Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
| |
Jan and I have a morning routine of getting up at 5:30 am each day to have coffee together and discuss our schedule for the day and any pertinent news or emails. It’s become a habit which we have now enjoyed for years. We have a lot to talk about!
| |
I’m making great progress on the locus dealing with the doctrine of Christ in volume IV of my Systematic Philosophical Theology. On May 22 I finished the section on the person of Christ. The central question of this section is how Christ can be both human and divine.
| |
 | Rembrandt. Head of Christ, 1648. Oil-on-panel painting, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.
|
| I argue that the second person of the Trinity, whom John refers to as “the Logos” (John 1.1), does not assume a complete human nature but rather forms a complete human nature by uniting his person with a human body. Since man is made in the image of God, in that he is a person just as God is personal, the Logos brings to his hominin body precisely the properties needed to make a complete human person or man.
By assuming flesh, the Logos becomes the soul of Jesus. Just as we should not think of a human person as a composite entity but rather as a soul intimately connected to its body as an instrument, through which it perceives the world and acts in the world, so also we should not think of Christ as a composite entity made up of two parts, divinity and humanity. Rather we should think of Christ as the person of the Logos related to his body just as our soul is to our body. Christ’s soul is thus, like Christ himself, truly human but not merely human.
| |
In order to have a biblically faithful account of the incarnation, I suggest that in Christ’s single person his conscious and subconscious were differentiated in a theologically significant way. Roughly, only mental states typical of a human conscious life were conscious for Jesus, while most atypical states, states more appropriate to divinity, were subliminal. The Logos freely condescended to take on this state of humiliation during his earthly sojourn out of his great love for us for the purpose of our salvation. I was surprised to discover that this view of the incarnation (with variations, of course) is becoming increasingly popular, being advocated by such philosophical theologians as Richard Swinburne, Charles Taliaferro, Stewart Goetz, Michael Rea, Andrew Loke, Joseph Jedwab, and others. It’s nice to be in good company!
| |
Now I’m working on the next section on the work of Christ, specifically his atoning death for the sins of the world. Fortunately, prior to beginning my Systematic Philosophical Theology, I wrote a book on the subject, entitled Atonement and the Death of Christ (Baylor University Press, 2020). So writing this section will be much easier, since I’m not starting from scratch. I’ll present a multifaceted theory of the atonement with penal substitution at the center, but also including Christus Victor, satisfaction, moral influence, and so on as subsidiary facets.
| |
Most all my working time in May was devoted to my writing. But I did do a very interesting interview with Ethiopian students of Dr. Tedla Woldeyohannes, an Ethiopian who years ago came to Talbot School of Theology with little more than the shirt on his back and who is now a professor of philosophy at Huntington University in Indiana. We had a great discussion concerning my work on the historical Adam. This is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to minister to people in Ethiopia. And to my surprise Tedla told me, “Bill, you are greatly beloved in Ethiopia!” It’s so wonderful to know that in a country half the world away under such pressure from Islam the Lord is using our work to build his church!
| |
Kevin Harris and I recorded some entertaining and educational podcasts on the Harrison Butker controversy, the passing of Daniel Dennett, and a critique of my work on the meaning of life by the British philosopher Timothy Mawson. In my weekly Defenders class we have now moved on to a discussion of divine providence, where I’ll be discussing the Calvinist, Arminian, and Molinist perspectives.
| |
|
For Christ and His Kingdom,
| |
Dear Mr. Lepien,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Hanif Avarsaji. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Craig briefly last year in San Antonio, Texas, during the 75th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. During our conversation, I mentioned that my ministry was working on translating his book, "The Son Rises," into Farsi.
I am delighted to inform you that, after a year of dedicated work, I have successfully completed the translation. Additionally, I have obtained the necessary permissions from Wipf and Stock Publishers and have printed 100 copies of the book. It is now ready to serve the Iranian Christian community worldwide.
I would be honored to send Dr. Craig a copy of the translated book as a token of my appreciation and respect. Thank you once again for your assistance and for the opportunity to bring Dr. Craig’s work to a new audience.
Warm regards in Christ,
Hanif Avarsaji
| |
|
|
|
|
