Category: Christology

Introduction

This is part 2 of a lengthy blog article I have written in response to comments William Lane Craig made in his 999th Q&A, titled Annihilation and Atonement. You can find that Q&A here and part 1 of my response here. In that first installment of this series, I argued that Craig relies on a flawed silent premise regarding the nature of death and fails to acknowledge established conditionalist models that reconcile Christ’s death with the tenets of annihilationism. In this installment, I will discuss the various problems in Craig’s position.

Craig’s theological lens affects his appraisal of annihilationism

I would posit that Craig’s own theological commitments mislead him to think that his argument is insurmountable for Conditionalists, when his arguments require things that most conditionalists and many Christians reject. First, he holds that ‘God is timeless sans creation, but in time since the moment of creation.’ Divine timelessness is the notion that God has all his existence so his existence is not divided up into time. Craig thinks this is true of God before He created the cosmos. However, he holds to a theory of tensed time, the view that ‘time involves an objective distinction between past, present, and future,’ and that God exists now in time.¹William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time, (Crossway: 2001), 240–241. Being in time now, God has come ‘into the relation of sustaining the universe or at the very least, of coexisting with the universe.’²William Lane Craig, ‘Divine Eternity’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Thomas P. Flint & Michael C. Rea, (Oxford University Press: 2009), 155. This raises the question of how this might change God. Craig denies the Logos is changed intrinsically by being in time, but affirms He is changed extrinsically as he comes to knowledge of tense facts (events that happen each moment of time). Furthermore, Craig teaches the Logos is ‘the source of all created things’³Craig, Time and Eternity, 18. and continues to uphold the universe as Christ (see here and here). This entails the idea that the Logos (who is necessarily existent) sustains the cosmos on a moment-by-moment basis within time whilst incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth (see on Craig’s Christology below). This helps explain why Craig insists the annihilation of Jesus is problematic for annihilationism. If Craig held to divine timelessness then he could accept the argument that what happens in time to Jesus cannot affect the timeless Logos in any way. However, with the Logos being in each and every moment of time then there is a question of how the death of Jesus could affect Him. Craig needs to rule out any notion that the Logos himself was affected intrinsically by the death of Jesus. This predisposes him to reject any view that entails the annihilation of Jesus even if that view could be explained in a way that does not contravene orthodox Christology (such as Peoples’ mortal God proposal).

Second, Craig tentatively holds that the ‘soul of the human nature of Christ is the second person of the Trinity,’ which he calls Neo-Apollinarianism. One of the problems of classical Apollinarianism is that this view entails Christ not having a complete human nature, since the Logos functions in place of the human rational soul in Christ. To address this problem in the view, Craig argues that the Logos has always possessed the properties of personhood, which means the Logos has always ‘contained perfect human personhood archetypically in his own nature.’⁴J. P. Moreland & William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd ed., (IVP Academic: 2017), 606. Humans have a body and a soul, so the Logos did not have a complete human nature until His ‘acquisition of a hominid body’. This brought ‘the human nature of Christ to completion’ so that ‘Jesus of Nazareth could not have existed apart from the incarnation.’⁵Moreland & Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 610. Craig can then argue that in this view Christ did have a complete human nature.

Though Craig posits this as a possible view of the incarnation, there are good reasons to think that he is personally persuaded that this is the preferred view of Christology. In Does Dr. Craig Have an Orthodox Christology?, Craig posits Neo-Apollinarian Christology to fend off charges by Muslims and secularists that the incarnation is incoherent, and defend against the heresy of Nestorianism. Moreover, he also generally seems to have difficulty with some aspects of orthodox Christology which he thinks lead to Nestorianism.⁶In Does Dr. Craig Have an Orthodox Christology?, Craig makes the following statement. ‘Orthodoxy says there is only one person in Christ (or who is Christ), and that person is divine. There is no human person, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is a divine person with two natures. I can’t make sense of that if we say that Christ had, in addition to his divine person, a merely human soul conjoined with a human body. That seems to me to be sufficient for another person in which case you have two Sons – one the divine Son and the other a human Son.’

But if the concept of personhood is bound up with that of a complete human nature, then it seems very difficult, given the rejection of Apollinarianism, to affirm two natures in Christ while avoiding Nestorianism.⁷Moreland & Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 598.

Neo-Apollinarianism solves these issues for Craig, so it is highly likely that Craig automatically (perhaps even at a subconscious level) defaults to Neo-Apollinarianism when conducting theological synthesis generally. He appears to do the same when critiquing doctrines like annihilationism. This is another reason why he would be predisposed to reject annihilationism. After all, if the Logos is necessarily existent while being in time and functioning as the rational soul of Jesus of Nazareth, then there could be no logical way that he could die. The particular Christological lens of Craig would mean he must begin his analysis of annihilationism and PSA with a presupposition that Christ could not die, let alone be annihilated in the strong sense. So, while Craig’s argument appears to follow logically, he would have engaged in circular reasoning in the form of beginning with the premise that the Logos could not be annihilated, which then forms part of his conclusion.

Problems in Craig’s case against annihilationism

Neo-Apollinarianism presents its own problems for Craig. First, while it is true that in Craig’s view the Logos continued to exist after the death of Jesus’s body, his emphasis that the incarnation brought Jesus of Nazareth into existence presents an interesting possibility. If the uniting of the Logos with a human body completes the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth so he came into existence, then it follows that the death of Jesus would result in him ceasing to exist. This is closer to Glenn Peoples’ account of the death of Christ from a physicalist perspective than one would assume. Both Craig and Peoples (see Part 1 linked above) think the Logos survived the death of Jesus of Nazareth. They would offer different reasons for this conclusion, but the unceasing existence of the Logos is a shared conviction. Likewise, since Craig’s view entails that Jesus of Nazareth would have ceased to exist at his death, then we can say his view is similar to Peoples’ view that Jesus was annihilated when he died. To be sure, Craig thinks the person of the Logos continued to exist because the necessarily existent Logos functioned as Jesus’s rational soul, but the dissolution of the union between Jesus’s body and soul meant he no longer existed as Jesus of Nazareth for the time that he was dead. This being so, then Craig’s argument against annihilation on the basis that Jesus would have ceased is a double edged sword that cuts into his own view.

Furthermore, in a recent discussion with Tony Costa, Craig responds to Costa’s statement that under annihilationism the Logos would have ceased to exist when Jesus died. Craig runs with this, surmising that annihilationists might account for the annihilation of Jesus when he died by saying he died in his human nature but not in his divine nature (this can be found here).

I think that the best response the annihilationist could give would be to say, “Yes, Christ was annihilated in bearing our punishment, but he was annihilated in his human nature, not in his divine nature.”

Craig appears to be ignorant of stronger arguments from the likes of Chris Date and Glenn Peoples (see my first blog article linked above), which do not entail a Christological heresy. This appears to have led Craig to erroneously suppose that the best way forward open to annihilationists is riddled with theological problems. I hesitate to call this a strawman, because Craig is oblivious to the stronger positions offered by conditionalists. Nevertheless, his ignorance means he offers objections that the stronger conditionalist models have already answered. Craig continues by saying,

Now, what that would imply, however, is that Christ’s concrete human nature ceased to exist at that point.

When Craig talks about Jesus’s human nature doing something like ‘ceasing to exist’ he is, perhaps unintentionally, reverting to Nestorian language. Nestorianism is the view that the incarnation involved the coming together of two persons in Christ. That is, ‘Jesus was really like two people walking around in one body.’⁸John M. Frame, Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An Introduction to Systematic Theology, (P&R Publishing: 2006), 143. One of the developments that came from the struggle with Christological heresies that arose during the several hundred years after the NT era was a distinction between a ‘person’ and the ‘nature’ of that person. That is, the nature of the person was no longer seen to be the same as that person. John Frame puts it this way.

Natures don’t do anything; persons do. When Jesus works a miracle, it is his person who works the miracle. When he suffers, it is his person who suffers. That person is the second person of the Trinity, who has taken on a human nature. So, in a real sense, it is God, a divine and human person, who hungers and thirsts, who suffers and dies for us.⁹Ibid., 144.

This distinction is especially important when critiquing Nestorianism. Whenever you see modern theologians talking as if Jesus’s human nature did anything, then you know they have slipped back into Nestorian categories, even as they are swerving to avoid other possible Christological problems. Craig is doing this when he talks about Jesus’s human nature ceasing to exist. In contrast, Date and Peoples do not fall into this error with their account of the death of Christ.

Craig continues,

In other words, Jesus reverted back to being just the disincarnate second person of the Trinity so that his resurrection from the dead would represent reincarnation. Well, is that what we as Christians are committed to … the reincarnation of Jesus? That’s certainly not orthodox Christianity.

Given Craig holds the Logos is the rational soul of Jesus of Nazareth, then it is rather surprising he misses the discarnate-reincarnate argument cuts into his own view of Christology. After all, if as Craig believes, death is the separation of the soul from the body, then would not the Logos have disincarnated when Jesus died and reincarnated when Jesus was resurrected? Now, Craig could say that since Jesus’s body did not decay then the Logos is rejoining the same body that was separated from Him. But, if that is the case, then annihilationism remains untouched by Craig’s argument, since annihilationists can say the same thing as Craig.

 

Moreover, Craig has his own problems. As noted above, in Craig’s view the joining of the Logos with a hominid body resulted in the formation of a complete human nature in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth did not exist until that happened. It follows, then, that when the Logos was disincarnated from the hominid body of Jesus at his death, that his human nature was rendered incomplete again and Jesus himself ceased to exist. Craig’s own view of Christology entail the cessation of Jesus of Nazareth at his death. But this is not what Craig thinks happens to humans when they die, since their human soul continues to exist after the death of the body. Therefore, Jesus’s death was not a normal human death so could never stand in for human sinners, those who deserve to die for their sin (Rom 1:32). Therefore, Jesus could not properly represent humans through his death. Therefore, Craig’s theological position fails his test against PSA.

Another problem surfaces when we contemplate Matthew 10:28. If Jesus’s soul is the pre-existent Logos who cannot die, his soul cannot have been destroyed in any normal sense that ἀπόλλυμι (apollumi) may take in this verse. While the human body and soul will be destroyed in Gehenna (Matt 10:28), Christ’s divine soul must be impervious to such destruction, no matter which nuance of ἀπόλλυμι (apollumi) is assumed in a text like Matthew 10:28. For instance, Douglas Moo argues that ἀπόλλυμι (apollumi) usually refers ‘to the situation of a person or object that has lost the essence of its nature or function.’¹⁰Douglas J. Moo, ‘Paul on Hell’, in Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment, Kindle ed. (Zondervan: 2007), Kindle loc. 2452. If Matthew 10:28b (‘Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell’) teaches that the soul loses the essence of its nature or function in Gehenna, then Craig’s appeal to PSA works against him in another way. There is simply no room for Craig to maintain that Christ’s soul was ruined in that sense when He died on the cross.

Given his adherence to the belief that the final fate of the lost is their relational separation from God, Craig might adopt a reading of this verse that is posited by Timothy R. Phillips,¹¹Timothy R. Phillips, “Hell: A Christological Reflection,” in Through No Fault of Their Own? The Fate of Those Who Have Never Heard, ed. William V. Crockett and James G. Sigountos (Baker: 1991), 51 n. 8. a view approvingly quoted by D. A. Carson, that ‘Christ is contrasting two qualitatively different types of existence, one involving a loving communion with God and another lacking it (a state of “ruin”).’ This, however, would be problematic as well. For one thing, though Craig does think Christ suffered a relational separation from (presumably) the other members of the Trinity, Jesus’s statement there is focused on what can be done to both the body and soul in a way that does not at all fit with the notion of relational separation. How does this account for the language of Matthew 10:28b (or other verses like Matt 3:12; 13:40-42; 18:8-9; Jude 1:7; 2 Peter 2:6; Rev 14:9-11; 10:20, etc.)? So, Craig has the problem of a lack of coherent synthesization of the biblical data within his own theology.

Furthermore, aspects of Craig’s version of PSA work against him with respect to his argument that Jesus suffered the punishment due to humankind. His view that there was a relational separation between Jesus and the other members of the Trinity is framed as ‘the withdrawal of God’s fellowship and blessing.’¹²D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism, Kindle ed., (Zondervan: 1996), Kindle loc. 11895. This needs to be viewed in the context of others statements he has made. In an informal debate with Greg Boyd, Craig stated that God the Father did not vent his wrath on Christ on the cross.¹³Did God punish Jesus on the cross? William Lane Craig vs Greg Boyd on Penal Substitution Atonement Craig also uses a forensic framework known as vicarious liability to argue that, though Jesus remained personally free from guilt, the guilt of humanity was legally transferred to Him.¹⁴Craig, Atonement and the Death of Christ, 186-192. If Craig is correct on these issues, then we may ask on what basis there could be a relational separation between Jesus, whose soul is the Logos, and the other members of the Trinity? After all, Jesus was not personally tainted by sin and the Father was not wrathful towards him, and Luke 22:42 establishes Jesus’s conformity to the Father’s will on the need for him to go to the cross. It is doubtful that Jesus could have experienced the kind of relational separation from God simply by suffering and dying on the cross. This means Christ cannot have fully experienced what humans will at the final judgment.

Conclusion:

This concludes the second part of my series on William Lane Craig’s argument against annihilationism from the doctrine of PSA. In summary, Craig’s arguments fail to show that the actual positions held by prominent Evangelical conditionalists are problematic. Ironically, his arguments have been shown to pose significant problems for his position. This is a sign that he is not fully aware of the stronger versions of conditionalist accounts of the death of Jesus. It also shows that his own theological integration needs an overhaul to shore up some gaping holes in his theology.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series.