Aug 112006
Here’s another poll.
Vote. Observe. Think. Discuss. Argue. Come to blows. Agree to disagree. Find the truth of the matter together. Rejoice.
For policies, see here.
Here’s another poll.
Vote. Observe. Think. Discuss. Argue. Come to blows. Agree to disagree. Find the truth of the matter together. Rejoice.
For policies, see here.
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As I write this, the score is 19-0 in favor of “false” – I have to say, I’m really suprised. I would’ve expected at least 50% saying “true”.
My best guess is: the sample is skewed – only loyal readers are voting, who have been reading my bashing of Son-modalism…
I said true. I’m not at all convinced that the wording of the poll is such that the true answer is modalist, because it is about how God ‘eternally lives his life,’ not how he is manifested to us – that is, like the Chalcedonian theology, it insists that this is a real distinction in the nature of God and not merely in our experience of him. I would say true because I think that personhood is about conscious experience, so if ‘person’ in the creeds means anything like what I think it means with regard to human persons, then God must have three different conscious experiences, which sounds like what this poll is describing.
Do you think the wording of the poll is such as to be modalism in disguise?
Hey Kenny,
Thanks for the comment! I’d like to hear why others voted “yes” or “no” too. You’re right – the wording of the statement doesn’t imply “modalism” as commonly understood, for precisely the reason you give.
It does, however, strongly suggest modalism as I define it – see my posts on modalism and “modalism”. How? God, it suggests, is identical to a person – that’s why the personal pronoun “Him” is used of God. The persons are “ways God is”, that is, not substances, but rather so many modes of one substance, God. That’s what I call FSH modalism, which implies son modalism, which, I’ve argued in a couple of posts, is so doggone bad.
About “persons” – personhood is indeed associated with conscious experience. It would be true by definition that a person is a thing capable of conscious experience. But a person is, common sense says, a thing, not an event – it is the thing which has, which is the subject of conscious experience – a self. So if a being had three separate streams of consciousness, it wouldn’t follow that he had three persons “in” him. When I’m driving down the road, in a sense, I (a single person) enjoy at least three streams of consciousness. I may be watching the road & steering, listening to the Who on the radio, and thinking about philosophy at the same time.
Most theologians recognize the above point (that a person is a subject of consciousness, not the stream of consciousness). That’s why they often assert that the ancients had a different concept of a person (in my view, a dubious claim) or that they sometimes used the word “person” (hypostasis, persona) to refer to a role played by a person (true, but if so, that would just show that some of the Nicene creed writers were FSH modalists!)
Well, I happen to believe that persons are events (http://blog.kennypearce.net/archives/philosophy/metaphysics/philosophy_of_mind/persons_as_events.html), but I’m not 100% sure that hupostasis in the Council of Chalcedon or the Christian tradition in general is to be taken to have the same meaning as when we talk about human persons (http://blog.kennypearce.net/archives/theology/church_dogmatics/three_persons_one_substance_pa.html), so I would leave things up in the air as to whether the ‘three distinct counscious experiences’ statement was exhaustive of the threeness of God (I wouldn’t want to say that any statement about God was ‘exhaustive’, actually). However, I do think that this interpretation preserves God as both three hupostases AND three prosopa (which I interpret to mean three persons both as to hist inward nature and as to our experience of him).
Hmmm… the claim that persons are events seems all to convenient in this context. In a way, it’s designed to show that yes, FSH modalism is true, BUT that’s OK, as ALL those apparent things we call “persons” are in fact events, and not things. Rather, event-persons have things as constituents, and these three event-persons all have God as their constituent.
I wonder, though. Does this provide a worthy reply to my objection against Son-modalism? Which premise does it deny or cast doubt on, or does it claim that the proof is invalid?
I would actually deny premise (2) of the argument (meaning that I don’t accept modalism according to your definition). I would apply the relative identity solution here. I think that in order to hold orthodox Christian theology and say that the three Persons are indeed one substance we must affirm that they are totally united in will, but this won’t make them numerically identical. We also have to say that they are totally united in will in order to avoid contradiction when we attribute omnipotence to all three Persons. Only the Son experiences the cross (directly), since the three Persons are distinct conscious experiences. So this is not modalism in your sense. Rather, on this view, we could say that the three Persons are phenomena which supervene on the one Substance, God. Of course, this doesn’t tell the whole story, because it is still correct to say that the Son IS God.
By the way, regarding your argument, we ought not, in metaphysical rigor, to say that “the Son has had a loving interpersonal relationship with God,” but rather, “the Son has had a loving interpersonal relationship with the Father, and the Holy Spirit.” Certainly my theory can account for this – persons have loving personal relationships with one another, and the fact that the Persons in question share a single Substance is unproblematic here.
I want to reiterate that I don’t claim to understand the Trinity; what I do want to argue is that my speculations are orthodox in both their content and their consequences and also generally plausible.