Tim Pawl

[paragraph 3 of the article] The goal of this article is to flesh out that initial understanding of incarnational immutability. The method I employ to attain this goal is to consider cases of predications from the texts of conciliar Christology. I show potential ontological truth conditions for those predications being true that do not require the truth conditions I propose for immutability to be unsatisfied. Put otherwise, I show ontological truth conditions for predications that imply Christ’s mutability and Incarnation that are also consistent with the truth of “Christ is immutable.” Since the truth conditions for the incarnational texts do not require the falsity of the claim that “Christ is immutable,” the incarnational claims do not require the rejection of immutability. In other words, the Incarnation is no reason to deny divine immutability, and vice versa.

I argue that Traditional Christian Theism is inconsistent with Truthmaker Maximalism, the thesis that all truths have truthmakers. Though this original formulation requires extensive revision, the gist of the argument is as follows. Suppose for reductio Traditional Christian Theism and the sort of Truthmaker Theory that embraces Truthmaker Maximalism are both true. By Traditional Christian Theism, there is a world in which God, and only God, exists. There are no animals in such a world. Thus, it is true in such a world that there are no zebras. That there are no zebras must have a truthmaker, given Truthmaker Maximalism. God is the only existing object in such a world, and so God must be the truthmaker for this truth, given that it has a truthmaker. But truthmakers necessitate the truths they make true. So, for any world, at any time at which God exists, God makes that there are no zebras true. According to Traditional Christian Theism, God exists in our world. In our world, then, it is true: there are no zebras. But there are zebras. Contradiction! Thus, the conjunction of Traditional Christian Theism with Truthmaker Necessitation and Truthmaker Maximalism is inconsistent.

I consider the fundamental philosophical problem for Christology: how can one and the same person, the Second Person of the Trinity, be both God and man. For being God implies having certain attributes, perhaps immutability, or impassibility, whereas being human implies having apparently inconsistent attributes. This problem is especially vexing for the proponent of Conciliar Christology – the Christology taught in the Ecumenical Councils – since those councils affirm that Christ is both mutable and immutable, both passible and impassible, etc. Many extant solutions to this problem approach it by claiming that the predicates are incompatible when said of the same thing without qualification, but that once the appropriate qualification is added, compatibility is achieved. I provide a different approach. Here I argued that the predicates can be understood so that they are compatible. I then work out the logical relations between the predicates, so understood, showing that no contradiction follows from understanding them in the way I suggest. After that, I consider some of the motivations we have for believing the purportedly incompatible pairs to be, in fact, incompatible, and argue that, on the view offered here, we can salvage most of our intuitions that motivate taking the predicates as incompatible. Finally, I consider three objections.

In this paper I show that the problem of temporary intrinsics and a fundamental philosophical problem concerning the doctrine of the incarnation are isomorphic. To do so, I present the problem of temporary intrinsics, along with five responses to the problem. I then present the fundamental problem for Christology, which I call the problem of natural intrinsics. I present six responses to that problem, all but the last analogous to a response to the problem of temporary intrinsics. My goal is not to argue that any individual response to either problem is correct. Instead, my goal is to present and defend an interesting and unnoticed similarity between two different problems, and to note how work on one problem can help with work on the other. This is a penultimate manuscript, and not a final version, of a forthcoming article in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. As such, please do not cite this version; cite the official version, due out in OSPR VII in 2015.

In this article I canvas the options available to a proponent of the traditional doctrine of the incarnation against a charge of incoherence. In particular, I consider the charge of incoherence due to incompatible predications both being true of the same one person, the God-man Jesus Christ. For instance, one might think that any- thing divine has to have certain attributes – perhaps omnipotence, or impassibility. But, the charge continues, nothing human can be omnipotent or impassible. And so nothing can be divine and human. So Christ is not both God and man, contrary to the traditional doctrine of the incarnation. To do so, first, in Section II, I will present the problem as a deductively valid argument. I then, in that section, go on to show that the proponent of traditional Christology should grant all but one premise of the argument. In the remaining sections I will canvas possible solutions to the problem. In Section III I discuss three ways to deny Premise 3 of the forthcoming argument. These ways include a Kenotic response, qua-modification (in four versions), and finally a response that accepts the compatibility of the allegedly incompatible predicates.

The traditional view of heaven holds that the redeemed in heaven both have free will and are no longer capable of sinning. A number of philosophers have argued that the traditional view is problematic. How can someone be free and yet incapable of sinning? If the redeemed are kept from sinning, their wills must be reined in. And if their wills are reined in, it doesn’t seem right to say that they are free. Following James Sennett, we call this objection to the traditional view of heaven ‘the Problem of Heavenly Freedom’. In this paper, we discuss and criticize four attempts to respond to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom. We then offer our own response to this problem which both preserves the traditional view of heaven and avoids the objections which beset the other attempts.

In this article I present St. Thomas Aquinas’s views on the possibility of multiple incarnations. First I disambiguate four things one might mean when saying that multiple incarnations are possible. Then I provide and justify what I take to be Aquinas’s answers to these questions, showing the intricacies of his argumentation and concluding that he holds an extremely robust view of the possibility of multiple incarnations. According to Aquinas, I argue, there could be three simultaneously existing concrete rational natures, each of which is assumed by all three of the Divine Persons, all at the same time.

Many Christians seem to have difficulty in their worldview insofar as they affirm: (1) If a person cannot do something, then that person is not blameworthy for not doing that action, (2) No one has it within his or her power to acquire faith, and (3) Some individuals who do not have the virtue of faith are nevertheless blameworthy for not having faith. These propositions together appear to entail a contradiction. In this paper I show how the Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, affirms these propositions but avoids the contradiction because of his understanding of faith, blame, and grace.

Moral education requires interdisciplinary engagement across philosophy, psychology, and education. Positive psychologists regularly acknowledge the breadth and depth of wisdom regarding the cultivation of virtues present in philosophical and religious texts and consult such writings when creating constructs, but they are less prone to integrate scientific findings with historical texts as inquiry proceeds. Thus, we provide a comparative analysis of the advice given in Lorenzo Scupoli’s The Spiritual Combat, from traditional Christian moral wisdom literature and the research findings from positive psychology on the cultivation of the virtue of patience. Points of convergence relate to the utility of engaging activities that include cognitive reappraisal, habit formation through daily practice, activating positive motivation, prayer, mantra/transcendental meditation, and cultivating elevation through meditation on moral exemplars. Areas of divergence include the advisability of suppression, the role of motivation, and necessity of spiritual intervention, which suggest areas for future inquiry in moral education.

This article addresses a difficult case at the intersection of philosophical theology and truthmaker theory. I show that three views, together, lead to difficultiesin providing truthmakers for truths of contingent predication, such as that the bread is white. These three views are: the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, astandard truthmaker theory, and a trope (or accident) view of properties. I present and explain each of these three views, at each step noting their connections to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. After presenting the three views, I show why they entail a difficulty for providing truthmakers for truths of contingent predication,drawing on two cases that are not impossible, for all we know. I then present four ways that one can respond to this difficulty, afterward noting some shortcomingsof those responses.

Divine immutability, the claim that God is immutable, is a central part of traditional Christianity, though it has come under sustained attack in the last two hundred years. This article first catalogues the historical precedent for and against this claim, then discusses different answers to the question, “What is it to be immutable?” Two definitions of divine immutability receive careful attention. The first is that for God to be immutable is for God to have a constant character and to be faithful in divine promises; this is a definition of “weak immutability.” The second, “strong immutability,” is that for God to be immutable is for God to be wholly unchanging. After showing some implications of the definitions, the article focuses on strong immutability and provides some common arguments against the claim that God is immutable, understood in that way. While most of the historical evidence discussed in this article is from Christian sources, the core discussion of what it is to be strongly immutable, and the arguments against it, are not particular to Christianity.

A necessary part of David Armstrong's account of truthmakers for modal truths is his Possibility principle: any truthmaker for a contingent truth is also a truthmaker for the possibility of the complement of that contingent truth (if T makes _p_ true and _p_ is contingent, then T makes ⋄∼_p_ true). I criticize Armstrong's Possibility principle for two reasons. First, his argument for the Possibility principle both relies on an unwarranted generalization and vitiates his desire for relevant truthmakers. His argument undercuts relevant truthmakers by entailing that each contingent being is a truthmaker for all modal truths. Second, even if the argument seems successful, the Possibility principle is subject to counterexamples. Armstrong's being composed of more than fifty atoms makes it true _that something composed of more than fifty atoms exists_ and that truth is contingent, but his being composed of more than fifty atoms does not make it true _that it is possible that it is not the case that something composed of more than fifty atoms exists_

The fundamental problem of Christology is the apparent contradiction of Christ as recorded at Chalcedon. Christ is human and Christ is divine. Being divine entails being immutable. Being human entails being mutable. Were Christ two different persons there’d be no apparent contradiction. But Chalcedon rules as much out. Were Christ only partly human or only partly divine there’d be no apparent contradiction. But Chalcedon rules as much out. Were the very meaning of ‘mutable’ and/or ‘immutable’ other than what they are, there’d be no apparent contradiction. But the meaning is what it is, and changing the meaning of our terms to avoid the apparent contradiction of Christ is an apparent flight from reality. What, in the end, is the explanation of the apparent contradiction of Christ? Theologians and philosophers have long advanced many consistency-seeking answers, all of which increase the metaphysical or semantical complexity of the otherwise strikingly simple but radical core of Christianity’s GodMan. In this paper, I put the simplest explanation on the theological table: namely, Christ appears to be contradictory because Christ is contradictory. This explanation may sound complicated to the many who are steeped in the mainstream account of logic according to which logic precludes the possibility of true contradictions. But the mainstream account of logic can and should be rejected. Ridding theology of the dogma of mainstream logic illuminates the simple though striking explanation of the apparent contradiction of Christ — namely, that Christ is a contradictory being. Just as the simplest explanation to the apparent roundness of the earth has earned due acceptance, so too should the simplest explanation of the apparent contradiction of Christ.

In this paper we present the standard Thomistic view concerning substances and their parts. We then note some objections to that view. Afterwards, we present Aquinas’s Christology, then draw an analogy between the relation that holds between the Second Person and the assumed human nature, on the one hand, and the relation that holds between a substance whole and its substance parts, on the other. We then show how the analogy, which St. Thomas himself drew at points, is useful for providing a theory that answers the objections that the standard Thomistic view faces. Finally we answer objections to our approach. We conclude that there is a hylomorphic theory, founded on an analogy from Aquinas’s Christology, that fits well with the empirical data concerning substance parts, on which some complete created material substances have other complete created material substances as parts.

Call the claim, common to many in the Christian intellectual tradition, that Christ, in virtue of his created human intellect, had certain, infallible, exhaustive foreknowledge the Foreknowledge Thesis. Now consider what I will call the Conditional: if the Foreknowledge Thesis is true, then Christ's created human will was not free. In so far as many, perhaps all, of the people who affirm the Foreknowledge Thesis also wish to affirm the freedom of Christ's human will, the truth of the Conditional would be most unwelcome to them. I consider an argument in support of the Conditional; I argue that it is not successful.

In this article I provide a Thomistic truthmaker principle. Although Aquinas himself never provides a truthmaker principle, he does say things that show he thought many truths require truthmakers, or, in other terms, that truths have an ontological grounding. That truths are somehow grounded or explained by reality is an important aspect of Thomistic thought. The principle I provide could be affirmed by someone with Thomistic tendencies: it is consistent with Aquinas’ thought and makes sense of some peculiar aspects of his writings. In what follows, I will argue that a Thomistic truthmaker principle should require all truths about being to have a truthmaker at any time that they are about.

Call the claim, common to many in the Christian intellectual tradition, that Christ, in virtue of his created human intellect, had certain, infallible exhaustive foreknowledge the Foreknowledge Thesis. Now consider what I will call the Conditional: If the Foreknowledge Thesis is true, then Christ’s created human will lacked an important sort of freedom that we mere humans have. Insofar as many, perhaps all, of the people who affirm the Foreknowledge Thesis also wish to affirm the robust freedom of Christ’s human will, the truth of the Conditional would be most unwelcome to them. I consider an argument in support of the Conditional from the necessary conditions for deliberation, arguing that the argument fails