#825 The Soul of Christ
March 05, 2023I have a question about the relationship between your trinity model and your incarnation model.
1- The soul of the Son is the soul of the Holy Spirit and the Father.
2- The soul of the Son is human.
3- Therefore, the soul of the Father and the Holy Spirit is human.
Reading what you wrote in the "philosophical foundations for a christian worldview", I concluded that both premises are true (you say that God is a unique three-person soul, and that the soul of the Logos has all the human properties from eternity, lacking only unite with a body to be truly human). But the conclusion seems to me, to say the least, strange, even though it cannot be concluded that the Father himself and the Holy Spirit himself (which are not identical to the Trinitarian soul itself) are human. In that case, my question is: do you consider this argument solid? If not, which of the premises do you deny?
Caio
Brazil
Dr. craig’s response
A
The conclusion (3) is not merely strange but theologically unacceptable. Neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit has a soul, much less a human soul. So (1) is false.
But what about my affirmation that God is a tripersonal soul? That affirmation means that God is an immaterial, rational substance that is tripersonal. He doesn’t have a soul; He is a soul, i.e., an immaterial, rational substance. But He is unique in being tripersonal. He is one tripersonal soul.
One of those persons became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. He has a soul only in virtue of his incarnation, that is to say, the body-soul composite that is Jesus’ concrete human nature has a soul. It is a human soul in virtue of its being united with a hominin body. But, I maintain, his soul was not merely human but also divine. On my neo-Apollinarian Christology, Christ’s soul is the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. Therefore, he does not have a merely human soul, as on the traditional orthodox Christology. The second person of the Trinity completes the human nature of Christ by bringing to the hominin body properties sufficient for a rational soul. That soul, because it belongs to a human being, may be truly called human but not merely human. So if (2) means that the soul of the Son is merely human, it, too, is false.
- William Lane Craig