May 24, 2026—Defenders · Reasonable Faith

Doctrine of Christ Part 6: Plank Two — A Reformed Apollinarian Move

Key Points

01Plank Two: postulate with Apollinarius that the Logos is the rational soul of Jesus of Nazareth. This explains how one person can exemplify both natures — the Logos himself is the unifying constituent.
02Apollinarius’s historic defect was that his Logos seemed to replace a normal human soul entirely, leaving Christ with mere "animality" rather than full humanity. If Christ lacked a truly human nature, he could not have represented humanity before God or redeemed humanity.
03Craig argues the defect is remediable. Apollinarius may have meant something more subtle: that the Logos already contained perfect human personhood archetypally in his divine nature. The Logos is "the archetype of man."
04On this rehabilitated view, when the Logos assumes a hominid body, the union itself completes Christ’s human nature — the Logos brings to the flesh the rationality, freedom, and self-consciousness necessary for full humanity.
05The doctrine of the imago Dei undergirds the move. Humans image God not in virtue of our animal bodies (shared with other creatures) but in virtue of being persons. God himself is personal; he already possesses everything necessary for human personhood prior to the Incarnation. All the Logos lacked was corporeality.
06Christ’s human nature is the body-soul composite that walked Galilee, taught the Sermon on the Mount, and was crucified. Even though that soul is uncreated (the Logos himself), the human nature as a whole — body plus soul united — is a new, contingent, created substance brought into being at the virginal conception.
07Because Christ has a complete human nature on this view, he has fully identified with our humanity, and his atoning work on behalf of mankind is therefore efficacious.
08The Incarnation is a permanent status taken on by the second person of the Trinity — not a temporary thirty-year visit. Through the ascension, human nature is taken into the glorified, eternal state, an emphatic divine ratification of the value of material, bodily existence.
09The principal remaining problem (raised by Scottish theologian A. B. Bruce): on this model, how can Christ be genuinely tempted? Reduplicative predication seems to handle omnipotence and mortality, but cannot easily handle omniscience and impeccability if there is a single self-conscious subject. This is the question the third plank, in the next session, must answer.

Watch the Full Discussion

Summary

Dr. William Lane Craig advances his proposed model of the Incarnation with its second plank — a controversial but, he argues, repairable move: postulate with Apollinarius that the Logos (the second person of the Trinity) is the rational soul of Jesus of Nazareth. If we are to avoid a duality of persons in Christ, the man Jesus and the divine Logos must share some common constituent that unites the two natures. The single person who exemplifies both natures is most naturally explained if the Logos himself functions as the soul of Christ’s human nature, much as a soul is united with its body in an ordinary human being. The historic problem with Apollinarius was that this seemed to give Christ a mere animal nature — denying him a full humanity — and so to undercut the redemptive work of Christ. Craig argues the defect is remediable. Apollinarius may have meant that the Logos is the archetype of humanity (containing perfect personhood in his divine nature already), so that by assuming a hominid body the Logos brings to it precisely those properties (rationality, freedom, self-consciousness) needed for a complete human nature. The doctrine of the imago Dei — humans created in God’s image — provides strong support: it is not in virtue of our animal bodies that we image God, but in virtue of being persons. God already possessed everything necessary for human personhood prior to the Incarnation; all the Logos lacked was corporeality. So in Christ, one self-conscious subject (the Logos) possesses both a complete divine nature and a complete human nature. Discussion ranges over the resurrection body, the ascension and where Christ’s body is now (Craig offers the tuning-fork analogy: perhaps Christ has stepped out of our spacetime manifold and so his body is unmanifested without ceasing to exist), the virginal conception as a creationist (not Traducian) account of the soul, and the principal remaining objection: A. B. Bruce’s charge that Apollinarian models make Christ’s temptations a sham. Craig flags that the third and final plank, to come next session, is designed to answer exactly this.

Scripture References

Detailed Outline

I. The Project Resumed

Craig continues the proposed model of the Incarnation, again emphasizing that the model is offered as a possibility — one logically coherent and biblically faithful account that would defeat objections from Muslims, secularists, and cultists that the Incarnation is impossible.
Plank One (recap): with Chalcedon, Christ has two complete and distinct natures — human and divine — united in one person.

II. Plank Two — The Logos as Soul of Jesus

The second plank: postulate with Apollinarius that the Logos is the rational soul of Jesus of Nazareth.
Motivation: if Christ has two complete individual natures (one human, one divine), how can there not be two persons? The orthodox answer is that there is a single hypostasis — a single property-bearer — who exemplifies both natures. But how can one person exemplify two complete natures?
Apollinarius’s answer: the Logos itself is the unifying constituent. The Logos replaces what would otherwise be a separate human soul, so that one self-conscious subject (the Logos) exemplifies both natures.

III. Apollinarius’s Historic Defect

On the standard reading of Apollinarius, the Logos united with a mere hominid body — so that the Incarnation was not the assumption of full humanity but only of "animality."
A complete human nature requires more than just an animal body. The Apollinarian Christ seemed to lack genuine humanness.
Worse, the model undercut the work of Christ: if Christ did not have a truly human nature, he could not represent humanity before God and so could not redeem humanity.
For these reasons Apollinarius was condemned as heretical at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD.

IV. The Remediable Defect — A Closer Reading of Apollinarius

Craig asks: are these defects irremediable, or could Apollinarius’s view be reformulated within Chalcedonian bounds? He argues for the latter.
Apollinarius’s opponents (e.g., Gregory of Nazianzus) read him as claiming Christ’s flesh was pre-existent, which is absurd. But Apollinarius may have meant something more subtle.
On the more subtle reading, Apollinarius is claiming the Logos contained perfect human personhood archetypally in his own divine nature. The Logos is "the archetype of man."
On this view, when the Logos assumes a hominid body, the union itself completes Christ’s human nature — the Logos brings to the animal body precisely those properties that make it a fully human nature.

V. Support from the Imago Dei

Humans are created in the image of God. This is not in virtue of our animal bodies (which we share with the rest of the biosphere) but in virtue of being persons.
God himself is personal — rational, free, self-conscious. So insofar as we are persons we reflect God’s nature.
Therefore God already possessed all the properties necessary for human personhood even prior to the Incarnation. The Logos already had rationality, freedom of the will, and self-consciousness in his pre-incarnate state.
All the Logos lacked, on this model, was corporeality. By assuming a hominid body, he brought to it everything necessary for a complete human nature.
The result: one self-conscious subject — the Logos — possessing both a complete divine nature and a complete human nature. Both are genuinely complete.

VI. Christ’s Human Nature as a Created Substance

Chalcedon affirms a complete human nature composed of body and soul — a rational soul and a human body — but does not affirm a merely human soul.
Although Christ’s soul is uncreated (the Logos himself), Christ’s human nature as a whole is created. The human nature is the body-soul composite that walked Galilee, taught the Sermon on the Mount, was crucified, and lay in the tomb.
The virginal conception in Mary’s womb brings into being a new substance — Christ’s human nature — which is contingent, created, finite, and which did not exist prior to that moment.
Because Christ has a truly complete human nature, his work of atonement is efficacious for humanity. He has fully identified with us.

VII. Class Discussion — The Permanent Incarnation

The Incarnation is a permanent status, not a temporary thirty-year visit. After the resurrection and ascension the second person of the Trinity still has a human nature, now glorified.
The resurrection body is the same earthly body transformed — made immortal, incorruptible, dominated by the Spirit (1 Cor. 15). It is not a separate "heavenly body" donned from a closet.
Through the ascension, human bodily existence is taken into the eternal glorified state of the Godhead — an emphatic divine ratification of the goodness of the material and physical creation. Orthodox Christianity never devalues the physical in favor of the spiritual.

VIII. Where Is Christ’s Body Now?

If Christ retains his human nature in the present, where is his body? Some Christians postulate a higher spatial dimension; Craig finds this implausible.
Craig’s tuning-fork analogy: a plucked tuning fork still vibrates inside a vacuum jar, but with no medium to carry the sound waves, the vibration is not manifested as sound. The fork has not changed; the medium has been removed.
Similarly, perhaps in the ascension Christ exited our spacetime continuum. He still has a human nature, but with no spatial manifold to inhabit, that nature is not currently manifested as a three-dimensional body.
At his return Christ re-enters our spatial manifold; the body is manifested again, and every eye shall see him (Rev. 1:7). The disembodied souls of deceased believers communing with Christ (Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:1–4) fit this model better than they fit a Christ embodied in some higher dimension.
The same model elegantly handles the post-resurrection appearances — Christ stepping in and out of space, vanishing at Emmaus and appearing in Jerusalem (Luke 24; John 20:19), without "walking through walls."

IX. The Virginal Conception and the Origin of the Soul

On the proposed model, Jesus’ soul is the second person of the Trinity — not the product of Mary’s soul or Joseph’s.
This is a creationist view of the soul (the soul is a special creation of God at conception) rather than a Traducian view (the parents’ souls beget the child’s).
The virginal conception need not commit one to creationism about all human souls. It is a singular miraculous event — a special creation of Jesus’ human nature. The Logos pre-exists; the human nature is created at conception.
Distinct from the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which concerns Mary, not Jesus. Craig (as a Protestant) does not affirm the Immaculate Conception.

X. The Looming Problem — A. B. Bruce’s Challenge

The principal problem with the model as so far described: how does it square with the human limitations of Jesus evident in the Gospels?
Reduplicative predication handles some attributes nicely: Christ is omnipotent with respect to his divine nature but limited in power in his human nature; eternal in his divine nature but mortal in his human nature.
But it does not obviously handle others. How can Christ be both omniscient and ignorant if there is a single self-conscious subject? How can he be impeccable (incapable of sin) with respect to his divine nature and yet peccable (capable of sin) with respect to his human nature?
A. B. Bruce’s sharp objection: an Apollinarian model leaves Christ with "no human nous, no freedom, no struggle" — the temptations of the Gospels become a sham and the resulting virtue is "cheap, devoid of all human interest, and scarcely deserving the name."
Craig concedes that, as so far developed, the model cannot withstand this charge. The third plank, in the next session, is designed precisely to turn back the objection.

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