LAUSR

Physicalist Christology (PC) is the view that God the Son (GS), in the Incarnation, became identical with the body of Jesus. The goal of this paper is to defend PC from two recent objections. One is that if GS is a physical object, then he cannot have properties had by God (e.g., necessary existence). Then, by Leibniz’s law, the incarnate GS cannot be identical with the second Person of the Trinity. The other objection is that PC implies that the incarnate GS did not exist in the interim period between his death and resurrection. PC then leads to the theologically absurd consequence that one of the three Persons of the Trinity did not exist during this period. I argue that the first objection fails because the very same argumentative strategy applies to the Incarnation on any view. As for the second objection, I endorse an animalist theory of death and argue that the incarnate GS continues to exist as a dead person from his death to resurrection. This shows that there is still continuing Trinity of GS during this period.