Stephen Law

I promised Chris something on the incarnation. This is from The Xmas Files. Are we, at Christmas, celebrating the birth of an entity as contradictory as a round square? Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation. Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to be God incarnate: both God and man. That might seem a fairly straightforward sort of claim. People may argue over whether it is true, of course. But that what is being claimed is clear and coherent is largely taken for granted on both sides. Which is odd, because the dispute over exactly how divinity and humanity are combined in the person of Jesus is actually one of deepest and most-ill-tempered in Christian history. Philosophers and theologians have been struggling to make sense of the incarnation for over two thousand years. The early church fathers fought bitterly over the issue and it remains a source of contention to this day. So what, exactly, is the difficulty? Here’s an analogy. Suppose I tell you that I have drawn a circle on a she...