Scripture and God in Christianity

guing that "It is sufficient if you have a human body animated by a human soul." 808 It is not the
bodily continuity or continuity of memory or character that makes for the identity of a human being.
It is the soul. "The soul is the subject of experience and initiator of action; and is the essential
part of any human being or other person, whose possession makes any future individual that
individual." 809 He contends that "if we don't draw the limit of the human too strictly, certainly
God can become man. He would do this by acquiring a human body (joining his soul to an
unowned human body), acting, acquiring beliefs, sensations and desires through it. Remaining
God, he would have become man by acquiring an extension to his normal modes of operation."
810 Using Freud's theory of divided mind Swinburne argues that "If God's human actions are
done only in the light of his beliefs, then he will feel the limitations that we have. God in becoming
incarnate will not have limited his powers, but he will have taken on a way of operating
which is limited and feels limited. So using the notion of divided mind we can coherently suppose
God to become incarnate while remaining God, and yet act and feel much like ourselves." 811
He concludes, arguing that "The Chalcedonian definition is not merely self-consistent but consistent
with the New Testament picture of Christ as acting in ignorance and weakness, and subject
to temptation. God could become man in a rather fuller sense than the traditional interpretation
allowed." 812
Swinburne seems to be confusing the issue even more than the Monarchians. In certain ways they
spared God's nature from human corruptions, limitations and qualifications. Swinburne seems to
be committing this mistake. He is making God pay a very high price for little accomplishment.
What kind of divine nature would adopt the human limitations and what kind of human nature
would the two minded person of human Jesus be? The figure would not be just with two heads
but also with two minds though quite confused and diffused ones. Therefore, Swinburne's interpretation
of Christ's relationship with God has its own limitations. It has to solve the problem of
Jesus' human soul and true humanity, issue of his true will, problem of an unusual person neither
complete God nor complete man, and the issue at hand of anthropomorphism in the light of
God's suffering and feeling of pain etc. in a human body. Though interesting enough, his interpretations
may not be fully intelligible either to the liberals or to the orthodoxy.
It is John Hick, who by his revolutionary but controversial book "The Myth of God Incarnate",
has taken long strides in the direction of recognition and then reconstruction of this issue. He has
brought the old theological controversies back to the Christian intelligentsia, the theologians as
well as philosophers, in a view to make Jesus intelligible and acceptable to the people of the
modern world. He starts his article "Jesus and the World Religions" with the recognition of the
problem in the following words: "If we start from where we are, as Christians of our own day, we
begin amidst the confusion and uncertainty which assail us when we try to speak about Jesus, the
historical individual who lived in Galilee in the first third of the first century of the Christian era.
For New Testament scholarship has shown how fragmentary and ambiguous are data available to
us as we try to look back across nineteen and a half centuries, and at the same time how large and
how variable is the contribution of the imagination to our 'pictures' of Jesus. In one sense it is
true to say that he has been worshipped by millions; and yet in another sense, in term of subjective
'intentionality', a number of different beings, describable in partly similar and partly different
ways, have been worshipped under the name of Jesus or under the title of Christ." 813 He believes
that the traditional or 'Incarnational' interpretation of Jesus is mostly the work of Greco-Roman
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