"The pervasive and most annoying difficulty that plagues this whole subject is the deficiency in definition. The crucial nouns (not concepts) are ambiguous, or actually meaningless. On page 149 Powell declares, 'The chief point which was established in regard to both the Holy Trinity and to the . . . Incarnation, was that a real difference was to be recognized between essence, or nature, and personality. If there was no such real difference, then the Sabellian conception of God must be true.' The reader should recall that Sabellianism is the theory of a Unitarian modal trinity. Now, if essence means definition, which is its only suitable meaning, and if personality is a part of that definition, it is hard to see how defining the Father to include personality prevents one from including personality in the somewhat different definition of the Son. Powell's argument implies that all human individuals are one individual because every one of them is a person.
Powell goes even further. Continuing on page 149 he argues, or rather, asserts, 'if there was no distinction between person and nature [nature, he had previously identified with essence], it would seem to follow that there could be no separation in our Incarnate Lord between his Divinity and his humanity, in which case he could not have been really man, as we are.'
In the first place, however, according to the orthodox doctrine, Christ was not really man as we are, for we are persons and Christ was only a 'nature.' In the second place, Powell wants to define person in one way and nature in another way, even though he had earlier identified nature with essence, or definition. The nature is the definition of the person. How this prevents us from separating divinity from humanity, as he says it does, is not at all clear. Condense his argument: Unless person and nature are distinct, the definition of divinity is precisely the definition of humanity." - Gordon H. Clark, Incarnation, Pg. 30-31
No comments:
Post a Comment