podcast 165 – Alvan Lamson’s On the Doctrine of Two Natures in Jesus Christ – Part 1

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All Christians have always believed that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, right?

Wrong. In today’s podcast we hear from a learned Congregationalist minister who rejected such theories on several grounds, in his short 1828 book On the Doctrine of Two Natures in Jesus Christ. 

Alvan Lamson (1792-1864) was a Harvard-educated minister who was for some time was a co-editor of the periodical The Christian Examiner. He’s most remembered now for his magisterial book The Church of the First Three Centuries.

In this first part we hear his first three objections, dealing with history and coherence of these claims, and his charge that such theories make Jesus a liar. Do these objections stick?

Links for this episode:

• On the Doctrine of Two Natures in Jesus Christ from Sixteen American Unitarian Tracts
• The Church of the First Three Centuries: Or, Notices of the Lives and Opinions of the Early Fathers, with Special Reference to the Doctrine of the Trinity, Illustrating its Late Origin and Gradual Formation
• podcast 74 – Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho – Part 1
• posts on Origen
• Petavius
• Ralph Cudworth
• podcast 30 – The Council of Nicea
• Dogmatic Definition of the Council of Chalcedon, 451
• podcast 145 – ‘Tis Mystery All: the Immortal dies!
• podcast 143 – Dr. Timothy Pawl’s In Defense of Conciliar Christology – Part 1
• The Council of Ephesus, 431
• podcast 86 – Kermit Zarley on distinguishing Jesus and God
• Jeremy Myers asks: “Did Jesus Learn?”
• mental reservation
• Acts 2:24, Acts 2:32, Matthew 24:36, Mark 10:18, John 5:30.
• This week’s thinking music is “Stars Collide (Instrumental Version” by Josh Woodward.