Volume 29, Issue 1, January 2012
Jonathan Hill
Pages 3-29
Incarnation, Timelessness, and Exaltation
Christian tradition holds not simply that, in Christ, God became human, but that at the end of his earthly career Christ became exalted (possessing and
exercising the divine attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience), and yet remained perpetually human. In this paper I consider several models of
the incarnation in the light of these requirements. In particular, I contrast models that adopt a temporalist understanding of divine eternity with those that adopt an atemporalist one. I conclude that temporalist models struggle to accommodate the doctrines of Christ’s exaltation and perpetual humanity, and that the only viable atemporalist models are compositionalist ones.