The One vs. The Many

This paper looks at a recent exchange concerning the human nature of Christ and the Christological anthropology of Thomas F. Torrance. In this exchange, Oliver Crisp and Christopher Woznicki offer competing readings of Torrance’s Christological anthropology. Crisp argues for a concretist understanding of Christ’s human nature while Woznicki offers an abstractist metaphysic. This paper will look at this exchange in conversation with Torrance’s work and recent work in group ontology, offering a third way forward between the impasse of Crisp’s concretism and Woznicki’s abstractism which I call communal participation and argue is more in line with Torrance’s own understanding. 

Keywords: Christological anthropology; human nature; group ontology; participation; vicarious humanity; T. F. Torrance