A Brief Introduction to Christological Monism or Monistic Christology

Fresco of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (Council of Chalcedon) in the narthex of the Church of Saint Athanasius the Athonite (Great Lavra, Mount Athos)

Robert Lawrence Kuhn (creator of the PBS series Closer to Truth) recently wrote an article called “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications” in which he tried to catalog every “explanation of consciousness” with the ambitious goal of summarizing and organizing “all contemporary theories that are sufficiently distinct with explanations that can surmount an arbitrary hurdle of rationality or conceivability.” David Bentley Hart made Kuhn’s list with the conclusion that Hart “constructs an ultimate unified monism, first by showing that consciousness/mind and being/existence are profoundly inseverable” and then by “taking consciousness and being, already one and the same, and unifying it with God” resulting in what Kuhn maintains “is not pantheism (or panentheism), but based on Hart’s Orthodox Christian convictions, a Christological monism.” Kuhn published this just a few months after Hart gave a series of five lectures at Cambridge University (The Stanton Lectures in April and May of 2024) entitled “The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology” (see here as well as lecture 1, lecture 2, lecture 3, lecture 4, and lecture 5). In recent weeks, I have been seeing more and more questions about what is meant by monistic Christology, so here is a very brief overview.

(As an initial warning, if you use web searches to try to help here, you might go down an entirely wrong pathway with the completely unrelated concept of Christomonism. Despite some similarity in the terms, Christomonism has absolutely nothing to do with monistic Christology. Christomonism denies the Trinity and asserts that only Jesus Christ is God. In contrast, monistic Christology is fully and robustly trinitarian, and focused instead on the relationship between Christ’s two natures: human and divine.)

To get started, trinitarian theology is monotheistic and not tritheistic. (As an aside, Hart claimed in a recent conversation with Ed Simon, see here or here, that most Americans do not understand this and are thinking like tritheists in most respects.) Most will recognize, at any rate, that the Trinity is one God in three persons who share one nature. The Trinity is a monistic concept. In addition, monotheism implies monism because of the basic parallelism in classical theism between creatio ex nihilo and creatio ex deo as equivalent concepts (even for Aquinas). During a conversation with Hart about the book You Are Gods, John Milbank said “we’ve got all these things in Christianity like Trinity, incarnation, grace and deification and so on, these aren’t qualifying monism." Instead, Milbank said that Hart’s book shows that Christianity has always been about spelling out or expounding monotheism and monism.

So now we move specifically to monistic Christology. The Chalcedonian definition says that Christ is “acknowledged in Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis.” This pushes against monism because it posits the existence of two fundamentally different natures for creatures (Christ’s human nature) and for God (Christ’s divine nature). Orthodox Christianity since Chalcedon teaches that Christ has two natures united in one person and one hypostasis. Hart pushes the boundaries here by saying that human nature (or creaturely nature) has its source and its end in divine nature (God’s ousia or physis) so that creaturely nature is just the becoming of God’s nature. God’s nature for Hart is fully actualized kenotic love while creaturely natures are the finite becoming of God’s nature (i.e. creatures are kenotic love as a finite potential versus as an infinite and actualized reality).

However, applied to Christology, this can easily be seen as conflicting with Chalcedon and suggesting that Christ’s human and divine natures are not separate and different but are actually equally grounded in the divine nature so that Christ has one nature, in some sense, as well as one person and one hypostasis. The doctrine that Christ has one nature is called miaphysitism and is associated with the Coptic and Oriental Orthodox Churches (although there has been much talk for many years of overcoming and reconciling these differences, and not all Coptic and Oriental Orthodox theologians would consider miaphysitism an accurate name for their position).

With one final note, Hart loves both Sergei Bulgakov and Hindu philosophy (Vedanta specifically). I know very little about Vedanta other than that it is a nondualistic system of philosophy based on the ancient Hindu Upanishads. Hart, however, in defending monism, turns to these thinkers who go back to times long before such topics were picked up by the Greeks. I can speak a little more confidently about Bulgakov whose doctrine of Sophiology offers a famous resolution to all of this by positing that Sophia is the nature of God (the one ousia of kenotic love and wisdom shared by all three persons of the Trinity) which is not hypostatized as a person in her divine or actualized existence but who is hypostatized in her creaturely life (as all of the finite persons of creation). In this model, Sophia holds together creaturely and divine nature as one nature while Christ receives both the fullness of creaturely Sophia from Mary (his human or creaturely nature) and yet is also God whose nature (shared with Father and Spirit) is the divine Sophia. With the incarnation, according to this theology, Christ restores and reveals humanity as what it always has been and forever will be within the life of God.

These are, obviously, serious and complex topics, and I am entirely unqualified to address them or to have any meaningful opinions on them. However, I appreciate following the thinking of others on such questions, and I’m simply doing my best here to outline what I’m hearing. If you have corrections or clarifications, please share them in comments.