Dale

Dale is Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Fredonia. He's been reading, thinking, and writing somewhat obsessively about Trinity doctrines since around 1998.

A Few Thoughts on Sudduth’s Open Letter (Dale)

Feb 022012
 

A few thoughts on re-reading Sudduth’s open letter explaining his conversion.

Saith Sudduth,

Krishna is the all-attractive Absolute who is manifested in the different religious traditions of the world. There is merging into impersonal Brahman. There are also distinctly theistic experiences in which the self encounters a personal God.

The ultimate being is either personal or not. Thus, it can’t be that both the aforementioned experiences are veridical, i.e. represent God as God really is.

I think Sudduth agrees; he goes on to explain that “merging” experiences are something like the devotee coming in contract with what some would call the “energies” of God. Of course, Indian philosophers like Sankara would disagree. And I don’t know why we should accept Sudduth’s claim that:

…that transcendental consciousness (the aim of nearly all religious traditions) is in fact variegated in nature.

I don’t know that there is any one general sort of experience which nearly all traditions aim at. Experiences of a loving god are not at all like the sorts of experiences monistic types profess, wherein, they say, Continue reading »

Linkage: Win Corduan compares Christ and Krishna (Dale)

Jan 292012
 

Dr. Win Corduan responds to this site (which probably appears to many as a credible source).

I’ve enjoyed a couple of Dr. Corduan’s books, in particular this one.

Update: part 2, part 3.

Seems that he’s finished a new edition of the book I mention above – cool!

Reformed Christian Philosopher Converts to Hinduism (Dale)

Jan 252012
 

Given my scholarly interests in Hinduism, I had to post a link to this story about the conversion of a Reformed Christian philosopher to a form of Hinduism.

Pictured here are Krishna and his lover Radha. I take it that in Sudduth’s form of Hinduism Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu. Other Hindus consider Krishna to be the high god himself.

There is much art celebrating the love of these two.

The story for me was a bit spoiled when I watched a documentary in which a Hindu, Indian man explained that (at least on some versions) Radha is married to another, and is Krishna’s aunt. Perhaps some would object that I’m not looking at it metaphysically enough.

In another famous episode, Krishna charms a bunch of cow-herding ladies.

I’m curious to read more about Sudduth’s conversion. How does one get from Calvin’s all-determining triune deity to Vishnu? I wonder if it is by way of fairly mainstream trinitarian modalism…

Myself, as I read Sudduth’s interesting narrative of his conversion I’m not sure where, i.e. with what sort of Christianity, he was starting from. I too have taught the Gita in an academic setting, but I have not had experiences like this:

Around 4:20am (Friday morning) September 16th, I woke suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of the name of “Krishna” being uttered in some way Continue reading »

Is the Pope a Modalist? (Dale)

Dec 312011
 

First, a few clarifications. By “modalist” I do not mean “Sabellian” or “monarchian.” (Those ancient catholics probably did hold to various forms of modalism, but the term is not a historical one, and can refer to other views which probably no ancient person held.) Nor do I mean modalism by definition to be heretical relative to orthodox/catholic creeds. What I mean is that at least one of these – Father, Son, Spirit – is a mode of the one God, in some sense a way that God is. That last phrase is deliberately ambiguous.

In his recent Christmas sermon the Pope said:

In all three Christmas Masses, the liturgy quotes a passage from the Prophet Isaiah, which describes the epiphany that took place at Christmas in greater detail: “A child is born for us, a son given to us and dominion is laid on his shoulders; and this is the name they give him: Wonder-Counsellor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace. Wide is his dominion in a peace that has no end” (Is 9:5f.). … A child, in all its weakness, is Mighty God. A child, in all its neediness and dependence, is Eternal Father. …

God has appeared – as a child. It is in this guise that he pits himself against all violence and brings a message that is peace. (emphases and link added)

This last phrase, X has appeared as S, is ambiguous. It could mean Continue reading »

Merry Christmas (Dale)

Dec 252011
 

Pictured here is Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone (a.k.a. St. Francis of Assisi, d. 1226 ) – my photo of a 19th c. statue from southern Arizona, probably well worn from processions and general fondling. I understand that he started, or at least popularized the building of manger scenes.

I remember reading his early biographies some years ago. I never could decide what to think: whether he was extremely holy, mentally ill, or both. Once a well known Christian philosopher who works in medieval philosophy described St. Francis to me as “a stinker” – I think the meaning was a sort of drama queen or manipulator. So that’s another option. ;-) But I remain perplexed.

Went to a Christmas eve service tonight. At one point the pastor said that the incarnation – that God became a human being – makes no sense to us, yet at some level we – i.e. all we Christians – believe it. If I were less tired, or in a different mood, this would induce a whole series of rants/lectures from me. But, not tonight. I will just say: I am grateful that God sent us his only Son, the perfect representation of him and sure way to him.

After the jump: another pic taken at the same place as the Francis pic. This time, someone indisputably both holy and sane, also celebrated Catholic-style. Merry Christmas! Continue reading »

books 25% off (Dale)

Dec 042011
 

Just in time for Christmas: 25% off at trinities books. Use the coupon code: BUYMYBOOK305. Coupon expires December 14, 2011. $50 Max Savings.  Update: misc. daily coupons up till Christmas. Some notable reprints, in no particular order:

Rush 2.0 and Rush 3.0 (Dale)

Nov 302011
 

(continued) Unbeknownst to Brian and Rich, powerful aliens from Alpha Centuri were listening in on their conversation. The aliens thought it a shame that Rush was not a musician. After some discussion, they decided to make a band which was otherwise just like Rush, but which was itself, or rather, himself, a musician – a power trio who was a virtuoso. For starters, they copied the patterns of Peart, Lee, and Lifeson, ensuring they could duplicate their musical abilities. Then, they set about making a power-trio-man.

It seemed to them that Lee was the font of Rush. So first they created the new Lee. But they made him with an unstoppable urge to rock, and a power, like theirs, to create things from nothing. He automatically gave rise to Continue reading »

Meeting Rush (Dale)

Nov 292011
 

“Is this your first Rush concert?”

“Yes, I’m so excited.”

Rich and Brian had been talking about this for months. Like geeky hard rock fans worldwide, they had long been in awe of Neal Peart’s furious and precise drumming, Geddy Lee’s dancing bass and soaring vocals, and the rich textures and screams of Alex Lifeson’s electric guitar. This was their first Rush concert, and they crowded towards the entrance with thousands of other fans, many decked out in concert t-shirts.

But Rich and Brian had an edge over nearly all of them: backstage passes. “I can’t wait to meet him,” said Rich.

“Who?”

“Rush.”

Brian gave him a strange look but said nothing. Continue reading »

follow trinities on Facebook and/or Google+ (Dale)

Nov 272011
 

I’m not a big social media person, and probably never will be. But I realize that this is where a lot of people spend a lot of their time online.

Here’s a quick guide to including this blog in your social media life:

  • Want to see links to new trinities posts on Facebook? Just “Subscribe” to me once you’ve found my profile (don’t send me  a “friend” request unless I know you fairly well).
  • Use Google+? If you add me to one of your “Circles” there, it’ll let me know, and I”ll add you a group I send trinities updates to.
  • Did you think a post here was interesting? Share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. Look for the colorful little “Sociable” icons after the phrase “Be Sociable, Share!”
  • Finally, if you use a newsfeed reader, the RSS 2.0 feed link you need is always on the right hand side of the blog, part way down.

two scholars on the concept of monotheism (Dale)

Nov 272011
 

At the blog The Time Has Been Shortened, interviews with Dr. Nathan MacDonald and Dr. Michael S. Heiser.

I read most of MacDonald’s Deuteronomy and the Meaning of ‘Monotheism’. I found it helpful, but had some fundamental disagreements with it. Those another time.

The two have very different views of the OT & the issue of monotheism. To oversimplfy, MacDonald thinks that for a long time, Jews were polytheistic, then they became monotheists of a sort and changed older polytheistic OT texts to fit their new views. In contrast, Heiser thinks that all along they believed YHWH to be unique, although many could be called “elohim.” This is a very interesting disagreement, but  I won’t join the fray here.

Just a couple of comments.

Yes, monotheism is the belief that there there exists exactly one god. This sounds silly to say, but this has been denied repeatedly as of late.

Contra MacDonald’s first answer in the interview, the only real unclarity in this is what counts as a god, i.e. the concept of godhood.

The important issue here is the idea of monotheism, not the word “monotheism.” Yes, it is a fairly recent term, but I would argue, a helpful one – at least, once we make clear what is meant by the term “god.”

Heiser says, 

I don’t care for the modern definition as someone who accepts the Judeo-Christian canon.

Eh… how would accepting the authority of the Bible tell you that “monotheism” is or is not a helpful term? Continue reading »

back in the saddle (Dale)

Nov 262011
 

Have finally come up for air, in the home stretch of a very busy semester.

Hope ya’ll like the new blog theme… haven’t quite tweaked it to my satisfaction, but I think it is close.

Should be posting in the next few weeks on various themes.

 

Prothero on Christianity, Jesus, and the Trinity (Dale)

Sep 272011
 

Stephen Prothero, of Boston University, is the rare professor who is to a household name and face. He’s been on all sorts of media, and is an able spokesman for the cause of religious literacy. Preach it!

His latest book, God is Not One, is possibly the best introduction to a variety of religious traditions for the general reader. It’s well-written, informative, humorous, apt at comparing religions, and I would say pretty fair. I recommend it overall. The book is worth it just for his bashing of the soft-headed pluralism that infects so many popular books on religion. (Ch.1)

Less positively, Prothero’s outlook on religion is colored in many ways by the fact that he is an ex-Christian, having been raised as a mainline church. He sports of whole range of attitudes I see as deriving from this, or from this plus our present intellectual scene. Also, it strikes me that his childhood faith he left behind was just that. In any case, he has a nice way of wearing his inclinations on his sleeve. An author should be opinionated.

Here I want to ask: Is Prothero both fair and accurate in how he presents Christian belief? He says:

…the Christianity… of my childhood… was all about the doctrine of the Incarnation, which to me was as mysterious as adult life in general. According to this core Christian teaching, at the fulcrum of world history God took on the form of a helpless baby, born of a frightened young woman and held in the rough hands of a carpenter. “What if God was one of us?” asks the Joan Osborne pop song. Christianity responds, “He was!” (p. 68)

Well, is.

Again, at one level,  Continue reading »

A movie with another Trinity: The Ramayan (1986) in 88 minutes (Dale)

Sep 052011
 

Ram, avatar of Vishnu

For those who enjoyed my previous posts (here and here) on avatars in Hinduism, here’s something I’ve done recently for a class I’m teaching – excerpts of the long (78 part!) ultra-hit Indian tv series Ramayan into movie form. (Here’s the whole series.) Yes, I watched the whole thing, over a couple of months, so you don’t have to. Grab some popcorn and check it out. My notes in the comment below will help you to bridge the plot-gaps.

This doesn’t directly have to do with Christian theology. My interest here was to illustrate the Hindu tradition for my students, specifically a popular, present-day, devotional Vaishnavite form.

Still, one can fruitfully apply philosophical analysis and comparison with Christian theology here:

  • What’s presented here, despite appearances, is supposed to ultimately be monotheism. The one god is Vishnu, and the other gods and goddesses are just manifestations of him, him acting in different forms. This is clear when at one point the three functions of creation, preservation, and destruction are assigned to Vishnu. It’s modalism on a massive scale.
  • The series asserts the primacy of Vishnu, even while bending over backwards to exalt Shiva as a great god and proper object of worship (and also the Great Goddess). He’s a perfect self, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, a se.
  • Ram (aka Rama, pictured here – but in the movie, he’s not blue) is Vishnu’s manifestation as a human being, Vishnu incarnate, or in their terms, a descent (avatar) of Vishnu. The screenplay reflects the tensions Continue reading »

Comment on a Poll – an inconsistent triad (Dale)

Aug 192011
 

The poll below is an interesting one. (The bogus one to the left is only fun, but not interesting.) As I write this post, it is still current, and is available for voting at the upper right of the main blog page.

Which of these is false?

  1. The Christian God is a self.
  2. The Christian God is the Trinity.
  3. The Trinity is not a self.

One option is to vote that none are false, since all are true. As I write this, 27% have picked this option. But this is a poor pick. This “is” here is the “is” of numerical identity throughout. Given this, it is impossible that all three be true; they are demonstrably inconsistent. (The logical form is: 1. g=s, 2. g=t, 3. -(t=s).)  At least one must be false.

  • If 1 & 2, then not-3. If this God is a self, and is the Trinity, and it must be false that the Trinity is not a self.
  • If 1 & 3 then not-2. If God’s a self, and the Trinity isn’t, then it must be false that God just is the Trinity.
  • If 2 & 3 then not-1. If God’s the Trinity, but is not a self, then it is false that the Christian God is a self.

Why then do 27% opt for inconsistency (affirming all three)? Continue reading »

A few thoughts on generation and time (Dale)

Aug 172011
 
A reader emailed to ask me what I thought about the classic patristic doctrine of “eternal begetting.”
When this reader objected to someone that any process of begetting  must be temporal, with a before and an after, he was told that this was an illicit use of “finite logic.”
A few thoughts in response:
  • People who talk of “finite logic” generally don’t know what a logic is. I think what they mean to say is rather something about our finite, human intellectual powers, e.g. to think, believe, know, understand.
  • Of course, we can only use the powers we have! Continue reading »

Linkage: Did God the Son change in becoming incarnate? (Dale)

Aug 152011
 

“Classic” (i.e. mainstream catholic, Platonic) Christian theism holds that God is timeless, and so incapable of any change whatever.

And they add: the Word is God, and the Word became flesh.

Sounds like a change, doesn’t it? First, the Word is simply divine, and a moment later, he’s entered into a “hypostatic union” with a “complete human nature.”

Reformed philosophical theologian James Anderson takes a crack at this one. (HT: Triablogue.) I much like his set-up. I’m less keen on the solution. Short answer: it’s a mystery (apparent contradiction). You’ll have to read his post to see why I chose this pic.

A few quick comments: first, I’m with Continue reading »

On an alleged counterexample to Leibniz’s Law – Part 2 (Dale)

Aug 092011
 

(click for image credit)

In his comment on my previous post, Brandon points out that he doesn’t assert the case described there to be a counterexample. Rather, he was wondering why it isn’t a counterexample; he was probing to see my response.

Fair enough. I’ve left the title of the post as is just for continuity with part 1.

The case Brandon described, was an omniscient God, who is both subject and object of knowledge of himself. God as knower is subject of knowledge but not object. But God as object is what is known, and not the subject of knowledge. So, don’t we here have something which is and isn’t intrinsically some way (being self-knowing) at a time? If so, the principle is false.

My response is that there Continue reading »

On an alleged counterexample to Leibniz’s Law – Part 1 (Dale)

Aug 052011
 

In a recent post I put forward my own preferred version of “Leibniz’s Law,” or more accurately, the Indiscernibility of Identicals. It’s a bit complicated, so as to get around what are some apparent counterexamples to the simpler principle which is commonly held.

Aside for non-philosophers: philosophers are usually after universal principles, truths which hold in all cases, rather than mere non-universal generalizations, i.e. rough rules of thumb which have exceptions. (An example of the latter: Boys love trucks.) Thus, when a philosophers makes a (universal) claim, other philosophers come along and try to show that it is false with “counterexamples” – real, or even merely possible, examples which show the principle to be false (as it doesn’t apply to them). For example, if someone says that all Texans love tacos, a counterexample to this would be a person who is from Texas and doesn’t like them. Just one counterexample is enough to show a universal claim to be false. When provided with a counterexample, of course, one will often refine, as it were, the original claim (e.g. All native Texans love tacos, or All Texans who appreciate Tex-Mex food love tacos) and the game goes on. This is all in the interest of discovering together what is true and what is false. (In my example, of course, those “refinements” would admit of easy counterexamples too.)

So my principle said, to paraphrase, that for any x and y, x just is (=) y, only if they don’t ever intrinsically differ. (I put this in terms of one having a “mode” at a time if and only if the other also has that mode at that time. Others would call these “intrinsic properties.”)

Here our friend, philosopher and blogger Brandon offered a counterexample, Continue reading »

GOD THE BABY – RAMA / RAM, AVATAR OF VISHNU – Reloaded (DALE)

Jul 312011
 

VishnuCould a god have been a baby?

It depends on what it takes to be a real god…

Hindus who believe in avatars, and catholic Christians say: yes, this is possible, for it has been actual.

In Hinduism, this is particularly emphasized in Vaishnavite traditions, in Christianity, Roman Catholicism.

They of course differ about which god this was.

For other Christians, the answer is no.

In a previous post, I commented that there is something pleasing about the idea that a mighty god stooped to become a small, weak baby.

This time: story of Vishnu incarnate has been updated.

My edit, with comments, after the break. Continue reading »

Linkage: Who do you say I am? (Dale)

Jul 292011
 

One answer: the Messiah.

Another answer: here.  (HT: kingdomready.)

Evidently, Fred Sanders isn’t the only theological cartoonist out there. But I do prefer his cuddly lecturing bear Dr. Doctrine.

Commenters: please link your best God, Trinity, or Jesus related cartoons. Only requirements: that they be at least mildy amusing, and not too offensive.

Re: “Herman & Nudix“. True story: in Christian college c. 1990, some yahoo buddies and I ran an imaginary person for Student Association President. Made up a hilarious trifold campaign handout, and other silly promotional materials. He got 4% of the vote. His name: Herman Ootics (full name: Herman J. Ootics III). Yeah, some theology nerds got a kick out of that name. I should post the awesome pic we used some time.

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