Reasonable Faith

Guest (Male): Hello Dr. Craig, In your 2024 EPS paper, ‘Anthropological and Christological Compositionalism,’ you argue that a person is identical to his soul. You’ve also argued for the Trinity as one soul with three rational faculties. Does this create some tension for your view of the incarnation?

It seems that either Jesus has to use part of the divine soul for the incarnation, or is both or part of a divine soul and adds on a human soul, thus having or being two souls. And in that latter case, do you believe that a soul can exist without grounding a personal I?

During the Q&A at EPS 2024, someone asked, ‘Would this be one exception where each person of the Trinity can’t say, ‘I am identical to my soul’ because of your particular view of the Trinity?’ And you ended your response by saying that ‘God is a tri-personal soul, whereas we are uni-personal souls.’ What am I missing, and how would this factor into my question? Thank you for your response. Eric, United States.

Dr. William Lane Craig: My argument that a human person is not a soul-body composite, but rather a soul intimately united with a body as an instrument, was restricted to human persons, Eric. In general, a uni-personal soul is a person. But a tri-personal soul, like God, is obviously not a person, for that would be self-contradictory. As a soul equipped with three sets of cognitive faculties, each sufficient for personhood, God is tri-personal, not a person.

According to classic Christian theology, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos, acquired a distinct human soul, and so has, in effect, two souls: one divine and one human, though orthodoxy would never use language of this sort. I do not like this view because I do not, as you put it, believe that a soul can exist without grounding a personal I. A human soul distinct from the Logos would be another person, leading to the heresy of Nestorianism.

So, on my proposed model of the incarnation, the Logos just is the soul of Jesus Christ. What applies in our case applies here as well. The person Christ is, just is the soul of Christ, that is to say, the Logos. So, no tension here.

Rather, the difficult question is how to characterize the relation between the Logos and the soul that God is. As previously indicated, none of the Trinitarian persons is, strictly speaking, identical with God. I have suggested that each is, in a sense, a part of God, in that no single person is the whole Godhead.

One could in this sense say that part of God became incarnate, meaning merely that only one divine person took on human flesh and not all three. While all that is true, nonetheless talk of part is apt to be misleading and so unhelpful. It is better just to stick with the affirmation that God is a soul that is tri-personal rather than uni-personal and that only one of those persons became incarnate.