Actually, I did read most of Was Jesus God? Which parts did you think were most important?

Let’s wait – I’m really very interested in your take on my paper, and I want to get it together in decent shape before I take up your time with it.

To clarify – I think this has never been shown self-contradictory: one divine person exists and no created thing exists. Further, such a scenario seems possible. Now, this could be overturned by divine revelation; my claim is that philosophical reflection on divinity doesn’t reveal any impossibility in a one divine person scenario. If I’m right, and divine revelation does imply that a lone divine person is impossible, then this is a genuine faith vs. reason conflict.

You’re right – it is a different issue whether divinity implies uniqueness (so that if there’s a god, there’s only one god). One might think so, but I’m not prepared to argue that – I’m not sure I understand divinity enough to see either way!

No – most days of the week, I don’t reject perfect being arguments – but I’m aware that they are perilous. My arguments against a priori ST proofs don’t depend on rejecting the method outright.

I have Swinburne’s Is Jesus God, but haven’t read it yet. I’m particularly interested in ch. 3 The Marks of an Incarnate God and ch. 6 Jesus Implied his Divinity. If I weren’t too swamped already, I’d consider blogging through it.

When I was preparing my talk, I looked at Richard Swinburne’s Is Jesus God? I found new points there on reasons to believe God is a Trinity. Might be worth a look.

Yes, I do think it is possible for there to be only one divine being. I’ve been working on a paper – actually, it was on the shelf, but now I’m trying to finish it – in which I argue that the arguments by Swinburne, Morris, and Davis (that one divine person implies at least one other divine person) don’t work, and further, that we ought to think it is possible, at least, going by reason alone. Now I’m revisiting Richard of St. Victor, seeing if he really adds anything to their case. So far, I think for the most part the newer arguments are better, but I’m probably going to discuss a few of his tries as well. Also, I’m slogging through parts of this book because he has a try at interpreting Richard of St. Victor as well. Also, he says a lot about mysteries, in a heavy, German sort of way, and I’ll still trying to finish my book proposal on that. Anyway, I think I’ll serialize a draft of my paper in progress – maybe after we’re done with this series – and we’ll have it out then. Unless we do before then in the comments.

I don’t think we’ve really had it out yet about whether one divine person can exist alone. Do you think for all Richard says one divine person can exist alone or do you think rather that for all Richard says, though one divine person can’t exist alone, i.e. there must be another thing or person, there needn’t be another divine person? Do you buy into perfect-being theology arguments at all?

Don’t tease us! Let’s see those conference posts, and that church talk!

So in chapter 14, Richard realizes his discussion has been diffuse and rambly (like our posts), and he wants to summarize his arguments more clearly.

Maybe we can help him be more concise – he’s really urging that two things are impossible:

that there should be only one divine person

and

that there should be less than three divine persons

In ch 1-14, he’s made it clear that he wants a triple (trinitarian) argument for these claims, and so he urges that we’ll see that both of the above are impossible when we properly consider three divine features:

perfect charity

perfect happiness, and

perfect glory.

The only one divine person scenario is impossible because in it that divine person would (allegedly) lack each of the three features above. So there must be at least two.

But, it’d be greedy to hold back sharing this two-way love, and would be inconsistent with perfect love, or glory, or both. Hence, any more than one but less than three scenario is inconsistent / impossible as well.

Is that fairly accurate?

To me, he hasn’t made the sale for either yet – but for right now, I’m just trying to help people to catch up with where we’re at.