The Resurrection

[Belacqua]

Just saying that your man-god doesn't make sense to me.

So, an abstract concept like happiness and a concrete concept like male, stop making sense to you the moment a single entity possess both?

Yeah, I don't understand the problem with this. We can say that a person is a good man. "Good" being an attribute, a thing knowable through judgment and the mind. And "man" being a material object. They can go together.


It might be better in the long run, instead of using "abstract" and "concrete," to use the traditional terms "intelligible" and "sensible." (Intelligible meaning of course "known only through the mind" and sensible meaning "known through the senses.") So numbers, for example, are intellligible. We can extrapolate their existence from sensible objects (two people, two books) but we never perceive a number itself through the senses -- we never perceive "two" itself. 

Things like justice and kindness are intelligible. Goodness is intelligible. We can perceive examples of these things as embodied in the material world but never perceive them in themselves. 

Similarly, God cannot be known through the senses but only through the mind. Since the time of Plato, it has been said that God has no material existence but exists, like numbers, like goodness, as a purely intelligible thing. We can know something of what God is like by seeing goodness, justice, etc., in embodied cases, but never see the Good itself. God is goodness itself, not a good thing. 

Then there are two points that are necessary for the incarnation. The first is kenosis -- which says that Jesus, though the incarnation of God, is also a diminution of God's full nature. In his embodied form, God cannot be the Good itself, the Form of the Good, but only the best possible human. The second is that Jesus is said to be the best possible human in every way, since he embodied the goodness, justice, mercy, etc. -- the qualities of goodness of which God is the intelligible end and source -- more than any other person could. 

The framework in which this explanation holds is that everything in the world is an emanation of the Goodness of God, so all of us already embody God's qualities to some degree. Some more than others. Jesus is like a limit-case -- the extreme example of what it is like to embody God's goodness in the maximum possible form. This is what it means to be divine -- to embody God's nature in this way. But it is a difference in degree and not kind, since all of us (according to this theory) are emanated from God, and embody to some degree his goodness.

The usual objection to this type of theology is to point to literalist readings of the Bible, or different versions of theology that don't allow for this reading. But these objections are like a Gish Gallop, jumping from one system to another in order to offer objections that aren't relevant for the theory at hand.