A Divine Mind in Human Flesh? William Lane Craig’s Neo-Apollinarian Christology

 

William Lane Craig is sometimes accused rather loosely of Apollinarianism, but in this case the label is not something his critics simply dreamed up. Craig and J. P. Moreland themselves propose what they call a “reformulation (or rehabilitation!) of Apollinarius’s insight.” Their goal is understandable: preserve the unity of Christ’s person without turning Jesus into two subjects, two selves, or two persons awkwardly sharing the same skin. The difficulty is that their solution places the divine Logos where orthodox Christology insists a genuinely created human rational soul, mind, and will must be. D. Glenn Butner devotes a remarkably useful discussion to the problem in Christological Dogmatics, and Donnie L. DeBord has pursued it even more extensively. DeBord’s interest is hardly casual: he earned his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2022 with a dissertation titled A Chalcedonian Critique of Neo-Apollinarianism, completed under the guidance of Matthew Barrett and Shawn Wilhite.¹ His earlier essay, “Classical Theism and Neo-Apollinarian Christology,” anticipates much of that larger project.²

The problem goes back to Apollinarius of Laodicea in the fourth century. Trying to safeguard the unity and sinlessness of Christ, Apollinarius effectively allowed the divine Logos to occupy the place of the rational human mind or soul. Gregory of Nazianzus saw the soteriological danger: “what has not been assumed has not been healed.” Chalcedon in 451 subsequently confessed one and the same Son as truly God and truly man, complete in deity and complete in humanity, possessing a rational soul and body, with the two natures united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”³ Constantinople III in 680–81 drew out an implication Chalcedon had left largely unstated: because Christ possesses two complete natures, and because willing is a natural faculty, the incarnate Son possesses two natural wills and two natural operations. This is dyothelitism. It does not mean two persons. Quite the contrary. There is one who, the eternal Son, who acts and wills according to two distinct whats, divine and human. Maximus the Confessor paid dearly for defending that distinction, losing his tongue and right hand before dying in exile, but the church eventually recognized that his argument protected the completeness of Christ’s humanity.⁴

Craig and Moreland deliberately go elsewhere. The preincarnate Logos, they argue, already possesses rationality, freedom, volition, self-consciousness, and the other features ordinarily associated with personal human existence. At the incarnation, the Logos assumes what they rather strikingly call a “hominid body” and supplies to that animal nature the rational properties necessary for it to count as a complete human nature. The Logos therefore functions as both the hypostasis of Christ and the “self-conscious ego” of the divine and human natures. During Christ’s earthly humiliation, most specifically divine cognitive properties remain largely subliminal, allowing Jesus to possess an apparently normal human conscious life, to undergo temptation, and to grow in wisdom. Most importantly, Craig and Moreland recognize what follows: a single mind does not leave room for two genuinely distinct natural wills. They accept the consequence. Dyothelitism, they say, despite its conciliar pedigree, lacks adequate warrant in Scripture.⁵ This is why describing the model as monothelitic is not name-calling. The single will is built into the machinery.

Butner puts his finger on an even deeper problem. Craig’s argument works only if divine consciousness and human consciousness are sufficiently alike that the former can do the ontological work of the latter. And that is far from obvious. Human consciousness involves embodied sensation, temporal experience, discursive reasoning, limited knowledge, changing mental states, and cognition mediated through creaturely faculties. I taste a lemon because I possess tastebuds. I hear middle C because pressure waves strike an eardrum. I reason from something I already know toward something I do not. God does none of these things. Divine knowing is eternal, infinite, non-discursive, and uncreated. So when we call God “knowing,” “conscious,” or even “mind,” the language is analogical rather than univocal. Butner therefore argues that Craig and Moreland make a fundamental category mistake when they suppose the divine consciousness of the Logos can satisfy the requirements of a genuinely human rational consciousness. A divine mind is not simply a human mind with the sliders pushed all the way to infinity.⁶ And once that point is seen, the supposed dilemma between one mind and two persons begins to lose much of its force. Personhood cannot simply be equated with a center of consciousness. The one subject, the Son, can know divinely according to his divine nature and humanly according to his assumed humanity without becoming two Sons. Two minds need not mean two selves.

DeBord presses the problem from the other direction, and his classical-theist critique deserves more attention than it usually receives. Craig explicitly rejects ontological kenoticism; he does not say that the Logos ceases to be omniscient or surrenders deity. Still, the “divine subconscious” explanation asks us to imagine the Son’s divine cognitive life as reorganized at the incarnation so that properly divine knowledge and powers are largely submerged beneath an ordinary waking consciousness. DeBord argues that this sits uneasily with the classical doctrines of divine immutability, simplicity, infinity, and perfect actuality.² The orthodox alternative is actually less exotic. The Son does not become less divine so that he can experience human limitation. He remains everything he eternally is and adds what he was not: a complete created human nature. Calvin put the basic point nicely. Each nature retains its distinctive integrity, yet the two belong to one Christ. Aquinas, working more technically, likewise insisted that Christ’s humanity possesses its own proper powers and operation while subsisting in the one hypostasis of the Word. There is no need to stuff omniscience into a divine psychological basement. Jesus grows in wisdom because the Son truly possesses a finite human intellect capable of growth, even while the same Son eternally knows all things according to deity.⁷

The biblical and soteriological stakes become clearest in Gethsemane. “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42). The Son cannot there be contrasting his divine will with the Father’s divine will, since Father and Son possess the one undivided divine nature and therefore the one divine will. Classical dyothelitism gives us a much more satisfying reading: the Son’s genuinely human will naturally recoils before agony and death while remaining perfectly obedient to the divine will. There is no sinful revolt in Christ, no civil war inside Jesus. Human aversion to death is not sin. His human willing is exactly what sinless creaturely willing ought to be, freely ordered to God even at terrible cost. Hebrews pushes in the same direction. The Son had to be made like his brothers “in all things” (Heb. 2:17); he was genuinely tempted yet without sin (Heb. 4:15); he “learned obedience from the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5:8). DeBord rightly draws attention to Hebrews 2 here, while Butner invokes the old Nazianzen principle behind the conciliar tradition: the humanity needing redemption must actually be assumed.⁸

And that is why this matters far beyond a quarrel between analytic philosophers and patristics nerds. Human beings did not fall merely in the flesh. We sinned intellectually, affectively, and volitionally. Adam’s catastrophe was, among other things, an act of human willing, and the second Adam comes to heal human nature at precisely that depth. Christ must obey as man. He must resist temptation with a human will, learn through a human mind, suffer through a human soul and body, and offer to the Father the creaturely obedience Adam refused to give. If the uncreated Logos simply supplies the rational and volitional element that should belong to Christ’s humanity, something essential has quietly gone missing. Craig’s proposal is clever, and the question motivating it is real: how can two complete natures belong to one personal subject? But mystery is not necessarily incoherence, and an ingenious model is not an improvement if it solves the puzzle by shaving away part of Christ’s humanity. The older grammar remains sturdier. The eternal Son did not become human by attaching divine consciousness to a human organism. He assumed everything that belongs to our nature, body, rational soul, mind, and will, sin excepted. What he assumed, he healed. And what he healed, he saves.

Endnotes

1. Donnie L. DeBord presently serves as Professor of Systematic Theology and the E. Claude and Delores Gardner Chair of Biblical Excellence at Freed-Hardeman University.

2. Donnie L. DeBord, “Classical Theism and Neo-Apollinarian Christology: A Comparative Analysis,” Donnie’s Dogmatics, September 6, 2021, updated July 1, 2024. DeBord argues that the neo-Apollinarian model threatens both Christ’s complete humanity and the classical doctrine of God and develops the alternative through Chalcedon, Calvin, Aquinas, dyothelitism, and the communicatio idiomatum.

3. Craig A. Blaising, “Chalcedon and Christology: A 1530th Anniversary,” Bibliotheca Sacra 138, no. 552 (October 1981): 326–27. Blaising reproduces and analyzes Chalcedon’s confession of Christ as perfect in deity and humanity, possessing a rational soul and body, with the natures united without confusion, change, division, or separation.

4. John E. McKinley, “A Model of Jesus Christ’s Two Wills in View of Theology Proper and Anthropology,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 19, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 69–83; D. Glenn Butner Jr., “Eternal Functional Subordination and the Problem of the Divine Will,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 58, no. 1 (March 2015): 131–49. Both explain the Maximian logic by which will belongs to nature rather than hypostasis, so Christ possesses two natural wills while remaining one person. McKinley also recounts Maximus’s mutilation and exile in the controversy.

5. D. Glenn Butner Jr., Christological Dogmatics: A Theological Witness to the Person and Work of Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2026), 185–90. Butner quotes Moreland and Craig’s description of their proposal as a “reformulation (or rehabilitation!) of Apollinarius’s insight,” their account of the Logos assuming a “hominid body,” their subliminal model of divine consciousness, and their explicit rejection of dyothelitism’s scriptural warrant. For the original formulation, see J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 606, 608–11. Randall K. Johnson independently analyzes the same model as neo-Apollinarian, Word-flesh, and effectively monothelitic in “The Doctrine of Analogy and Christ’s Human Nature,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 64, no. 1 (March 2021): 147–60, esp. 150–51. 

6. Butner, Christological Dogmatics, 187–90. Butner’s crucial objection is analogical: Moreland and Craig’s definition of consciousness assumes too much continuity between divine and human consciousness. Divine knowing cannot simply substitute for the created rational consciousness constitutive of complete humanity. Butner therefore argues that the one Son eternally shares the divine mind and, in the incarnation, assumes a genuinely human mind and a genuinely human mode of knowing.

7. DeBord, “Classical Theism and Neo-Apollinarian Christology.” DeBord draws particularly on John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.14.1–2, and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 18–19. His use of Aquinas is especially helpful: each nature retains its proper operation, yet both operations belong to the one personal subject, the Word.

8. DeBord emphasizes Luke 22:42 and Hebrews 2:17 as important biblical evidence against the neo-Apollinarian model. See also Butner, Christological Dogmatics, 185–90; McKinley, “A Model of Jesus Christ’s Two Wills,” 69–83. McKinley emphasizes the soteriological principle inherited from Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus: because human willing is implicated in the fall, the Son must assume and heal a genuinely human will.