Thanks for the comment! Yeah, what you suggest is possible. It commits us to what I think is an odd and hard to accept historical story, which goes as follows:

The anonymous writer of the creed didn’t grasp the truths conveyed by his works. Nevertheless, he thereby expressed profound truths, the mean of which could be grasped by humans only centuries later (until Geach, or IF Geach is correct, until Aquinas). This wasn’t, of course, a matter of luck. Rather, God guided the anonymous author in what he wrote; God was in fact the author in a more primary sense. When our human writer composed the Creed, God himself was expressing what at that time only He understood.

My problem with this, is that it seems to remove the Quicunque from the realm of human speculation, and place it in the category of a divinely inspired writing. I can’t bring myself to believe that.

Another problem with your suggestion is that we can confess words we don’t understand, but we can’t really believe what they express. But the doctrine of the Trinity it supposed to be an important, action-guiding belief. If I confess “XYZ”, i.e. that those words express some truth or other, it is hard to see how this can guide my actions and choices. Maybe one could assert that we understand part of the content of “XYZ”, and that’s good enough…

This account nicely explains how even small children can sincerely recite a creed, even one that contains words that they do not understand. Augustine talks about the simple believers not understanding what they believe, and this may be a case like that. This also explains why people can sincerely pray in a sacred language (e.g., Hebrew or ecclesiastical Latin) that they do not actually understand.

If this is correct, then the authors of a creed do not need to have a semantics for the terms in the creedal claims. All they need to have is the belief that a good semantics is possible.

In other words, even if the author(s) of the pseudo-athanasian creed did not believe in relative identity, if the hypothesis relative identity provides a reasonable semantics for the creed that renders the creed non-contradictory, then this is all that is needed for defending the creed.

I am not endorsing relative identity as the only way to make sense of this creed. I just want to point out that the fact that the authors didn’t know about relative identity does not rule out the possibility that relative identity is the right rendering of their claims.

To worship Jesus as God is idolatry, because he is not God.

As the King of the coming Kingdom of God (whom God has given all authority) he is worthy of praise and admiration. He can be ‘worshipped’ (in biblical language, but not in our language today) like Joseph, David, Solomon, and such were worshipped.

In other words, I think reading it as a ‘speculation’ is entirely the wrong way to read it. There is nothing in the text nor in the way it is usually used that suggests it should be treated this way. The text itself presents itself simply as a brief account of tradition on certain key points. The strongest ecclesiastical affirmation of it, that of the Council of Florence, treats it simply as a summary of much more important things. And the most common usage of it is not as a theological text but as part of public prayer. These do make the question of its consistency under various interpretations an interesting one; but if it’s only in the ballpark, or if it has an infelicitous expression or two, that isn’t much of a criticism against it. It would be absurd, for instance, to take a basic primer on government from government class, and complain that it lacks a rigorous analysis of constitutional law, or that if taken too literally it leads to an inconsistent view. It’s a primer; if you’re taking it as a sophisticated account, you’re misreading it, even if it turns out, in fact, more sophisticated than some of the criticisms let on. Likewise here: if it’s best taken as a summary, it’s a mistake to read it as a speculation, because summaries aren’t venues for speculation. I do think, as I said, that the Quicunque Vult is more sophisticated than most of its critics will admit. I also think that this is something of a moot point. The value of a summary is not that it is a sophisticated account, but that it puts in small space what a sophisticated account would have to put in much larger space. This is not a principle of charity but one of common sense; and when we use it, I don’t think there’s much of a basis for coming down hard on the Creed Called Athanasian.

So, in other words, my point is that, while I agree that it occupies much too large a place in contemporary discussions about the Trinity, I don’t think it can be simply dismissed without carefully reflecting on the question of whether it is being misread in the arguments for its dismissal. And I think defenders of it have plenty of room to argue that there is a better way to read its claims, and a great deal of freedom as regards which direction they can take this argument.

The reason I asked if you considered the Creed to be divinely revealed (or something like it) is that I was trying to understand why many people are so infinitely patient with it, tolerating its problems unresolved for so long, and expending massive amounts of intellectual energy to come up with a genuinely new interpretation of it. One doesn’t treat failed speculations like that.

If I understand you, you see the document as a well-motivated and highly sophisticated theory, which ain’t necessarily true or even possibly true, but is nonetheless… helpful as a route into a certain line of thinking – an admittedly inaccurate “summary” of much Patristic intellectual labor.

To be honest, I just can’t bring myself to take such a hyper-sophisticated stance on something which doesn’t seem true. If the research project it’s a part of is fruitful, then isn’t it best to ditch it, and in its place substitute something which seems true?

To put it differently, even the principle of charity has its limits. After we’ve done our best, some documents are just internally inconsistent, inconsistent with something else we know, or graspable but implausible, or just dark and ungraspable.

Do you hold that it is idolatry to worship Jesus? Or a permissible polytheism? Or is it OK to worship him, but not to worship him as God? Or not as a god?

Just curious.

To worship more than one person as God is polytheism. The definition of monotheism means that you worship one person as God.

Luke,

I happen to highly admire NT Wright and Ben Witherington (though I haven’t read a complete work of either) – the tidbits I do get show that they are not afraid to challenge convention (not the least of which is going to to heaven when you die). I know NT Wright is sympathetic to my position regarding Christology. Though I’m not sure about Witherington. In any case an even more sympathetic person – Dr Colin Brown of Fuller Seminary, where he teaches christology and systematic theology – that I know of. Bart Ehrman (as wacky as he is sometimes) would fully be in my corner (from an NT textual perspective). JAT Robinson (another Brit) would also be sympathetic. But ultimately it isn’t in any of their hands – it is in my hands and your hands.

So when Jesus says to the Pharisees that they are called God, what does that mean?

“And we can try to ignore the long post-biblical theological tradition, but that seems impossible to me to do. In any case, no one really does it, that I’ve ever seen.”

You asked me to let you know when I started my Trinity on Trial series. Well, the first post is up.

I have nothing against the traditional historical-critical method. But I don’t think agreeing that we need to do good critical history and sociology and form study and whatever else is going to be much help. These methods yield very different results, depending on whose hands they’re in; NT scholars like N.T. Wright and Ben Witherington are light years apart in their reconstructions from the likes of Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan.

So I’m all for historical criticism in the right hands. How do we decide which hands are the right ones, which reconstruction is closest to reality? I tend to think that my own inclination to find someone like Wright or Witherington more plausible than, say, Mack is (more than anything else) a product of my prior acceptance of a more-or-less traditional view of Xianity. If I’m being honest, it’s my previous faith commitments that drive my assessment of different historical-critical proposals.

This doesn’t mean I can’t have those commitments challenged; I do have them challenged, and sometimes I give up certain beliefs I previously held dear. But it’s usually a confluence of factors that prompts this change. I see that maybe the text isn’t as clear as I thought, or under-determines a certain conclusion; then I’m influenced by philosophical or theological factors in such a way that I find myself holding a different belief than I previously did.

Anyways, what do you propose?

luke

So then, choosing the hermenutic should be discussed. What do you have against the current historical-critical modern exegesis methods? What would you propose instead?

It would be nice if we could just hold up the products of the tradition against Scripture and get an unambiguous declaration on their accuracy (or veridicality, or whatever). In principle I’m all for it; in practice, I don’t think it’s possible.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to get a verdict on these matters out of Scripture without employing some hermeneutic or other. So far as I can tell, hermeneutics always presuppose substantive philosophical or theological commitments, and thus different hermeneutics are going to yield different results. Our conclusions about which aspects of the tradition align w/ Scripture are thus going to be strongly influenced by our prior, extra-biblical commitments; if we can’t agree on them, we won’t agree on what parts of the tradition to keep.

No doubt we’ll want to say that our extra-biblical commitments, despite the fact that they can’t be extracted verbatim from Scripture, nevertheless are supported by and plausible on Scripture itself–that they find inferential support therein. Then we can argue (if we want) about which hermeneutic is *better* supported by Scripture itself. But I also don’t think it’s illegitimate to bring philosophical commitments to bear on this endeavour. If we think the existence of an omnipotent, morally perfect God requires the denial of, say, theological determinism, then that might legitimately influence the way we read certain passages of Scripture.

I tend to agree that tradition isn’t as important as good biblical exegesis–informed by a sensible hermenutic–or theological or philosophical plausibility. But I do think tradition carries some weight. After all, Scripture itself always comes to us as part of a tradition, as redaction criticism shows; the canon wasn’t formed in a vacuum. Anyways, cheers!

luke

Like I previously stated, defensible according to what? I would have to think Biblical exegesis. And Biblical exegesis demands us to stay within the confines of the environment in which it was written. We must interpret Jesus as his hearers would have interpreted him.