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Conceptual difficulties that arise from attempting to express incarnation in categories drawn from the Greeks. Sarah Coakley points to one such problem in a discussion of the work of Richard Norris on the Chalcedonian settlement. She finds fault with some of Norris historical analysis, charging that he imports post-liberal obsessions into his interpretations of the historical evidence, and she nicely defends the notion that the formulators of Chalcedon thought they were making ontological claims and not merely offering \u201cgrammatical\u201d rules for ecclesial life. <\/p>\n
More fundamentally, she notes: \u201cNorris concludes that [Chalcedon] \u2018appears to insist upon a synthesis or union of incompatibles \u2013 precisely because it takes its physical models too seriously.\u2019 In other words, the concretization of thought about the \u2018natures\u2019 leads, he avers, to the supposition of their \u2018incompatibility.\u2019 And whereas in the patristic debate this false disjunction resulted in an overemphasis (claims Norris) on Christ\u2019s divinity, the modern form of this aberrant perception of Chalcedon\u2019s intent has been the opposite: \u2018a new type of Monophysitism \u2013 a tendency, in the face of its own strong sense of the incompatibility of divine and human agencies, to reduce the Christ not to a God fitted out with vestiges of humanity but to a human being adorned with the vestiges of divinity.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
As Coakley argues, \u201cBoth these alternatives, however, suffer from a misconception of the \u2018natures\u2019 as \u2018interchangeable contraries\u2019 \u2013 as \u2018differing items of the same order,\u2019 competing against one another for the same space,\u201d and she suggests that \u201cwe need a \u2018negative theology\u2019 here in a particular sense, one that denies that the difference between God and humanity is a matter either of \u2018contrariety\u2019 or of \u2018contradiction.\u2019\u201d In short, \u201cIt is not an issue of \u2018how to fit two logical contraries together into one, as its ancient and modern interpreters have all but uniformly supposed, but how to dispense with a binary logic in figuring the relation between God and creatures.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
Norris\u2019 analysis suggests that there is a problem with certain understandings of the Chalcedonian conceptualization of Christology. In Thomist terms, the problem is that it assumes that God (or divine \u201cnature\u201d) is a member of the genus \u201cnature.\u201d There exists a general metaphysical category of \u201cnature,\u201d of which there are (at least) two subsets, divine and human. But Thomas is surely right that God is not a member of a genus, and, since God is His nature in perfect simplicity, God\u2019s nature cannot be conceived of as a genus either. Analogy helps here; divine and human nature are not two \u201cdegrees\u201d or individual types of a single category but are analogically related. This is apparently what the Chalcedonian formula has in mind, but at least it needs to be emphasized that we are not talking about two \u201cnatures\u201d competing for the same \u201cspace.\u201d This is addressed in part by the classic insistence that the human nature is \u201canhypostatic,\u201d but this point needs to be made more explicit. Just as there is divine concurrence with every human act, a concurrence which does not destroy the secondary actor, so in a unique way the divine and human operate at different \u201clevels\u201d in Jesus. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Conceptual difficulties that arise from attempting to express incarnation in categories drawn from the Greeks. Sarah Coakley points to one such problem in a discussion of the work of Richard Norris on the Chalcedonian settlement. She finds fault with some of Norris historical analysis, charging that he imports post-liberal obsessions into his interpretations of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology-christology"],"yoast_head":"\n