Post tagged with incarnation

  • Do you go to hell for having the wrong theory of atonement?

    April 11th, 201010:54 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Just before Easter I began a critique concerning a particular understanding of atonement, that encapsulated in the legal metaphor of Christ paying our debt of sin, as well as the penal substitutionary metaphor of Christ dying in our place. It is not that I deny these are metaphors of scripture. Rather, I deny that they provide a theoretical account...

  • Can Jesus make a better Caesar salad than my wife?

    January 12th, 201002:02 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Yesterday I was at the dinner table with my wife and daughter Jamie eating a tasty meal. As I crunched the crispy romaine lettuce dressed with croutons, parmesan cheese, lemon juice and the rest, I exclaimed to Jamie, "Nobody can make a better Caesar salad than your mom!" to which she replied: "Jesus can!" Well I admit, according to Christian...

  • Did fallible human testimony ensure that Jesus would have false beliefs?

    January 07th, 201009:54 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Another reason to think Jesus had false beliefs The debate on whether Jesus had false beliefs usually centers on evidence from scripture. (Hence, my previous token post on the topic.) Here I'm going to shift the ground and offer another reason to think that Jesus probably had some false beliefs. My argument builds on the amply demonstrated fact th...

  • Did Jesus have any false beliefs? A look at the Gospel of Mark

    January 07th, 201009:38 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    A brief recap In this post we return to our exploration of the omniscience of the incarnate Son of God. To recap all too briefly, we saw that a blastocyst cannot be omniscient, and therefore at the point where Jesus was a blastocyst (or fetus, or neonate) he could not be omniscient. Further, our intuitions on deity leave us to conclude that omnisc...

  • Was Jesus Christ blastocyst innately omniscient?

    December 28th, 200912:19 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Now that the presents are opened and the turkey is eaten, we can get back to business. But first a moment's frivolity. I made this joke up a few days ago to wide acclaim in my household. In the spirit of Christmas giving, you are free to use it ... so long as you send me a royalty cheque: What did Whitney Houston hang on her door at Christmas?A-wr...

  • Was Jesus of two minds ... literally? (Part 1 and a half)

    December 21st, 200902:44 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    In my last post I laid down the raw materials for an account of how Jesus could be simultaneously omniscient (qua his divinity) and finite in knowledge (qua his humanity). I did so by outlining the dual consciousness of split brain patients. In those fascinating cases people who suffered from severe seizures were given a corpus callosotomy, an oper...

  • Was Jesus of two minds ... literally? (Part 1)

    December 16th, 200907:53 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    We continue our reflection on the paradoxical notion of God becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ (with special attention to the property of omniscience and finite human knowledge). Our last foray focused on the unsatisfying "reduplicative formula" which really does little more than label the paradox at issue. According to this "model" (if it can be c...

  • Was God the Son merely close friends with Jesus?

    December 14th, 200909:58 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Thus far we have been considering the logical puzzle of how an omniscient God could possibly become a human being. The basic problem we face is one of incompossibility of properties: i.e. there are many properties that Christians believe God exemplifies of necessity which are incompatible with attributes human beings exemplify. (Note I haven't yet ...

  • An Atheist Pot, a Christian Kettle, and an ironic charge of blackness

    December 12th, 200912:53 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    In my last couple posts I initiated a discussion on theories of incarnation. In the threaded discussion to the post "Did Baby Jesus know more physics than Einstein?" I made the following comment: "The challenge is to explain what this [incarnation] means qua human and divine knowledge in a way that is both orthodox and coherent." In other words, ...

  • Did Baby Jesus know more physics than Einstein?

    December 10th, 200903:59 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Christians have classically defined God as omniscient. That is, they have affirmed that God has all knowledge; more specifically, God knows all true propositions and believes no false propositions. According to that classic understanding of God, which theologians often refer to as "classical theism", God is not only omniscient but essentially so. T...
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An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).