RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
This is a toned-down version of his Logic of God Incarnate and in many ways it is just as powerful and more accessible.. With the exception of his take on foreknowledge and eternity, I whole-heartedly recommend this book.
Furthermore, this book is a skillful exercise in analytic theology. Morris invites us to think deeply on what we mean by God. And we mean by God:
God is the greatest possible array of compossible great-making properties.
Morris explains some of the terms:
Great-making property: a property it is initially good to have.
Compossible: a set or array of properties is compossible if it is possible that they all be had by the same individual at the same time, or all together.
Morris’s take on God’s knowledge starts off well and cuts finite goddism off at the knees:
If God has to depend on any intermediary for knowledge, then this defeats creation theology: God would then be the creator of the intermediary, yet also lacking the knowledge of what he creates. Morris then defines two useful concepts in analytic philosophy: de re and de dicto.
The proposition
(1) God is omniscient
Is necessarily true. True in every possible world. It has both de dicto and de re status.
G1: Necessarily, God is omniscience (de dicto status)
G2: God is necessarily omniscience (both de dicto and de re).
I am going to skip what Morris says about Molinism, Presentism, and Eternity. On one hand those discussions are quite learned, but it's never clear what his conclusion is. His true skill is in Christology. Is it logically incoherent to say that Jesus is both God and Man? Morris shows that when we gloss our terms, there is no problem. He writes,
“Divinity, or deity, we shall continue to construe as analogous to a natural kind, and thus as comprising a kind-essence, a cluster of properties individually necessary and jointly sufficient for belonging to the kind, or in this case, for being divine” (162).
Morris then capitalizes on the argument in several crucial sentences:
“An individual-essence is a cluster of properties essential for an individual’s being the particular entity it is, properties without which it would not exist. A kind.essence is that cluster of properties without which, as we have seen, an individual would not belong to the particular natural kind it distinctively exemplifies. Of necessity, an individual can have no more than one individual-essence, or individual nature, but it does not follow from this, and is not, so far as I can tell, demonstrable from any other quarter, that an individual can have no more than one kind-essence” (163).
Let’s cash this out. Humans are sinful. Jesus was human. Yet, Jesus was without sin, so how could Jesus be human? Morris shows that sin is a common human property, but not an essential one (since it wasn’t there originally and won’t be there in heaven). Further, we say that Jesus is fully human, not merely human.
Fully human: exemplifying all of the properties in the kind-essence humanity
Merely human: exemplifying only those H-properties.
Two Minds Christology
They stand in an asymmetric accessing relation. Jesus typically drew upon his human resources.
This book is easier to read than Logic of God Incarnate, and can probably be found cheaper than Logic. It ends with a short bibliography.
Furthermore, this book is a skillful exercise in analytic theology. Morris invites us to think deeply on what we mean by God. And we mean by God:
God is the greatest possible array of compossible great-making properties.
Morris explains some of the terms:
Great-making property: a property it is initially good to have.
Compossible: a set or array of properties is compossible if it is possible that they all be had by the same individual at the same time, or all together.
Morris’s take on God’s knowledge starts off well and cuts finite goddism off at the knees:
If God has to depend on any intermediary for knowledge, then this defeats creation theology: God would then be the creator of the intermediary, yet also lacking the knowledge of what he creates. Morris then defines two useful concepts in analytic philosophy: de re and de dicto.
The proposition
(1) God is omniscient
Is necessarily true. True in every possible world. It has both de dicto and de re status.
G1: Necessarily, God is omniscience (de dicto status)
G2: God is necessarily omniscience (both de dicto and de re).
I am going to skip what Morris says about Molinism, Presentism, and Eternity. On one hand those discussions are quite learned, but it's never clear what his conclusion is. His true skill is in Christology. Is it logically incoherent to say that Jesus is both God and Man? Morris shows that when we gloss our terms, there is no problem. He writes,
“Divinity, or deity, we shall continue to construe as analogous to a natural kind, and thus as comprising a kind-essence, a cluster of properties individually necessary and jointly sufficient for belonging to the kind, or in this case, for being divine” (162).
Morris then capitalizes on the argument in several crucial sentences:
“An individual-essence is a cluster of properties essential for an individual’s being the particular entity it is, properties without which it would not exist. A kind.essence is that cluster of properties without which, as we have seen, an individual would not belong to the particular natural kind it distinctively exemplifies. Of necessity, an individual can have no more than one individual-essence, or individual nature, but it does not follow from this, and is not, so far as I can tell, demonstrable from any other quarter, that an individual can have no more than one kind-essence” (163).
Let’s cash this out. Humans are sinful. Jesus was human. Yet, Jesus was without sin, so how could Jesus be human? Morris shows that sin is a common human property, but not an essential one (since it wasn’t there originally and won’t be there in heaven). Further, we say that Jesus is fully human, not merely human.
Fully human: exemplifying all of the properties in the kind-essence humanity
Merely human: exemplifying only those H-properties.
Two Minds Christology
They stand in an asymmetric accessing relation. Jesus typically drew upon his human resources.
This book is easier to read than Logic of God Incarnate, and can probably be found cheaper than Logic. It ends with a short bibliography.
