Why the Reformed Tend to be Nestorian and the Lutherans Monophysite: The Degeneration of Christological Language in Incarnation-Talk

Something I wrote up for an online class:

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COMPOSITION VERSUS HYPOSTATIC UNION IN THE INCARNATION

The goal of this paper is to explore what Evangelicals should think about the Incarnation and argue that we should think about it in terms of a hypostatic union. My main thesis is that much confusion and argumentation over the Incarnation could be avoided by a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union rather than some other form of union. This is extremely important since a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union preserves the orthodox Christian viewpoint that the person of Christ is identical with the Divine Person of the Eternal Word of God and that this Divine Person has become human. Otherwise, various difficulties occur, which push one either in the direction of Monophysitism or Nestorianism.

In the course of my paper, I will first examine the views of Eutyches and Nestorius who each have an understanding of the Incarnation as a composition of Christ out of the two natures. I will then show how a common way of speaking about Christ’s two natures encourages this viewpoint and that this tendency, when coupled with different assumptions, has led to Monophysite tendencies among Lutherans and similar-minded thinkers and Nestorian tendencies among Reformed thinkers. A common way of stating the communicatio idiomatum is involved in these tendencies. Following this, I will show how the ancient, traditional Christian notion of the Incarnation as hypostatic union avoids these negative tendencies, affirming unity and yet maintaining the integrity of each nature.

I. The Problem: Incarnation as Composition

I.1. The Early Heresies: Nestorius and Eutyches

In much discussion throughout Christian history, both the divine and human natures of Christ have had a tendency to be spoken of as if they were subjects of attribution in their own right and the unity of Christ has similarly thus often been spoken of as if it was a matter of combining of the two natures to form one person out of this combination. This tendency, of course, derives from the early church and such a tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in the theologies of Eutyches and Nestorius, where the person of Christ was seen as a result of a combining of divine and human natures, understood as distinct entities and subjects of attribution. On such a view, Christ is said to be divine because he is partly produced out of divinity and he is said to be human because he is partly produced out of humanity.

The difficulty of attaining a unified person out of this combination was resolved by mingling the natures in some way. Nestorius does this not by an actual mingling of the two themselves but, following Theodore of Mopsuestia, by a mingling of their respective appearances, that of God and that of man, so as to produce the appearance of a single person, Christ. Because of this, human predicates could be applied to the divinity and divine to the humanity, but this was only in appearances, a matter of words only. Strictly speaking, the divine only applied to the divinity and the human to the humanity, but because of the single appearance of Christ, they could both be applied to Christ.[1] So one could say, for instance, “Christ died on the cross” or “The man died on the cross” in virtue of Christ being partly compounded out of the human, but not “God died on the cross”, even though one could also say “Christ is God” in virtue of being partly compounded out of the divinity. The subjects of the divine properties and human properties, respectively, however, remain the divine nature on the one hand and the human nature on the other.

Eutyches, on the other hand, took the same starting point – Christ as the result of the combination of the two natures – but when he gained unity for Christ through the exchange of properties, it was not merely a matter of words as with Nestorius. Instead, this was a real exchange of properties for Eutyches, resulting in a kind of Monophysitism as the distinction between the two natures was blurred or lost. If this was understood as the Word actually changing by taking on human attributes, it would result in a loss of divinity. If, on the other hand, it was understood as the humanity being overtaken by divinity, it would result in a kind of Docetism and a loss of full humanity.[2]

Considering Christ a result of the compounding of the two natures, then, requires finding a tight unity between the natures, the tightest on this picture being a blending of the two, anything less failing to account for the unity of the person in Christ. If one takes this blending as merely notional, we have Nestorius’s view. On the other hand, if one takes this blending as a real, metaphysical blending then we have Eutyches’s view, some form of Monophysitism which renders Christ either not fully human or not fully divine, with either both natures being destroyed or one taking backseat to the other. A more Docetist version would uphold the divinity at the expense of the humanity, whereas a Kenotic view would uphold the humanity at the expense of the divinity. In either case, Christ ends up a third thing in addition to the two natures, composed out of the two.

I.2. Modern Turns: Reformed and Lutheran

In modern times, people still often speak as if the two natures were themselves the subjects of the divine or human attributes, giving at least the appearance or tendency because of this way of speaking, even if it is not meant literally, of a notion of Incarnation as a compounding of the two natures to form a single person out of them. This tendency, unchecked, gives rise to precisely the Nestorian and Monophysite troubles enunciated above: Christ is seen as unified in virtue of an exchange of properties between the natures and the key division between those holding to this is whether to opt for a mere verbal exchange or a real one.[3]

In the Reformed tradition, one sees the tendency towards composition-talk resulting in a distinctly Nestorian tendency as Reformed thinkers tend, in contrast to Lutherans, to speak of an exchange of attributes between the two natures as a merely verbal one. John Calvin, for instance, could speak of some things as attributed to one nature, some to the other, and some to the composite whole, as if Christ was this third, composite thing just as a man is an additional thing dependent on and composed out of body and soul. Being combined into one thing, the attributes of one nature could be spoken of as if they belonged to the other, even though in reality they did not.[4]

On the Lutheran side, there is the opposite Monophysite tendency either in a Docetist or Kenotic direction. There is here a tendency to speak of a real exchange of attributes between the two natures rather than a merely verbal one. Diverse writers, for instance, have accused Martin Luther himself of believing that the person of Christ is the result of the union of the two natures – the unity of the person results from the unity of the natures rather than vice versa.[5] Lutheran Jan Siggins, for instance, both holds that Luther’s early work treated the two natures as sometimes too distinct[6] and also speaks as if for Luther the union of the two natures results from the fact that we can attribute the properties of one nature to the other and that this is so since “we can understand how Christ’s human properties can be predicated of God, or divine properties of man […] because the human nature shares in the glory of all the properties which otherwise pertain to God, ‘to worship this man is to worship God’”.[7] That is, worshipping the man Jesus is worshipping God since God’s properties have been bestowed upon the man. Or at least that is what Siggins’ language suggests, whether that is what he intended or not. It certainly seems that we have two subjects: the human nature, “Jesus,” and the divine, “God”, and that by an interchange of properties they form a single unit.

Because of this Incarnation-as-composition tendency, we also have the tendency to speak of the communicatio idiomatum – the fact that we can say things like “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” – as an exchange of properties between the two natures since these themselves are viewed as the subjects of these respective kinds of properties. Hence “God the Son suffered and died” could mean that the divine nature, understood as the subject of the properties, suffered and died, and “The man Jesus created the world” could mean that the human nature, again understood as subject, created the world. “God” then is understood as referring to the divine nature, being the subject of divine properties, “Jesus” as referring to the human nature, being the subject of human properties, and the union of the two “Christ”, resulting from some kind of exchange of these properties between the two. Hence, the frequent claims that followers of Calvin make the communicatio merely verbal and the uncomfortableness of some Reformed thinkers to say that things like “God died” go beyond something merely verbal.[8] From this we get claims such as that of G. C. Berkouwer, that “the man Jesus Christ has his existence immediately and exclusively in the existence of the eternal Son of God”,[9] appearing thereby to give separate referents to “the man Jesus Christ” and “the eternal Son of God”. Hence also the felt need of many Lutheran thinkers to combine or mix the properties in some way to come out with a single person as result, so as to be able to truly say things like “Jesus created the world.”

While the Reformed tendency is clearly Nestorian, then, the Lutheran tendency is towards either a Docetic or a Kenotic Christ.[10] By tending to speak of the Incarnation as if it was by a compounding of the natures, there is the obvious danger of getting a third thing, neither God nor man but a mixture or compound of the two. If one tries make sure the person so compounded is fully God, the humanity must thereby suffer – we have a Docetic Christ, the divinity pushing out the human. On the other hand, if one tries to make sure the person is fully human, the divinity must somehow suffer or be put in check – we have a Kenotic Christ, the humanity pushing out the divinity.[11] Moderate Kenoticist Millard Erickson, for instance, considers it obvious that in order for Christ to be fully human, he must give up “the privilege” of exercising his divine attributes.[12] Tellingly, he speaks of the attributes of one nature being added to the other, the divine attributes being restricted to their exercise through the humanity.[13]

The respective Nestorian and Monophysite tendencies of the Reformed and Lutheran camps, then, seems to arise largely as a result of the tendency to see and speak as if the two natures, as subjects of attribution, are compounded together in the Incarnation so as to form a single Christ. One need only look back to the church’s history, however, to see that the view of the Incarnation taken by the Church Fathers as it was developed in the great Christological controversies provides a very different take on things, one which avoids these tendencies and indeed was meant to combat them.

II. The Solution: Incarnation as Hypostatic Union

Evangelicals should avoid the heretical-seeming tendencies of both the Reformed and Lutheran camps. To do this requires abandoning seeing or speaking of the natures as subjects of attribution or of Christ as being a compound out of these. Otherwise, the natures invariably come to be seen as opposing one another and something must be done resolve that tension – either by making the union more a verbal one or by restricting or modifying one of the natures. The traditional, orthodox view, however, defended and developed in the Ecumenical Councils, treats the Incarnation not as a compounding of one person out of two other entities but rather as hypostatic union. That is, the unity of Jesus in the Incarnation is not founded on any special relations between two independent subjects but rather in the single hypostasis or person of the Divine Word who assumed a human mode of being (i.e., became human).

This is Incarnation as a coming to be a man, not a metamorphosis into one, a single person possessing two natures by first being divine and then being human as well. The two natures are not the subjects of the divine or human attributions but the Word Himself is that subject, who has both divine and human characteristics. Rather than the unity of the person resting in the unity of the natures, the opposite is the case, one person possessing both natures as hypostatic or personal modes of being, one subject of attribution existing as both human and divine.

The Divine Word in the Incarnation did not change in regard to his atemporal divinity but rather from eternity assumed temporal humanity to himself as an additional way of existing.[14] Rather than requiring some restriction or alteration of one nature or the other, this version of the Incarnation is both real, not merely verbal, and yet without conflict between the natures as the Word has two modes of existence and there is no need to try to smash or assimilate them together in order to get a relation of unity between them, since the unity comes via the one Person who exists in both manners. In fact, it is precisely because the Word in his divine nature remains unchanging and omnipotent, unrestricted and unchanged in his divine attributes, that God here is able to become man – that is, to take on a new mode of existence.[15] And this can happen without any restriction or alteration of either of the two natures since it is not they who are the subject or grounds of unity but rather the Divine Person of the Word Himself.

Hence, strictly speaking, the communicatio idiomatum which allows us to say “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” is, contrary to how it is often formulated, not a matter of one nature trading attributes with the other – the natures are not the subjects of attribution, nor are they referred to by “God” or “Jesus”.[16] The only referent and only subject of attribution here is the Divine Second Person of the Trinity. Hence, since this person created the world in his divine nature and suffered and died in his human nature and is the referent of both “God the Son” and “the man Jesus”, both “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” are literally true and not merely verbally so and this is the case even without the two natures exchanging properties since it is one person who is in possession of both the divine and the human properties and hence who is both God and man.

The communicatio idiomatum, then, is not about an exchange of properties between natures but rather the possession of both sorts of properties – having both natures and being the subject of their respective attributions – by a single hypostasis existing in both ways. Much confusion can be cleared up by this point alone – some attributes are indeed only human and hence are only had by the Word in virtue of having a human nature (that is, in virtue of being human), but it is still the Divine Word who possesses them (and all that without the divine nature changing or being restricted in any way).[17]

III. Conclusion

Against Stanley Grenz, then, the ancient notion of Incarnation as hypostatic union in no way involves a mythological god transforming into a human, any implicit Docetism, or a conception of the Word apart from Jesus.[18] On the contrary, it is precisely the hypostatic union which guarantees the falsity of these pictures by guaranteeing the integrity of the two natures and the singleness of the person who is both fully human and fully divine[19] – it is Jesus the man who is eternal God who takes upon himself a temporal, human life without any change in his divinity. Grenz’s criticisms, instead, find a target only in the ancient misunderstanding of the Incarnation as composition.

In sum, then, there is a common mistaken way of speaking to the effect the natures are the subjects of divine or human attributions and this leads to a mistaken view of Incarnation as composition and hence to a view of the communicatio as sharing of properties between natures, which in turn leads to grave difficulties with Nestorianism or Monophysitism and all the problems attending these. To avoid this, we should speak only of Jesus Christ as the single subject of these attributions, the Divine Person who took on humanity. We should not speak of “God the Son” or “Jesus” any differently, since these are not two natures, but one and the same person existing both fully divinely and fully humanly. Doing this will hopefully then resolve some of the difficulties between Reformed and Lutheran thinkers as we think more clearly about the Incarnation.

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[1] J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Fifth Edition (New York: Continuum, 1977), 315-316; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?: The Word’s Becoming in Incarnation (Still River, Massachusetts: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985), 43-44.

[2] This, at least, was how the consequences of Eutyches’s views were seen – his own thoughts are widely thought now to be rather more muddled and inconsistent. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 331-335; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 61-62. In keeping with common usage, however, I will continue to attribute these views to Eutyches in the interests of brevity.

[3] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 105-106.

[4] See, for instance, John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. J. Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Education, 1936), 527-529.

[5] E.g., Yves M.-J. Congar, Dialogue Between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. P. Loretz (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1966), 394; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 104-105.

[6] Jan D. Kingston Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 219.

[7] Jan Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ, 231-232.

[8] For this distinctly Nestorian phenomenon in Calvin, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 529.

[9] G. C. Berkouwer, The Person of Christ, trans. J. Vriend (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1954), 309.

[10] It is no accident that some Reformed thinkers have also ended up with a Kenotic Christology, since the underlying Christological tendency in thinking of the Incarnation as a union by composition is the same.

[11] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 106. For a criticism of strong versions of Kenoticism, see Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 307.

[12] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh: A Contemporary Incarnational Christology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991), 549-550.

[13] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh, 555.

[14] See, for instance, Donald Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior and Lord (Downer’s Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 54; Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 104; and the discussion of Cyril of Alexandria in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 54-55.

[15] Weinandy quotes Karl Rahner to this effect in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 174.

[16] Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, Christology: A Global Introduction: An Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 77-81 assumes precisely this confused manner of speaking of Incarnation and the communicatio in his exposition of Christological history and the Lutheran-Reformed debates. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the hypostatic union.

[17] Cf. John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 202; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 98. Note that the truth of the Lutheran view of the acquisition by the human nature of the divine attributes occurs in the belief of the Church Fathers that Christ’s human nature was divinized in its union with the Divine Person. That is, Christ was the original subject of theosis, a process we too can undergo without any injury to our human nature, this process being understood as a perfection or completion of human nature rather than its transformation into something else (which Lutherans have a hard time avoiding). Theosis was seen, after all, as a participation in God’s energies or operations, which indwell us, not as a taking on of God’s essence. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 321-322; John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 133-134; Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition, trans. and ed. S. Rose (Platina, California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994), 184.

[18] Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 309.

[19] On the issue of a divine being leaving heaven to become human, see Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 86.

Aquinas and Christmas

Like the great councils of Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III, Aquinas addressed, in his own theory of the Incarnation, many of the Christological concerns that had been prevalent during the patristic period. Indeed, one way to see what he is doing is to try to do justice in a philosophical framework to the insights of these great councils, seeing Christ as having both a human nature and a divine nature and these as united in the one person of the divine Word, each with its own characteristic activity and operations. In my previous paper, I showed how the councils just mentioned addressed these concerns; in the present paper my concern will be to show first of all how Aquinas addresses these. As his own views entail that in some sense Christ is not a human person, I will also show how Aquinas can maintain this in light of Christ’s full humanity. Similarly, in regards to Christ’s full divinity and full humanity, I will describe how it is that Aquinas thinks Christ’s human will can be the principle of its own self-determining action but always as an instrument of and in cooperation with his divine will.

In the Incarnation, what is most essential perhaps is that God becomes man. However, to do justice to the divine transcendence requires explaining this in a way that does not impinge on the transcendence and immutability of God. The distinction between the two natures in Christ provides the beginning of a way to do justice to this. Since God qua God – that is, as existing in and through the divine nature – cannot change, then it must be something else that undergoes a change, since obviously some change does occur with the advent of the Incarnation. So it must be the Creation itself which undergoes change, not the Creator. After all, one can say that the divine Word does change in the sense that at one time certain predicates (such as being a man) cannot be applied to the Word but then later one is indeed able to apply such predicates. But that is compatible with there being no actual change in the Word himself as existing in his divine nature since the change which results in a change in which predicates can be appropriately applied may be in something outside of that divine nature.

This change, which is not in the Word in his divinity but in creation, involves the creation by God of a human nature in personal dependence on the Word as the Word’s own. A bit of creation, in this way, has been taken into the divine life, conjoined to God. It is not a pre-existing human nature but a created nature created precisely as a way of being for the divine Word, itself dependent upon the Word and lacking its own separate individual existence distinct from and apart from the Word since it is itself a mode of the Word’s own existing.

For Aquinas, this change in creation and subsequent relation of dependence of the humanity of the Word on the person of the Word involves the coming into being of new mixed relations rather than relations in which each term is really related to the other. Instead, the human nature is really related to the Word as one of its two modes of existence. The relation is real in it as it comes into existence united to the Word. This involves a real effect in the humanity without a change or any kind of effect in the Word in his divine existence, guaranteeing thus both the possibility of full humanity and full divinity since the two natures thus remain unmixed yet united in the one person of the Word, the human nature subject to change and really related to the divine but the divine nature still immutable and only in ideal relation to the human nature, the relation being in the human nature alone. Because God thus remains immutable in becoming human, we can truly say that it is God in Christ who has become a mutable man, not some other entity which in becoming a human would be subject to change and hence devoid of the divine transcendence proper to God. This works precisely because it is one and the same divine Word who, in addition to his divine nature, has conjoined to him a human nature in addition, thus permitting the communication of idioms when speaking of Christ.

Christ has a full human nature, however, composed of a fully human soul united to a fully human body. The problem is having this body/soul compound and full humanity in Christ yet not have it constitute its own person in addition to the divine person of the Word. A Boethian conception of personhood would let any concrete nature capable of consciousness and freedom to be a person, in which case there would be a human person in addition to divine person of the Word. Aquinas, however, requires of personhood or being a hypostasis that it be complete and existing independently of other things. In this sense, there is only one person in Christ for Aquinas, the divine person of the Word.

A union of joined body and soul, however, would in normal circumstances result in the existence of a human person. In Christ there is no such person but only a human nature since the human nature of Christ does not exist apart from all other hypostases but instead exists only in dependence on the person or hypostasis of the Word. Otherwise, the human nature would have its own human person, existing apart from the Word. The divine person, then, takes the place of the human person, preventing the human nature of Christ from being the mode of existence of a separate human person. If we understand a human person as a human nature existing hypostatically in itself, then on Aquinas’s view, there is no human person of Christ, only a divine person existing compositely in both divine and human natures.

For Aquinas, a person or hypostasis is not equivalent to the modern notion of a personality or a stream of consciousness but an individual existent. Personhood is a matter of who, not of what. The hypostasis of someone specifies who it is, its nature specifies what it is, giving the way in which that who exists. Being fully human, however, is a matter of what one is – one’s nature – not who one is – one’s hypostasis. Whether or not the person who has the human nature is divine or human does not impact the full humanity of that person, since being a divine person in no way effects what that person is. Insofar as they have a full, working human nature, that person is thereby fully human. The absence of a human person does not, in Christ, involve an absence of anything in his humanity but rather is the result of its addition to the divine person. Christ, then, is fully human and in that sense, subsisting in a human nature, can be said to be a human person. But Christ’s personhood does not arise from the human nature on its own, existing apart from everything else, and in that sense Christ is not a human person, but in such a way that his full humanity remains intact.

All this shows, then, that on Aquinas’s views it is truly God who is redeeming us as a man, but in such a way that the divine Word retains his divine transcendence and yet also possesses full humanity and unites both divinity and humanity in a single person. To show, however, that Jesus’ humanity is truly a mediator in our salvation and not simply an instrument of God (and hence is a full humanity and able to save human beings through his life, death, and resurrection), Aquinas must elaborate a dyothelite position which allows for truly human acting and willing. Otherwise, the divine will and activity crowd out the human and it becomes the divine nature alone which is active, the human nature being merely a passive participant and not a truly human source of human willing and human activity. It is the human suffering and willing of the divine Word in a genuinely human fashion that is redemptive, after all.

In Aquinas’s view, it seems that there is first of all a coordination of the divine will and human will in Christ rooted precisely in the fact that it is one person who possesses both wills, both principles of genuinely divine and human activity. The human will of Christ receives its principle of activity and is moved towards the intentions of God by the divine will. In this way, the human will of Christ acts as an instrument of the divine will in bringing about the divine ends. It is not a mere instrument, however, as the actions of the human nature of Christ are mediated by his human will, which is free and self-determining. It is, hence, a conjoined will as the will of the very divine person using it as an instrument, but also an instrument of the rational order with its own principle of action moved via that principle by another principle of action, the divine. It is hence not passive in this interaction but actively pursues and chooses for itself the intentions and goals of the divine will.

The human will of Christ, hence, is moved by the divine will to freely act and is graced by God in its hypostatic union with the person of the Word with the grace necessary to do so. This grace perfects in some way the human nature of Christ, as human nature is always perfected through the infusion of divine grace, which thereby makes Christ’s will free to always follow the good. In this sense of freedom, freedom to do the good, the hypostatic union and corresponding instrumentality of the human will of Christ in fact guarantee the freedom of that will rather than take away from it. The divine will, then, moves the human will of Christ towards freely pursuing the good and the divine ends, but through the self-determining and active principles of the human nature, not directly and without that mediation. As a conjoined will being used by a divine will, the influence of that divine will is one from the inside (internal to that person), as it were, not an external or coercive one. This may very well require, as perhaps Aquinas, White and Crowley seem to think (see, for instance, White 415, 421), a progressive human knowledge in Christ of who he is and of God’s will in given situations, graced upon him as part of the cooperation of his human nature with his divine, thus helping to secure a psychological unity for Christ as a single, integrated person of unmixed humanity and divinity. As already said, this grace perfects Christ’s humanity rather than detracts from it. By always being aware of the good and will of God, Christ, because of his graced human nature and will, always acts in accordance with the good and divine will, the human and divine wills thus being coordinated and yet their own principles of genuinely free activity in the person of Christ.

The person of the divine Word, then, acts as a single person precisely through this coordinated cooperation of his two natures and two wills. The Word is fully God, transcendent and unchanging even in the Incarnation. The Word is fully human, possessed of a union of body and soul with a functioning human life and active, self-determining will. It is one divine person who exists in and acts through each of these natures; there is not a distinct human person in Christ. Hence, it is in Christ truly God who redeems and truly through his own humanity and its activities and will that he does so. Aquinas appears, then, to have further elaborated and defended the very balancing of the various Christological concerns that was so vigorously defended by the great councils of the church.

Patristic Christology

I have finally finished all my commitments for this semester at the GTU! I'm currently applying both for philosophy employment (please pray for that) and for New Testament PhD programs at the same time and will see where Providence takes us. In the meantime, I'll make a couple of posts from the papers (mostly summarizing my own synthesis of course materials) I wrote for my Historical Development of Christology class. Here's the first one:

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Arius, Apollinaris, and Nestorius represented respectively for the early church three different foils for the development of Christological doctrine. In response to the Christological imbalances in the views of these thinkers and others after them, the successive ecumenical councils of the early church progressively centered in on a truly balanced Christology, taking into account Christ’s full humanity, full divinity, and unity, while at the same time maintaining the transcendence of God within the mystery of the Incarnation. In this essay I will consider each of the three heterodox thinkers listed above and show how Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III all redressed in their particular ways the doctrinal mistakes of those three.

Arius was the first early heretical thinker to provoke his own ecumenical council devoted to adjudicating his views. It is arguable that one of the key determining factors in Arius’s Christology was his concern to protect the transcendence of the divine as he understood it – to keep the divine immutable and well-removed from the earthly realm of becoming and corruption. Arius’s God is, in effect, not so different from modern Deist versions of the deity, if not even more aloof from his creation, if that is possible.

The Logos serves in Arius’s thinking, as in Origenist theology of the period, as the intermediary in creation between God and the world, keeping the two firmly apart. But since the Logos is thus involved in creation, the Logos cannot be transcendent in the same way God is. With the rejection of a Platonic view of levels within God and a focus on divine transcendence as essential to divinity, this apparently lower being, the Logos, cannot have a share in that divinity. As such, the Logos must be created by God Himself, all else coming from the Logos directly rather than God in his unsullied distance from Creation.

Apart from cosmological considerations, Arius’s understanding of transcendence also pushes him towards a rejection of the Son’s divinity because of his view of the Incarnation and the nature of the unity of the Incarnate Son. Arius takes onboard the Logos-sarx framework then fashionable in Alexandria, according to which Jesus Christ had a human body but instead of a rational soul in the way other humans do, he had the supreme Logos as his rational, animating principle (I will return to this framework below in discussing Apollinaris). As such, since Christ underwent suffering and change, the Logos as his vital principle also underwent these. But since the divine nature is immutable and impassible, not to mention transcendent, the Logos cannot possess the divine nature as its own.

Arius, then, certainly protects divine transcendence as well as the unity of Christ – the Logos is not an additional entity but rather takes the role of the soul in the man Christ, thus combining Logos and human body in one incarnate being. The Platonically-influenced thought was that if something is the rational, animating principle of a human body then that basically makes it a human soul. However, the Logos was very different from a human soul, hence the worry with Logos-sarx Christology that Christ’s full humanity had been compromised. Christ becomes a kind of super-creature with a human body but something very different from the human mind or soul possessed by the rest of the human race. While preserving the need for Christ to actually suffer and die, thus entering into human reality, that very human reality is compromised by replacing the soul with the Logos. Christ, rather than being a human being, becomes in this view of the Incarnation a new kind of entity, compounded of human bodily parts and the super-creature who mediates between God and man. And if Christ, as many argued, needed to be fully human in order to fully save humans – possessing every bit of human nature in order to redeem every bit of it – then this Christ is not able to redeem us as whole human beings, bodies and souls. Jettisoning divinity for Christ, Arius thus also ran afoul of the objection that his Christ, lacking divinity, could not save, since only God can save.

The Council of Nicea, called to address Arius’s views, succeeded in theologically resolving at least some of Arius’s imbalanced theology. Without addressing issues relating to the divine transcendence or Christ’s humanity or unity, Nicea did affirm the full divinity of Christ, declaring him same in substance or being (ὁμοούσιος) with the Father. The Origenist notion of levels of divinity in the Godhead via emanation from the ultimate, transcendent, unitary God was abandoned. This safeguarded both Christ’s full possession of the divine nature shared with the Father as well as his ability to save in virtue of this fact.

Since Nicea did not address the other issues involved in Arius’s view, however, it is not surprising to see Apollinaris accept Nicea and the full divinity of Christ (or at least attempt to do so) and yet fall into other problems related to Arius’s view, all stemming from Apollinaris’s acceptance of the same Logos-sarx framework as Arius. Like Arius, Apollinaris views Christ as a composite of the Logos and a human body, the former again replacing the human soul in Christ. But once the Logos is recognized as fully divine, the combination with the Logos-sarx view, while rendering Christ a true unity, in fact causes problems in almost every other area.

Since the Logos, on Apollinaris’s view, joins with a human body, it seems to form a new, composite entity, Christ (similar to the way it does in Arius’s view) – a tertium quid neither fully human nor fully divine but something else. Just as in Arius’s view, a human body with the Logos instead of a human soul is not fully human. Christ apparently also cannot be fully divine for the additional reason that since it would seem that the Logos, as the replacement for the human soul, would have to serve as the seat of Christ’s suffering and other experiences. But that would make the Logos passable. The Logos in such a case could not have the full divine nature, lacking divine transcendence and its impassibility. Being neither fully God nor fully man, Christ would then neither save as God nor be able to redeem whole human persons since he would lack whole human personhood himself. While it could be claimed that the Logos retains its impassibility, this would require a mere appearance of suffering and human experience and hence a retreat to a docetic Christ, a denial of the true reality of the man Jesus and his real suffering, human life and free obedience for our salvation as he is swallowed up in the transcendent divine.

The First Council of Constantinople condemned Apollinaris and affirmed the true, full humanity of Christ. Rather than a mere human body, his humanity was a full one, involving a combination of both body and soul, complete humanity for the salvation of human beings. It thus also safeguarded against a violation of divine transcendence as well as the danger of docetism since the Logos was not directly compounded with a human body (and hence helped save the reality of the man Jesus).

Without the Logos-sarx framework, however, the problem of accounting for the unity of Christ returned. If we start with the divine Logos on one hand – God – and this complete human being on the other – the man Jesus – then how do we account for their unity in Christ? The unity of Christ thus provides the central problem affecting Nestorius’s Christology. Nestorius accepted both a full human nature and a full divine nature in Christ, but seems to have had problems putting them together in such a way as to form a convincing unity, so averse he was to the danger of forming a tertium quid out of the two as Apollinaris or Arius did. Nestorius’s notion of a nature was that of an concrete individual entity and hence he thought of the incarnation as the coming together of two concrete individuals, which results in one new prosopon or phenomenal reality of unity. On Nestorius’s view, then, there is not a single subject who is the Logos and hence has divine properties and who is also the man Jesus and hence has human properties – existing both as God and as man. Hence, there can be on his view no communication of idioms – no applying of predicates of divinity to the man Jesus and no applying of predicates of humanity to the divine Logos, as would have followed were the subject identical. Mary, on this view, cannot be rightly said to be the Mother of God – the Theotokos (Θεοτόκος) or God-Bearer.

Nestorius, in trying to maintain full divinity and divine transcendence on the one hand, and full humanity on the other, thus trips over the issue of the unity of Christ, which in turns raises the issue of whether Christ on Nestorius’s view would be able to save, given that only God can save, since it would seem that one would not then be allowed to say that God lived, suffered, died, and was raised for our salvation. Human mediatorship in salvation is secured, but the role of the divine, being pushed out of the created world as in Arius’s view, seems to be damaged.

The Council of Ephesus responded to Nestorius by rejecting his views as providing insufficient unity for Christ. It is one and the same Logos who is at once God and man, to whom both divine and human attributes accrue and hence Mary is indeed Theotokos. As Cyril noted, divinity and humanity are united in the one hypostasis or person of the divine Logos, hence the communication of idioms is completely appropriate (it is, in fact, just an application of the logical rule Leibniz’s Law, also known as the Indiscernibility of Identicals) – we can say both that God truly suffered on the cross and that the man Jesus is creator of the world, Second Person of the Trinity, since these are really one person, God the Son. Unity is hence found in the person of the Logos, not in some special extra relationship added as an outside extra to Christ’s divinity and humanity. Hence the unity of Christ and the divine role in salvation were secured for the time being by the council.

Ephesus, however, did not solve the question that Nestorius’s view seems to have addressed fairly well; that is, how to maintain divine transcendence and full divinity in the face of full humanity, taking both the divinity and humanity seriously as demanded by Nicea and Constantinople I. The idea of dividing humanity and divinity into two distinct, unmixed natures seems to do this, allowing for full humanity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with divinity and for full divinity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with humanity. Hence, in divinity Christ can remain transcendent and divine, whereas in humanity he can be a full, though sinless, human.

The Council of Chalcedon takes on this important usage of the notion of two natures, but without adding in Nestorius’s interpretation of the notion. That is, Constantinople does not interpret the notion of a nature in terms of a concrete individual entity. The natures are not independent things added together to form Christ but, instead, the human and divine natures are distinct sets of characteristic properties or ways of being, united in the person of Christ as the one subject of these properties who thus exists in two fully distinct ways – the divine way and a particular human way. Without changing in the divine nature, the single person of Christ took on a new mode of existence in the Incarnation, which is a change in the created order rather than in Christ qua God. Chalcedon thus takes on the important insights of the two-nature view held by people like Nestorius but without the distortions caused by too-concrete a notion of what a divine or human nature might be. Chalcedon thus successfully integrates the insights of Nicea – that Christ is fully God – and of Constantinople I – that Christ is fully human – with that of Ephesus – that Christ forms a unity in the person of the divine Logos.

The Third Council of Constantinople clarified and further developed the Chalcedonian trajectory of Christology by addressing Christ’s full humanity not merely in the sense of the possession of an abstract, though concretely realized, nature but also in terms of a fully human way of life and activity, a human use of human freedom to form a truly human life, giving truly human obedience to the Father unto death. Without a distinctly human will and human activity, which were rejected by the monothelites, there is an inherent danger of a kind of implicit Apollinarism or even docetism, where the human life of Christ is consumed by rather than perfected by the divine life he also possesses. There is a danger then in the two directions of either failing to respect divine transcendence by, in effect, replacing much of the functionality of the human soul with that of the divine Logos, or, on the other hand, failing to respect the true reality of the man Jesus. In either case, a truly human life has been compromised and, if as in the West, it is thought that such a life and human obedience are important for our salvation, then such a view will certainly not do. If Christ is to save us by humanly taking on as free, human action, a human obedience unto death on the cross, this would seem to require that he actually act and will in his human nature and that he both have a human will and source of activity and that these not simply sit there inert, as good as absent from him.

The Third Council of Constantinople addresses this concern by investing in Christ a fully human reality – Christ, in addition to his divine will, has and uses a human will, a human principle of activity. Christ, in other words, acts in both of his natures, not simply the divine one. The real human existence, activity, and freedom of the man Jesus are thus at last properly ascribed to the one Logos who is at once also in possession of a divine existence, activity, and freedom, unified together in that one divine person who acts and exists in each nature.

In conjunction with the councils before it, then, Constantinople III guarantees that Christ is truly one of us – the perfect human being and representative of us as human beings before the Father and to us of what we as Christians can and must become in Christ. At the same time, however, Christ is guaranteed as where we are able in this life to directly meet God – not mediated through creation but the divine Son himself who, in virtue of his consubstantiality with the Father, reveals to us the Father as well. In Christ, we encounter God himself in the only way we are currently able to do so – the infinite taking on the finite in order to be revealed to the finite.

The orthodox view developed in the councils examined in this paper, then, does something that the heterodox thinkers do not – that is, present a picture of Christ which balances all the important considerations and truths we get from theology and Scripture. While the heterodox views latch onto and appear to do extremely well with certain considerations, they do so at the cost of others, failing to take into account other important considerations or truths and thus ending up with a lopsided theology as a result or even a Christ who perhaps cannot even save.

Schleiermacher: A Short Historical Write-Up

With the advent of Enlightenment ways of thinking, many people in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s day were eager to abandon religion as so much superstition. The new ways were better – science and reason, unencumbered by the supernatural, religious tradition, or ritual, were to reign supreme as the only paths to truth in regards to the world and how we ought to live in it. Religion was no longer seen as a viable authority regarding either of these areas. Secular science, ethics, philosophy, and other pursuits of empirical study and reason unaided by special revelation were the authorities now. Against this climate, Schleiermacher insists on the indispensability of religion and himself affirms the Christian religion in particular as having a proper place alongside science and other such pursuits.
Schleiermacher, however, is not unaffected by the intellectual climate he is taking on. Rather than undermining all the crucial presuppositions of such an atmosphere, he instead makes just enough room to fit Christianity inside it in some form or other, letting what does not, at the end of this process, fit inside, fall out or get reinterpreted. Religion, in order to fit it into the schema of various intellectual pursuits, each with differing and seemingly discrete domains of authority, is a pursuit whose subject is reduced to a mere feeling or consciousness of a kind of dependence on the divine. All doctrine, to be legitimate (or perhaps even meaningful?), requires a foundation in this very consciousness. So distinct is this expression of the consciousness of dependence on God that, were it in a body of doctrine to be rendered exact, the statements making up this body would not or could not overlap in meaning with those appearing in philosophy or some other subject. It is simply a mistake to think that, once religious language is cleaned up and logically ordered, that it will be able to affirm or deny any proposition expressed in the language of one of the other subjects. True Christian doctrine, then, rightly understood, has no quarrel with the science or philosophy of those who would despise it.
In this particular line of thought, Schleiermacher’s views of religion and religious language are in the same general stream as those of the later logical positivists and other similar sorts of later empiricists who questioned whether religious language had any meaning at all, some indeed affirming that it did have meaning but only in virtue or its connections with religious feelings or attitudes rather than through any sort of correspondence with some kind of a supernatural or metaphysical external reality. That such views were able to hold sway in many philosophy departments (and among some theologians) is undoubtedly due in part to the influence of Schleiermacher and others coming from his general intellectual climate. Only with the dramatic Anglo-American resurgence of metaphysics in the third quarter of the twentieth century and the simultaneous collapse of logical positivism and extreme empiricism with it, did such views of religion and religious language in philosophical circles cease to be any kind of dominant or even major view.
One at times sees vestiges of such views, however, expressed by some (definitely not all) more progressive religious people, in part often also channeling seemingly the old religious Liberalism of which Schleiermacher is one of the primogenitors. When one thinks about the implications of such a view of religion or religious language fully applied, however, it is hard to see how it could possibly do justice to the various religious traditions which populate our world. It is not easy to see how every religion can be reduced to at bottom a kind of feeling of dependence or seeing the finite in its relation to the infinite without either excising or at least doing violence to the beliefs or practices of some religions or introducing foreign elements into it which were not already there to be found. Religious language and all the doctrines and dogmas of the various religions ultimately turn into a mere expression or discussion of our own feelings. Rather than focused, say, on God, our God-talk is, despite appearances, focused on ourselves. We do not worship God – rather, we express our feelings and call it “worship of God”. Taken to its logical conclusion, such a view ultimately pushes God, the supernatural, and religious claims to factual truth aside and leaves us instead with a kind of consciousness without any correspondence to any sort of external divinity or divine reality, only us, our consciousness and the empirical world all around. The factual content of Christianity has been gutted, and Christianity along with it, leaving only an empty form of words to be refilled with what we may like from our own experiences.
From the readings, however, it does not seem like Schleiermacher was completely consistent nor did he realize the full implications of the path on which he was taking Christian theology. At times he does seem to think that God really is a separate entity external to us, existing over and above our experiences and that we can really say factually true things about this God – things that correspond to the way the world is outside of us – not merely express our feelings. He seems to think, for instance, that there is some sort of real survival beyond death watched over by a real God who has real effects on real people – and that this is a basis for a real hope or comfort over those who have died. Others have followed Schleiermacher in this inconsistent mixture of an apparently emotive view of religious language and yet at times being committed to its opposite. When seen consistently for what it is, however, without the admixture of what is inconsistent with it, it is hard to see the plausibility in such a view (and hence why it has fallen on better days in philosophical circles).

Fatalism, Indeterminacy, and No-Future Views

A paper I gave at the 2008 Eastern APA (at the Philosophy of Time Society group meeting):

FATALISM, INDETERMINACY, AND NO-FUTURE VIEWS

Presentists and growing block theorists reject the idea of a concrete, determinate future. Such ‘No-Futurism’ is often in part motivated by an incompatibilist or libertarian view of free will and the desire to avoid the fatalism which is thought to accompany the denial of No-Futurism. However, this avenue to No-Futurism can be successfully blocked – we can show that the very assumptions which are meant to entail the incompatibility of a determinate future with libertarian freedom actually also entail, in conjunction with the common assumption that bivalence fails for future contingents, the incompatibility of an indeterminate future with such freedom. And in fact, what we are in the end forced to say is that this freedom, when conjoined with a denial of bivalence, is straightforwardly incompatible with No-Futurism in general, whether or not all of the No-Futurists’ assumptions are accepted in the first place. Far from providing a successful route to the nonexistent future, considerations from human freedom and incompatibilism actually point, if anywhere, in the opposite direction or, at least, to some other No-Future views which have their own share of problems.

I. The Open Road
Many people reject the existence of a real, concrete and determinate future because they think it leads to fatalism and hence a lack of freedom on our part. These people tend to fall neatly into one of two camps: presentists, who believe that neither the future nor the past exist (or at least that they do not do so except as parts of the present), or growing block theorists, who believe that only the future fails to exist. More carefully, presentists take it that everything which exists is present and exists at the present, whereas growing block theorists take it that everything which exists is either present or past and exists at the present or in the past. Though these two groups disagree about the ontological status of the past, they agree for the most part about the future. From now on, I will call such views ‘No-Future’ views.

Many No-Futurists hold the beliefs they do at least in part because of a widespread belief in Libertarianism about free will and the looming threat of fatalism which a determinate future is thought to provide. According to Libertarians about free will, free will both exists and is incompatible with determinism (that is, Incompatibilism is true). Libertarians will also take it that free will automatically rules out fatalism about our actions – that is, it rules out the possibility that we might have no power (at every given time) to affect what we will do in the future. So if fatalism turned out to be true, that would automatically rule out the existence of free will as understood by Incompatibilists. According to many of those who hold such views, though, the only way to avoid the fatalism supposedly provided by a determinate, real future is to get rid of it. Indeed, one often sees reasoning such as the following: “If it really is determinately the case that I will eat a burger even before I do it, then I had to do it. So there can be no determinate future featuring my eating of a burger – otherwise my eating would not have been a free action. So there is no future.”

Diekemper (2007, 429) expresses this attitude of the No-Future theorist as follows:

…if the event of the Third World War exists eternally, then in what sense is that event—prior to its occurrence—not inexorable? The [No-Future theorist’s] intuition is that there is no sense in which it is not inexorable; and so, in order to preserve the potentiality of the future, many philosophers of time have rejected the B-Theoretic doctrine of an existent future.

Tooley (1997, 45-46) describes (but does not endorse) such an argument as denying the existence of future facts because such facts would thereby be unpreventable, even by an omnipotent person. Lucas (1973) seems to endorse this sort of reasoning as, in several places, does Prior and those many who would equate eternalism with a deterministic block universe. Indeed, many people seem to take a real, determinate and concrete future to be a very grave threat to our freedom.

These sorts of lines of thought generally proceed from a largely Incompatibilist or Libertarian view of free will, according to which the predetermination of what I shall do by facts beyond my control render my actions thereby unfree. Let us state a formal, stripped down version of the Incompatibilist view as follows:

Incompatibilism: If either □N F(p) or □N F(~p), then ~Free (F(p)).

Here, ‘p’ stands in for some claim ascribing an action to me and ‘F’ is an operator making the claim future-tensed. ‘Free(F(p))’ claims that I am free with respect to whether I will perform the action described in ‘p’. Assuming a standard logic for tense, we can take ~F(p) to either entail or be equivalent to F(~p). It is important to note that the modality expressed in the modal operators here is not one of absolute metaphysical modality or logical modality. Rather, such a modality is meant to be understood in terms of the temporally-relative modality of ‘accidental’ or ‘temporal’ necessity – the modality of inevitability at a given time and future contingency. The basic idea of this sort of modality is that something is possible with respect to a given time if and only if it is compatible with the facts about that very time (plus the laws of nature and perhaps facts about earlier times). The Incompatibilist might add here that something can only be something I really have a choice about or say in if it is possible in this sense. So we should take ‘□t ’to mean roughly the same as ‘It is inevitable at t that…’ and ‘t’ to mean roughly the same as ‘It is not inevitable that it is not the case at t that…’. All modal operators in this paper should be understood to express this sort of modality and, unless stated otherwise, all verbs should be taken as present-tensed. In our statement of Incompatibilism, then, the subscript ‘N’ should be taken as referring to the current time, so that the whole claim can be read, ‘If it is either now inevitable that p or now inevitable that not-p, then I am not free with respect to whether it will be the case that p.’

On this sort of incompatibilist view we are looking at, then, causal determinism of the ordinary sort is straightforwardly incompatible with free will since if my performing a certain action at a later time is now causally determined, it will not be possible now for me to do otherwise and hence I will not have the power to do so and hence will not be free with respect to that action.

So far, however, none of this gives us any lack of free action when conjoined merely to a determinate, real future. On its own, Incompatibilism may appear prima facie compatible with a determinate future unless we add some further assumption or set of assumptions. As one might expect, though, some No-Future folks will also accept the following controversial principle (though not always stated in this precise form) :

Fatalistic Principle (FP): If Det(F(p)) then □N F(p).

Here, ‘Det’ should be read as ‘It is determinate that…’. I suppose the basic intuition behind FP (which seems on many interpretations to play the key role in Aristotle’s “sea-battle” discussion in De Interpretatione) is that if it is already true that I will perform a certain action, then this settled and hence, in order for it to be possible for me to do otherwise, I would have to be able to causally effect what is already settled (that is, the truth that I will perform that action) – an activity which to many seems impossible or at least beyond the powers of mortal ken. In other words, given that it is already true that I will A in 2010, for it to be possible for me to do otherwise than A, I would need to continue to have the ability to causally influence whether I will do A in 2010. But that would require an ability to causally influence whether it is now or was in the past true that I will do A in 2010. But since those things are already settled, it is supposed, I can have no such ability since those sorts of things cannot be causally influenced. So, on this intuition, if it is indeed true that I will perform an action it must also be necessary now that I do it – it is inevitable and completely unavoidable. And it is precisely this principle, FP, which in conjunction with Incompatibilism, entails the controversial position held by many that freedom with respect to some future action requires that it be indeterminate whether I will take such an action. From Incompatibilism and FP, then, we get:

Openness Principle (OP): If either Det(F(p)) or Det(F(~p)), then ~Free(F(p)).

And so these No-Future theorists will take it that, since there are instances where I am free to do something, there are therefore instances where my doing it in the future is indeterminate. So the Incompatibilist who accepts the Fatalist Principle will thereby be committed to OP and hence, if they believe in free will, will be forced to reject the idea that there is a real and determinate future. No-Futurism follows.

II. The Fatalistic Principle Strikes Back
That OP follows from the assumptions of the previous section is, I think obvious. But that these same assumptions are compatible with the existence of free will is, I think, taken for granted. As I hope to show now, one need not make any further substantive assumptions beyond what many No-Futurists already accept to reach the conclusion that Incompatibilism and FP, together with a common No-Futurist assumption, jointly entail that we have no determinate freedom, so that rejecting a determinate future will not help us to save free will after all.

A key assumption that we need here is one that is widely adopted by many No-Futurists, and this is just the denial of bivalence for future contingents – that is, that for any statement which neither is inevitable nor whose negation is inevitable, such a statement is neither true nor false (not that it is indeterminate whether it is true or false, but rather genuinely neither). We could take this to mean either that future contingents possess a third truth-value separate from truth and falsity, or simply that they are truth-valueless. I do not believe which one we choose will make much of a difference in what follows, so long as we deny bivalence in either case. On this sort of view, for some truth to be determinate is simply for it to be true (and vice versa) and for it to be indeterminate is simply for it to fail to be true and also fail to be false. That is, indeterminacy is a third option – a claim may be true, false, or neither. This view, then, is committed to the following principle:

Alethic Determinacy (AD): If p then Det(p).

Now what should someone who rejects bivalence think about the law of the excluded middle for future contingent propositions? That is, should we take the following as true or not:

Future Excluded Middle (FEM): Either F(p) or ~F(p).

One option here is to adopt a supervaluationist branching future view, accept the truth of FEM, and save the law of the excluded middle. On this strategy, there are many possible futures branching out from the present (and hence many possible complete histories) and if a given claim is true on all branches (that is, on all histories) then it will count as true, if false on all branches then it will be false, and indeterminate otherwise. And since on every history the action described in p occurs or it does not, FEM is also true on every history and hence is true simpliciter. Supervaluation, however, will not be much help here. Consider that we can here distinguish between two notions or modes of truth – there is super-truth (truth at all possible histories) and there is local truth (truth at a given possible history). Super-truth, then, is merely local truth relative to every possible history. A statement like p, then, can be locally true relative to some possible history while failing to be super-true. Local truth, that is, does not entail super-truth. Since Det(p) is generally taken to be true just in case p is super-true, p can be locally true without being determinately true. That is, for a given possible history, it could be true that p while false that Det(p). But this means that, given the existence of some future contingent, AD fails to be locally true relative to every possible future. If we take AD to be super-true just in case it is true at every possible history, then it follows that AD is in fact not super-true.

Along similar lines, we could show that on this understanding of the branching time framework that for any statement F(p) which reports a future contingent, it ends up the case that Det(F(~Det(p))), from which it would follow via the No-Futurist’s principles that I am not free as to whether or not it will be determinately the case that p. This may be better than it not being the case that I am free as to whether or not it will be the case that p, but for someone who wants a robust Libertarian free will it does not seem all that much better. There are various moves that could be tried at this point to avoid all these apparently bad consequences, but in every case I think the rejection of AD will be more plausible than any view which happens to retain it. The truth that AD is trying to capture, it seems, is simply the triviality that if it is determinate that p then it is determinate that p. This is admittedly a rather short dismissal of other supervaluationist alternatives, but for now I will leave the discussion at that and simply assume from now on that such gambits will not ultimately deserve our acceptance.

Supposing, however, we simply stipulate that AD is true at every possible history really is necessarily true in the strongest sense and really does hold even in each of these possibilities. In that case, it is important to remember that FEM is supposed to be true at each history. But that is simply because, for each history, either one disjunct is true or the other is. Given a possible history where F(p), it is also true that either F(p) or ~F(p), and the same for any history where ~F(p). But then, by AD, in histories where F(p), it will also be true that Det(F(p)) and hence that either Det(F(p)) or Det(~F(p)). Similarly for histories where ~F(p). But then, by OP, it follows that in each of these possible histories there is no freedom. But since this holds for every possible history, it holds simpliciter and hence there is no freedom, period.

Since the supervaluationist option was a bust, the anti-bivalentist might instead suppose that FEM, like its atomic constituents, is neither true nor false. This would be a desperate move indeed but perhaps not hopeless. Let us introduce a new operator, ‘Ind’, which obeys the following rule: For any claim c, ‘Ind(c)’ is true just in case c is neither true nor false; it is false otherwise. ‘Ind’ should, then probably be interpreted as saying something like ‘It is indeterminate that…’. Since FEM, we are supposing, is neither true nor false, the following proposition will be true:

Indeterminate Excluded Middle (IEM): Ind(Either F(p) or ~F(p)).

But since ‘Either F(p) or ~F(p)’ entails that I am not free with respect to F(p), it follows that either I am not free with respect to F(p) or it is indeterminate whether I am not free with respect to F(p). That is, ‘~Free(F(p))’ will be the case or ‘Ind(~Free(F(p)))’ will be the case. The former is straightforwardly inconsistent with a Libertarian position, but what of the latter? Since ‘Ind(F(p))’ will only be true just in case ‘Ind(~F(p))’ is also, it follows that ‘Ind(Free(F(p)))’ is also true and hence it is not determinate that I am free with respect to F(p). That is, it is indeterminate whether I have free will. This might be slightly better than having no free will at all but, again, if it is better, it is not much so. After all, a genuine Libertarian is surely going to be committed to its actually being the case – to its being determinately true, in fact – that I am free, not just that it is neither true nor false that I am free. So even if this gambit does not exclude free will, we can surely describe it as excluding determinate free will and that is about as bad. From now on, I will drop the ‘determinate’ adjective and simply assume that the free will we are interested in here is supposed to be determinate. Whether FEM or IEM is accepted, then, freedom is excluded. Instead of securing freedom, it looks like our No-Futurist must reject it.

III. Why No-Futurists Must Accept the Fatalistic Principle
To get out of this mess, it seems we must reject one of the following: free will, Incompatibilism, FP, AD, or FEM. Since I cannot see how anyone would plausibly accept all the other assumptions and yet reject FEM as false, I will leave that option aside. The live options, then, are these: either give up free will, reject Incompatibilism, give up the Fatalist Principle, or accept bivalence and reject AD. Although I would opt for both of the latter two options, it is perfectly open to the Libertarian No-Futurist to take only one. That option, however, cannot be the rejection of the Fatalist Principle – the No-Futurist is committed to this principle by their very views about the future and, hence, the only way for a No-Futurist to adopt a Libertarian position is for them to accept bivalence and reject AD. What I claim, then, is that the following is true:

No-Future and Fatalism (NFF): If No-Future then FP.
NFF, of course should probably be restricted in such a way that it is true only of future truths – that is, as far as facts about the future are concerned, if No-Future, then if these future things are determinate they are necessary. Take this as understood. But how does FP follow from a No-Future view? Here is one way to go – we can say that it follows largely due to the principle that Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) – a difference in truth value for a given proposition across two worlds requires a difference in the objects or instantiations of properties between those two worlds (that is, a difference in what there is and how things are between them). I take this to be an intuitively obvious principle (even though some may want to deny it) – after all, if the truth of a statement floats freely of the way the world is, we lose any grip on its really being about anything in the world in the first place.

But now, given TSB, if we believe No-Future we are going to be hard pressed not to accept FP as well. After all, if there is no future then all facts about the future must be grounded in the present (or the present together with the past) plus any relevant nomological laws. So if it is determinately true that p, then that fact is grounded in (let’s say) present facts. But for p to be temporally contingent, it must be temporally possible at this time both that p and that ~p. And that is only so if the intrinsic facts about the present (along with, perhaps, the past) do not determine that p. But if that were so, then given No-Future the present facts could not ground the truth that p. But, again, given No-Future and TSB, if that were so then it cannot be determinately true that p. So if it is determinate at this time, it is not possible at this time for it to be otherwise. Hence for the No-Futurist, NFF follows straightforwardly from TSB.

None of the various versions of the kinds of truthmakers No-Futurists give to ground truths about the future will work here. Take, for instance, the view that what grounds truths about the future are simply the current states of things plus the laws of nature. This is straightforwardly ruled out by Incompatibilism as a way of grounding truths about future free actions. Consider also the view that there are primitive, irreducible future-tensed properties such as being such that one will do A possessed by individuals or the world which ground truths about the future (see Bigelow 1996). The having of some such properties rather than some others clearly will be temporally necessary. Appeals to temporally distributional properties will seem to fare similarly, as will verificationists or dispositionalist accounts of the grounding of future truths. If any of those posited truthmakers now ground in the present what will happen in the future, such future occurrences are inevitable – that is, they are temporally necessary.

An ersatzist about times such as Bourne (2006) or Crisp (2007) – who treats times as abstract objects arranged in order via primitive ersatz earlier-than relations – will not do any better here. Such a view treats future truths as being grounded in what is represented as being the case by an ersatz time which is ersatz-later than the ersatz time which correctly represents the present. So if some such time represents p then it is true that p at the corresponding distance from the present time. But this is just as inevitable as any of the other options. These states of abstract objects are, after all, present states – as in all the other options, they render my future actions temporally necessary. Similar sorts of views which make future truths depend on God’s memories or will or some such divine mental state will obviously not do any better.

The argument for NFF I have been giving is similar to ones that have been given in the literature attempting to show that Libertarians and their ilk must reject bivalence or at least determinacy for at least some future-tensed statements. Rhoda, Boyd, and Belt (2007), for instance, argue that the guarantee by present conditions of the truth of future-tensed statements about my actions is straightforwardly inconsistent with Incompatibilism (though they do not use this exact terminology). And Michael Rea (2006) has skillfully argued that, if Presentism is true and all statements about the future are determinate then, since future truths about someone’s actions have not in the past been even partly grounded in the person such truths are about (since they were true before that person even existed), such a person never has and never will have a choice about such actions. And hence such a person will not be free with respect to such actions.

Rea considers ways someone might try to resist fatalism, but most of the ways out of principles like FP end up being available only to one who actually believes in a real, concrete and determinate future. At this point, though, one might think that if TSB is rejected for statements about my future contingents (as might be done by certain Molinists) then we would have a way out of NFF. But, as Rea (2006, 521-522) has in effect argued, even if TSB is false (as claimed by Merricks 2007), if No-Future is true and all statements of future contingents are now either true or false, then such ‘future contingents’ will indeed be temporally necessary. After all, these ungrounded truths are still present (or past) truths and, being ungrounded, they are not made true by anything outside of the present (or past). So the fact that F(p) is a wholly present fact, not dependent on anything future, and this fact guarantees or fixes what will occur in the future. Hence, any future contingents will be inevitable. So whether or not TSB is true, NFF follows once we accept a No-Future view.

IV. The No-Futurist’s Options
Given the truth of NFF, the No-Futurist is thereby stuck with FP. Hence, per the discussion of the previous sections, for the No-Futurist, the only options left are to abandon No-Futurism (so they can reject FP), abandon free will, accept compatibilism, or take bivalence on board. So for someone committed to both No-Futurism and Incompatibilist freedom, the only option is to accept bivalence and reject AD. Presumably, this would have to involve invoking some kind of perhaps entirely non-semantic metaphysical indeterminacy where F(p)’s indeterminacy is compatible both with its truth and its falsity – that is, where it really is either true or false, and hence bivalence holds for it, yet it is simply indeterminate which. On this view, indeterminacy would not be some third option over and above truth and falsity, but rather a kind of primitive state where the world is simply indeterminate between the two options. The problem here, of course, would be to make sense of this sort of metaphysical indeterminacy and the idea that something could be true but not determinately so.

Another bivalence-accepting strategy would be to take ‘~F(p)’ as true, and differentiate this from ‘F(~p)’. So far I have been taking these two claims to be either equivalent or for the former to entail the latter. However, were one to differentiate them, denying that one entails the other, and take all ‘will’ claims such as ‘F(~p)’, where they express future contingents, to be false, one could still affirm the truth of ‘~F(p)’. In this case, the inference from IEM to the denial of free will is rendered invalid. The basic idea of this view, then, is to accept bivalence and still get out of my argument by, in effect, denying that ‘will’ and ‘will not’ sentences are genuine contradictories. Contraries, yes, but not contradictories. This strategy, of course, has its own problems dealing with the way we ordinarily treat ‘will’ and ‘will not’ as contradictories and dealing with truth-value links between previous predictions about what were once future contingents and the truth of propositions about these same events occurring in the present..

So, from what we have seen, far from requiring a No-Future view of time, Libertarianism is straightforwardly incompatible with it (or at least with many common forms of it). To escape from this incompatibility, I have suggested two strategies the No-Futurists might make use of, both of which will involve a lot of work, if not substantial difficulties. Whatever the case may be, the denial of bivalence for propositions about future contingents in order to uphold our free will is a self-defeating gesture and No-Futurists who deny bivalence in the name of saving free will are instead attacking the very thing they set out to defend.

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