1. Let's start with the word 'mortal' and remind ourselves of some obvious points. 'Mortal' is from the Latin mors, mortis meaning death. That which is mortal is either subject to death, or conducive to death, or in some way expressive of death. Thus when we say of a human being that he is mortal we do not mean that he is dead, but that he is subject to death. My being mortal is consistent with my being alive and kicking. Indeed, if I weren't alive I could not be said to be either mortal or immortal. Sparkplugs are neither mortal nor immortal. Some will say of a car that it has 'died.' But that is a loose and metaphorical way of talking.
We also apply 'mortal' to wounds and sins. A mortal wound is not one that is subject to death but one that has a high probability of causing the death of the body of the one whose wound it is. A mortal as opposed to a venial sin is one that is conducive to the death of the soul in the sense of the separation of the soul from its ultimate good, God. Thomas Nagel has a collection of essays entitled
Mortal Questions. These questions are neither subject to death nor conducive to death, but they are questions raised by mortals especially insofar as they are mortal. Thus the first essay in the collection is appropriately entitled "Death."
2. What interests us is 'mortal' as a predicate of human beings. To be mortal in this sense is to be subject to death. But this phrase has at least two senses, one weak the other strong.
WEAK sense: X is mortal =df X is able to die, liable to die, has the potential to die. Mortality as posse mori.
STRONG sense: X is mortal =df X has to die, is subject to the necessity of dying, cannot evade death by any action of its own. Mortality as necessitas moriendi.
Correspondingly, there are strong and weak senses of 'immortal':
STRONG sense: X is immortal =df X is not able to die.
WEAK sense: X is immortal =df X is able to die, but is kept alive forever by a factor distinct from X.
3. Let's run through some cases to illustrate the distinction. God is not mortal in either the weak or the strong sense. It is built into the divine nature (essence) that he cannot die. 'God is dead,' taken literally is nonsense. (Of course, that is not the way Nietzsche intended it to be taken; he was making a cultural point.) God is a necessary being, a being that exists in all possible worlds and at all times in those worlds containing time.
Your humble correspondent is mortal in both senses. Not only can I die, I must die, I cannot do anything to avoid eventually dying: I am subject to the necessitas moriendi. Cryogenics won't help for reasons I won't belabor at the moment. It is worth noting that my having-to-die is a contingent attribute of me unlike my being-able-to-die. My having-to-die is punishment for original sin and is as contingent as that sin. My being-able-to-die, however, is grounded in my nature as a soul-body composite, and I am essentially such a composite. Thus it is not my nature to be immortal (in the strong sense), whence it follows that if I achieve immortality (in the weak sense) it is due to a supernatural gift: God freely grants me immortality; I don't have it apart from free divine donation. In this sense I am not naturally immortal: I am not immortal in virtue of my nature or essence.
Prelapsarian human beings are mortal in the WEAK sense but not in the STRONG. Unlike God, there is nothing in the nature (essence) of such beings to prevent them from dying if they should will to die. But if they do not will to die, God grants them unending life. Postlapsarian human beings, however, are mortal in both the weak and the strong senses.
4. Now what about Jesus Christ? He is one person in two natures; fully man and fully God. But all men are mortal in the weak sense: they can die. So Christ is mortal in the weak sense. But he is not mortal in the strong sense: he is not subject to the necessitas moriendi. He freely chose his death.
So is Christ a counterexample to 'All men are mortal'? It depends on what is meant by 'mortal.' Taken in the weak sense, Christ is not; taken in the strong sense, he is.
But there is still a Christological problem that wants solving. If Jesus Christ is God (or, to be precise, the Second Person of the Trinity), then JC is strongly immortal. But if JC is fully human, then he is not strongly immortal, but weakly immortal. How can one and the same person have contradictory attributes?
for me, your discussion of (im)mortality looks pretty sound, and helpful. And I agree that God is immortal in the strong sense, and I think God's immortality is just one example that indicates the fundamental difference between God's nature and human nature: we are able to die, God is not.
What I would like is more detail in the soteriological aspect, although you mention it: what does God achieve for us through his incarnation and death in Jesus? As is evident from your weak sense of immortality, God does not save us from mortality in the weak sense – humans are still subject to death. But in what sense is God keeping us alive? Again, you do say it, but I’d like to spell it out: God can save us from mortality in the strong sense.
(I’d like to add, as well, that not only this salvation is a supernatural gift, but also the fact that we can choose to be saved is a supernatural gift: God, after all, created us, including the freedom to choose between sin/mortality in the strong sense and faith/immortality in the weak sense.)
On to Jesus Christ, then: here, I think, one also needs to keep the soteriological aspect in view. If, indeed, Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, he is our Christ, our saviour. Christ is the being by which God can save us from mortality in the strong sense. To be able to save us, Christ has to be at least immortal in the weak sense – for how could he otherwise possibly save us from mortality in the strong sense? On the other hand, Christ has to be at least mortal in the weak sense, as he obviously died on the cross, and stayed dead until the third day.
I end the same way you do: Christ is mortal in the weak sense and immortal in the weak sense. But I would add: he needs to be this way to be a Christ, a saviour, for human beings. As you sharpen your point at the end, indeed, Jesus Christ is not God, for he is not immortal in the strong sense, as is obvious; but Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity. I am not too familiar with details of trinitarian theology, but I think this is one neccessary difference between God and Christ: that God is immortal in the strong sense, and Christ is not.
I can see that there is a certain tension here, but I do not judge it entirely contradictory – the tension is of course evident in the whole trinitarian theory from its inception onwards. My point is that this tension/contradiction is necessary for Christianity's claim for salvation to make sense at all.
"22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: 23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; 24 But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men." (Obviously my italics)
You ask: "How can one and the same person have contradictory attributes?"
He can't. It was Christ's human substance that perished, not His person, which is divine. His human substance was the same as that of any human being. It was bodily mortal in the strong sense. If Christ had not been crucified and lived to be an old man, that part of Him that existed as a human being would have eventually died a natural death.
So this raises a question: Can a divine being manifest himself with the substance of a human being -- i.e., body and soul -- without loss of his divinity?
This leads to another: If he can, does his acquisition of human substance preclude that substance from adhering to its nature -- for instance, retaining its mortality?
I think these questions go to the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation.
Regards, Bill T
Regarding the trinity, I find it more helpful to think of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as the three personalities rather than persons of God. Though God interacts with His creation through these different personalities, He has only one will.
Distinct from the matter of the trinity is God's incarnation as Jesus Christ. God was Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ was God. They are the same person in which God's divine nature was hypostatically united with a human nature. Therefore, God incarnated -- i.e., Jesus Christ -- did possess two wills, one human and the other divine.
Regards, Bill
I guess I have a slightly different conception of trinity - in which the incarnation defines the relationship between father and son. I can only say that this view is very provisional and not worked out enough to be of any use here. Under construction, so to say...
Thomas
But that is a loose and metaphorical way of talking.
I would say the same thing about God being immortal according to His divinity. "Immortal" in the context of God really means "existing eternally," but since we can't conceptualize that, we settle for the negation of something we can conceptualize to suggest it. As you've defined immortality, it's as much a category error to apply the term to God as it is to apply it to a sparkplug.
When we say that Jesus is both "mortal" and "immortal," we are necessarily equivocating about the senses of the terms, since divinity isn't the sort of thing of which either "mortal" or "immortal" can be predicated in the sense that it is applied to humanity.
I don't think it is a good idea to identify immortality in the strong sense with eternality. Platonica are presumably eternal, but not alive, whereas the God of Christianity is a living God. Of course, it is difficult to understand how a being without a body can be said to be alive, but that is a separate problem.
A sparkplug cannot die because it is never alive, and it cannot live forever for the same reason. But God is alive in at least an analogical sense. This strikes me as a crucial difference. The analogical character of God-talk is another separate, and difficult, issue.
I reject your final paragraph. There is no equivocation. In any case, we are not talking about divinity but about a person who is said to be both fully human and fully divine.
Very nice set of comments. We are definitely on the same page. "My point is that this tension/contradiction is necessary for Christianity's claim for salvation to make sense at all." I think you are right about this. The philosophical problem, however, is to make sense of this tension.
This is not quite the heresy of Docetism, but it suggests it. It is not clear what you mean by 'human substance.' It was not merely Christ's body that died, but Christ himself. Acc. to the Chalcedonian definition, there is one person in two natures. It is not enough for a man to die for us to be saved, it has to be the God-man.
I can show the equivocation by disambiguating senses of "alive."
Consider an example in which there could be a common sense to the term "immortal": spiritual death. God cannot be separated from God as ultimate end and Christ cannot be separated from God as ultimate end. Both are strongly spiritually immortal; neither can suffer spiritual death.
In the case of bodily death, the premises become:
weakly mortal: X has a body capable of death
strongly mortal: X has a body capable of death and unable to avoid death by its own power
strongly immortal: X has a body that is not capable of death.
weakly immortal: X has a body that is capable of death but protected from death by a power external to the body.
Christ is weakly immortal. The Father and the Holy Spirit have none of these properties.
"The eternity of God is, therefore, entirely natural for the Old Testament. Yet the OT does not mean by this that God is motionless, changeless and timeless, but that God has power over time. This aspect of God's identity is, moreover, not an abstract identity without the power to relate to anything else - it is a concrete historical identity that can show faithfulness." (my sloppy transl. from German)
What I think this passage hints at, in the context of our discussion, is that the concept of God as only a philosophical 'necessary being', by definition is strongly paradoxical with such a being incarnating into a human being.
Bill V, you made very useful distinctions in what it means to be (im)mortal, but we may need to think about how these concepts can apply to God. I think you are right to describe God as a 'living God', and in the above quote I think Kasper means to emphasize the same.
"This is not quite the heresy of Docetism, but it suggests it. It is not clear what you mean by 'human substance.'"
Worry not, no heresy. Christ's death on the cross was real, no illusion. What I mean by "human substance" is the matter and form -- i.e., body and soul -- of a human being. When I say His human substance perished, I mean that that human being who was Christ died.
However, Christ is a compound being. He possesses not only a human body and a human soul, but also the spirit of God. Hence He is a divine person. His spirit did not die on the Cross, although His spirit did not protect His human body from doing so (but later did reunite that body with its soul in the Resurrection).
By this means the purpose of the Incarnation was realized. God suffered the punishment for our sins to redeem through the death of His Son's body and the separation of His Son's soul from Him in Hell. For that punishment to be effective for redemption, the body and soul of Christ had to be real. No Gnostic or docetic illusions will do.
Regards, Bill
"I guess I have a slightly different conception of trinity - in which the incarnation defines the relationship between father and son."
I think that is a good way to grasp the Trinity. The different persons (or personalities) define the relationships between the different internal aspects of the Godhead.
Regards, Bill T
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you are saying.
Bill T writes, "Christ is a compound being. He possesses not only a human body and a human soul, but also the spirit of God. Hence He is a divine person."
OK, but this still doesn't address the difficulty of how one person can be both divine and human.
I must not be understanding you either, so let's track back to what you said.
You have defined "mortal" and "immortal" in terms of being subject to death.
"Death" is an equivocal term: one can be liable to die spiritually (i.e., commit sin) and one can liable to die bodily. Those senses must be disambiguated in your definitions, because they are completely non-overlapping as far as I can tell. Being liable to die spiritually (i.e., commit sin) is an entirely independent property from being able to die bodily.
So let's pause there. Do you agree that there are two independent sense of the term "death" that must be distinguished?
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