Thinking About Apples

For much of human history, the question why things fall seemed settled. The ancient world, following the formidable logic of Aristotle, offered an explanation that was elegant, intuitive, and, for nearly two thousand years, entirely persuasive. In Aristotle’s beautifully ordered cosmos, everything had a natural place. Earthy things belonged at the centre of the universe, and so they moved downward to where they properly belonged. Fiery or smoky things, being lighter and more refined, naturally rose upward. Motion, in other words, was not primarily about forces acting between objects; it was about an object expressing its inner nature. Things moved the way they did because of what they were.

To be fair to Aristotle and the many brilliant minds who followed him, this framework was not foolish. It was coherent. It was philosophically rich. It explained a great deal of everyday experience with remarkable elegance. There was only one small problem: its inability to provide a precise, mathematical and universal explanation of motion.

A chance encounter with deciduous fruit brought everything into perspective. Newton did not solve the mystery of why things fall by looking more closely at the apple. The shift occurred when he recognised that the apple was never acting alone. Instead of asking what kind of thing the apple was in itself, he began to think about the relationship between the apple and the earth. What if the falling of the apple was not the expression of its solitary nature, but the result of an interaction? The effect was revolutionary: the motion of the planets, the arc of comets, and the structure of the solar system suddenly became intelligible in a way they never had before.

Sometimes, I suspect, the reason that the world seems so confusing is simply that we have been asking the wrong kinds of questions and as a result, looking at things the wrong way.

For much of Christian history, the question of who Jesus is has seemed largely settled. The ancient church, drawing on the formidable theological instincts of its early councils, offered an account that was elegant, carefully reasoned, and deeply persuasive. Jesus, we are taught, possesses both a complete human nature and a complete divine nature, perfectly united in one person.

This framework is not foolish. It is coherent and philosophically serious. It seeks, with real intellectual devotion, to honour the fullness of what the gospel witnesses seem to demand. Like the ancient cosmologies that preceded modern physics, it represents the very best thinking available within the conceptual world in which it emerged.

And yet, for all its careful precision, many thoughtful readers of the gospels have sensed a lingering difficulty: when we reduce “God” or “human” to a list of intrinsic qualities and attempt to synchronise them, we end up defending theological contortions that are elegant but not altogether satisfying.

For example, in Luke 2:52 the gospel writer notes that Jesus “grew in wisdom”. When we are working with fixed human vs divine attribute lists, we are forced into increasingly careful explanations: Did Jesus possess but choose not to access divine knowledge? Did the divine mind remain untouched while the human mind developed? Are there two spheres of consciousness operating simultaneously?

The early church councils, operating within the constraints of their worldviews and the information available to them, wrestled honestly and rigorously with these questions. But elegant and sophisticated as their solutions are, one cannot but help feel that they have somehow missed the point.

Fortunately, we find ourselves today in a somewhat different intellectual landscape. Over the past century in particular, a wide range of disciplines, from the social sciences to cognitive psychology, have converged on a growing recognition: human beings are not best understood as self-contained individuals who occasionally enter into relationships. We are, rather, relational beings from the very beginning. Our desires are formed between us. Our identities emerge through interaction. Even our most private convictions bear the fingerprints of the communities that have shaped us. In other words, what earlier frameworks often treated as intrinsic qualities increasingly appear, on closer inspection, to be relational realities.

This prompts an important reconsideration of how we speak about both humanity and divinity in relation to Jesus. The gospel narratives, through a fresh hermeneutic lens, seem less interested in presenting Jesus as a catalogue of abstract properties and more interested in portraying a life lived in radical, responsive relationship with the Father he consistently names not as a distant metaphysical principle but as Abba, and with the human communities in which he lives and moves.

This is not a small shift in emphasis. If the most revealing things about both God and humanity are relational rather than merely intrinsic, then the meaning of Jesus’ identity may come into sharper focus not when we attempt to synchronise two lists of qualities, but when we attend carefully to the pattern of relationships his life discloses. And this is where the Nicene creed, for all its commendable synthesis of key ideas, fails us. It makes no mention of Jesus’s life or teachings at all but moves from his birth to his execution under Pilate in one breath.

Important as it was to formulate a unified statement of beliefs to give shape to emerging doctrine, the creed – in its synthesis of the negotiated resolutions to key debates – has an unintended side-effect today: it reduces faith to an intellectual activity. By contrast, the gospels detail a life that reveals the God-human interaction not through the articulation of abstract principles, but in the messiness of relationships. And it is at the cross, perhaps more than anywhere else, that these relationships are most starkly unveiled.

In the weeks leading up to Easter, I would like to us to think about apples. As we sit in the shadow of the tree, perhaps we should entertain the possibility that the meaning of both “divine” and “human” becomes clearest not when we analyse them in isolation, but when we attend carefully to what happens in their encounter in the life — and especially the cross — of Jesus.