On Beall’s contradictory Christology and beyond

Abstract

According to Conciliar Christology, Christ has a divine nature and a human nature. This dual nature of Christ leads us to face many apparent inconsistencies: For example, it seems to follow that He is both immutable and mutable (and, therefore, not immutable). This long-standing issue in Christology has been called the fundamental problem of Christology. Recently, Jc Beall has proposed a novel approach to the fundamental problem: contradictory Christology, that is, Christology which takes those apparent inconsistencies as genuinely contradictory. This paper examines Beall’s contradictory Christology by comparing it with James Anderson’s version of consistent Christology. Such a comparison highlights an important assumption of Beall’s contradictory Christology, that is, the language used to state the fundamental problem is univocal. ‘Immutable’ is, thus, used in the same literal sense in both `Christ is immutable’ and `Christ is not immutable’. On the one hand, this assumption has a good reason given the human nature of Christ. On the other hand, we follow Anderson in showing that the view that `immutable’ is equivocal has a good reason too. For there is an established theological tradition according to which, when we speak about the divine, our language is analogical. In light of those considerations, this paper presents a semantic explication of how the predicates used to state the fundamental problem are both literal and analogical. The proposed semantics treats those predicates as cases of multiple denotations and shows that the apparent inconsistencies are genuinely contradictory, but in a different way from Beall’s contradictory Christology.