2028.html

High Christology

Some Bible scholars have a low Christology. That's becomes somescholars are highly secularized, so they don't believe we live in the kind of world that the Bible describes. They think that's fictional. So it's really less about interpreting the NT witness to the Trinity or the Incarnation but their belief that the world is a kind of snowglobe. There is no afterlife. There is no divine involvement in the world. There's no room in their worldview for a divine Incarnation. 

Given their worldview, they don't think it's possible for the NT to have a high Christology that's true. They don't think we live in that kind of world. So their low Christology isn't really about what the NT teaches, but their understanding of reality. Given their closed-system worldview, they are bound to view NT Christology as legendary/mythological pious fiction. Even if the NT has a high Christology, that doesn't map onto reality

So a lot of this is driven, not by exegesis but by their view of historicity and reality. Although Hurtado was something of a theological moderate, he wasn't an inerrantist, he was heavy into redaction criticism, and I don't think he had a strong view of divine revelation, so for him there's bound to be an evolutionary Christology in the NT which has antecedents in speculative theological developments in 2nd Temple Judaism. He doesn't think the Enochian literature is historical. It's just pious fiction. I agree. Point, though, is he doesn't draw a categorical line between that and Scripture. It all has an element of legendary embellishment. It ranges along a continuum. So that's less about exegesis than his view of Scripture and the history of ideas. 

This is even more pronounced in the case of James McGrath. I believe he used to be evangelical, but lost his faith in grad school and is now a progressive. It isn't possible for McGrath to have a high Christology because he doesn't believe we live in that kind of world. He's basically a secularist. His closed-system worldview precludes the possibility that the NT presents a realistic Christology. So this isn't about exegesis but his worldview. For him, NT Christology has to be pious fiction. There's a mismatch between the Bible and reality. The Bible tells stories about divine intervention, angels, life after death, God, Incarnation, the Resurrection, &c., but these don't correspond with what really happens. 

So it's important when reading monographs about the historical supernatural Jesus to keep in mind that the conclusions are often predetermined, not by exegesis, but by the scholar's view of the supernatural and the historicity of Scripture. 

What does it mean to be Catholic?

In this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpGV-SN7AhU

Franciscan apologist Casey does a good job of summarizing the second principle: mediation. This exposes a fundamental flaw in Catholic theology. 

However, his first principle is terribly confused, although it goes to the rationale for Catholic sacramentality:

In order for God to be present in these 7 ordinary objects and ritual, we must first accept that it is even possible for an infinite God to be contained by time and space. The foundation for this belief is of course the Incarnation. God is capable, and so chooses, to make God's spiritual presence known in the material world…This is a major divergence from the classical Protestant worldview which has tended to focus much more attention on the complete otherness and transcendence of God. Thus the created world, is not seen to have any direct connection to God, or bear any inherent goodness. 

i) That's a very dubious and even contradictory model of how God relates to time and space. If God is not a physical being, then it's just not possible for God to be "contained" by time and space. I can see how, from a Catholic standpoint, it's appealing to think a wafer contains God. Pop the cork and ingest God! But God can't be bottled like a genie. 

ii) The Incarnation doesn't imply that God is contained by time and space. Rather, it's a type of relation or union.

iii) Protestant theology doesn't deny that God is capable, and so chooses, to make his spiritual presence known in the material world. The question is the mode of presence. For instance, a painter isn't physically present in his painting. Yet the painting is a pervasive representation of the painter. He chose what to paint, the style, composition, and color scheme. Every brushstroke is his. A painting reflects the painter. For instance, many paintings by Dante Rossetti reveal his passion for beautiful women. 

iv) So there's such a thing as indirect or mediated presence. For instance, God makes himself "present" when he answers prayer. Not that he's physically present, but an example of God's involvement in our lives.

v) Calvinism, for one, has a doctrine of meticulous providence. That's the polar opposite of "the complete otherness and transcendence of God." Rather, God is directing every event behind-the-scenes to achieve his goals for creation. 

Did God change at the incarnation?

"You Asked: Did God Change at the Incarnation?" (James Anderson)

Was God Incarnate tempted?

A part of me wonders why unitarians churn out painfully incompetent videos like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsfxIhQ6go0&feature=youtu.be

1. A problem many atheists have when attacking Christianity is that because they hold it in such intellectual contempt, they are unable to take it seriously even for the sake of argument. But this means their attacks on Christianity are sophomoric. By the same token, the unitarians who made this video lack the intellectual patience to acknowledge and engage Christian responses to their half-baked critique. They can't be bothered to consider the implications of the two-natures of Christ. That's because they don't believe in the two-natures of Christ. But if they're going to say the Incarnation is contradictory, they have to show it's contradictory on the model they reject. If, say, a Christian theologian operates with a two-minds Christology, then it's not contradictory for Jesus to be tempted in reference to his human mind but not his divine mind. The unitarians who produced this video are too jejune to distinguish between what they think is factually true and what they think is logically consistent. 

2. I'd add that quoting passages which say Jesus was "tempted" is not very informative inasmuch as temptation can mean more than one thing. On the one hand, it can mean exposure to an external inducement. On the other hand, it can mean to feel the appeal of something. The second kind of temptation is psychological. But it's possible to be exposed to something intended to be tempting, which some people find tempting, which others may not find attractive, or may even find repellant. 

I once read about a failed attempt by Ava Gardner to seduce Anthony Perkins. Gardner was one of the all-time great Hollywood beauties, but as she quickly discovered, Perkins wasn't wired like a normal man, so he didn't find her overtures tempting. Her effort was future from the start. 

My immediate point is not to determine in which sense Jesus could be tempted, but to point out that just seizing on the word "tempted" doesn't settle the issue because the concept is ambiguous. We're apt to read into it more than the word itself implies. 

Muslim etiquette

A Muslim objection to Christianity is that it means God Incarnate has an excretory system. That offends their sense of divine etiquette. 

But in Christian theology, matter isn't evil. The body isn't evil. The body processes energy. And waste products are a byproduct of energy processing. That's true for energy processing in general. Like burning wood produces smoke and ash. Is that bad manners? The body is like a machine.

Muslims have peculiar notions about etiquette. For instance, many Muslim couples practice anal sex. Why do they have dainty hangups about the Incarnation but their delicate sensibilities aren't offended by anal sex? 

Disguise and recognition

There's an interesting and neglected parallel between theodicy and certain kinds of Bible stories. The basic idea of theodicy is that God has good reasons for not preventing certain kinds of evils, but his reasons may not be evident. They don't lie on the face of events. Rather, it takes imagination, a long-range view, or retrospective view, to appreciate the instrumental value of evil. 

By analogy, the Bible contains stories about characters in disguise as well as recognition scenes. They go together.

In the OT, some theophanies or angelophanies are God or angels in disguise. They have a human appearance (e.g. Gen 18-19; Josh 5:13-15). Their true identity might initially be revealed to the reader (e.g. Gen 18:1), but concealed to characters in the narrative until they say or do something that discloses their supernatural identity (divine or angelic), like when the angels blind the Sodomites (Gen 19:11).

So initial disguise leads to a recognition scene, when it dawns on characters that these apparently human visitors are supernatural beings. There's more to it than meets the eye.

We see the same pattern in the NT. For instance, both Mark and John introduce Jesus to the reader as the coming of Yahweh or Yahweh Incarnate. But outwardly, Jesus just seems to be a man. It's only as he begins to say and do certain things that a dawning awareness occurs that there's more to Jesus than meets the eye. They discover things about him that don't lie on the surface. 

Recognition can operate at two levels. At one level they learn what he claims to be, but some of them reject it.

At a deeper level, some of them realize that what he claims to be is in fact his true identity. They have an epiphany. 

This is a general pattern in the Gospels, although there are some dramatic disguise/recognition scenes (e.g. Lk 24:13-34; Jn 20:11-18).

This is analogous to the problem of evil, where there's a sense in which evil is disguised good. It's genuinely evil, but with the benefit of hindsight or a long-range view, the instrumental value of evil becomes increasingly recognizable. So initial appearances are misleading. There's more to it than meets the eye. You can't properly assess it at the time it happens. Rather, it has a larger significance that's initially obscure, confounding, or hidden. 

Is Jesus the true God in 1 John 5:20?

R. Schnackenburg,82 who has given us the best commentary on 1 John, argues strongly from the logic of the context and the flow of the argument that "This is the true God" refers to Jesus Christ. The first sentence in 5:20 ends on the note that we Christians dwell in God the Father ("Him who is true") inasmuch as we dwell in His Son Jesus Christ. Why? Because Jesus is the true God and eternal life. Schnackenburg argues that the second sentence of 5:20 has meaning only if it refers to Jesus; it would be tautological if it referred to God the Father. His reasoning is persuasive, and thus there is a certain probability that 1 Jn 5:20 calls Jesus God—a usage not unusual in Johannine literature. Raymond E. Brown, 'Does the New Testament call Jesus God?', Theological Studies 26 (1965), 558.

Portal between two worlds

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain (Heb 6:19).

In science fiction, there are two kinds of portals: portals from one time to another and portals from one place to another. The first concerns time travel from past to future or future to past while the second concerns multiverse travel from one parallel universe to another.

On a related note, The Magician's Nephew was the last book Lewis wrote in the Narnia series. It provides a backstory for Narnia. One particular example is how it provides a backstory for the magic wardrobe. The wardrobe is made of apple wood that originates in Narnia. The unstated principle is that the wardrobe is a portal between Narnia and our world because it exists in our world but it originates in Narnia. So it's connected to both worlds. 

These are fictional examples. Heb 6:19 illustrates the same basic principle, only this is factual. The souls of living Christians exist in this world, but are connected to heaven or the world to come by an anchor chain. Like a lifeline, where one end is wrapped around the waist of the Christian while Jesus is holding the other end from heaven and reeling it in. Jesus connects us to heaven and pulls us through because he came from heaven and returned to heaven. 

A priori inerrancy

Lydia McGrew continues to do presentations and interviews on her recent book The Mirror or the Mask:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMdIENUFTGM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmAjVeGCG78

In the webinar, Lydia draws a distinction between two different approaches to inerrancy: a priori and inductive (1:41-42 min.)

She rejects both, but she's more sympathetic to the inductive approach. That's consistent with her evidentialist epistemology. I think it's safe to say that if she was an inerrantist, she'd be an inductive inerrantist rather than an a prior inerrantist. She draws a similar distinction in The Mirror and the Mask:

Most of the time the term "inerrancy" refers to an a priori approach in which one assumes for theological reasons related to the doctrine of inspiration that the biblical documents are inerrant (in their original MSS). That certainly doesn't describe me. I think we have to see whether or not there are errors by investigation (52). 

What's striking, though, is that she's not opposed to a priori inerrancy in principle. In her interview with Phil Fernandes, she says

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrek9fQnx1w

I don't think Jesus was mistaken about anything. Jesus was God, so I never say Jesus just made a mistake (1:15-16 min).

So here she takes the position that Jesus is inerrant by virtue of his deity. But that's a priori inerrancy, which assumes for theological reasons related to Christology that the teaching of Christ is inerrant. 

Yet that raises the question of why a priori inerrancy is consistent with evidentialist epistemology when indexed to the person of Christ but inconsistent when indexed to Scripture. Why does the deity of Christ entail or warrant a priori inerrancy but divine inspiration does not? 

It's true, of course, that God uses human agents in the process of inspiration, but by the same token, God uses human agency in the Incarnation. In both cases there's a human medium, as well as divine agency behind the human medium, operating through the human medium. 

Did Jesus die for little green men?

Now imagine the universe is teeming with other intelligent civilizations. What is a Christian believer supposed to say? Claiming that Christ died only for us, while the rest of the universe is screwed, would be incompatible with God’s love. If, however, earthly Jesus died for the whole universe, myriads of extraterrestrial sinners included, we would have to accept a geocentrism even more preposterous than the spatial variant. Neither is there a way out by suggesting that other intelligent species may not have been “fallen.” This proposal amounts to a negative human exceptionalism that is totally unbelievable, given that alien species are subject to the same general evolutionary mechanisms as we are. Natural selection favours “selfish” traits.

What about multiple incarnations? Here another difficulty of traditional Christian doctrine comes into play: Christ has two natures—he is “truly God and truly man.” But how are members of completely different biological species (“truly man” and “truly Klingon,” let’s say) supposed to stand in a relationship of personal identity? Even worse, if the number of sinful species in the universe exceeds a certain threshold, God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously. However, no single person who is an embodied being with a finite nature, i.e. a “truly” biological organism, can be more than one such being at the same time. If, on the other hand, the incarnations were not personally identical, many different persons with a divine nature would result—too many even for a Christian. Finally: May extraterrestrial sinners have been reconciled to God by means different from a divine incarnation? Perhaps, but even if the Christian believer concedes alternative means of salvation she is stuck with the highly implausible geocentric claim that the incarnation, i.e. one of the most remarkable events in the history of the cosmos, happens just 2000 years ago on our planet, although myriads of other inhabited planets were also available.

Therefore, I conclude, the traditional Christian believer can’t make theological sense of extraterrestrial intelligent life.

https://gizmodo.com/which-religion-is-friendliest-to-the-idea-of-aliens-1841241730

i) Unless and until we discover aliens, or they discover us, this is purely academic. Even if this might be a defeater for Christianity, it's a hypothetical defeater, not a demonstrable defeater. 

ii) Calvinists, who subscribe to limited atonement, reject an assumption of his argument.

iii) According to Scripture, many angels are fallen, but no provision was made for their redemption.

iv) There's no reason to think the fall of Adam would implicate inhumane species in original sin. Aliens are not Adam's posterity. Adam is not their federal head.

v) Assuming that aliens exist, there's no presumption that they are fallen. Hence, there's no presumption that aliens require an atonement even if they do exist.

vi) The doctrine of original sin isn't based on evolution. Indeed, theistic evolution typically denies a historic fall.

vii) There's no presumption that if aliens exist, they are the product of evolution rather than special creation. 

viii) The Incarnation is unique in reference to the Son becoming human. In principle, the Incarnation is repeatable in reference to the Son assuming the nature of other intelligent creatures. The uniqueness of the Incarnation doesn't preclude multiple incarnations in that respect because each incarnation would be a unique, unrepeatable union  between the Son and the nature of an intelligent species. 

ix) It's not contrary to personal identity for the Son to form a hypostatic union with more than one species. It would be the same timeless, spaceless Son at one end of the relation. Although there'd be more than one individual creature at the other end of the relation, that would just mean the Son qua Incarnate is not uniquely identical to any particular instance of incarnation, but identical to the ensemble. 

To take a comparison: suppose God created a multiverse. In that event, God is the Creator of each separate universe as well as the multiverse. His identity as Creator operates at more than one level. The Creator of the set as well as the subsets. 

x) In the nature of the case, Bible history zeros in on earth history and human history. It's silent on the question of alien life. It's silent on the question of a multiverse. It doesn't speak to those hypotheticals one way or the other. It doesn't address the world history of aliens on other planets, assuming they exist. For the record, I have no opinion about the existence of aliens in our universe.  

Did Jesus die for Klingons?

Christian Weidemann argues:

Every major religion on Earth could easily accommodate the discovery of (intelligent) alien life, with one exception: Christianity.

...Now imagine the universe is teeming with other intelligent civilizations. What is a Christian believer supposed to say? Claiming that Christ died only for us, while the rest of the universe is screwed, would be incompatible with God’s love. If, however, earthly Jesus died for the whole universe, myriads of extraterrestrial sinners included, we would have to accept a geocentrism even more preposterous than the spatial variant. Neither is there a way out by suggesting that other intelligent species may not have been “fallen.” This proposal amounts to a negative human exceptionalism that is totally unbelievable, given that alien species are subject to the same general evolutionary mechanisms as we are. Natural selection favours “selfish” traits.

What about multiple incarnations? Here another difficulty of traditional Christian doctrine comes into play: Christ has two natures—he is “truly God and truly man.” But how are members of completely different biological species (“truly man” and “truly Klingon,” let’s say) supposed to stand in a relationship of personal identity? Even worse, if the number of sinful species in the universe exceeds a certain threshold, God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously. However, no single person who is an embodied being with a finite nature, i.e. a “truly” biological organism, can be more than one such being at the same time. If, on the other hand, the incarnations were not personally identical, many different persons with a divine nature would result—too many even for a Christian. Finally: May extraterrestrial sinners have been reconciled to God by means different from a divine incarnation? Perhaps, but even if the Christian believer concedes alternative means of salvation she is stuck with the highly implausible geocentric claim that the incarnation, i.e. one of the most remarkable events in the history of the cosmos, happens just 2000 years ago on our planet, although myriads of other inhabited planets were also available.

Therefore, I conclude, the traditional Christian believer can’t make theological sense of extraterrestrial intelligent life.

(Source)

1. And this is from a lecturer in Protestant theology! With "friends" like these...

2. Why isn't it possible for Christ to have died "only" for humans? Suppose intelligent aliens exist, but suppose they likewise rebelled against God. So they're fallen too. In that case, why should God's "love" extend to rebels? What about God's justice? Is it "incompatible with God's love" if God doesn't rescue Satan and the fallen angels?

3. Is it "preposterous" if an "earthly Jesus" died for other extraterrestrials? What if other extraterrestrials in the universe are also human?

4. Weidemann assumes evolutionary mechanisms shape our morality, but that's highly contentious. He'd have to mount a case for this for a start.

Besides, just because an act is "selfish" doesn't necessarily mean it's sinful. It's selfish for me to walk on the beach alone when I could be having a conversation with a friend, but it's not necessarily sinful for me to do so.

In theory it's possible aliens could have evolutionarily "selfish traits". Such as caring more about themselves than other aliens. But that's not necessarily sinful. Just like it's possible humans might care more about other humans than other animals, but still care for other animals.

5. The multiple incarnations dilemma is an interesting one. Granted, I'm no philosopher or theologian, but I'll try to take a stab at this:

a. For one thing, why assume "God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously"? Why couldn't God incarnate himself sequentially?

b. What's more, even if the Son of God incarnated himself simultaneously, I don't see how this would be problematic if, as most traditional Christians believe, God is outside spacetime. Why couldn't a timeless God have multiple instances of himself at multiple points in the spacetime continuum? Take the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Lewis wrote about Aslan in Narnia as well as Maleldil in Perelandra. We know Lewis meant both to be the Son of God. I envision Narnia and Perelandra sort of (not quite) paralleling other worlds. (Indeed, consider whether God the Son could have become incarnate in parallel universes rather than other worlds within the same universe.)

c. I assume some form of Cartesian dualism is true. If so, then it's possible for humans to become disembodied. Our souls can be decoupled from our bodies (at death). We live on despite the death of our physical bodies. Meanwhile our corpses rot away; they become dust and ashes. At the same time, God promises his people new bodies in the world to come. As such, it's possible for our souls to inhabit more than one body. (As an aside, this likewise calls to mind scifi shows like Altered Carbon where people have their minds uploaded to a cloud, then downloaded to various bodies.)

Why couldn't something like this be true of the Son of God too? However an objection might be humans cannot possess more than one body at the same time. Perhaps a response could be that that's not necessarily the case for the Son of God. For one thing, he is omnipresent, unlike humans.

d. As far as the issue of identity, was the Son of God's pre-resurrection body identical to his post-resurrection body, given his pre-resurrection body died and deteriorated?

e. Weidemann floats the rejoinder that the salvation of extraterrestrials could have occurred with "alternative means of salvation" absent the incarnation (I agree). However, he immediately dismisses it because it means the Christian is "geocentric". However I don't see what's necessarily wrong with "geocentrism"? Why is it necessarily morally problematic for God to have saved Earthlings by having the incarnation (and crucifixion and resurrection)?

If anything, wouldn't the incarnation imply how far the moral rot in humans has spread that God the Son had to become flesh like us to save us rather than implying anything virtuous about humans? There's no room for pride in the criminal who had to have another pay for his crimes because he had no other options for restitution left to him.

Parsing the Incarnation

A comment left on my EO post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/01/why-im-not-eastern-orthodox.html

I think you need to strengthen your notion of hypostatic union.

I wasn't offering a detailed view of my position. I've explicated my position in other posts. 

1. The humanity that the Logos took from Mary is a real and perfect humanity.

i) Humanity includes both body and soul. He did receive his soul from Mary?

ii) No doubt his humanity is real. I'm not sure what is meant by "perfect". Does that mean morally perfect? If so, yes. 

Does that mean Jesus had to have 20/20 vision? No. His humanity could be "imperfect" in the sense of, say, having a congenital heart defect, or allergies. He didn't need to be a specimen of physical perfection. 

2. The whole point of the incarnation is HE who is God has truly become Immanuel- God with us as man.

Is that the whole point? That's not even the primary point. The Incarnation was a necessary condition for him to make penal substitution for the elect. A means to an end. 

3. For HE to be truly man, he must truly make his own that humanity that is common to the elect.

i) True, but it may be worth expatiating on that point. A standard way of putting it is that human beings share a common nature. Every human being is a property instance or exemplification of human nature.

ii) Another way of putting it is that God has a constitutive idea of what makes humans human, as well as a constitutive idea for unique individual. God creates individual human beings according to his complete idea for each, with its distinctiveness as well as commonality. 

iii) When, however, the Son assumes or unites himself to a concrete human nature, that doesn't have a domino effect on other human beings. It's a self-contained instance, separate from other human beings. The Incarnation doesn't transmit something to human beings in general. He is related to other human beings at a natural level, but he assumes a particularized nature. The action doesn't change other human beings, as if the Incarnation is a circuit which relays a current to human beings generally. 

4. Therefore, the Logos neither displaces the human mind of Christ (Apollinarianism) nor is he separated from the mind of Christ (Nestorianism). Rather- The Logos, the second person of the trinity, has taken and made, as HIS OWN a full and complete humanity. So the flesh of Christ is the flesh of the Logos. The soul of Christ is the soul of the Logos. The mind of Christ is the mind of the Logos- not in a fusion of mixing, but in a unity of person. “The Logos became flesh.” 

i) As a matter of terminology, I prefer in this context to say the "Son" rather than the "Logos"–inasmuch as the Logos is an economic term for the Son in his contingent role as the Creator of the world, whereas the Son is a divine title, connoting his eternal, ontological identity.

Since, moreover, I don't think the Son and Spirit derive their existence from the Father, I avoid the "first/second/third person(s)" of the Trinity rubric. I side with the Trinitarian paradigm of theologians like Warfield, Frame, and Helm. 

ii) If the word "flesh" comes from Jn 1:14, then we need to define it in Johannine terms. 

iii) "Person" or hypostasis is a term of art in Cyrillian Christology. 

iv) I don't know what is intended by statements like "the mind of Christ is the mind of the Logos". Is that an allusion to the an/enhypostatic union? But that raises familar questions about whether such a nature is a defective, incomplete human nature. To be truly human, Jesus must have a rational human soul. 

5. Therefore, the human mind of Christ always had the infused vision of his divinity- the divinity proper to the Logos.

It's not a two-way conduit. The human mind doesn't have access to the divine mind unless the divine mind shares something with the human mind. 

Of course, from the time his human mind was old enough to understand, Jesus knew he was God Incarnate. There's a dual-consciousness, and the individual was aware of his complex identity, even in his human consciousness. 

6. If the Logos can hold two natures in connection, but not union- then the he who died on the cross cannot save us- for he dies solely as man, not God-made-man, and he rises solely as God, nor God-made-man.

I never said it was a connection rather than a union. Mind you, "union" is a just a generic, neutral verbal placeholder. It doesn't do much theological work. That depends, not on a particular word, but a philosophical model. 

7. Therefore, for the sake of the elect, it is necessary to proclaim that Immanuel is truly God, having made his OWN that humanity conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary from the first instant of its conception.

"His own" in the sense of a unique property instance of human nature uniquely and permanently coupled with the divine Son. 

You’re perilously close to Paul of Samosata and Nestorius. Tread carefully. 

There's nothing adoptionist about my position. The human nature of Christ only exists in virtue of the Incarnation. As for modalism, unitarian philosopher Dale Tuggy accuses me of Tritheism (on his tendentious characterization). "Nestorian" is a term of abuse rarely defined with precision, and routinely used as a lazy intellectual shortcut. In other posts I've provided models to illustrate the asymmetrical relation between the divine and human natures. 

My primary frame of reference is NT Christology. Beyond that we're left with philosophical theology. I'm not obliged to confine myself to the conceptual resources of Cyril of Alexandria. The ongoing history of ideas has provided us with additional analogies we can use to refine Christology. It's necessary to do full justice to what the NT says about the person of Christ. If that generates some tensions with Cyrillian Christology, so be it. 

A Savior And Lord

"today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2:11)

"You are willing to have Christ to pardon you, but we cannot divide him, and therefore you must also have him to sanctify you. You must not take the crown from his head; but accept him as the monarch of your soul. If you would have his hand to help you, you must obey the scepter which it grasps. Blessed Immanuel, we are right glad to obey thee!" (Charles Spurgeon, The C.H. Spurgeon Collection [Albany, Oregon: AGES Software, 1998], Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol. 36, p. 635)