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The fourth incarnational model, which will be the focus for the rest of the book, is the kenotic model. The development of kenoticism is briefly traced through four different variants, but the main concern is with those variants which posit a self-emptying in terms of a giving up of certain characteristic divine properties by the Son in order to become incarnate. Seven key objections to kenoticism which have been advanced by critics are presented and responded to, before a further challenge is posed: that a full kenosis would require a series of impossible transformations concerning presence, immateriality, goodness, and time. Whether the transformations in question are truly impossible is the subject of Part II (Chapters 5–8).

This introductory chapter sets out the central challenge posed by the incarnation: to show that the idea of a single person being both human and divine is not an incoherent one. The constraints imposed by the early Ecumenical Councils of the Christian Church are presented, and the question discussed how far philosophical explorations of the incarnation should be conducted within the limits set by orthodoxy. Different strategies for dealing with the apparent paradoxical nature of this idea are outlined, and the four main models with which this book is concerned are introduced. Part I of the book (Chapters 2–4) explores those models in turn.

God is traditionally conceived of as a necessary being—one which could not have failed to exist. But a vulnerable human being is a contingent, non-necessary object. So, in becoming incarnate, did a necessary being become a contingent one? But surely this notion makes no sense. So either the Son is contingent, or Christ is a necessary being, and neither option looks acceptable. The problem is distinguished from the question whether an immortal being could become mortal. The notions of conditional necessity and self-sufficiency are introduced, and the suggestion explored that the Son is conditionally necessary, that the conditions of that necessity may change, and that the property given up in the kenotic act is not necessity but self-sufficiency.

What is it for God the Son to become embodied? Does that require the Son to give up the divine property of omnipresence? What would it be to give up such a property? And does becoming embodied require the transformation of an immaterial being into a material one? If not, what explains the Son’s exclusive relation to the body of Christ? If so, how would such a transformation be possible? For isn’t an object’s being material or immaterial essential to that object? These questions are explored in the context of different accounts of omnipresence (in terms of occupation, identity, and power), space (relationist versus substantivalist), and embodiment (causal versus realization). The kenotic model is best placed to explain the Son’s embodiment.

An orthodox tradition represents God as timeless, a proposition that is also the conclusion of a compelling argument from the status of God as creator of all things. But divine timelessness would seem to rule out an act of kenosis, as this would require the Son to undergo an intrinsic change, and so be in time. A truly timeless being cannot become temporal. Conceding that the kenotic model is not orthodox, the kenoticist must dismantle the argument from creation to timelessness. This chapter aims to do just that, in the context of a relationist view of time. But it also attempts to show how a temporal God can nevertheless be, to some degree, not dependent on time. The final conclusion of the book is that a radical version of kenoticism is both defensible and superior to rival accounts.

It seems contradictory to say that Christ is, by view of being both God and man, both omniscient (for example) and not omniscient. But at least the surface contradiction is avoided by the reduplicative formula, ‘Christ is omniscient qua God, and not omniscient qua man’. But the formula needs interpretation, and this chapter looks as a number of interpretations before focusing on one which takes the formula to ascribe different properties to different parts of Christ. We may, that is, see Christ as a composite being. Two compositional models are considered: one in which the Son is the divine part of Christ, and the other in which an initially partless Son becomes composite, having divine and human parts. The first fails to deliver the requirement that two natures be had by one person, and the second faces a version of a well-known paradox of identity.

The third incarnational model imagines two separate streams of consciousness in the mind of Christ, where the divine stream can access the human stream but not vice versa. Potentially helpful analogies can be found in cases of split brains and dissociated identity disorder. A number of questions concerning the divided mind model are explored in this chapter: should the human stream be thought of as contained within the divine mind? If so, does this introduce error, or the propensity to error, in the divine mind? Does the model lead to the heretical view that there were two persons in Christ? And does the model collapse into one of the compositional models? The divided mind model, it is argued, faces a series of dilemmas on these fronts.

Divine Command Ethics, and related meta-ethical views, have it that God is the ground of moral value. What are the implications of this divine meta-ethics for the incarnation? Is God the Son a ground of goodness, by virtue of being divine? And is this property given up when the Son becomes a man subject to temptation? Can the ground of goodness shift? This chapter argues that we can make sense of such changes, and that God’s relation to moral value is not threatened by the Euthyphro dilemma. However, if the incarnation involves a change in meta-ethical status, what consequences does this have for Christ’s role in normative ethics? The answer is that Christ is a unique moral exemplar.

The doctrine of the incarnation—that God became human in Christ—is one of the most astonishing propositions ever advanced, and it is at the heart of the Christian faith. It is also a paradoxical one, in that it immediately faces the objection that, since the properties of humanity and divinity are incompatible, nothing can be both divine and human. Can the doctrine be defended against the charge of incoherence? This is the central question of this book. It is a question which has received intense attention in recent philosophy of religion, but the distinctively novel features of this book are twofold. First, it brings a range of debates in contemporary metaphysics—in particular, debates over identity, persistence, composition, embodiment, essence, mind, space, time, and necessity—to bear on the central question. Second, it defends a particularly wide-ranging version of the view of the incarnation known as the kenotic model, on which God the Son gave up, in an act of kenosis or self-emptying, certain divine characteristics in order to become human. There are certain properties traditionally ascribed to God, such as being independent of time, being disembodied, existing of necessity, and being the ground of goodness, which it apparently makes no sense to suppose could be given up: they are, it seems, held by God timelessly or eternally. This book proposes a development of the kenotic model in which kenosis could coherently be thought to apply even to these apparently unchangeable aspects of the divine.

Is Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions in terms of paradigm shifts appropriately applied to cases of radical changes in religious outlook, and in particular conversion to faith, or loss of faith? Since this question cannot be addressed in purely a priori terms, three case studies of philosophers who have described significant changes in their own perspectives are examined. Part of the justification for such an approach is to see how changes in view seem from the first-person perspective. Although what is offered here is a very limited group of studies, each of them perforce brief, a key theme emerges: that the incommensurability between paradigms which is part of the Kuhnian model is mirrored by the shift away from atheist or humanistic perspectives, though not necessarily by loss of faith.

The great Scottish Enlightenment man of letters David Hume (1711–76) offered an account of causation in terms of regularities: repeated pairings of certain kinds of events. Anything more than this, a supposed ‘secret connexion’ binding individual causes and effects, is not something we could ever experience. This, at least, is the view traditionally ascribed to him. Here the account, and its empiricist motivation, is outlined, and a fundamental problem identified: his account of causation is in tension with his account of the way in which we acquire the concept of a distinctive connection between causes and effects. To explain both our experience of causation, and causation's intimate connection with time, we need to appeal to singular causation: the connection between individual events which Hume found so elusive.

Consider the agnostic who thinks that reason and evidence are neutral on the question of God’s existence, and as a result neither believes that God exists nor believes that God does not exist. Can such an agnostic live a genuinely religious life – even one in which God is the central animating idea? They might do so by accepting Pascal’s Wager: the expected rewards will always be greater if one bets on God’s existence than if one does not. Or they might accept William James’s argument that religious beliefs are properly activated by our passional nature. But both of these routes involve abandoning the initial agnosticism, and so are open to charges of irrationality. In this paper I explore a third route to the religious life, suggested by Pascal’s discussion, one which uses fiction and make-believe as the central prop. It might seem that this too entails abandoning agnosticism in favour of the view that religion just is fiction. I suggest, however, that there is a phenomenon which I term “serious make-believe” in which one can remain agnostic about whether the object of make-believe is real or a useful fiction. Applied to religion, the result is a religious life that is both genuinely engaged (and not merely experimental) and yet, by remaining agnostic, cannot be accused of irrationality.

I am very grateful to Natalja, Jacob and Sebastian for their kind attention to my paper, and for their many insights on this topic, which have materially helped me get clearer about some of the issues. All the points of disagreement are constructive and it has been both a pleasure and an education to engage with them. I’m also happy to note some points of agreement, too! Here I attempt to reply to some of the objections.

What is agnosticism? Is it compatible with a genuinely religious life? Here is a conventional answer to these questions: ‘Agnosticism is the view that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know whether God exists. Provided we think the epistemic probability of God’s existence is not negligible, engagement in religious discourse and practice is entirely rational’. Agnosticism so defined is quite different from fictionalism, which takes religious discourse to be fictional discourse, and religious practice a game of make-believe. Fictionalism, it seems, would have to offer a completely different justification for a religious life. This paper explores a hybrid between these positions, a hybrid that might be called ‘religious semantic agnosticism’, but which is perhaps more memorably called ‘New Agnosticism’. It is suggested that this hybrid position combines the advantages of both traditional agnosticism and fictionalism, but does not inherit their disadvantages.

This Element is an introduction to contemporary religious fictionalism, its motivation and challenges. Among the issues raised are: can religion be viewed as a game of make-believe? In what ways does religious fictionalism parallel positions often labelled 'fictionalist' in ethics and metaphysics? Does religious fictionalism represent an advance over its rivals? Can fictionalism provide an adequate understanding of the characteristic features of the religious life, such as worship, prayer, moral commitment? Does fictionalism face its own version of the problem of evil? Is realism about theistic (God-centred) language less religiously serious than fictionalism?

Does a proper understanding of the Atonement – the restoration of mankind’s relationship with God as a result of Christ’s sacrifice – require a particular conception of time? It has been suggested that it does, and that the relevant conception is a ‘tensed’ or ‘dynamic’ one, in which distinctions between past, present and future reflect the objective passage of time. This paper examines two arguments that might be given for that contention, and finds that both may be answered by appeal to the asymmetry of causation. The Atonement leaves us free to think of all times as equally real, as traditionally they are for God.

There is a common-sense distinction between terms such as ‘statue’ or ‘chair’ on the one hand, and ‘concert’ or ‘war’ on the other. A long-standing tradition in metaphysics has attached some significance to this distinction, holding that the first kind of term is used to name continuants, whereas the second kind is used to name events or processes. The difference is that continuants can be said to change, and therefore persist through change, whereas events do not. However, the distinction between continuants and events has been challenged on the grounds that no concrete object does, in fact, retain its identity through time. It has been suggested, for example, that unless we give up the notion of identity through time, we are faced with questions that we cannot answer. In addition, the notion that things persist through change is, apparently, threatened by a certain view of time. On this view there is in reality no past, present and future, but rather unchanging temporal relations between events. It has been suggested that such a view is committed to the idea that objects have temporal parts, and these by definition cannot persist through time.

Presentism, as a metaphysical thesis about time, is the view that only what is present exists. The past and future are in some sense to be explained, unreal. Although this appears at first sight to be both an intuitive and a substantial thesis about the world, the first challenge to anyone wishing to espouse it is to show that it is not simply the trivial truth that only what is present exists now. One way of giving content to the presentist thesis is to provide a positive account of how past and future can be constructed from presently existing items, in ways that parallel attempts to construct possible states of affairs from actual states. Some presentists, however, would decline the invitation to provide such a construction, arguing that the flow of time allows one to say quite unproblematically that the past is what once existed, but no longer does so. A further challenge to the presentist is to account for the truth of statements that appear to require the existence of relations between non-contemporaneous items, statements that contain terms such as ‘is earlier than’, ‘is a cause of’, ‘is the larval stage of’, ‘is the remote ancestor of’, etc. Although the initial attraction of presentism is its offer to provide a more systematic statement of our pre-theoretic views, a fully worked-out and consistent presentist theory seems likely to be quite revisionary.

A thought experiment invites us to examine our intuitive beliefs about the reality of the past, the reality of the future, and our capacity to affect either, and provides a test of our attitudes towards life. Given an inescapable choice and extraordinary power, would it be our duty to destroy the whole of reality, both past and future?

Moore characterizes metaphysics as “the most general attempt to make sense of things.” This is not offered as a piece of conceptual analysis, which we might challenge by putative counterexample, but rather as an inclusive organizing principle. Nevertheless, there are ways in which (I submit) the definition could be helpfully developed, to draw out distinctive (and distinctively valuable) aspects of philosophical, and more specifically metaphysical, inquiry, and I offer some suggestions here. The aspects addressed include the appearance of mind-independence in the subject matter of metaphysics, and the importance of critical inquiry. Two concerns are raised about Moore’s inclusion of non-propositional sense-making in his conception of metaphysics: how the notion of generality applies to non-propositional sense-making; and what success-condition in non-propositional sense-making would be the counterpart of truth in propositional sense-making. I end by considering whether, despite the inclusiveness of his characterization, Moore’s view of the real point of doing metaphysics involves commitment to realism about the self.

Consider these central tenets of the Christian creeds: God the Father is the creator of all things; God the Son is of one substance with the Father; the Son became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Is there a tension between these? Perhaps. Consider the following: ‘if the Father is creator of all things including time, then he must be in some sense outside time. And as the Son is of one substance with the Father, then he too must be outside time. But becoming incarnate is to come to be in time, and no timeless being can become temporal.’ We may call this problem ‘the temporal paradox of the incarnation.’ This paper argues that the problem is especially acute on a substantivalist conception of (space-)time, according to which(space-)time is independent of its contents, and it explores an alternative, reductionist picture which offers a resolution of the temporal paradox of the incarnation.

The paper explores the connections between three debates concerning the metaphysics of time on the one hand and our understanding of the nature of episodic memory on the other. The metaphysics debates in question are over the passage of time, the reality of the past, and the direction of time, respectively. The aspects of episodic memory in focus are its role in structuring perceptual experience and its provision of knowledge of our experiential pasts.

When philosophers of perception contemplate concrete examples, the tendency is to choose perceptions whose content does not essentially involve time, but concern how things are at the moment they are perceived. This is true whether the cases are veridical (seeing a tree as a tree) or illusory (misperceiving the colour or spatial properties of an object). Less discussed, and arguably more complex and interesting cases do involve time as an essential element: perceiving movement, for example, or perceiving the order and comparative duration of events. And, like other kinds of perception, time perception can involve illusions, such as the puzzling ‘stopped clock’ illusion. I want to suggest that these dynamic cases, and perhaps particularly those involving illusion, make a distinctive contribution to the direct realist/sense datum theory debate over perception, and they undermine a popular argument in favour of the objective passage of time, namely that passage is an ineliminable feature of our temporal experience.

The doctrine of the Incarnation faces the following modal challenge: ‘The Son, as God, exists of necessity; Jesus, as man, exists only contingently. Therefore they cannot be one and the same.’ On the face it, the kenotic model, on which the Son gave up some of the divine properties at the Incarnation, cannot help to meet this challenge, since the suggestion that the Son gave up necessary existence implies that the necessity in question was only contingent, and this notion makes no sense. A necessary being is necessarily (and therefore eternally) so. This paper, however, argues that some necessities may appropriately be described as ‘contingent’, being conditional on contingent and mutable circumstances, and that there is a natural understanding of divine necessity on which the Son could give up necessary existence on becoming incarnate.

The central doctrine of traditional Christianity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, is that the Second Person of the Trinity lived a human existence on Earth as Jesus Christ for a finite period. In the words of the Nicene Creed, the Son is himwho for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

A familiar problem is here viewed from an unfamiliar angle. The familiar problem is the Euthyphro dilemma: if God wills something because it is good, then goodness is independent of God, so God becomes, morally speaking, de trop. On the other hand, if something is good because God wills it, then, given the absence of constraint on what God may will, moral truths are – counterintuitively – contingent. An examination of the kinds of necessity and possibility at work in this conundrum leads us to the most promising solution: there is a metaphysical connection between God and goodness. What he wills is an expression of his nature. But (and this is the unfamiliar angle), that solution now poses an acute problem for an understanding of the Incarnation. For if God is constitutive of goodness, and Christ is God incarnate, then Christ is constitutive of goodness. But Christ, as a human, is subject to external moral evaluation and obligation, which entails that he is not constitutive of goodness. This metaethical difficulty is not easily met by the usual strategies by which Christ is understood to have two natures. Reflection on our moral relations to our past selves, however, suggests a way forward.

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of realism in various areas of philosophy, including metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, and this trend has continued in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In philosophy of religion this led to explorations of the philosophical coherence of orthodox doctrines, such as the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In metaphysics, there was renewed interest in debates concerning persistence, composition, the relation between mind and body, time and necessity, among others. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the links between these two strands of realist inquiry, focusing on some metaphysical issues raised by the Incarnation. It ends with some suggestions as to how recent developments in metaphysical debate might inform our understanding of this most central of Christian beliefs.

In Honest to God, John Robinson distinguished between the idea of the divine as a person and the idea of ultimate reality, or the ground of being, as personal. C. S. Lewis, commenting on this distinction, remarked that, since God is ultimate reality, a personal ultimate reality entails a personal God. This article attempts to defend Robinson's distinction against Lewis's criticism, making use of an influential, though controversial, philosophical theory ofthe self.

One way of understanding the reduplicative formula ‘Christ is,quaGod, omniscient, butquaman, limited in knowledge’ is to take the occurrences of the ‘qua’ locution as picking out different parts of Christ: a divine part and a human part. But this view of Christ as a composite being runs into paradox when combined with the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation, according to which Christ is identical to the second person of the Trinity. In response, we have to choose between modifying the orthodox understanding, adopting a philosophically and theologically contentious perdurantist account of persistence through time, or rejecting altogether the idea of the composite Christ.

In the broadest sense of the phrase, there is action at a distance whenever there is a spatial or temporal gap (or both) between a cause and its effect. In this sense, it is not at all controversial that there is action at a distance. To cite a few instances: the page a few inches in front of you is impinging on your senses; the Sun is now warming the Earth; we are still living with the consequences of the Second World War. What is controversial is the idea of unmediated action at a distance, where there is both a gap between cause and effect and no intermediate causes and effects to fill it. The three examples just mentioned are cases of action at a distance, certainly, but not, surely, unmediated action at a distance. What we expect to find, in each case, is a spatially and temporally continuous causal series stretching across time and space.

[FIRST PARAGRAPH]\ud \ud Consider a straight line on a flat surface running from point A to C and passing though B. Suppose the distance AB to be four inches, and the distance BC to be six inches. We can infer that the distance AC is ten inches. Of all geometrical inferences, this is surely one of the simplest. Of course, things are a little more complicated if the surface is not flat. If A, B and C are points on a sphere, then the shortest distance between A and C may be smaller (it may even be zero). We can make our inference immune from concerns about non-Euclidean spaces, however, by qualifying it as follows: if AB = n, and BC = m, then, in the direction A⇒B⇒C, the distance AC is n + m. This is apparently entirely trivial. But trivial truths can hide significant ontological ones. Let us translate our mathematical example to the physical world, and suppose A, B and C to be points, still in a straight line, but now at the centre of gravity of three physical objects