THE LOGICAL COHERENCE OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION

It is certainly difficult, indeed paradoxical, to suppose that a human life lived out within the framework of first-century Jewish consciousness could actually be the incarnate life of God himself in one of the modes of his infinite and eternal being. But this doctrine is not overthrown by setting out travestied versions of it, nor is it overthrown by pressing the details of all-too-human analogies. It is a travesty to suggest that, for kenotic Christology, divinity is predicated of Jesus' humanity. That is certainly to confuse the natures. We predicate divinity of Jesus, because we believe his humanity to be the vehicle and expression of the eternal Son. There is no conversion of the Godhead into flesh. To think that is to operate with some crude picture of two kinds of stuff. Nor is there any reason to postulate three consciousnesses where God incarnate is concerned. All we need is Jesus' own sense of filial dependence on the one hand, and God's awareness of his (God's) own acts through incarnation on the other.

In his reply, Cupitt attacks my metaphor of ‘inclusion’ – the suggestion that Jesus' human self-consciousness is ‘included’ within the divine self-consciousness as its vehicle and expression. Cupitt asks how we are to imagine it, as though our talk of God is decided by what we can imagine! He goes on not only anthropomorphically but Cupittomorphically by talking of some hypothetical division of his own personality, as though that were a basis for advance in theological understanding.