The God of classical theism and the doctrine of the Incarnation

Abstract

The tradition of classical theism (CT) from Augustine to Aquinas developed a philosophical theology which posited for God a knowledge of the world that Aristotle's first unmoved mover arguably lacked. Yet this timelessly eternal God was still viewed as essentially simple and immutable. In addition, it was considered to be without either contingent attributes or any intrinsic relations to something other than itself. It cannot suffer and eternally knows that it cannot. Is it not then logically impossible for such an unchangeable and impassible deity to achieve an identity with a creaturely condition so that it could be said that God is some one that suffered, died, and sufferingly knew the evils of our world? Must a classical theist not acknowledge that acceptance of the reality of such an ontological empathy requires a leap of faith contra rationeml Must CT not adopt the stance of one of its staunchest proponents, Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus, and concede that for it the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation constitutes an 'Absolute Paradox' genuinely believed only if its intrinsic absurdity and rational offensiveness are humbly acknowledged?1 Negative responses to these questions are best developed in a logical framework historically associated with CT and one intrinsically capable of explicating the amphibolous character of much theological discourse. Some aspects of this logic, an Aristotelian syllogistic not relying on a twoname theory of the proposition, will be sketched in Section I.2 The task of clarifying, modifying, and defending some of the basic theses of CT by means of this logic can then be undertaken in Section 2. Finally, in Section 3, it can be argued that one widely accepted way of stating the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is amphibolous. In this respect the 'Absolute Paradox' bears similarities to some of the basic claims of CT itself and to Russell's antinomy. It is true that some of Aquinas' s own formulations of the doctrine of the Incarnation conflict with CT's conclusions about the