Chapter 17

The Kryptic Model: Loke's Divine Preconscious Christology

(The Author's Position)

Introduction: The Model I Find Most Compelling

So far we have looked at two major models of the Incarnation. We saw why kenotic Christology fails: it asks the Son to give up properties He cannot give up without ceasing to be God. We also saw why Thomas Morris's two-minds view, while a real improvement, raises a worrying question about whether Christ ends up with two conscious "selves." In this chapter I want to share the model I have come to believe is the strongest of all the options on the table — Andrew Ter Ern Loke's Kryptic Model of the Incarnation, and specifically his "Divine Preconscious Model" (DPM).¹

Loke's central claim can be stated in a single sentence: when the Son became incarnate, He did not surrender His divine attributes — He concealed them. The eternal Son retained all of His omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, but those attributes operated at a "preconscious" level, available when the Father willed their use. At the conscious level, Jesus lived a genuinely human life — feeling tired, growing in wisdom, not knowing the day or hour of His return.²

This is the model I want to defend. It solves the puzzles that defeat kenoticism, avoids the "two subjects" worry that haunts Morris, and — crucially for this book — depends entirely on Christ having a real human soul. If physicalism is true, the kryptic model collapses. That last point is what makes this chapter not just a chapter on Christology but a chapter that ties the book's whole argument together.

What Is Krypsis?

The model takes its name from the Greek word krypsis (κρύψις), which simply means "hiding" or "concealment." It is the same root we get our English word "cryptic" from — something that is there but hidden from view. When you hear "kryptic Christology," you can think of it as "hiding Christology" or "concealment Christology." The Son did not stop being omniscient. He simply hid that omniscience from His own conscious experience as a man.³

This is the very first thing to grasp, because the difference between kenosis ("emptying") and krypsis ("hiding") is the difference between a model that fails and one that works. Kenoticism says the Son gave up certain attributes when He became man. Krypsis says He kept them all but concealed some of them from His waking awareness. A flashlight that has been thrown away is not the same as a flashlight whose beam has been hooded. The first one is gone; the second one is still in your hand.

Loke is not the first person to use the word krypsis in Christology. There is a tradition behind it — a debate among Lutheran theologians in the 1620s between the schools of Giessen and Tübingen over whether Christ's humanity, having received divine properties through union with the Logos, was simply concealed (Tübingen's krypsis) or whether the use of those properties was actually relinquished (Giessen's kenosis).⁴ But Loke's version is genuinely new. He is not simply repeating the old Lutheran debate. He is asking a more basic question: when the Logos took on human nature, what happened to His divine consciousness? And his answer borrows the language of modern philosophy of mind to explain it.

The Divine Preconscious Model

Here is where Loke's contribution gets really interesting. He uses three categories from depth psychology — the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious — to describe how the divine and human aspects of Christ's mental life are organized.⁵

The conscious, Loke says, is the part of mental life that is right now active and aware — the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings I am experiencing at this very moment. The preconscious is the part of mental content that is not currently in awareness but is available — I can pull it up if I direct my attention there. The unconscious, in the classic Freudian sense, is repressed material that cannot be brought to awareness without special effort.⁶

Try this for a moment. What is your phone number? Before I asked, you were not actively thinking about it. Now you are. Where was that information one minute ago? It was not gone — you have not been re-learning it for the last sixty seconds. It was stored in what Loke calls the preconscious: present, real, accessible by directing attention, but not currently lighting up the conscious stage. Multiply that by infinity and you have a useful (though imperfect) picture of how the divine attributes can be present in Christ without overwhelming His human awareness.

On Loke's model, when the Son became incarnate, His one mind came to include a single stream of consciousness with two preconsciouses behind it — a divine preconscious and a human preconscious. Divine attributes like omniscience and omnipotence are located at the divine preconscious level. Human properties — bodily sensations, the developing knowledge a child accumulates, the ordinary memory of yesterday's conversations — are located at the human preconscious level and in the human body.⁷ The conscious experience of the incarnate Son is genuinely human: He sees through human eyes, hears through human ears, learns by hearing His mother teach Him the Psalms.

This explains, beautifully, the moments in the Gospels where Jesus does seem to access something supernatural. When He knows what the Pharisees are thinking (Matthew 9:4), when He tells Nathanael, "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you" (John 1:48), when He predicts the details of His own betrayal and death — these are moments when the divine preconscious is being "accessed" into His human conscious experience. Loke's image is something like this: the Son chose, in obedience to the Father's plan, to keep the floodlight of omniscience off most of the time, but the Father could and did "switch it on" at specific moments to authenticate His Son's identity and to do the saving work He had come to do.⁸

One Consciousness, Two Wills

One question some readers will ask immediately: doesn't the church teach that Christ has two wills? Yes. The Third Council of Constantinople (681) defined dyothelitism — two wills, divine and human — and that definition is binding on orthodox Christology.⁹ I treat the two-wills doctrine in detail in Chapter 14, so I will not repeat that argument here. But how does it fit with Loke's "one consciousness" claim?

The answer is that consciousness and will are not the same thing. Loke is not saying Christ has only one will. He is saying Christ has only one conscious experiencer. Christ has two wills (divine and human), but the human will operates at the conscious level, while the divine will is always present, always in harmony, always behind every conscious choice in a way that ensures that the two wills never compete with each other.¹⁰ What we never see in Loke's model is two parallel "I"s, two separate first-person perspectives, two streams of inner narration — which is what we seem to get on the two-minds view.

Solving the Classical Puzzles

Now I want to walk through how this model handles the three classical puzzles of Christology — the puzzles about omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. These are the questions every model of the Incarnation has to answer.

Puzzle 1: Omniscience and Mark 13:32. Jesus says, "But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32, ESV). The Greek verb here is oiden (οἶδεν), from oida, "to know" — but as Loke points out, oida in the New Testament often carries the sense "to be aware of, to perceive, to recognize."¹¹ The text can naturally be read: "no one is aware of that day or hour, not even the Son, but the Father alone." On Loke's model, this is exactly right. Jesus, in His human conscious experience, was genuinely not aware of the day or hour. That knowledge existed in His divine preconscious — He was, as the eternal Son, omniscient — but in obedience to the Father's plan, He restrained Himself from accessing it consciously.¹² He IS omniscient (preconsciously) AND limited in awareness (consciously), with no contradiction. (For more on Mark 13:32 in the context of Christ's human soul, see Chapter 8.)

Puzzle 2: Omnipotence and the weariness at Jacob's well. "Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well" (John 4:6). The Greek kekopiakōs (κεκοπιακώς), "having grown weary," is no act. It is a real physical and psychological state. How can the omnipotent Son of God be tired? On the kryptic model, He IS omnipotent at the divine preconscious level AND genuinely human and embodied at the conscious level. He chose, in obedience to the Father, to live within the limits of an ordinary first-century male body. The fatigue is not playacting — it is what it really feels like to be the eternal Son walking on dusty Galilean roads in human flesh that has not yet eaten.

Puzzle 3: Omnipresence and being located in Palestine. The eternal Son is everywhere; the man Jesus is in one place at a time. On the kryptic model, the divine nature's omnipresence operates at the preconscious level — the Son in His divine being remained the One who upholds the universe (Hebrews 1:3). At the same time, His human conscious experience was spatially located. He could not, as a man on earth, be in Galilee and Jerusalem at once. But He could be in both places as God. The two are not contradictory; they are predicated of different levels of His one personal life.

Why Krypsis Beats Kenosis

I argued in Chapter 15 that kenoticism — the view that the Son surrendered some divine attributes to become incarnate — is theologically unworkable. The kryptic model has at least four advantages over kenoticism that I want to highlight here.

First, krypsis preserves the Son's possession of all divine attributes. Nothing essential to deity is lost. This matters because divine attributes are not optional accessories God carries around; they are essential properties of the divine nature. A being who is not omniscient is not God. Krypsis avoids this disaster.

Second, krypsis satisfies Chalcedon's "without change" (atreptōs). The Definition of Chalcedon says that in the Incarnation, the two natures are united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." Kenoticism violates "without change" by altering the divine nature. Krypsis does not.

Third, krypsis preserves the Trinity's unity of attributes. If the Son surrenders omniscience, do the Father and Spirit still know what the Son does not know? That fractures the Trinity's shared divine life. On the kryptic model, the Son still knows all things — He simply does not access that knowledge into His human conscious experience.

Fourth, krypsis avoids the logical impossibility of an essentially omniscient being becoming ignorant. Kenotic theologians have to explain how a necessarily omniscient being could fail to be omniscient. Krypsis sidesteps the puzzle entirely: the Son never stopped being omniscient.¹⁴

Why Krypsis Beats the Two-Minds View

I treated Morris's two-minds view in Chapter 16. It is a serious model with real strengths. But Loke's kryptic model improves on it in three ways.

First, the kryptic model avoids the "two subjects" worry. On Morris's view, there are two simultaneously active streams of consciousness in Christ — a divine consciousness aware of all things and a human consciousness aware of much less. The trouble is that two streams of consciousness look like two experiencers, and two experiencers look like two persons. That is uncomfortably close to Nestorianism, the heresy condemned at Ephesus (431) which split Christ into two persons.¹⁵ Loke argues that the two-consciousness model implies Jesus would be aware of Himself being aware of the day of His coming and aware of Himself being unaware of the day of His coming at the same time — which looks like two selves, not one.¹⁶ The kryptic model has only one conscious experiencer, the man Jesus, and so the worry never arises.

Second, the kryptic model gives a more natural account of Jesus' unified personal experience. The Gospels do not show us a divided Jesus living two parallel lives. They show us one Jesus, one life, one perspective — a life that includes moments of supernatural insight and a deep sense of His Father's mission, but always told from a single first-person point of view. Loke's model fits that data effortlessly.

Third, the kryptic model avoids the part/whole problems of Morris's spotlight-within-a-floodlight analogy. If the human mind is a "proper part" of the divine mind, the human nature begins to look like a subdivision of the divine nature, rather than a genuinely distinct nature. Loke avoids this by keeping the divine and human firmly distinct: the divine attributes are at the divine preconscious; the human conscious experience is the experience of a complete human nature (body and soul) hypostatically united to the eternal Son.

Engaging Crisp on Krypsis

Oliver Crisp, in Divinity and Humanity, offers an independent and carefully argued defense of a krypsis-style Christology. His version differs slightly from Loke's. For Crisp, the Word does not restrict the exercise of His divine properties as such; He restricts the access His human nature has to those properties. The human nature of Christ is in an "asymmetrical accessing relation" with the Logos.¹⁷ Crisp insists this is not a sneaky version of functional kenoticism, because the Word is not refraining from exercising His attributes everywhere — He is exercising them everywhere, in upholding creation and in His Trinitarian life. The only "limit" is the limit on what the human nature of Christ has access to.¹⁸

Loke and Crisp are mutually reinforcing. Loke gives us a clearer psychological model (the divine preconscious and the analogy of stored knowledge); Crisp gives us a clearer metaphysical map (the asymmetrical accessing relation between the Word and the assumed human nature). Together they show that the basic intuition — concealment, not surrender — has serious philosophical and theological legs.

The Critical Connection to the Soul

Now I come to what is, for the purposes of this book, the most important point of all. The kryptic model requires a human soul. It cannot be made to work on physicalism. This is the chapter's contribution to the book's larger argument, and it deserves careful attention.

Here is the problem. The whole kryptic model is built around the idea of a "preconscious" level — a metaphysical place where divine attributes can be stored, present, and available without flooding into conscious awareness. But what kind of thing is a preconscious? It is a feature of a mind. It is mental content held by a thinking subject. The preconscious is not a region of physical space; it is a structural feature of an immaterial mental life.¹⁹

Now ask: on physicalism, what is Christ's "human nature"? On Christian physicalism, the human nature of Christ is His physical body, including His brain. There is no immaterial soul. There is just a particular human organism the Logos has united Himself to. So where does the kryptic model put the conscious human experience of Jesus? In the brain. And where does it put the divine preconscious? Now we have a problem. The infinite content of divine omniscience cannot be stored in the finite physical structure of a first-century human brain. A brain has, at most, around 86 billion neurons. Omniscience is the knowledge of all true propositions about everything that exists, has existed, will exist, and could exist in every possible world. That is not a finite quantity of information.

On dualism — and especially on the substance dualism that the church fathers and the ecumenical councils assumed — this problem disappears. Christ's human nature includes a real human soul, which is the seat of His genuine human consciousness. His divine nature is the "location" (so to speak) of the divine attributes at the preconscious level. The kryptic structure has somewhere to live: an immaterial human soul on one side providing conscious human experience, and the divine nature on the other side housing the preconscious divine omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. The hypostatic union is the union of the eternal Son with this complete human nature — body and soul.²⁰ The model is coherent because there is enough metaphysical real estate to hold what it asks us to believe.

The councils, of course, already assumed exactly this. Constantinople II (553), in defining what was wrong with Apollinarianism, insisted that Christ has a rational human soul (psychēs logikēs) — an immaterial intellect proper to His human nature.²¹ Loke's model fits hand in glove with this conciliar definition. Wilkinson rightly calls a Christology that takes the councils seriously a "Chalcedonian anthropology" — Christ's human nature norms our human nature.²² If Christ's human nature includes a soul, ours does too. And if ours does too, physicalism is wrong about us — and even more wrong about Him.

This is why Chapter 17 belongs at the heart of the book. It is not just a chapter on Christology. It is a chapter that shows that the most plausible model of the Incarnation that has emerged in contemporary analytic theology — Loke's kryptic model — presupposes substance dualism. Lose the soul, and you lose the model. Lose the model, and you are back to either kenoticism (which surrenders divine attributes) or some form of two-minds dualism (which struggles with the two-subjects worry) or — worst of all — a physicalist Christology that, as I will argue at length in Chapters 21 through 27, cannot survive the cross or the resurrection. The kryptic model is the best model available, and it requires a soul.

Concluding Reflection

I want to end this chapter the way I began it — personally. When I first read Loke's Kryptic Model of the Incarnation, I had the experience some readers may know: the experience of finding language for something I had always sensed but could not articulate. The Jesus of the Gospels is one Person, with one perspective, living one human life — but a human life shot through, at unexpected moments, with intimations of a deeper reality. He is tired at the well; He also reads the Samaritan woman's whole life. He weeps at Lazarus's tomb; He also calls a four-day-dead man back into the world. He does not know the day or hour; He also knows what is in every man. The kryptic model gives me a way to hold all of this together without making Jesus into either a diminished god or a divine actor pretending to be human.

The Son did not empty Himself of what He was. He concealed it, for love. He veiled His glory in flesh — and in a real human soul — so we could meet Him as one of us, while He never ceased to be God. That is what the Gospels actually show us, what the councils actually defined, and what the kryptic model preserves. To make the model work, you need a soul. To follow Christ as the early church confessed Him, you need to confess that He has a soul too.