Apollinarian Christology and the Denial of Divine Simplicity

Over on Twitter, Dr. Jordan B. Cooper notes how Dr. William Lane Craig is a formal heretic: “He has adopted a "Neo-Apollinarian" christology, and here seems to outright deny that infants are in need of salvation at all.” Cooper is spot on here, and I have noticed, in the thread itself and elsewhere, that many people are surprised, and saddened, when hearing this. But this is not news. Craig has been an Apollinarian for decades. In their book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview from 2003, he and J. P. Moreland, states outright that they are adopting a neo-Apollinarian christology, and they have not gone back on it in the latest edition, from 2017.¹ But to explain this, and how this is the logical consequence of Craig’s view of God, we first need to briefly introduce Apollinarianism.

Apollinarianism is a view of Christ which was first proposed by bishop Apollinarius of Laodicea in the second century AD. He opposed Arianism and held firmly that Christ was indeed fully divine. He went to the other extreme, however, by denying that Christ had a rational human soul. As Joseph Francis Sollier notes, he argued this both ontologically and psychologically.² Ontologically, he thinks that “the union of complete God with complete man could not be more than a juxtaposition or collocation. Two perfect beings with all their attributes, he argued, cannot be one.” And psychologically, he considered “the rational soul or spirit as essentially liable to sin and capable, at its best, of only precarious efforts,” which means that he “saw no way of saving Christ’s impeccability and the infinite value of Redemption, except by the elimination of the human spirit from Jesus’ humanity, and the substitution of the Divine Logos in its stead.” Here, he appealed to the Platonic division of human nature: “body (sarx, soma), soul (psyche halogos), spirit (nous, pneuma, psyche logike).” The Logos had assumed the first two, while itself taking the place of the human spirit, “thus becoming the rational and spiritual centre, the seat of self-consciousness and self-determination.”

Craig has, together with J. P. Moreland adopted a version of this, which may be called “neo-Apollinarianism.” Now, this phrase (“neo-Apollinarianism”) does not appear in the book mentioned above, but Craig uses it in a podcast episode, discussing whether or not Craig has an orthodox christology (he does not). There, he says:

What I argue in my Neo-Apollinarian proposal is that the Logos brought to the human body just those properties which would make it a complete human nature – things like rationality, self-consciousness, freedom of the will, and so forth. Christ already possessed those in his divine nature, and it is in virtue of those that we are created in the image of God. So when he brought those properties to the animal body – the human body – it completes it and makes it a human nature. Against Apollinarius, I want to say that Christ did have a complete human nature. He was truly God and truly man. Therefore his death on our behalf as our representative before God was efficacious.

What makes this “neo” is that unlike Apollinarius, at least on the surface, Craig thinks that Christ had a complete human nature. In the book, Moreland and Craig says (emphasis in original):

The key to Apollinarius’s ingenious solution to the problem of achieving a true incarnation lay in his anthropology. Each human being consists of a body (sōma), an animal soul (psychē) and a rational soul (nous). The nous was conceived to be the seat of the sinful instincts. In Jesus, the divine Logos took the place of the human nous and thus became embodied.³

So far, Moreland and Craig describes Apollinarius’s view, but later they adopt it, and modify it (emphasis in original):

We postulate with Apollinarius that the Logos was the rational soul of Jesus of Nazareth. What Apollinarius correctly discerned was that if we are to avoid a duality of persons in Christ, the man Jesus of Nazareth and the divine Logos must share some common constituent that unites their two individual natures. Chalcedon states that there is a single hypostasis that exemplifies the human and divine natures. That hypostasis is identified as the person Christ is. The question is how to make sense of this. If there exists a complete, individual human nature in Christ and a complete, individual divine nature who is the Logos, then how can there not be two persons? Apollinarius proposed that the Logos replaced the human mind of Jesus, so that there was in Christ a single person, the Logos, who was united with a human body, much as the soul is united with a body in an ordinary human being. On Apollinarius’s view, it is easy to see how a single hypostasis can exemplify the properties proper to each nature.⁴

They go on to explore this further, by noting that this was inadequate and suggest that “in assuming a hominid body the Logos brought to Christ’s animal nature just those properties that would serve to make it a complete human nature.”⁵ The problem with this, however, is the metaphysical assumptions that underlie this view, especially Craig’s adoption of the univocity of being and his denial of divine simplicity (which, it seems to me, is also lurking behind Apollinarius’ own view).

On Craig’s view, the Divine Logos has certain “properties” and these are the same in human creatures. But if we affirm divine simplicity, this makes no sense. There are no “properties” in God and God does not “possess” anything. We have rationality and intelligence but this is not an “instance” of what is in God. It is created, and God is not. Moreland and Craig’s Apollinarianism only works if we postulate that (1) the Divine Logos “has” properties of intellect, and (2) that these are essentially the same in rational creatures. Thus, on their view, “in assuming a hominid body the Logos brought to Christ’s animal nature just those properties that would serve to make it a complete human nature.”⁶ The clearest expression comes when they say that the Logos “already possessed in his preincarnate state all the properties necessary for being a human self. In assuming a hominid body, he brought to it all that was necessary for a complete human nature. For this reason, in Christ the one self-conscious subject who is the Logos possessed divine and human natures that were both complete.”⁷ And this follows further upon Craig’s adoption of univocity. On the Q&A section of his website, Craig was asked whether or not God is “a Being in the Same Sense that We Are,” and answered:

I agree wholeheartedly with Scotus that there is a univocal concept of being which applies to both God and creatures. One of the aspects of Thomas Aquinas’ thought that I find most disturbing is his claim that we can speak of God only in analogical terms. Without univocity of meaning, we are left with agnosticism about the nature of God, able to say only what God is not, not what He is. Scotus rightly saw that when we say that God is or exists, we are using the term in the same sense in which we say that a man is or exists.

Craig flattens out the differences between God and creation. But if Christ has no human subconsciousness, He is not fully human. The Logos is God, and God does not “possess” anything, neither a “subconsciousness” nor an “intellect.” God is not a creature. God has created all these things and He is not a being like we are. He is the source of being, and therefore beyond being. So to sum up: Craig has a faulty theology which results in a faulty christology and a faulty anthropology. Craig ends up endorsing heresy because he gets the fundamental question of God wrong, and because he subsequently gets nature wrong as well.

1. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 595–611 (esp. 598–600, 603–610).

2. Joseph Sollier, “Apollinarianism,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907).

3. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 596.

4. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 605.

5. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 606.

6. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 606.

7. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 606.