Appendix B

Comparison Chart of Incarnation Models

One of the most important developments in contemporary Christology has been the emergence of several distinct philosophical models that attempt to explain how the Incarnation is coherent — how the eternal, omniscient, omnipotent Son of God can become a finite, limited, suffering human being while remaining fully divine. These models are not rival theologies in the sense that one must be heretical if another is orthodox. Rather, they represent different philosophical frameworks for understanding the same conciliar faith. The councils tell us what is true of Christ — that He is one Person in two natures, fully divine and fully human, without confusion, change, division, or separation. The models try to explain how this can be so without logical contradiction.

This appendix provides a detailed comparison of five major models of the Incarnation that have shaped contemporary analytic Christology: the Kenotic Model, the Two-Minds Model of Thomas Morris, the Kryptic Model (Divine Preconscious Model) of Andrew Ter Ern Loke, the Conciliar Christology of Timothy Pawl, and the Compositional Model associated with Brian Leftow and the broader Thomistic tradition. Each model has significant strengths, and each faces distinct challenges. The purpose of this comparison is not merely academic classification but theological discernment: which model or models best preserve the full testimony of Scripture, the definitions of the ecumenical councils, and the philosophical coherence of the Christian faith? And — critically for the argument of this book — which models require, presuppose, or are compatible with the existence of a human soul in Christ?

Before presenting the comparison chart, a word of caution is in order. No philosophical model can fully "explain" the Incarnation. The union of infinite deity and finite humanity in one Person is, as the church fathers repeatedly insisted, a mystery — not in the sense that it is irrational or contradictory, but in the sense that it exceeds the capacity of any finite mind to comprehend exhaustively. As Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, the Incarnation is a new mixture, a paradoxical union that defies all prior categories. The models discussed here are best understood not as complete explanations but as conceptual maps — they help us navigate the terrain without claiming to have charted every square inch of it.

I. Overview of the Five Models

Before presenting the comparison chart, it will be helpful to provide a brief overview of each model so that the reader can understand the categories of comparison that follow. Each overview is intentionally brief, as the models are treated at length in Chapters 15 through 19 of this book.

A. The Kenotic Model

The Kenotic Model takes its name from the Greek word kenōsis (κένωσις), meaning "emptying," drawn from Philippians 2:7, where Paul writes that Christ "emptied himself" (heauton ekenōsen, ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν). The central idea of kenoticism is that in becoming incarnate, the Son of God surrendered, laid aside, or chose not to exercise some or all of His divine attributes — particularly omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence — in order to live a genuinely human life.¹

Kenotic Christology comes in two major varieties. Ontological kenoticism holds that the Son actually divested Himself of certain divine attributes at the Incarnation. On this view, the incarnate Son was literally not omniscient and not omnipotent during His earthly life — He truly did not possess these attributes. The most prominent historical advocates of ontological kenoticism include the nineteenth-century German theologians Gottfried Thomasius and Wolfgang Friedrich Gess, who proposed various schemes for dividing divine attributes into those that were surrendered and those that were retained.² Functional kenoticism, by contrast, holds that the Son retained all of His divine attributes but voluntarily chose not to exercise them. On this view, the incarnate Christ was still omniscient "in principle" but chose not to access His omniscience; He was still omnipotent but chose not to use His power. The earthly Jesus experienced genuine human limitations — not because He lacked divine attributes, but because He refrained from using them.³

The Kenotic Model has an immediate intuitive appeal. It takes the New Testament witness to Jesus' genuine limitations with utmost seriousness. When Jesus says, "But concerning that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only" (Matt. 24:36, ESV), the kenoticist can say straightforwardly: Jesus did not know because He had surrendered His omniscience. When Jesus grew weary, hungry, and thirsty, it was because He had genuinely become limited. This is the model's great strength — it preserves the full reality of Christ's human experience.

However, as discussed at length in Chapter 15, kenoticism faces devastating philosophical and theological objections. The most fundamental is the essential properties argument: if omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence are essential properties of the divine nature — properties without which a being simply is not God — then a being who lacks these properties is not God. If the Son surrendered His omniscience, then during the Incarnation, the Son was not fully God. This directly contradicts the Chalcedonian definition, which affirms that Christ is "truly God" (alēthōs theon, ἀληθῶς θεόν) with His divine nature preserved "without change" (atreptōs, ἀτρέπτως).⁴ Additionally, if the Son surrenders attributes that the Father and Spirit retain, the Persons of the Trinity no longer share all divine attributes, undermining the Nicene homoousion. Functional kenoticism avoids the essential properties objection — since the Son still possesses the attributes — but faces its own difficulty: can a being who possesses omniscience genuinely choose not to know something? If the knowledge is present but simply "set aside," in what sense does the Son genuinely experience human ignorance?⁵

B. The Two-Minds Model (Thomas Morris)

In his landmark study The Logic of God Incarnate (1986), Thomas V. Morris proposed what he called the "two-minds" view of the Incarnation.⁶ According to this model, the incarnate Christ possessed two distinct minds and two distinct consciousnesses — a divine mind encompassing the full scope of omniscience and a human mind that came into existence at the conception and grew and developed as the boy Jesus grew and developed. The human mind was not consciously aware of everything the divine mind knew.

Morris proposed an asymmetric accessing relation between the two minds. The divine mind had full and direct access to everything in the human mind — it "contained" the human mind as a proper subset. But the human mind did not have direct access to the divine mind, except on those occasions when the divine mind chose to grant such access. Morris compared this to a spotlight within a floodlight: the floodlight illuminates everything the spotlight does and more, but the spotlight illuminates only a limited portion of what the floodlight covers.⁷

Morris suggested several analogies to make this model intelligible. One analogy draws on the phenomenon of dreaming: a dreamer is having a dream with a large cast of characters, and the dreamer himself is one of those characters, perceiving the internal environs of the dream and taking part in its action "from within." The dreamer qua dreamer knows everything about the dream world, but the dreamer qua character within the dream experiences genuine limitations. Another analogy involves two computer programs, one containing but not contained by the other.⁸

The Two-Minds Model has significant strengths. It preserves the full deity of Christ by maintaining that the divine mind retains omniscience at all times — the Son never stops being omniscient. It also takes Christ's genuine human experience seriously — the human mind truly grows, learns, and experiences ignorance. It avoids the essential properties problem that plagues kenoticism, since the Son does not surrender any divine attributes.

However, the model faces its own set of challenges, as explored in Chapter 16. The most serious is the unity of consciousness problem, sometimes called the "two subjects" worry. If Christ has two simultaneously conscious minds — one omniscient and one limited — does He have one unified experience or two parallel experiences? If the latter, is there really one person, or are we approaching Nestorianism (two persons in one body)? As Loke has argued, the simultaneous presence of two contradictory self-consciousnesses seems to imply two selves. If the divine consciousness is consciously aware of omniscient knowledge while the human consciousness is consciously aware of limited knowledge, there appear to be two "I's" — two subjects of experience — which threatens the unity of Christ's person.⁹ Additionally, Morris's analogies have been questioned. The split-brain analogy, for instance, may actually involve two persons rather than one, which would undermine rather than support the model. The dreaming analogy is suggestive but imprecise — the dreamer is not literally two consciousnesses but one consciousness in two modes.¹⁰

C. The Kryptic Model — Loke's Divine Preconscious Model

Andrew Ter Ern Loke's Kryptic Model, which he also calls the Divine Preconscious Model (DPM), represents what this book regards as the most promising contemporary framework for understanding the Incarnation. Developed in Loke's monograph A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation (2014), the DPM proposes that at the Incarnation, the divine properties of the Son — omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence — were not surrendered (contra kenoticism) but were concealed (krypsis, κρύψις) at the preconscious level of the incarnate Christ's mind, while His conscious experience was genuinely and fully human.¹¹

The key innovation of Loke's model is its appeal to the distinction between conscious and preconscious mental states — a distinction well established in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Human beings possess a vast store of knowledge, beliefs, memories, and cognitive capacities at the preconscious level that are not consciously accessed at any given moment but can be brought to conscious awareness under certain conditions. Loke applies this structure, by analogy, to the incarnate Christ. At the Incarnation, the mind of the pre-existent eternal Logos came to include both a conscious level and a preconscious level. The divine properties — omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence — were possessed by the Logos in the divine preconscious, while the conscious level acquired genuinely human properties: limited knowledge, limited power, spatial location, and so forth.¹²

Crucially, Loke's model postulates that Christ had only one consciousness — not two. This is the decisive difference between the Kryptic Model and Morris's Two-Minds Model. On Morris's view, there are two simultaneously conscious minds. On Loke's view, there is one consciousness that is genuinely human in its experiential character, but the divine properties remain present at the preconscious level, available to be accessed when the divine mind chose to manifest them — as in miracles, prophetic knowledge, and displays of authority. The human preconscious and the divine preconscious together constitute what Loke describes as the total preconscious of the incarnate Christ, while the single conscious awareness is the locus of Christ's unified personal experience.¹³

The advantages of the Kryptic Model are significant. By postulating one consciousness, the DPM maintains the unity of Christ's person and avoids the "two subjects" worry that confronts Morris's Two-Minds view. By postulating that the Logos possessed and had access to His divine properties in virtue of His divine preconscious, the DPM maintains the full deity of Jesus even while He truly experienced human limitations, thus avoiding the problems with ontological kenoticism. As Loke summarizes, the DPM retains the strengths of the kenotic model in maintaining the unity of consciousness and retains the strengths of the Two-Minds Model in maintaining that the Logos possessed omniscience and other divine properties, while avoiding the weaknesses of both.¹⁴

Critics have raised the objection that the DPM is more complex than the alternatives — that its appeal to conscious/preconscious distinctions and its careful parsing of divine and human mental levels involves a degree of philosophical machinery that the simpler models avoid. Loke responds that complexity is not a vice when the phenomenon being modeled is genuinely complex. The Incarnation is the most extraordinary event in the history of the universe — the union of infinite deity with finite humanity — and we should not be surprised that an adequate model of such an event requires careful philosophical nuance.¹⁵

D. Conciliar Christology (Timothy Pawl)

Timothy Pawl's In Defense of Conciliar Christology (2016) represents a distinctive approach that differs from the other models in a crucial respect: Pawl does not attempt to explain how the Incarnation works (as the kenotic, two-minds, and kryptic models do) but rather to defend the logical coherence of the conciliar Christological definitions against the charge that they are self-contradictory.¹⁶

Pawl's project is, by his own description, more modest than those of Morris or Loke. He does not ask, "What was it like for Jesus to be both divine and human?" or "How did the two natures relate in Christ's experiential life?" Instead, he asks, "Is the conjunction of claims made by the ecumenical councils logically consistent?" His answer is a resounding yes — and he uses the tools of analytic philosophy, including predicate logic and modal metaphysics, to demonstrate this.

The core philosophical problem that Pawl addresses is what he calls the "Fundamental Problem" of Christology: how can one being simultaneously possess apparently contradictory properties? Christ is said to be omniscient and limited in knowledge, omnipotent and weak, immortal and mortal, infinite and finite. These seem to be contradictions. If Christ is omniscient, then it is not the case that He is ignorant. But the Gospels present Him as ignorant of certain things (Mark 13:32). How can both be true?¹⁷

Pawl's primary strategy is to deny that these predications are truly incompatible. He argues that when we say "Christ is omniscient" and "Christ is limited in knowledge," these predications are not made "in the same way." The omniscience belongs to Christ's divine nature; the limitation belongs to Christ's human nature. Pawl develops what he calls a "qua" strategy: Christ is omniscient qua His divine nature and limited in knowledge qua His human nature. Since the predications are indexed to different natures, they are not contradictory in the strict logical sense — they do not violate the law of non-contradiction, because the "way" in which the predicates apply differs.¹⁸

Pawl also defends the concrete nature view — the position that Christ's human nature is a concrete particular (a body-soul composite), not an abstract property or universal. This is significant for our purposes because it aligns with the book's own position and it means that Pawl's philosophical defense of the councils implicitly presupposes a human nature that includes a soul, since the councils he defends explicitly define Christ's human nature as consisting of a rational soul and a body (ek psychēs logikēs kai sōmatos, ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ σώματος).¹⁹

Pawl's approach is valuable precisely because it operates at a different level from the other models. Morris, Loke, and the kenoticists each offer a specific philosophical mechanism to explain the "how" of the Incarnation. Pawl demonstrates that the "what" — the conciliar claims themselves — is logically consistent, regardless of which specific mechanism one adopts. In this sense, Pawl's work is complementary to rather than competitive with the other models. One can accept Pawl's defense of conciliar coherence while also adopting Loke's kryptic model as the best available account of the experiential dimension.²⁰

E. The Compositional Model (Leftow and the Thomistic Tradition)

The Compositional Model, associated primarily with Brian Leftow and the broader Thomistic tradition represented by Eleonore Stump and Thomas Aquinas himself, understands the Incarnation in terms of composition or mereology — the metaphysics of parts and wholes. On this view, the incarnate Christ is a composite entity whose "parts" include the divine nature (God the Son) and the assumed human nature (a body-soul composite). The human nature is a genuine component of the incarnate Christ, but it is not itself a person — it subsists in the Person of the Son.²¹

Leftow's specific version of the compositional model draws on a hylomorphic metaphysics — the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework in which substances are composites of matter (hylē) and form (morphē). On this account, Christ's human nature is a composite of a human body (matter) and a human soul (form), and the Incarnation is the assumption of this composite by the divine Person. Leftow has argued that there is no good general principle for when wholes "borrow" properties from their parts — we must figure this out case by case. In the case of the Incarnation, some properties of the human nature (such as suffering) are genuinely predicated of the whole Person, while other properties of the divine nature (such as eternality) are also predicated of the whole Person.²²

Importantly, in earlier presentations of his model, Leftow denied that the composite of God the Son, the created human body, and the created human soul of Christ was a "person" in the ordinary sense — which created difficulties with the conciliar affirmation that Christ is one Person. He subsequently modified his position on this point. The compositional model, in its various iterations, has faced the challenge of explaining how predications "spread" from parts to wholes — what Thomas Senor has called the "property borrowing" problem. If a part of Christ (His human nature) has the property of suffering, under what conditions does the whole Christ (the Person) also have that property?²³

Oliver Crisp provides a helpful discussion of compositional Christology in Divinity and Humanity, distinguishing between "two-part" Christologies (divine nature + human nature as a single body-soul unit) and "three-part" Christologies (divine nature + human body + human soul as three distinct components). The compositional model is naturally suited to a three-part framework, since it treats the human nature as itself a composite of body and soul — each of which stands in a distinct metaphysical relationship to the divine Person.²⁴

The compositional model has the advantage of being deeply rooted in the Thomistic tradition, which has centuries of theological development behind it. It takes the "parts" language of the conciliar definitions seriously and provides a framework for understanding how a single Person can have properties that seem to belong to different "levels" of His being. However, it faces challenges related to the property borrowing problem, the question of whether the human nature is a "part" in a strict mereological sense, and — as Robin Le Poidevin has argued — an identity dilemma regarding how the divine nature, the Son, and the incarnate Christ relate to one another.²⁵ Loke has responded to Le Poidevin's objections by drawing on an analogy from material coinciding objects and by proposing a hylomorphic account of immaterial entities inspired by Richard Swinburne's work in The Christian God.²⁶

II. The Comparison Chart

The following chart compares the five models across twelve key categories. Each category represents a question of significant theological and philosophical importance. The chart is followed by a detailed discussion of each category, explaining why it matters for the argument of this book.

III. Detailed Discussion of Key Categories

The comparison chart above provides a high-level overview of how each model handles the key questions of Christology. In this section, we provide a more detailed discussion of several categories that are particularly relevant to the central argument of this book — namely, that physicalism about human nature is incompatible with orthodox Christology and that the Incarnation requires the reality of the human soul.

A. The Question of Consciousnesses: One or Two?

Perhaps the most immediately striking difference among the models concerns the number of consciousnesses they attribute to the incarnate Christ. This is not merely an academic curiosity — it has profound implications for the unity of Christ's person, the coherence of His personal experience, and the intelligibility of the Gospel narratives.

Morris's Two-Minds Model posits two simultaneously conscious minds — a divine mind and a human mind — united in one Person. The divine mind is omniscient, aware of all things at all times. The human mind is limited, growing, and developing. Both are "active" at the same time. Morris compares this to a spotlight within a floodlight: the floodlight (divine mind) illuminates everything, including everything the spotlight (human mind) illuminates, but the spotlight can only see its own limited range.²⁷

The difficulty with two simultaneous consciousnesses is that it seems to introduce two subjects of experience — two "I's." When Jesus says "I do not know the day or the hour," is it the human "I" speaking while the divine "I" knows perfectly well? If so, who is the "I" that speaks? And can a single person genuinely have two simultaneous, contradictory states of awareness? Loke argues that the simultaneous presence of two contradictory self-consciousnesses — one that is consciously aware of being omniscient and one that is consciously aware of being ignorant — implies two selves, not one. If the divine consciousness can reflect on its own omniscience while the human consciousness reflects on its own ignorance, there are two centers of self-reflection, which is tantamount to two persons.²⁸

Loke's Kryptic Model resolves this by postulating only one consciousness — a genuinely human conscious experience — while locating the divine attributes at the preconscious level. There is only one "I" in Christ — one center of conscious awareness. When Jesus says "I do not know," this is a true statement about His conscious experience: the human consciousness genuinely does not know. The divine omniscience is present but preconscious — real but not consciously accessed at that moment. This preserves both the truth of Jesus' statement and the metaphysical reality of His divine omniscience.²⁹

Pawl's Conciliar Christology does not take a definitive position on the number of consciousnesses, since his project is to defend logical coherence rather than to specify the experiential structure. His framework is compatible with either approach. The Compositional Model, following the Thomistic tradition, generally affirms two intellects (divine and human) as faculties of the two natures, but whether this entails two "consciousnesses" in the modern philosophical sense is a question the medievals did not address in those terms.

B. The Triduum Mortis: The Decisive Test

Of all the categories in the comparison chart, the triduum mortis — the approximately thirty-six to forty hours between Christ's death on Good Friday and His resurrection on Easter Sunday — is the most critical for the argument of this book. The triduum is the place where physicalism's failure becomes most vividly and inescapably apparent, and it is also the place where the models of the Incarnation reveal their deepest commitments regarding human nature and the soul.

On any model that affirms a human soul, the triduum can be handled coherently. When Christ died, His human soul separated from His body — just as happens with every human being at death. The body was placed in the tomb. The soul continued to exist in a disembodied state. Crucially, the Son of God remained united to both the separated soul and the body in the tomb. The hypostatic union was not dissolved — it was stretched, so to speak, across two metaphysical domains (the body in the tomb and the soul in the realm of the dead), but it was not broken. This is the traditional position affirmed by virtually all the major models: Morris's two-minds view, Loke's kryptic model, the Thomistic compositional model, and the conciliar framework that Pawl defends.³⁰

Thomas Aquinas provided what remains the most careful treatment of the triduum in the history of theology. Aquinas argued that during the three days, the Son was united to the human soul (which descended to the limbus patrum, the "limbo of the fathers," to liberate the righteous who had died before Christ) and to the body in the tomb. The soul without the body was not a complete human nature — Aquinas acknowledged this frankly — but it was still the Son's human soul, and the union was maintained. The body without the soul was not a living human being, but it was still the Son's body, preserved from corruption by the ongoing union with the divine Person. This is an extraordinary theological claim, and it is only coherent if there is a soul to survive the body's death.³¹

On physicalism, the triduum becomes an intractable problem. If there is no soul — if the human nature IS the physical body — then when the body dies, the human nature ceases to exist in any meaningful sense. A corpse is not a human nature. Dead biological matter is not a person. The Son of God was united to... what? A pile of decomposing cells? This is not a human nature in any sense recognized by the councils. The hypostatic union was effectively dissolved at the cross. The Incarnation was interrupted. "Without separation" (achōristōs, ἀχωρίστως) was violated. For approximately thirty-six to forty hours, the Second Person of the Trinity was not incarnate — He was no longer "true God and true man." This is not a minor theological quibble but a fundamental catastrophe for orthodox Christology.³²

The kenotic model is least equipped to handle the triduum, because if the Son has surrendered His divine attributes, His metaphysical status during the interval between death and resurrection is deeply unclear. The two-minds, kryptic, conciliar, and compositional models all handle the triduum consistently — provided they affirm a human soul. It is the affirmation of the soul that does the theological work. Without it, no model can preserve the continuity of the Incarnation through death.

C. The Requirement of a Human Soul

As the chart demonstrates, every major model of the Incarnation — with the possible exception of certain radical forms of kenoticism — either explicitly requires or strongly presupposes the existence of a human soul in Christ. This convergence across otherwise divergent philosophical frameworks is deeply significant. It means that the affirmation of Christ's human soul is not a peculiarity of one particular model but a shared assumption of the entire orthodox Christological tradition.

Morris's Two-Minds Model requires a human soul as the locus of the limited human consciousness. Without a soul, where does the human mind reside? On physicalism, it would reside in the brain. But the brain is a finite physical organ that grows, develops, can be damaged, and ultimately dies and decomposes. The divine mind, by contrast, is infinite, eternal, and indestructible. The relationship between a divine mind and a physical brain raises all the difficulties that substance dualism is designed to resolve — and more, because the brain's destruction at death would eliminate the human "mind" entirely.³³

Loke's Kryptic Model requires a human soul even more explicitly. The whole structure of the model — the distinction between the conscious level (human) and the preconscious level (divine) — presupposes a metaphysical framework in which conscious and preconscious states can be organized. If Christ has no soul and His "mind" is merely the activity of neurons in a physical brain, then the divine preconscious attributes would need to be somehow housed in that physical brain. But this is incoherent: the informational content of omniscience is infinite, and a finite brain — with a finite number of neurons and synaptic connections — cannot contain infinite information. The kryptic model requires that the divine attributes reside in the divine nature (at the preconscious level), while the human soul provides the seat of the human conscious experience. On physicalism, there is no soul, and the entire kryptic structure collapses.³⁴

Pawl's Conciliar Christology implicitly requires a human soul because the councils he defends explicitly define Christ's human nature as consisting of a rational soul and a body. The Chalcedonian definition states that Christ is "acknowledged in two natures... the distinction of the natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved." If the human nature includes a rational soul, then the "property" of that nature includes the soul's existence. To deny the soul would be to alter the human nature that the councils affirm — which is precisely what Apollinarius did, and which the councils condemned.³⁵

The Compositional Model requires a human soul as a matter of metaphysical necessity. On the hylomorphic framework that undergirds this model, the soul is the form of the body — the organizing principle that makes matter into a living human being. Without the soul, there is no human nature — only unformed matter. The entire compositional structure of the Incarnation depends on the soul's existence. This is why Aquinas could give such a careful account of the triduum: the soul survives death because it is a subsistent form, and the Son remains united to it even when it is separated from the body.³⁶

D. Compatibility with Physicalism

The chart reveals a striking and uniform result: none of the five major models of the Incarnation is compatible with physicalism about human nature. This finding is at the heart of the book's argument. Physicalism — the view that human beings are purely physical organisms with no immaterial soul — cannot be harmonized with any coherent model of the Incarnation.

The Two-Minds Model requires two non-physical minds. The Kryptic Model requires a human soul as the seat of consciousness and a divine nature as the "location" of the preconscious divine attributes. The Conciliar approach presupposes the conciliar definition of human nature as including a rational soul. The Compositional Model requires a soul as the form of the body. Even the Kenotic Model, which is the most flexible on metaphysical details, struggles with the triduum on a physicalist anthropology.

Some physicalist thinkers have attempted to construct alternatives — what might be called "physicalist Christologies." These typically involve denying the intermediate state (the Son was not incarnate during the triduum), denying the descent to the dead (Christ did not go anywhere between death and resurrection), affirming immediate resurrection (Christ was raised at the instant of death, so there was no gap), or appealing to divine reconstitution (God recreated the same person at the resurrection). As argued at length in Chapters 21-22, 24, and 35, each of these strategies fails — they either contradict the biblical narrative, violate the conciliar definitions, or create insoluble problems of personal identity.³⁷

The physicalist Glenn Andrew Peoples has conceded that on a physicalist account of the Incarnation, the human nature of Christ would be a fully functioning human person apart from the Incarnation — which raises the specter of Nestorianism (two persons in Christ). R. T. Mullins has argued that physicalist approaches to the Incarnation face radical difficulties that have not been adequately addressed by their proponents. The contributors to Christian Physicalism? Philosophical Theological Criticisms, edited by R. Keith Loftin and Joshua R. Farris, provide extensive arguments demonstrating the Christological failures of physicalism, particularly in the chapters on Holy Saturday, the death of Christ, and the triduum mortis.³⁸

E. The Question of Unity: Person and Natures

Another important dimension of comparison concerns how each model handles the unity of Christ's person in relation to His two natures. The Chalcedonian definition affirms that Christ is "one and the same Son... acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." This means the two natures must be genuinely distinct (not confused or changed) and yet inseparably united in one Person (not divided or separated). Each model approaches this balance differently.

The Kenotic Model, particularly in its ontological form, tends to emphasize unity at the expense of distinction. If the Son surrenders His divine attributes, the "divine nature" that remains is a reduced version of full divinity — which risks either confusing the natures (the divine nature has been changed to become more like a human nature) or losing one of them (if the Son is no longer omniscient, is He still fully divine?). Functional kenoticism fares better on this point, since the divine nature retains its attributes, but the question remains: what is the experiential difference between a being who has omniscience but never uses it and a being who lacks omniscience?

Morris's Two-Minds Model emphasizes distinction — two minds, two consciousnesses, two sets of experience — and faces the challenge of maintaining unity. The asymmetric accessing relation (the divine mind has access to the human mind but not vice versa) is meant to preserve unity by making the human mind a "proper part" of the divine mind. But critics have questioned whether this is sufficient: if the two minds are doing different things simultaneously — the divine mind governing the cosmos while the human mind struggles in Gethsemane — in what meaningful sense is there one unified experience?³⁹

Loke's Kryptic Model handles the unity question most naturally, precisely because it posits only one consciousness. There is one experiential center, one "I," one unified stream of awareness. The divine attributes are present but preconscious — part of the total person but not part of the conscious experience at every moment. This is analogous, in some respects, to how a human being can possess vast stores of knowledge at the preconscious level without being consciously aware of all of it at any given moment. The unity of person is secured by the unity of consciousness.⁴⁰

Pawl's approach handles the unity question at the logical level rather than the experiential level. He shows that the conciliar affirmation of one Person in two natures is logically coherent — the predications do not contradict each other when properly understood. But he does not develop an account of what the unified experience is like. This is why Pawl and Loke are best understood as complementary: Pawl establishes the logical possibility; Loke fills in the phenomenological content.

The Compositional Model handles unity through the metaphysics of parts and wholes. The incarnate Christ is one composite entity whose "parts" include the divine nature and the human nature. The unity is the unity of the whole — just as a human being is one entity composed of body and soul. The challenge is that the parts-and-wholes framework raises questions about how tightly the "parts" must be integrated to constitute one Person rather than an assemblage of distinct entities.

F. Handling the Communicatio Idiomatum

The communicatio idiomatum — the "communication of attributes" or "interchange of properties" — is the principle that the properties of both natures can be truly predicated of the one Person. We can say, "God suffered on the cross" (because the Person who suffered is God the Son) and "This man created the universe" (because the Person who is this man is the eternal Logos). The communicatio is not a transfer of properties between natures — the divine nature does not suffer, and the human nature does not create the universe — but a predication of both sets of properties to the single Person who possesses both natures.⁴¹

Each model handles the communicatio differently. The Kenotic Model struggles with it, because if the Son has surrendered divine attributes, then we cannot truly say "this man is omniscient" — even as a communicatio predication. Morris's model handles it by attributing each property to the relevant mind — the divine mind is omniscient, the human mind is not — while affirming that both minds belong to the one Person. Loke handles it similarly, with the added precision that the divine attributes are at the preconscious level — they are truly possessed by the one Person but not consciously accessed at every moment.

Pawl's qua strategy is explicitly designed to handle the communicatio. When we say "Christ is omniscient," we mean "Christ is omniscient qua His divine nature." When we say "Christ is limited in knowledge," we mean "Christ is limited in knowledge qua His human nature." Both are true of the same Person, but they are indexed to different natures, so there is no contradiction. This is, in a sense, the formal philosophical articulation of what the tradition has always meant by the communicatio idiomatum.⁴²

The Compositional Model handles the communicatio through the property borrowing principle: some properties of the parts are truly predicated of the whole. Christ suffers because His human nature (a part) suffers; Christ is eternal because His divine nature (a part) is eternal. The challenge, as noted above, is that there is no clear general principle for which properties of parts are inherited by wholes.

IV. Summary and Conclusion

This comparison of the five major models of the Incarnation reveals several important findings that bear directly on the central argument of this book.

First, every model that is compatible with the ecumenical councils requires, presupposes, or strongly supports the existence of a human soul in Christ. This is not a coincidence. The councils themselves define Christ's human nature as consisting of a rational soul and a body. Any model that takes the councils seriously must affirm the soul. The only models that might be compatible with physicalism — radical forms of ontological kenoticism — are precisely the models that are incompatible with the councils. There is no philosophically coherent model of the Incarnation that is both compatible with the councils and compatible with physicalism.

Second, the triduum mortis is the decisive test case. It is during the approximately thirty-six to forty hours between Christ's death and resurrection that the models reveal their deepest anthropological commitments. Models that affirm a human soul can give a coherent account of what happened during Holy Saturday: the soul separated from the body, the Son remained united to both, the Incarnation continued, and Christ was active in the descent to the dead. Models that deny the soul — or that are built on a physicalist anthropology — cannot give such an account. On physicalism, the Incarnation was interrupted at the cross, the descent to the dead is impossible, and the resurrection raises intractable problems of personal identity.

Third, the kryptic model (Loke's DPM) has the strongest claim to being the most comprehensive, coherent, and conciliar-compatible model currently available. It preserves full deity (attributes retained at the preconscious level), full humanity (genuine human consciousness), the unity of Christ's person (one consciousness), compatibility with the councils (Chalcedon, Constantinople III), a coherent account of the triduum (the soul survives death), and — critically — it requires a human soul as a metaphysical necessity. The kryptic model is not merely compatible with substance dualism; it demands it.

V. Additional Comparison: Sub-Variants and Hybrid Models

Before concluding, it is worth noting that the five models presented above admit of several sub-variants and hybrid positions that the careful reader may encounter in the scholarly literature. These deserve brief mention to provide a more complete picture of the contemporary Christological landscape.

A. Functional Kenoticism as a Bridge Position

Functional kenoticism — the view that the Son retained all divine attributes but voluntarily chose not to exercise them — occupies an interesting position between kenoticism and the two-minds or kryptic models. If the Son has omniscience but chooses not to exercise it, the question immediately arises: where does the unexercised omniscience "reside"? One natural answer is that it resides in the divine nature at a level that is not consciously accessed during the earthly life — which sounds remarkably like Loke's divine preconscious. In this sense, functional kenoticism, when pressed for details, may collapse into either the two-minds view (the divine knowledge is held in a divine mind that the human mind does not access) or the kryptic model (the divine knowledge is present but preconscious). C. Stephen Evans has argued for something close to functional kenoticism, and Andrew Loke has engaged Evans's position in detail, suggesting that Evans's insights can be better captured within the kryptic framework.⁴³

B. The Extra Calvinisticum

The extra Calvinisticum — so called because it was prominently affirmed by John Calvin, though it has roots in earlier theology — holds that the eternal Son, even during the Incarnation, continued to sustain and govern the universe beyond (extra) the human nature. The Son was not "contained" by the human nature; He remained omnipresent in His divine nature even while being spatially located in His human nature. This is compatible with all of the models except ontological kenoticism (which denies that the Son retained omnipresence during the Incarnation). The extra Calvinisticum is particularly relevant to the kryptic model: on Loke's account, the divine preconscious includes the Son's ongoing governance of the universe, which operates at the preconscious level while the human conscious experience is spatially located in first-century Palestine.⁴⁴

C. Neo-Apollinarian Tendencies

Some contemporary models — particularly certain forms of "Word-flesh" Christology or "Logos-sarx" Christology — effectively deny or minimize Christ's human soul, with the divine Logos replacing the soul's functions. These models are not included in the chart because they fall outside the boundaries of orthodox Christology as defined by the ecumenical councils. They are, in effect, modern forms of Apollinarianism — the heresy that the councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) explicitly condemned. As Gregory of Nazianzus famously argued: "What is not assumed is not healed" — if the Son did not assume a human soul, then the human soul is not redeemed. Any model that eliminates or replaces the human soul with the Logos repeats Apollinarius's error and falls under the conciliar condemnation.⁴⁵

D. Concrete vs. Abstract Nature Views Across the Models

An important distinction that cuts across all five models is the question of whether Christ's human nature is a concrete particular (a specific body-soul composite, a particular individual thing) or an abstract universal (a set of properties necessary and sufficient for being human). Oliver Crisp discusses this distinction at length in Divinity and Humanity, and Pawl defends the concrete nature view in In Defense of Conciliar Christology.⁴⁶

The concrete nature view holds that the Son assumed a particular human nature — this body united to this soul. The abstract nature view holds that the Son assumed the property of being human — He "exemplified" human nature as a universal. As Crisp notes, the abstract nature view tends to generate a "one-mind" or "two-part" Christology (divine person + property of being human), while the concrete nature view tends toward a "two-mind" or "three-part" Christology (divine person + human body + human soul).⁴⁷

The author of this book holds the concrete nature view, in agreement with Pawl. Christ assumed a concrete human nature — a real body united to a real soul — not an abstract set of properties. This matters for the argument because: (1) persons assume concrete things, not abstract properties; (2) the Incarnation involves a real union with a real human nature, not the addition of properties to a divine Person; and (3) the concrete view better preserves the genuine humanity of Christ — He has a real body and a real soul, not merely the property of "being human." Leftow has also argued that the concrete-nature view is the more basic, since abstract-nature incarnation can take place only by concrete-nature incarnation.⁴⁸

VI. The Models and the Book's Central Argument: A Final Word

The central argument of this book is that the Incarnation — the most glorious truth of the Christian faith — requires that Christ possessed a complete human nature, including an immaterial human soul. Physicalism, by denying the soul, renders the Incarnation incoherent. The comparison of models presented in this appendix powerfully reinforces this argument from a new angle.

When we survey the entire landscape of contemporary Christological models — developed by philosophers and theologians spanning a wide range of traditions, methods, and philosophical commitments — we find a remarkable convergence on one point: the soul is essential. The kenoticist needs a soul to have a complete human nature (even if some kenoticists are unclear about this). Morris needs a soul as the locus of the human mind. Loke needs a soul as the seat of conscious human experience and the metaphysical framework for the conscious/preconscious distinction. Pawl's defense of the councils presupposes a soul because the councils define the human nature as including one. The Thomistic compositional model needs a soul as the form of the body. Aquinas needs a soul for his treatment of the triduum. The convergence is complete.

And the convergence on the soul means a convergence against physicalism. If the soul is essential to every viable model of the Incarnation, and physicalism denies the soul, then physicalism is incompatible with every viable model of the Incarnation. This is not a parochial argument from within one philosophical tradition. It is a consensus that emerges from the entire field of orthodox Christological reflection — from analytic philosophers like Morris and Pawl, from Asian Christian philosophers like Loke, from the Thomistic tradition of Leftow and Stump, and from the conciliar tradition that all of them engage. The Word made flesh demands the soul. Every model agrees.

The reader who wishes to explore any of these models in greater detail is directed to the relevant chapters of this book: Chapter 15 for the Kenotic Model, Chapter 16 for Morris's Two-Minds view, Chapter 17 for Loke's Kryptic Model (the author's preferred position), Chapter 18 for Pawl's Conciliar Christology, and Chapter 19 for the anhypostasia/enhypostasia framework and the concrete vs. abstract nature debate. The philosophical case against physicalism and for the necessity of the soul in Christology is developed in Chapters 20 through 29, with the triduum mortis argument in Chapters 21 and 22 representing the most devastating single challenge to physicalist Christology.

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