Nick:

we take Jesus to have two intellects/mentalities.

You’d say Jesus doesn’t have two minds yes? If so. How would you differentiate a mind from a mentality?

Jimmy:

It’s clearer to start with what you think demarcates the Trinitarian persons in Scripture. Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct, yet God. What distinguishes them in the text?

Everyone who argues for the deity of the Spirit – everyone – appeals to His unique will, center of emotions, actions, etc. Likewise, modalism is countered in Scripture by differentiating the wills of God and the Son. So there is a hermeneutical favoring of personalism, even back in the church fathers (when they’re not busy relying on pagan chain-of-being logic).

Nevertheless, Christians want to hold on to tradition, and as a result, the more church-history preoccupied Christians take on the (Greek) metaphysics of the church fathers. In patristic metaphysical categories, will is subsumed under nature; hence, there is one will in God.

The church is not consistent about this. However, believers tend to favor one side, the hermeneutical or the patristic, in how they decide the two-minds issue in the end. They either favor a personhood-consciousness-will concept or they favor a nature-will-mind concept, if they do not capitulate to mysterianism.

So, if in the end, one identifies will with nature and/or counts only one will in the Godhead, then Christ will have two wills of necessity. This does result in orthodox Trinitarianism, but it effectively bars you from making sense of the hermeneutic you used to transcribe Chalcedonian Christianity from Scripture. The reason being that when we interpret Scripture, words and concepts surrounding the will and consciousness presuppose personalism: wills and minds correspond to persons foremost. So while this kind of Trinitarianism does line up nicely with this or that church father, it’s sort of like presbiterianism. There’s a lot of bathwater kept with the baby.

The other side has problems less obvious to the modern post-Cartesian thinker. So don’t think of me as saying that if you cut off Greek paganism from the church fathers, we’re magically set free with the help of contemporary philosophy of mind. That’s Craig’s mistake.

Suppose we remain consistent with the hermeneutical principles. We denominate will as indicative of a unique person. Therefore, there’s three divine wills corresponding to the three divine Persons. Now, Christ does not require two wills for the Incarnation. Rather, His one divine will operates “divinely” in His deity and “humanly” in His human nature, making His will a logically neutral category toward the natures just the same way any Chalcedonian reasons about Christ’s Sonship with respect to His natures.

This will sit well with modern “intuitions” because we tend to feel like we’re saying Christ is two persons if we say He has two wills or two minds. In other words, the patristic view doesn’t avoid Nestorianism in any exegetically and theologically satisfying way. Unfortunately, if we’re not careful, the personalists end up in the same boat.

The problem arises when we consider the relation of human nature to personhood. A human – being a human object is usually sufficient for being a person, just like we supposed a will or a mind is sufficient to indicate a person. But wait, that would mean Christ is a divine Person and a distinct human person! Now we’ve got Nestorianism. (And again, if you think the personalist hermeneutic is right, you’ll think the opposing view inconsistently avoid Nestorianism as well.)

One way to get around this problem is to reduce the human nature. This is what neo-apollinarians like Craig do. They negate certain features we may or may not suspect humans already have, and attribute to the divine Son these features brought to a human organism.

It’s simplistic to say, but it’s also mostly accurate – the soul of Christ is divine, while his biology and psychology are human. But because biology and psychology are all that it is to be human, no more, no less, Christ can be said to have a true human nature. So the view goes.

I’ll hand-wave Craig’s view because most robust Trinitarians think it’s the wrong way to go. One worry is to do with Craig falling into a Eutychian tertium quid. In the same move, I’ll pass over views that try the reverse strategy: reducing the divine nature. Those won’t work for more obvious reasons.

So what are we left with?

The “mentality” verbiage is a way to try to think about the Incarnation by emphasizing its assumed existence while maintaining that there is one mind-category.

The creeds are clear to demarcate the way in which Christ is and is not a creature. The Incarnate Son is not created. His human nature is created. The Son takes on creaturehood without ceasing to be Creator. The nature is taken on voluntarily, not inherited like everyone else. It is assumed.

Quite independent of that nature, Christ was a thinking, willing rational mind. What happens when He assumes a human nature, then?

The “mentality” strategy is to use the Chalcedonian formula for the ways in which Christ is a mind (read: mentalities). How is the Son a son? He is one divinely and He is one humanly; once for His divine nature, twice for His human nature. Now let’s use that logic.

Christ has one mind, because the Son just is His mind. To be the Son is to be the Second Mind of the Trinity. But that mind is possessed of two natures. The same way the Son is son humanly and divinely, so the Mind thinks and wills and possesses consciousness once intrinsically for His divine nature, twice for the human nature He deigns to take on to Himself.

The word “mentality” is pointing to the adverbial logic going on. Christ can be a mind in different ways unavailable to humans. It is the adverbial or modal distinction.

I’ll note at the end here, this isn’t some staunch position. Nor do I think it’s spelled out very clearly in Scripture. It’s intended to show that the whole one will vs three will debate about the Godhead is not the only concern with Christological heresies. A very real threat comes from how a human nature does not just throw us into Nestorianism.

One strategy is to look at passage in the Bible and interpret the Logos as controlling His human nature with His one will and mind by giving them a creaturely nature out of which terminates operations. Then Christ would have two outlets, or
mentalities.