Chapter 19

Anhypostasia, Enhypostasia, and the Personhood of Christ's Human Nature

Introduction: A Puzzle at the Heart of the Incarnation

There is a question at the very heart of the Incarnation that has puzzled Christians for centuries. It goes something like this: If Jesus Christ has a complete human nature — a real human body and a real human soul, with a genuine human mind and a genuine human will — doesn't that add up to a complete human person? And if Christ already is a divine Person (the eternal Son of God), wouldn't that mean there are two persons inside Jesus Christ? Wouldn't that be exactly the heresy the early church called Nestorianism — the idea that Christ is really two persons awkwardly joined together rather than one unified Person?

This is not just an abstract puzzle for theologians who enjoy word games. It strikes at the very core of who Jesus is. If we get this wrong, we either deny that Christ is truly and fully human (which the church condemned as Apollinarianism), or we accidentally split Him into two persons (which the church condemned as Nestorianism). We need a way to say that Christ's human nature is complete — He lacks nothing that belongs to genuine humanity — and yet that He is only one Person, the eternal Son of God.

This is where two beautiful and important theological concepts come to our rescue: anhypostasia and enhypostasia. These terms may sound intimidating, but the ideas behind them are wonderfully clear, and they do essential work in protecting the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation. In this chapter, we will explore what these terms mean, why they matter, how they emerged in the history of the church, and — most importantly for this book's argument — why they require that Christ's human nature be understood as a body-soul composite rather than a merely physical organism.

I want to show you something that I believe is enormously significant: the anhypostasia-enhypostasia framework works beautifully on substance dualism (the view that a human being is a body united to an immaterial soul), but it runs into serious and perhaps fatal problems on physicalism (the view that a human being is nothing more than a physical body or brain). In fact, I believe the physicalist cannot satisfy the anhypostasia-enhypostasia constraint on Christological thinking — and that this failure is yet another powerful reason to reject physicalism as incompatible with orthodox Christology.

1. What Is Anhypostasia?

Let's begin with the first of our two key terms. The word anhypostasia comes from the Greek anhypostatos (ἀνυπόστατος), which means "without its own hypostasis." Now, as we discussed in Chapter 14, the word hypostasis (ὑπόστασις) in its developed Christological usage means roughly "person" — an individual, concrete subsistence, a "who" rather than a "what." So to say that Christ's human nature is anhypostatos is to say that it does not have its own independent personal existence. It is not a person on its own. It never was a person on its own. From the very first moment of its existence, Christ's human nature existed in union with the eternal Son of God.¹

Why does this matter? Because if Christ's human nature did have its own independent personal existence — its own hypostasis — then we would have two persons in the Incarnation: the divine Person of the Son, plus the human person of Jesus. That would be Nestorianism, the heresy that the Council of Ephesus (431) condemned and that the Council of Constantinople II (553) worked to root out even more thoroughly.²

Think of it this way. Every ordinary human being is a person — a "who." You are a person. I am a person. Your human nature (your body and soul together) constitutes an individual human person. But Christ's human nature is different — not because it is incomplete (it has everything a genuine human nature needs), but because it never existed independently. It was, from the very first instant of conception in Mary's womb, assumed by the Person of the eternal Son.

Let me offer an illustration that I think is helpful, though like all illustrations it has limits. Imagine a flame on a candle. That flame is real — it has heat, it has light, it has all the properties a flame possesses. But this particular flame has never existed as a "free-floating" flame. It has always been on the candle. It has always been the candle's flame. Similarly, Christ's human nature is real and complete — it has everything a human nature needs. But it has never been a "free-floating" human nature. It has always been the Son's human nature. It has never existed apart from the Person of the Logos.³

The anhypostasia doctrine tells us something profoundly important about the Incarnation: the human nature of Christ did not pre-exist the union with the Son. There was no human being named Jesus who was walking around and then got "taken over" by God the Son. No — the very act of the human nature's creation was simultaneously the act of its assumption by the Logos. The Holy Spirit brought the human nature into existence in Mary's womb, and at that very same moment, the Son united Himself to it.⁴

As R. T. Mullins helpfully explains in his treatment of this doctrine, the anhypostasia claim involves two conditions. First, the Son's human nature would not have existed if it were not for the Incarnation. Second — and this is the crucial addition — the human nature is only personal because it is assumed by a divine Person, namely, God the Son. The Son brings His personhood to the assumed human nature. The human nature is not, nor could have been, a person independent of the Son's assumption.⁵

Fred Sanders captures this beautifully when he explains that the anhypostasia-enhypostasia distinction "excludes the very possibility that the human nature of Christ could have formed some person" apart from the Son's assumption. The human nature of Christ simply cannot constitute a person independent of the Incarnation.⁶

2. What Is Enhypostasia?

Now we come to the companion doctrine. If anhypostasia tells us what Christ's human nature is not (not an independent person), enhypostasia tells us what it is. The word enhypostasia comes from the Greek enhypostatos (ἐνυπόστατος), which means "in-personalized" or "having its hypostasis in another." Christ's human nature has its personal existence in the Person of the Logos. The Son gives the human nature its "who." The human nature is the Son's own human nature — not a separate person's nature that happens to be associated with the Son.⁷

This is a subtle but enormously important point. The enhypostasia doctrine does not say that Christ's human nature is impersonal in the sense of being a mindless, lifeless thing. Far from it! Christ's human nature has consciousness, will, emotion, intellect — everything that makes a human nature genuinely personal and alive. But these personal characteristics belong to the Son's personal existence. The human nature is "personalized" by the Logos. It is, so to speak, the Son living a human life — not a separate human person living alongside the Son.⁸

Wolfhart Pannenberg captured this with striking clarity when he summarized the neo-Chalcedonian theology: "By itself Jesus' humanity would not only be impersonal in the modern sense of lacking self-conscious personality, but taken by itself Jesus' human being would be non-existent."⁹ That is a strong statement, and it is important to understand it correctly. Pannenberg is not saying that Jesus' humanity is somehow unreal or ghostly. He is saying that the very existence of this particular human nature depends on the Incarnation. Without the Son's decision to become incarnate, this human nature would never have existed at all.

The enhypostasia doctrine tells us that the personal reality of Christ's human nature is entirely derived from the Person of the Son. The Son is the personal subject — the "I" — who lives, thinks, feels, wills, suffers, and acts through the human nature. When Jesus says "I am thirsty" (John 19:28), the "I" is the eternal Son of God speaking through His human nature. When Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35), the one who weeps is the eternal Son of God experiencing genuine human grief through His human soul. The human nature provides the "what" — the capacities, the experiences, the feelings. The Son provides the "who" — the personal subject who has those experiences.

3. The Historical Development: From Chalcedon to Constantinople II

Where did these doctrines come from? To understand their development, we need to appreciate the theological landscape after the Council of Chalcedon in 451. As we explored in Chapter 11, Chalcedon gave us the magisterial definition of Christ as one Person in two natures, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." But Chalcedon did not settle everything. In fact, it left a critical question unanswered: How exactly is Christ one Person if He has two complete natures?

After Chalcedon, the church found itself caught between two groups that were deeply unsatisfied. On one side were the monophysites — Christians who held that Christ has only one nature (a fused divine-human nature). They worried that Chalcedon's two-nature language sounded too much like Nestorianism — two natures implying two persons. On the other side were various Nestorian parties who felt they could actually interpret Chalcedon in a way that supported their view of a loose association between the divine and human in Christ.¹⁰

This situation demanded clarification, and it came primarily through the theological work that led up to the Fifth Ecumenical Council — the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. One of the main motivations for this council was to give a proper interpretation of Chalcedon that would fully exclude Nestorianism.¹¹ Though the council did not use the specific terms anhypostasia and enhypostasia, it adopted and affirmed the underlying theology as the proper interpretation of Chalcedonian Christology.¹²

The deep concern motivating this development was the "Two Sons Worry" — the fear that any Christological model might entail, even unintentionally, that there are two persons in Christ. This worry had deep roots in the early church. As Mullins notes, one form of the argument from the fourth-century theologian Eunomius went like this: a human person is a soul and a body; if the Son assumed a soul and a body, then the Son assumed a human person; therefore there are two persons (two sons) in the Incarnation — and that is heresy.¹³

The anhypostasia-enhypostasia distinction was developed precisely to answer this worry. It functions as what Mullins rightly calls "a constraint on Christological theorizing." It does not, by itself, give us a complete Christological model. Rather, it provides a test: any proposed model of the Incarnation must be able to satisfy this constraint. If a model cannot show that Christ's human nature is anhypostatos (without its own independent personhood) and enhypostatos (personalized by the Logos), it fails to meet the standards of ecumenical orthodoxy.¹⁴

It is also instructive to note how seriously the Council of Constantinople II took this constraint. The council explicitly condemned Theodore of Mopsuestia — even though Theodore had claimed that Jesus "had union with the Logos straightaway from the beginning when he was formed in his mother's womb."¹⁵ In other words, Theodore affirmed that the union began at conception. But the council still condemned his view because his Christological model entailed two persons, regardless of when the union took place. Simply saying "the union started at the beginning" is not enough. The model itself must be such that the human nature could not possibly constitute an independent person — even in principle.

4. The Concrete Nature View vs. the Abstract Nature View

To understand how anhypostasia and enhypostasia work — and why they require a body-soul understanding of human nature — we need to engage with an important philosophical question: What exactly is Christ's "human nature"? In the history of theology and philosophy, there have been two main ways of answering this question, and Oliver Crisp has provided an exceptionally clear analysis of both in his book Divinity and Humanity.¹⁶

4.1 The Abstract Nature View

On the abstract nature view, Christ's human nature is fundamentally a property or set of properties — what Thomas Morris calls the "kind essence" of human beings. Just as all red things share the property of redness, all human beings share the property (or set of properties) that makes them human. On this view, the Incarnation is the Word's assumption or exemplification of this property. The Word gains the property of "being human" in addition to His divine properties.¹⁷

This view has some appeal because it keeps things simple. But as Crisp shows, it has significant problems when we try to apply the anhypostasia-enhypostasia framework to it. If human nature is just a universal property shared by all humans, then saying Christ's human nature is anhypostatos becomes trivially true — and not in a theologically interesting way. It merely says that Christ, like every other human being, possesses the properties that are essential to being human. There is nothing special about Christ's case here. The anhypostasia doctrine becomes theologically inconsequential.¹⁸

What about the enhypostatos aspect? On the realist version of the abstract nature view, saying that Christ's human nature is "personalized" by the Word is a peculiar claim. What does it mean to "personalize" a universal property? The Word exemplifies the property of being human — but the same could be said of any human being who exemplifies this property. It is hard to see what is theologically substantive about this.¹⁹

There is an alternative version of the abstract nature view that treats human nature as a set of particulars rather than universals — what philosophers call "tropes." On this trope version, Christ's human properties are unique to Him and cannot be possessed by anyone else. This makes better sense of the enhypostatos claim (the properties exist only "in" the person of the Word), but it comes at a cost: it renders the anhypostatos claim meaningless. If properties are just particulars that cannot exist apart from the person who has them, then there is no independent human nature to be "without a hypostasis." The anhypostatos physis simply cannot be stated.²⁰

So the abstract nature view faces a dilemma: the realist version trivializes anhypostasia and renders enhypostasia theologically thin, while the trope version makes good sense of enhypostasia but cannot account for anhypostasia at all. Neither version can do full justice to the theological richness of the an-enhypostasia distinction.

4.2 The Concrete Nature View

The concrete nature view offers a far more satisfying account. On this view, Christ's human nature is not fundamentally a property but a concrete particular — a real, individual thing. Specifically, it is a body-soul composite: a genuine human body united to a genuine human soul, forming a concrete human nature that is assumed by the Word at the Incarnation. This gives us what Crisp and others call a "three-part Christology": the Word + a human body + a human soul distinct from the Word.²¹

Why is this view preferable? Let me give you three reasons.

First, persons assume concrete things, not abstract properties. When we say that the Son of God "assumed" a human nature, we are describing a real, concrete act of union. The Son did not merely gain a new attribute or check a box on a list of properties. He took to Himself a real human body and a real human soul, uniting them to His divine Person in the most intimate union imaginable. The concrete nature view preserves this robust understanding of assumption.²²

Second, the Incarnation involves a real union with a real human nature, not the addition of abstract properties to the divine Person. As Alvin Plantinga himself noted, the term "human nature" can denote either a property (the abstract view) or a concrete human being (the concrete view). Plantinga observed that on the concrete view, "the thing denoted by 'human nature' and that gets assumed is a human being, a concrete object, not an abstract object like a property."²³ Timothy Pawl likewise works with the concrete nature view in his defense of conciliar Christology, representing a concrete human nature as a composite of body and soul.²⁴

Third, the concrete view better preserves the genuine humanity of Christ. He has a real body and a real soul — not just the property of "being human." The early church fought long and hard to establish that Christ's humanity was real, complete, and concrete. The Chalcedonian definition says Christ is "truly man of a rational soul and a body" — language that points to a concrete reality, not an abstract property.²⁵

4.3 The Concrete Nature View and the An-Enhypostasia Distinction

Now we come to a crucial point. How does the concrete nature view handle the an-enhypostasia distinction? Crisp provides a careful and illuminating analysis. On the concrete nature view combined with a three-part Christology (and a realist understanding of properties), the anhypostatos claim works like this: Christ's human nature has those properties that are common to all human beings — what we might call a "kind essence." These properties exist independently of the Incarnation (they are universals shared by all humans). So there is a real sense in which Christ's human nature shares a core of properties with every other human being.²⁶

But — and this is the crucial difference from the abstract nature view — on the concrete nature view, it is not merely true that Christ has these common properties. He has a concrete body-soul composite that is distinct from the Word. This concrete particular has certain properties common to all humans (like rationality, physicality, and mortality) as well as properties unique to Christ (like being born in Bethlehem, being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and being in hypostatic union with the Word of God).²⁷

The enhypostatos claim is straightforward on this view: the concrete particular that is Christ's human nature exists only "in" the Person of the Word. It was brought into existence at the Incarnation and has never existed apart from the Word. The Word "personalizes" this concrete human nature by making it His own. As Crisp puts it, "it is the Word who is the personal subject of the Incarnation, and the Word who assumes this human nature (understood here as the natural endowment of a human being), literally 'personalizing' it in the process."²⁸

What about the worry that a concrete body-soul composite, if it existed without the Incarnation, would be a complete human person? Crisp addresses this directly. He asks us to imagine a scenario where the Holy Spirit performs the miracle of creating a human nature via parthenogenesis in Mary's womb, but without the Incarnation — without the Word assuming that nature. In such a scenario, the resulting human being would be a person. But it would not be the person of Christ, because the Word has not assumed it. The concrete particular that would have formed only constitutes "part" of Christ if and only if it is hypostatically united with the Person of the Word. Without the Incarnation, you just have a human being named Jesus, not the God-Man.²⁹

This is a powerful result. The three-part concrete nature view can affirm both aspects of the an-enhypostasia distinction. The human nature is anhypostatos because it has no independent personal existence — it has never existed apart from the Word, and if it had (in some possible world), it would not be the person of Christ. The human nature is enhypostatos because it receives its personal reality from the Word — it is the Word who personalizes this concrete human nature and makes it His own.

5. Andrew Loke's Divine Preconscious Model and the An-Enhypostasia Constraint

As we discussed at length in Chapter 17, Andrew Loke's Divine Preconscious Model (DPM) is the author's preferred Christological framework. Here I want to show something important: the DPM provides a particularly elegant solution to the Two Sons Worry — precisely because it takes substance dualism seriously and offers a unique account of how the Son's personhood relates to the assumed human nature.

Recall how the DPM works. Before the Incarnation, God the Son has (or is) a divine mind. At the Incarnation, the Son's mind comes to include a consciousness with two "parts" in the preconscious: a divine preconscious (containing the divine attributes like omniscience and omnipotence) and a human preconscious (containing human mental contents). The Son also acquires a human body. The result is a three-part Christology: one divine part, one immaterial human part (the human preconscious), and one material human part (the human body).³⁰

Now, here is why the DPM handles the an-enhypostasia constraint so well. On the DPM, there is only one person — one center of consciousness — in the Incarnation: the Son. The Son does not assume a separate, independently existing human soul with its own consciousness. Rather, the Son's own mind is reconfigured at the Incarnation to include a human preconscious. The human preconscious of the Son cannot possibly exist separated from the Son, because it is not a separate mind — it is a part of the Son's own mind that was created at the Incarnation for the specific purpose of enabling the Son to live a genuinely human life.³¹

As Mullins recognizes in his analysis, "The DPM avoids the Two Sons Worry because it only involves one person, or one center of consciousness. Further, it can easily account for the an/enhypostatic constraint. The human nature of Christ simply would not count as a full human person apart from the incarnation."³² Loke can acknowledge that the human body of Jesus could, in principle, be created without an incarnation taking place. But on dualism, a body alone does not constitute a complete human person — a body without a soul is not a person. So even if the body existed without the Incarnation, it would not be a person, and therefore the an-enhypostasia constraint is not violated.

This is a crucial advantage. On substance dualism, the human body by itself is not a person. A person, on the dualist account, is an immaterial substance — a soul — that has the capacity to think and act freely. The human body is the soul's instrument, the physical component of the person, but not the person itself. So even if Christ's body could exist without the Incarnation, it would not automatically be a person. The an-enhypostasia constraint is preserved because the personal dimension of Christ's humanity is bound up with the immaterial aspect of His human nature — and on the DPM, this immaterial aspect is not a separate soul but a division within the Son's own mind. It could not possibly exist apart from the Son.³³

6. The Standard Three-Part Christology and the Two Sons Worry

Before we turn to the physicalist problems, I want to be honest about a challenge that faces even the traditional dualist position — the standard three-part dyothelite Christology that affirms the Son, a human soul distinct from the Son, and a human body. On this traditional model, the human nature (body + soul + human will) looks an awful lot like a complete human person. And indeed, as Mullins points out, some contemporary defenders of this Christology readily admit that the Son's human nature would be a complete human person without the Incarnation. Thomas Flint, for instance, has acknowledged this possibility.³⁴

The physicalist might pounce on this and say: "See! Your dualist Christology entails two persons!" But the dualist has several responses available.

The first response, offered by Oliver Crisp, is to point out that there never was a time when the human nature of Christ existed apart from God the Son. When the Holy Spirit conceived the human nature in Mary's womb, the Son joined Himself to that nature at the very first instant. The human nature "is never in a position to form a supposit distinct from God the Son."³⁵

Now, as I noted above, Mullins points out that this response alone may not be sufficient. Theodore of Mopsuestia made essentially the same claim — that Jesus had union with the Logos from the very beginning of his formation in the womb — and Constantinople II still condemned his view.³⁶ What the council was after was not merely the timing of the union but the metaphysical structure of the model. It is not enough that the human nature happened never to exist independently; the model must show that it could not constitute an independent person.

This is precisely where Loke's DPM has an advantage over the standard three-part model, as we discussed above. On the DPM, the human preconscious literally cannot exist apart from the Son because it is a reconfiguration of the Son's own mind. This provides the stronger metaphysical guarantee that the council was looking for.

But even for those who prefer the standard three-part model, the situation is far better for the dualist than for the physicalist. Here is why: on the standard dualist model, even if we grant (for the sake of argument) that the human nature could in principle constitute a person, the dualist can appeal to Crisp's insight that this nature was created simultaneously with its assumption by the Word. The very act of creating the human body-soul composite was the act of the Word's assumption. There is no gap — not even a logical gap — between the human nature's existence and its union with the Word. And more importantly, the dualist can offer a coherent account of how the Word personalizes the human nature: the immaterial Person of the Son unites with an immaterial human soul, and through that soul with a human body. The soul serves as a metaphysical "point of union" between the divine Person and the physical body.³⁷

The physicalist, as we will now see, cannot match this.

7. The Physicalist Problem with Anhypostasia and Enhypostasia

We have arrived at what I believe is one of the most devastating arguments in this book against physicalist Christology. Let me state the problem clearly, and then we will work through it step by step.

On physicalism, a human person is identical to a physical substance — typically a human body or a human brain. There is no immaterial soul. Mental properties are either identical to physical properties (reductive physicalism) or they emerge from physical processes but are still entirely dependent on the physical substrate (nonreductive physicalism). Either way, a complete, living, functioning human body with a brain is a complete human person.³⁸

Now consider the Incarnation on physicalist terms. On a physicalist Christology like the one endorsed by Trenton Merricks, God the Son becomes completely identical to a human body.³⁹ But here is the problem: it seems clearly metaphysically possible for the Son's body to exist without the Incarnation. If the Holy Spirit had performed the miracle of a virgin birth without an Incarnation taking place, the resulting body would have been a complete human person — because on physicalism, a body with a functioning brain just is a complete human person. There is nothing else needed.⁴⁰

This means that the physicalist Christology violates the an-enhypostasia constraint. The human nature of Christ (which, on physicalism, just is a human body) could in principle exist as a complete human person apart from the Incarnation. The body of Jesus would be a complete human person without the Son. That is a violation of the anhypostasia constraint, and it falls squarely into the Two Sons Worry.⁴¹

7.1 The Physicalist's First Response: The Body Could Not Have Existed Without the Incarnation

The physicalist might respond by saying: "Given the virgin birth, the particular body of Jesus would never have come into existence without the Incarnation of the Son. The very coming into existence of this body is a miracle performed by the Holy Spirit, and it was done precisely for the purpose of the Incarnation."

But as Mullins argues, this response is not persuasive. The reason is straightforward: it is metaphysically possible for the Holy Spirit to perform the miracle of a virgin birth without an Incarnation. The Holy Spirit could, in principle, miraculously create a human being in Mary's womb without the Son assuming that human being. If this is a metaphysical possibility, then it is possible that the particular body of Jesus could come into existence without being incarnated by the Son. And if that is possible, then the particular body of Jesus could be a person without the Incarnation — and the an-enhypostasia constraint is still violated.⁴²

Notice how different the situation is for the dualist. On Loke's DPM, the human preconscious is literally a reconfiguration of the Son's own divine mind. It cannot exist apart from the Son because it is not a separate entity — it is a new dimension of the Son's own mental life, created for the purpose of enabling a genuinely human experience. Even on the standard three-part model, the dualist can say that the body alone (without a soul) would not constitute a person. The body is a necessary component of human nature, but it is not sufficient for personhood on the dualist view. A body without a soul is just a corpse, not a person. So even if the body could exist without the Incarnation, it would not be a person — and the constraint is preserved.

The physicalist has no such escape. On physicalism, a body with a brain is all you need for personhood. There is no further immaterial component that must be added. So any possible world in which Christ's body exists is a possible world in which a complete human person exists — whether or not the Incarnation has taken place.

7.2 The Physicalist's Second Response: It Is Metaphysically Impossible

The physicalist might try a stronger move: claiming that it is metaphysically impossible for the particular body of Jesus to exist without the Incarnation. But what could ground such a claim? On physicalism, the body is just a physical organism — a collection of cells organized in a certain way. There is nothing about the body qua physical organism that makes it metaphysically tied to the Incarnation. The connection between "this particular arrangement of matter" and "the eternal Son assuming it" seems entirely contingent. The physicalist would need some account of why this particular body could not possibly exist apart from the Son, and it is very difficult to see what such an account would look like within a physicalist framework.⁴³

On the dualist view, by contrast, there are clear metaphysical resources for grounding the impossibility. On Loke's DPM, the human preconscious is intrinsically tied to the Son's mind — it is a part of the Son, not a separate substance. It cannot exist independently any more than my left hand can exist independently of my body (while remaining my left hand). The metaphysical impossibility is built into the structure of the model.

7.3 The "In-Personalization" Problem

There is a further difficulty for the physicalist that goes beyond the an-enhypostasia constraint itself. It concerns the very intelligibility of the enhypostasia claim on physicalist terms. Recall what enhypostasia says: Christ's human nature is "personalized" by the Logos. The Son gives the human nature its personal subsistence. The Son is the "who" of the human nature.

On dualism, we have a reasonably clear picture of what this looks like. The Person of the Son — an immaterial, divine Person — unites with an immaterial human soul, and through that soul, with a human body. The soul provides what we might call a "metaphysical interface" between the divine Person and the physical body. Both the divine Person and the human soul are immaterial, so there is a natural ontological affinity between them. The soul serves as the "point of contact" through which the divine Person lives a human life — experiencing the world through human senses, feeling human emotions, exercising a human will.

On physicalism, the picture is far more puzzling. The divine Person is immaterial — God is spirit (John 4:24). But the human nature, on physicalism, is entirely material — just a body and a brain. How does an immaterial divine Person "personalize" a purely physical organism? What does it mean for the Logos — an infinite, eternal, incorporeal Being — to give personal existence to a collection of cells? On dualism, the soul provides a bridge between the immaterial divine Person and the material body. On physicalism, there is no such bridge. The union is between the purely immaterial and the purely material, with no intermediate metaphysical link.⁴⁴

I want to be careful here. I am not saying that the Incarnation is logically impossible on physicalism — God can do whatever is logically possible, and perhaps an immaterial Person can unite with a physical body directly. But I am saying that the union is far more metaphysically puzzling on physicalism than on dualism. On dualism, the soul provides a natural metaphysical bridge between the divine and the physical. On physicalism, this bridge is missing, and the physicalist has not offered any alternative account of how the "in-personalization" of a merely physical nature by an immaterial Person would work.

8. The Communicatio Idiomatum and Its Connection to Enhypostasia

The doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum (κοινωνία ἰδιωμάτων) — the communication of attributes — is intimately connected to the enhypostasia doctrine, and it provides yet another angle from which to see why physicalism is inadequate. Let me explain.

The communicatio idiomatum is the principle that, because both natures belong to one Person (the enhypostatos reality of the union), the properties of each nature can be predicated of that Person. We can say, "The Creator was born in Bethlehem," even though being born is a property of the human nature, not the divine nature. We can say, "The man Jesus Christ created the stars," even though creating the stars is a property of the divine nature, not the human nature. Both statements are true because both natures belong to one and the same Person — the Son of God.⁴⁵

As Oliver Crisp explains, the communicatio idiomatum involves "the attribution of the properties of each of the natures of Christ to the person of Christ, such that the theanthropic person of Christ is treated as having divine and human attributes at one and the same time, yet without predicating attributes of one nature that properly belong to the other nature."⁴⁶ So we can say that Christ is both omnipotent (according to His divine nature) and weak and tired (according to His human nature). We can say that He is both eternal (according to His divine nature) and born at a specific time (according to His human nature). But we cannot say that Christ's human nature is omnipotent, or that His divine nature was born — the properties remain proper to their respective natures.

As Geerhardus Vos summarized in the Reformed tradition, we are dealing here with a communicatio realis — a real communication — not a mere verbal trick. "The person really possesses both natures, and what belongs to the natures may accordingly also be attributed to the person."⁴⁷ Vos insisted that the human nature, though it has the capacities of "self-consciousness and will and feeling, does not operate of itself but is at every moment the instrument of the person who bears it." The Logos is the person for the human nature, "the starting point for all its thoughts and emotions."⁴⁸

Now, for the communicatio idiomatum to work properly, the human nature must be a genuine bearer of properties — not merely physical properties (location, weight, chemical composition) but also what we might call "soul properties" (consciousness, will, emotion, intellect). On dualism, the human nature has both kinds of properties: it has body-properties (because it includes a real human body) and soul-properties (because it includes a real human soul with consciousness, will, and emotion). The communicatio idiomatum attributes both kinds of properties to the one Person of the Son.

On physicalism, the human nature has only physical properties — or, at best, emergent mental properties that are entirely dependent on physical processes. The consciousness, will, and emotions of Jesus are nothing more than brain states. But if Christ's "human" properties are all reducible to (or emergent from) brain states, then the communicatio idiomatum is attributing brain states to the eternal Son of God. We are saying that the infinite, incorporeal Logos is "in-personalized" through a set of electrochemical processes in a three-pound organ. While this may not be strictly incoherent, it is a far cry from the rich, robust understanding of the communication of attributes that the tradition has always assumed — one in which the human nature is a genuine substance (body + soul) with its own real properties that can be meaningfully predicated of the divine Person.⁴⁹

9. The "Two Persons" Worry Answered: Complete Nature Without Independent Personhood

We have seen the worry, and now we need to address it head-on. If Christ has a complete human nature — a real body, a real soul, a genuine human mind, and a genuine human will — doesn't that add up to a complete human person? And if so, isn't there a second person lurking inside the Incarnation?

The answer is no — and the anhypostasia doctrine tells us why. There is a crucial distinction between a complete nature and a complete person. A nature is a "what" — the set of capacities, properties, and components that make something the kind of thing it is. A person is a "who" — an individual subject with its own existence, identity, and agency. Every ordinary human being is both a complete human nature and a complete human person. But in the unique case of the Incarnation, Christ's human nature is complete as a nature (it has everything a human nature has) without being complete as a person (it has no independent personal existence apart from the Son).⁵⁰

How is this possible? Because of the way the human nature was created. As we noted above, it was brought into existence by the Holy Spirit at the very moment of the Son's assumption. It was never "free" to become its own person. The Son's personal existence was communicated to it from the very first instant. The human nature is fully human — with a real body, a real soul, real consciousness, real will — but its personal identity is the Son's personal identity. It is not a second "I" within Christ; it is the human dimension of the single "I" who is the eternal Son of God.

Michael Wilkinson helpfully articulates this in his book Crowned with Glory and Honor. He writes that only the assumption of a concrete body-soul nature by the divine person of the Son provides the conceptual clarity and coherence required to support Chalcedonian Christology. The divine person of the Son as an ontological "who" must possess a human nature as an ontological "what," and that nature must be as real, substantial, and complete in its own integrity as the divine nature, including a body and a fully functioning human soul.⁵¹

Wilkinson goes on to note, following Turretin, that to become the perfect sacrifice for sinful humanity, the Son of God joined together with Himself in unity of person "not a person, but a human nature" — a crucial distinction. The Son did not assume another person. He assumed a human nature. And that nature, while complete in itself, receives its personal identity from the Son.⁵²

This distinction between nature and person is one of the most important achievements of the early church's Christological reflection. It was forged in the fires of the Apollinarian controversy (see Chapter 12), the Nestorian controversy (see Chapter 11), and the post-Chalcedonian debates that led to Constantinople II. The church learned to say: Christ's human nature is complete — not deficient in any respect. But this complete nature does not constitute a separate person, because the Person who lives in and through this nature is the eternal Son of God.

10. The Concrete Nature View, the Soul, and the Incarnation's Metaphysical Structure

Let me now bring the threads of this chapter together by showing how the concrete nature view, the an-enhypostasia framework, and the necessity of the human soul all connect to provide a coherent metaphysical picture of the Incarnation.

On the concrete nature view combined with a three-part Christology and substance dualism, the Incarnation has the following structure:

The eternal Son of God — an immaterial, divine Person — assumes a concrete human nature at the moment of the virginal conception in Mary's womb. This concrete human nature is a composite of a human body and a human soul. The human soul is not the Son Himself (that would be Apollinarianism) but a genuinely human soul with its own faculties of intellect, will, and emotion. The human body is a genuine human body, conceived miraculously in Mary's womb by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Son's assumption of this concrete human nature means that the Son now has two natures: His eternal divine nature (which He has always possessed) and a newly assumed human nature (which He takes on at the Incarnation). Both natures belong to the one Person of the Son. The divine nature is not altered by the union (Chalcedon's "without change"), and the human nature is not dissolved into the divine (Chalcedon's "without confusion"). The two natures remain distinct but are never separated (Chalcedon's "without separation") and never divided (Chalcedon's "without division").⁵³

The human soul plays a critical role in this metaphysical structure. It serves as the "interior" of Christ's human nature — the seat of His human consciousness, human will, human emotions, and human intellectual life. It is the dimension of Christ's humanity that is most directly related to the divine Person of the Son. As we discussed in Chapter 17 on Loke's DPM, the Son's consciousness is partly dependent on the human brain (for sensory experience and physical desires), but the soul provides the immaterial substrate for the Son's human mental life. On the standard three-part model, the human soul is a distinct substance that the Son assumes alongside the body. On Loke's DPM, the human preconscious is a new dimension of the Son's own mind, created at the Incarnation. Either way, an immaterial component of the human nature is essential to the metaphysical coherence of the union.

Without the soul, the metaphysical structure collapses. If the human nature is nothing but a body, then the Son is united to a purely physical organism — a biological machine. The personal dimension of the union (the enhypostasia) becomes deeply puzzling: how does an immaterial Person "personalize" a collection of atoms? The bridge between the divine and the human is missing. The "point of contact" between the eternal Son and His human life is reduced to… what? A brain? A nervous system? Electrochemical signals? The richness and depth of the Incarnation — God experiencing human life from the inside, God feeling human pain, God exercising a genuine human will — is diminished almost beyond recognition.

11. Loke's Concrete Nature Three-Part Christology and the Communicatio Idiomatum

In his articulation of the DPM, Loke explicitly affirms a concrete nature three-part Christology and shows how this framework handles the communicatio idiomatum with particular elegance. Christ, on the DPM, has two "main parts": the divine nature and the human nature. The human nature itself is composed of the human body and a human soul (understood on the DPM as the human preconscious element of the Son's mind) that is distinct from the divine nature. This three-part structure enables the communicatio idiomatum to work properly.⁵⁴

The communicatio idiomatum was a live issue from the earliest days of the church. Patristic interpreters noticed that the New Testament on one hand attributes divine glory to the man Jesus, while on the other hand it attributes human weaknesses to the divine Son of God. Early church fathers like Ignatius used striking expressions such as "the blood of God" and "the suffering of my God." The Alexandrian theologians, who favored a "Word-flesh" Christology, tended to think of the divine nature penetrating the human. The Antiochene theologians, who favored a "Word-man" Christology, allowed only a communication of attributes from both natures to the person, not an exchange of attributes between the natures themselves.⁵⁵

Loke's DPM stands firmly in the Antiochene tradition on this point while preserving the Alexandrian emphasis on the unity of the Person. The properties of the divine nature (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) belong to the divine preconscious and are predicated of the Person of the Son. The properties of the human nature (limited knowledge, physical sensation, human emotion, etc.) belong to the human preconscious and body and are also predicated of the Person of the Son. But the divine properties are not transferred to the human nature, nor are the human properties transferred to the divine nature. The natures remain distinct, and the communicatio idiomatum operates strictly from natures to person, not from nature to nature.⁵⁶

This is precisely what the tradition has always taught. As Pawl explains in his defense of conciliar Christology, we can predicate properties from the natures to the person, but not from the person back to a specific nature, and certainly not from one nature to the other nature. We can say "Christ died" (predicating a human property of the person), and we can say "Christ is incapable of death" (predicating a divine property of the same person) — and both are true, according to different natures. But we cannot say "the divine nature died" or "the human nature is incapable of death."⁵⁷

This whole framework presupposes that each nature is a genuine bearer of its own distinct properties. The divine nature bears divine properties; the human nature bears human properties. And the human properties include not just physical attributes (like being located in space, being capable of fatigue, being capable of bleeding) but also spiritual attributes (like consciousness, will, emotion, and intellect). On substance dualism, these spiritual attributes belong to the human soul — a real substance that can genuinely bear these properties. On physicalism, these "spiritual" attributes are just brain states, and it becomes far less clear how they can be meaningfully predicated of the eternal, immaterial Son of God through the communicatio idiomatum.

12. Pawl's Bare Bones Model and the Presupposition of the Soul

Timothy Pawl, in his rigorous defense of conciliar Christology in In Defense of Conciliar Christology, develops what he calls a "bare bones model" of the Incarnation. This model is deliberately minimal — Pawl wants to show what the councils actually committed to, without adding unnecessary metaphysical speculation. But even this minimal model presupposes a concrete human nature composed of body and soul.⁵⁸

Pawl represents a concrete human nature pictorially as a composite of soul and body. He notes that "a concrete human nature is a composite of soul and body, again, understood however one understands the conciliar statements to have used those terms." His pictorial model shows the body and soul as two components of a single concrete nature, which is then assumed by the Word in the hypostatic union.⁵⁹

Pawl also acknowledges that "what one views the concrete nature of a human to be will be dependent upon the ontological story one tells for humans." If humans are body-soul composites (as the hylomorphicist contends), then a concrete human nature is a particular hylomorphic compound. If humans are just souls (Cartesian dualism), then a concrete nature is just a soul. But notably, Pawl does not consider the possibility that a concrete human nature could be a body without a soul — because the conciliar definitions he is defending explicitly include a rational soul as part of Christ's human nature.⁶⁰

This is a quiet but powerful point. Even on Pawl's deliberately minimal model, the soul is a non-negotiable component of the concrete human nature. The councils define Christ as "truly man of a rational soul and a body" (ek psychēs logikēs kai sōmatos, ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ σώματος). This is not incidental language — as we explored in Chapter 11, it is a deliberate anti-Apollinarian clause that defines what a complete human nature consists of. Any Christological model that takes the councils seriously must include a rational soul as part of Christ's human nature. Physicalism, which denies the existence of the soul, cannot satisfy this requirement.

13. The Person-Nature Distinction: Why It Matters for Anthropology

I want to draw out an important implication of our discussion that connects back to the broader argument of this book. The an-enhypostasia framework relies on a fundamental distinction between person and nature. A person is a "who" — an individual subsistent subject. A nature is a "what" — the kind of thing something is, including its essential properties and capacities. In the Incarnation, one Person (the Son) has two natures (divine and human). The natures are the "what"; the Son is the "who."

This person-nature distinction is not unique to Christology. It shows up everywhere in Christian theology. In the doctrine of the Trinity, one God has one divine nature shared by three Persons. In theological anthropology, each human being is one person with one human nature (body + soul). The person-nature distinction is a fundamental structural feature of Christian theological thinking.

Now here is the important point: on substance dualism, the person-nature distinction maps naturally onto the structure of a human being. A human person is a "who" — an immaterial soul that bears consciousness, identity, and agency. A human nature is a "what" — the body-soul composite that constitutes the kind of thing a human being is. The person (the soul) is the subject; the nature (body + soul) is what the person has. There is a clear distinction between the person and the nature, even though they are intimately united.

On physicalism, the person-nature distinction becomes much harder to maintain. If a human person just is a physical body, and a human nature just is a physical body, then person and nature are the same thing. There is no distinction between the "who" and the "what." The body is both the person and the nature — they collapse into one and the same entity. But if person and nature collapse into one in ordinary human anthropology, it becomes very difficult to maintain their distinction in Christology. How can we say that Christ has two natures but is one Person if, on the anthropological level, person and nature are identical?⁶¹

Wilkinson makes exactly this point in Crowned with Glory and Honor. He argues that a proper theological anthropology must be shaped by Christology — specifically by the Chalcedonian definition. If Christ's human nature includes a body and a soul, then human nature includes a body and a soul. The Chalcedonian pattern — one person with a composite nature — provides the model for understanding human beings as well. A human being is one person (the soul or, more precisely, the soul-body unity) with a composite nature (body + soul).⁶²

This is what Wilkinson calls a "Chalcedonian anthropology." And it is deeply incompatible with physicalism. If the Chalcedonian definition tells us that human nature consists of "a rational soul and a body," then any anthropology that denies the rational soul is at odds with Chalcedon — not just in Christology, but in its understanding of what it means to be human in the first place.

14. Addressing Objections

14.1 "The Councils Were Not Doing Philosophy of Mind"

Someone might object: "The councils were not trying to settle debates in the philosophy of mind. They were addressing Christological heresies. We should not read their language as endorsing a particular philosophical anthropology."

There is a grain of truth here — the councils were indeed addressing Christological heresies, not writing philosophy textbooks. But their Christological definitions presuppose certain anthropological commitments. When Chalcedon says Christ is "of a rational soul and a body," it is not making a neutral statement that can be interpreted physicalistially. It is affirming that Christ's human nature includes a rational soul — and that this soul is a genuine component of His humanity, distinct from His body. If we strip away the soul, we strip away a component that the council explicitly names as part of Christ's complete human nature.⁶³

Moreover, the reason the councils named the soul at all was precisely to combat Apollinarianism — the view that Christ had no human rational soul (see Chapter 12 for the full treatment). The councils were making a deliberate, considered affirmation: Christ has a human rational soul. To reinterpret this as compatible with physicalism would be to gut the anti-Apollinarian intention of the definition.

14.2 "The Physicalist Can Redefine 'Soul' as 'Life' or 'Self'"

Another objection: "The physicalist can agree that Christ has a 'soul' — she just defines 'soul' differently. For the physicalist, 'soul' (psychē) means something like 'the life principle' or 'the self' or 'the person as a whole.' It does not necessarily refer to an immaterial substance."

This is an important objection, but I do not think it succeeds. The conciliar language is quite specific. Chalcedon does not merely say that Christ has a psychē (which could, perhaps, be interpreted as "life" in a thin sense). It says Christ is "of a rational soul (psychēs logikēs) and a body." The adjective logikēs (λογικῆς, "rational" or "endowed with reason") makes it clear that what is in view is not just biological life but a rational, thinking, conscious faculty — the nous (νοῦς, mind) that Apollinarius denied to Christ. This is the very thing the council is insisting Christ possesses. It is hard to see how "a rational soul" can be redefined as "a body functioning in a living way" without doing violence to the council's clear intention.⁶⁴

Furthermore, the entire historical context of the an-enhypostasia distinction — as developed in response to Nestorian, Apollinarian, and monophysite challenges — assumes that the human nature consists of a body and a distinct rational soul. The church fathers who developed this framework were not physicalists. They understood the human soul as an immaterial substance distinct from the body. To claim that their theological conclusions can be separated from their anthropological assumptions, and then reinterpreted on physicalist terms, is a move that requires far more argument than physicalists have provided.

14.3 "The Dualist Has Her Own Two Sons Problem"

A third objection: "As you yourself admitted, the standard three-part dualist Christology also faces the Two Sons Worry. So the dualist is no better off than the physicalist."

I did acknowledge that the standard three-part model faces this challenge. But I also showed that the dualist has resources to respond — most notably, Loke's DPM, which avoids the Two Sons Worry entirely by positing only one center of consciousness (the Son). On the DPM, the human preconscious cannot possibly exist as a separate person because it is a part of the Son's own mind. Even on the standard three-part model, the dualist can appeal to the simultaneous creation and assumption of the human nature (Crisp's response) and the metaphysical fact that a body without a soul is not a person (which provides a crucial safety valve that the physicalist lacks).

The physicalist, by contrast, has no analogous resource. On physicalism, a living body with a brain just is a person. There is no additional component (the soul) that must be present for personhood. So the physicalist cannot avail herself of the dualist's best escape routes. The dualist may face a challenge, but she has answers. The physicalist faces the same challenge and has no clear answer.⁶⁵

14.4 "The An-Enhypostasia Distinction Is Not Binding Doctrine"

A final objection: "The terms anhypostasia and enhypostasia were not used by any ecumenical council. They are post-conciliar theological constructs. Why should they be treated as binding constraints on Christological models?"

It is true that the specific terms are not used by the councils. But the underlying theology is clearly affirmed by Constantinople II, which explicitly condemned Christological models that entail two persons in Christ and insisted that Christ's human nature has its personal subsistence in the Logos. The an-enhypostasia framework is simply a convenient shorthand for the theology that the Fifth Ecumenical Council endorsed as the proper interpretation of Chalcedon.⁶⁶

Moreover, this framework has been widely received across the major Christian traditions — Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant. As Mullins notes, it is "widely held by theologians to be part of the orthodox Christological deposit."⁶⁷ To dismiss it as non-binding would be to dismiss a framework that the vast majority of Christian theologians across every major tradition have considered essential to orthodox Christology.

Conclusion: The Soul Is Essential to the Incarnation's Metaphysical Coherence

We have covered a great deal of ground in this chapter, and I want to draw it all together. We began with the fundamental puzzle: how can Christ have a complete human nature without being two persons? The answer lies in the anhypostasia-enhypostasia framework: Christ's human nature is complete as a nature but has no independent personal existence (anhypostasia). It receives its personal reality from the Logos, who personalizes it and makes it His own (enhypostasia).

We explored the historical development of these doctrines, from the post-Chalcedonian struggles with Nestorianism to the theological clarifications of Constantinople II. We engaged with Oliver Crisp's careful analysis of the concrete and abstract nature views and saw that the concrete nature view — Christ's human nature as a body-soul composite — provides the most satisfying account of the an-enhypostasia distinction. We examined Loke's Divine Preconscious Model and saw how it handles the Two Sons Worry with particular elegance. And we showed, drawing on Mullins's powerful argument, that physicalism cannot satisfy the an-enhypostasia constraint because, on physicalism, Christ's body alone constitutes a complete human person — making the body potentially a separate person apart from the Incarnation.

We also explored the communicatio idiomatum — the communication of attributes — and saw how it presupposes that Christ's human nature is a genuine bearer of both physical and spiritual properties. On dualism, the human nature has body-properties and soul-properties, both of which are predicated of the one Person of the Son. On physicalism, the human nature has only physical properties (or physically grounded emergent properties), making the communicatio idiomatum far less intelligible.

Finally, we addressed the person-nature distinction and showed that it maps naturally onto a dualist anthropology but collapses on a physicalist one. If person and nature are identical in ordinary human beings (as physicalism implies), the Christological distinction between the one Person and two natures becomes difficult to maintain.

The conclusion is clear: the anhypostasia-enhypostasia framework — which is at the very heart of orthodox Christology — requires a robust understanding of human nature that includes an immaterial soul. Without the soul, the framework falls apart. The Incarnation requires the soul. Physicalism denies the soul. Therefore, physicalism is incompatible with the Incarnation as the church has understood it.

In the next chapter, we move to the heart of this book: the argument that physicalism cannot account for the Incarnation at all. The an-enhypostasia problem we have explored here is only one strand of a much larger case. But it is a powerful strand — and one that should give every thoughtful Christian serious pause about the adequacy of physicalist anthropology for the deepest truths of the faith.

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