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:

• Moses Stuart, Letters on the Eternal Generation of the Son of God. - leading 19th c. American evangelical Bible scholar and theologian takes aim at what he thinks is a mistaken speculation, long before this was cool.
• Nathaniel Lardner, Lardner on the Trinity. - some short works by a super-heavyweight patristic scholar and one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time. Makes a case for humanitarian unitarian theology against various rivals.
• Thomas Belsham, A Calm Inquiry Into The Scripture Doctrine Concerning The Person of Christ. - unique, non-polemical but opinionated survey of various christologies, ultimately arguing for humanitarian christology. Very useful.
• Joseph Pohle, The Divine Trinity: A Dogmatic Treatise. - a thorough but pretty readable Roman Catholic account of trinitarian doctrine; a good place to start in sorting out dark talk of subsistent relations, perichoresis, eternal generation, and so on. Or, if you want to know about the hypostatic union, there’s this.
• Joseph Priestley,  A History of the Corruptions of Christianity – interesting polemic by bold but reckless polymath Joseph Priestley. Not always historically accurate, but worth a read.
• Samuel Clarke’s The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity & Related Writings. - a lost classic by one of the greatest philosophical theologians of the early 18th century. This Anglican minister puts forward a strong case for subordinationist unitarianism based on scripture and the pre-Nicene “fathers.” Classifies and intelligently discusses all New Testament passages that have to do with the Trinity.
  
• William Christie, Dissertations on the Unity of God. - essays by a serious, talented amateur theologian and sometime minister who moved from trinitarianism, to subordinationist unitarianism, to humanitarian unitarianism.
• David James, A Short View of the Tenets of Tritheists, Sabellians, Trinitarians, Arians, and Socinians. - a short, irenic survey of various Christian theologies, in the end making a case for mutual tolerance, and for subordinationist unitarianism. Here’s a post with some quotes.
• William Jones,  In Defense of the Trinity. - popular 18th c.  trinitarian apologist, rebutting several unitarian opponents. Often not well argued, but it is interesting to see what he does and does not say. Some of these went through many editions, well into the 19th c.
• Thomas Emlyn, The Works of Mr. Thomas Emlyn - short controversial theological works by a virtuous, careful, thoughtful Christian who literally went to jail because of his convictions. The included An Humble Enquiry into the Scripture Account of Jesus Christ is an amazing little book. Includes an account of his life and works by his son.
• Edward Stillingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity - very sophisticated trinitarian apologetic by prominent public intellectual, Anglican bishop, and theologian. Provides a mysterian defense of catholic trinitarian formulas against unitarian charges of unintelligibility and poor fit with the Bible, rebutting various late 17th c. “Socinian” sources.
• Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Discrepancy Between the Sabellian and Athanasian Method of Representing the Doctrine of the Trinity - a short but dense work by Schleiermacher on ancient “monarchian” theologies – one of the very best things I’ve read on that obscure subject. Translated by Moses Stuart.
• John Wilson, Scripture Proofs and Scriptural Illustrations of Unitarianism. - amazingly comprehensive source, in some ways summarizing a lot of unitarian-trinitarian arguments of the early modern era. Anyone who thinks unitarian theologies are based on off-the-wall, obviously wrongheaded misreadings of the Bible, or on “rationalism” should give this a read!

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? What matters, I think, would be theoretical considerations like classification and explanation. The question is: can the term earn its keep?

Heiser again,

The biblical writers used the term elohim to refer to half a dozen figures or entities in the unseen spiritual world (Yahweh, the elohim of Yahweh’s council, “demons” [Deut 32:17], the disembodied human dead [1 Sam 28:13], and angels [at least I’d argue for that on the basis of the plural verb in Gen 35:7 and its referent point]). The fact that they do that should tell us loudly and clearly that that they did not associate the term elohim with a specific set of attributes.

Oh, to the contrary – attributes implied would be: selfhood, being normally invisible, being powerful, being interested in what various humans are doing. What he means to say, is that “god” for the ancient Hebrews was not a kind-term, not assumed to refer to whatever has some metaphysical essence. That is correct, and I think the point applies far beyond ancient Hebrews and the term elohim.

We do that reflexively as moderns—we use “g-o-d” thinking of the singular being we know as the God of the Bible.

No, this is a different point than the previous, but again, he’s right. The point could be put thusly: we use “God” as a name or title for the God of Abraham (etc.).

Elohim is what I like to call a “place of residence” term. It doesn’t tell me what a thing is in terms of attributes; it tells me the proper domain of a thing. All elohim are members of the unseen spiritual world, their place of residence.

I don’t think that’s part of the meaning of “god,” but rather an image or assumption that may accompany it… But again, by his own words, it does imply that the bearer has certain attributes – what he means to say is that it doesn’t attribute any essence to the bearer, or assume that any being to whom the term applies has an certain essence (roughly, defining features).

He does believe monotheism, and that monotheism is assumed in all parts of the Bible. It’s just that they would deny that there was only one elohim, even while holding that one of those elohim was unique.

But I didn’t get into the complexities of this story. It’s a fascinating one, if you at all enjoy textual detective puzzles.

I found some excellent recent posts by Sean Finnegan, posted at kingdomready.org. The subtitle of the post is a red herring, but the article is well done and informative. Check them out:

• Part 1 deals with the Latin textual tradition.
• Part 2 discusses the Greek evidence, and the odd case of Erasmus.

I think he overreaches a bit at the end; yes, many catholics c. 1500-1900 wanted these verses kept in – they were just too convenient, and it was an embarrassment that they’d so long been in the received version, only to be taken out in these latter days (unless you’re Greek Orthodox!).

But it’s unclear why they were composed in the first place. I mean, how exactly would this combat the “Arians’s” theology? Why wouldn’t they want to say that the heavenly Three are “one”? It doesn’t say one god; they could be one in testimony.

And if we’re now right about the original text, how could one read that as a statement about the Trinity (just ’cause there’s three?) so as to compose a marginal note about the three in heaven? By what mental leap could one go from the eathly trio to a heavenly one? Maybe I underestimate the patristic-era imagination, though… it has surprised me many times.

So I don’t see any big polemical point here for unitarianism. I say, bravo to the intellectually honest trinitarian scholars who smoked out this rat, despite the inconvenience. Even Erasmus, though he caved.

It is true that unitarians of various sorts were out in front on this one. (e.g. Clarke nukes it on p. 121.)

• someone: Jesus is God.
• me: You mean, Jesus is God himself?
• someone: Yeah.
• me: Don’t you think something is true of Jesus, that isn’t true of God, and vice-versa?
• someone: Yes. e.g. God sent his Son. Jesus didn’t. God is a Trinity. Jesus is not a Trinity.
• me: Right. Then in your view, Jesus is not God.
• someone: But he is.
• me: So, you think he is, and he ain’t?!
• someone: [silent puzzlement]

In this post, I want to explain the part in italics. First: a point of clarification. The second and third lines are important. When many say “Jesus is God” they just mean that in some sense or other Jesus is “divine.” (This could mean a lot of things, depending on one’s assumed metaphysics.) But this sort of person (line 3) understands Jesus to be “divine” in the sense of just being one and the same as God – that Jesus is God himself – one person, so just one (period).

In the italicized line, I’m applying  something called Leibniz’s Law, or the Indiscernibility of Identicals. I sometimes put this roughly as, some x and some y can be numerically identical only if whatever is true of one is true of the other. That’s a sloppy way to put it.

In logic, a more precise way of stating it (used e.g. by Richard Cartwright) is:

(x)(y)(z) ( x= y only if (z is a property of x if and only if z is a property of y))

Literally: for any three things whatever, the first is identical to the second only if the third is a property of the first just in case the third is a property of the second.

The basic intuition is that things are as they are, and not some other way. So if x just is (is numerically the same as) y, then it can’t be that x and y qualitatively differ. This seems undeniable.

There are a few problems, though, with the above formula, which any person trained in philosophy may spot.

First, don’t things change? e.g. Last year you weighed 200, and now you weight 210 lbs. But does this mean that the you of 2010 is not numerically the same as the you of 2011? Ridiculous! Things can qualitatively change while remaining numerically the same. That’s just common sense.

Second, what about this property: being believed by Laverne to be innocent. Suppose that Casey Anthony’s lawyer mounted this defense:

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury. I submit that we can be sure that Caylee’s killer is not one and the same as my client Ms. Anthony, for the killer has a feature she does not: being believed by Ms. Laverne Shirley of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to be guilty of murder. I’ve got Ms. Shirley right here, so you can just ask her.

This would move the defendant to tears, as it is such an obviously stupid defense.

Strictly, then, there are two sorts of counterexamples to the principle I stated above.

I haven’t concerned myself much with this so far in print or online. I’m more concerned with the fundamental intuition (that is, the evidence) imprecisely gestured at above, than I am with coming up with a counter-example-proof universal principle. When arguing about God and Jesus, I just stick with differences which are at a time (or eternal) and which are intrinsic, or which are relational, but don’t have to do with intentional attitudes of third-parties, like beliefs. (I take mental states or actions or stances to be intrinsic to the self whose they are.)

Thus, one of my favorite examples has been that one night in the Garden of Gethsemane: at that time, Jesus didn’t want Jesus to be crucified (he was asking that this may be averted, if God would so permit) yet God did want Jesus to be crucified (that was his plan all along). Or again: if you think God is triune – that would be intrinsic to God and eternal – either something which holds at all times, or in timeless eternity. If one thing is always triune and the other ain’t – we’re not talking about one thing here.

But here’s a crack at a principle which is necessary, exceptionless, and self-evident: sadly, it requires 4 variables. It requires in addition just one 3-place predicate W (a, b, c). This is to be read: a is a way b is at c, or a is a mode of b at c, or a is how b intrinsically is at c. Here then, is my preferred version of Leibniz’s Law:

(w)(x)(y)(z) ( x = y -> (W(z, x, w) <-> W(z, y, w)))

Literally: for any four things, the second and third are identical only if the fourth is a way the second is at the first just in case the fourth is a way the third is at the first.

Dang, that’s ugly. Perhaps better to use the variables:

For any w, x , y, and z: x just is y only if: z is a way x is at w if and only if z is a way y is at w.

Call these, from left to right: z, y, x. (click for image credit)

This gets around the two sorts of problems noted. This principle would not let us infer that I’m not numerically the same as my slimmer, younger self. Nor would it license a foolish juror to exonerate Anthony on the grounds that the killer, but not she, has the feature being thought by Laverne to be guilty, for that phrase does not pick out any intrinsic way Casey Anthony ever has been, is, or will be.

The predicate W (_,_,_) can be interpreted in different ways. Not believing in properties, but believing in primitive modes of things, I like to understand it as above. But if you like, interpret W in terms of property-instantiations (if you believe in universal properties) or individual properties (tropes) if you believe in those. It is just meant to refer to things we’re all familiar with, like my being happy now, that ball’s present redness, etc.

It seems to me that this formula captures the intuition gestured at above, and that it is self-evident – something a normal, adult human knows to be true upon coming to understand what it means.

Dear reader: you understand it, with a bit of effort, no? And so, does it not have that obvious shine of truth to it that this has:

For any x, y, and z: if x is bigger than y, and y is bigger than z, then x is bigger than z.

You know this to be true not just of the cartoon here, but of any three things there are or could be, right?

And so, if you’re very sure this version of Leibniz’s Law is true, you should be as sure that Jesus and God are two, as you are that they have ever, do, will, or just could differ (be different ways). You too are now a dastardly “denier of the divinity of Christ,” but only in the sense described at the top of this post. Whether Christ is divine in some other sense, e.g. possessing the divine nature, or being the member of a perfect society, is another question.

Back to the conversation above, last two lines. You think them to have differed. Yet, things which have differed can’t be numerically one. Ergo, in a sense, you already believe them to differ. Or at least, you’re already in a sense committed to their non-identity. If you don’t believe this outright, you should, once it is pointed out that it follows by a self-evident truth from things you do believe. You then have a choice – revise those old beliefs, so they no longer imply this new one, or accept this new belief, and adjust other beliefs according. I suggest that your beliefs about = and Leibniz’s Law are not good candidates for revision, though.

Interestingly, I never have these sorts of conversations with people who understand what identity is and believe there are truths about it – i.e. philosophers, philosophy majors, theologians who have studied a bit of philosophy and logic. They simply accept that Jesus and God aren’t one and the same (aren’t identical), and go on to theorize accordingly.

Dear philosophical readers: can you provide a counterexample to my version of Leibniz’s Law?

Another sort of review, quoting the above, with some comments.

Latest entry here, with my comment. Can’t keep up with all the posts.

A “tale”? Man, I was hoping for a better story.

Am I foolish for responding? Quite possibly. I hope not. I care passionately about these issues and have infinite patience for discussing them (though not infinite time); the danger is getting sucked in to one of these.

Update: yes, foolish. I really have to listen more to cynical-Dale. This would’ve helped too.

Last time I said that I thought Waterland was a social-mysterian-trinitarian. But I’m not so sure about the “social” part! He’s very unclear on whether the “Persons” are selves. They’re different somethings, in any case. But in this series, I’m sticking to an exegetical issue.

Here are excerpts of Waterland’s second salvo about the “only God” texts.

[Clarke] had produced John 17:3, 1 Cor. 8:6, Eph. 4:6, which prove that the Father is styled, sometimes, the one God, or only true God; and that he is the God of the Jews, of Abraham, etc. I asked how those texts proved that the Son was not? You say… “very plainly… Can the Son of the God of Abraham (Acts 3:13) be himself that God of Abraham, who glorified his Son?” But why must you here talk of that God, as if it were in opposition to this God, supposing two Gods; that is, supposing the thing is question. …I tell you that this divine Person is not that divine Person, and yet both are one God… (A Second Vindication of Christ’s Divinity in Waterland’s Vindications of Christ’s Divinity, 422-3, original italics, bold added, punctuation slightly modernized)

This is wheel-spinning. Clarke does, and Waterland does not take the passages in question to identity (assert to be numerically identical) the Father and Yahweh.

Clarke had asked whether Waterland thought that the term “Father” in these texts actually includes, i.e. refers to, the Son as well. Waterland clarifies,

…we do not say, that in these, or the like instances, both persons are included in the term Father; but that the exclusive terms, alone, or only, are not to be so rigorously interpreted, as to leave no room for tacit exceptions. To make this a little plainer to you.

Rev. 19:12 it is said to the Son, “He had a name written, which oudeis, no person, knew but himself.” This was not said in opposition to the Father, or as excluding him from that knowledge; for, it is still tacitly supposed,  that he knew as much as the Son… (A Second Vindication of Christ’s Divinity in Waterland’s Vindications of Christ’s Divinity, 424, original italics, bold added, punctuation slightly modernized)

Clarke pounds the table, insisting that if something is the only F, then there can’t also be other F’s. This is correct, and yes, it is obvious.

But Waterland is also making an important point, though he’s unable to put it clearly. This is that quantitative statements (all, none, at least one, exactly one, etc.) are always relative to some domain of entities, and this is almost never explicitly stated.

Thus, one may truly say: “There is only one redhead” when one is assuming the domain: kids in my class. Of course, it’s false that there’s just redhead in all the universe. But when the teacher asks, “How many red-haired children are here?” it is clear that the domain in which we’re quantifying is: kids in this class. So Waterland’s point is that not all quantification has to be universal, i.e. within the domain of all things whatever, a wholly unrestricted domain. So there can be “exceptions” to true “only” statements. But here’s where he’s muddled. They are not exceptions at all to the assertion, when they are outside the assumed domain.

Thus, in our classroom scenario, if a kid yelled out “What about Carrot Top?” he’d be missing the point. That is not an exception to the truth “There is only one redhead [in our class].”

And in the Revelation passage, the assumed domain should exclude the Father. There’s a background assumption, Waterland correctly points out, that God knows all. And so, if Christ is the only one who knows the name given to him, this must be the only one in the domain including all intelligent beings other than God.

Waterland thinks that Clarke cannot allow these sorts of  ”exceptions” to only-statements, and so will have trouble interpreting various passages.

But Clarke can and does. (e.g. There’s nothing God didn’t create – Clarke doesn’t think this implies, absurdly, that God created himself.) It’s just that in these instances, in the three passages above, unlike the cases Waterland gives, he’s assuming an unrestricted or maximal domain – that is, that the Father is the only God period  - not the only God in Romania, or the only God out of this set: Jimmy Carter, Yahweh, Mickey Mouse, Zeus, Hera, Elvis.

Now, concerning this issue, either Clarke or Waterland is correct; the three texts above either do or do not assume a universal domain. We’ll return to this point eventually.

 In the next post, I’ll try to parse some points Waterland makes about the Father “emphatically” or “primarily” being called “the only God.” 

Daniel Waterland (1683-1740) was by all accounts the most important disputant of Samuel Clarke about the Trinity.

Waterland spent his career at Cambridge, where he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming Vice-Chancellor, and also serving as a Chaplain to the King, and as an Anglican clergyman in a number of cities.

He had a good reputation, and was an energetic, but normally cool-headed controversial/polemical writer (aganist Clarke, and other other theological topics, against other respected men), and he gained somewhat of a reputation in Anglican circles as a defender of catholic orthodoxy.

Many, including himself, contemplating his becoming a bishop, but in 1740 he died after complications, seemingly, from surgeries on an ingrown toenail in one of his big toes! He was survived by his wife of 21 years. (His only children were his books.)

I’d describe Waterland’s views on the Trinity as social, with a liberal dose of negative mysterianism. Like Clarke, he insists that his is the ancient catholic view, and much of the dispute concerns pre-Nicene fathers. Like Clarke, he wants to stick to those fathers and to the Bible, and takes a dim view of medieval theology.

About the pre-Nicene catholic “fathers,” I’d say both Clarke and Waterland somewhat bend the material to their own ends (I mean, they tend to see those authors as supporting their view, and being perhaps more uniform than they were), but I think Waterland bends the materials more. In his view, catholics had always believed the Three to be “consubstantial” in a generic sense, yet which, somehow, together with their differences of origin, makes them but one god. Like Swinburne and Clarke, he agrees that the Father is uniquely the “font of divinity.” He continually hammers Clarke with the claim that there’s no middle ground between the one Creator and all creatures.

In this series, I’ll examine the way he deals with some favorite unitarian proof-texts, which, unitarians think plainly assert the numerical identity of the Father with the one true God, Yahweh. According to Waterland, these unitarians are making a mistake like the one I made.

You [i.e. Clarke] next cite John 17:3, 1 Cor. 8:6, Eph. 4:6, to prove, that the Father is sometimes styled the only true God; which is all that they prove. But you have not shewn that he is so called in opposition to the Son, or exclusive of him. It may be meant in opposition to idols only, as all antiquity has thought; or it may signify that the Father is primarily, not exclusively, the only true God, as the first Person of the blessed Trinity, the Root and Fountain of the other two.

You observe that “in these and many other places, the one God is the Person of the Father, in contradistinction to the Person of the Son.”

It is very certain, that the Person of the Father is there distinguished from the Person of the Son; because they are distincly named: and you may make what use you please of the observation against the Sabellians, who make but one Person of the two. But what other use you can be able to make of it, I see not; unless you can prove this negative proposition, that no sufficient reason can be assigned for styling the Father the only God, without supposing that the Son is excluded.

…As to 1 Cor. 8:6, all that can be reasonably gathered from it, is, that the Father is there emphatically styled one God; but without design to exclude the Son from being God also: as the Son is emphatically styled one Lord; but without design to exclude the Father from being Lord also. Reasons may be assigned for the emphasis in both cases; which are too obvious to need reciting.

…observe… that the discourse there, v. 4, 5, is about idols, and nominal gods and lords, which have no claim or title to religious worship. These the Father and Son are both equally distinguished from: which may insinuate at least to us, that the texts of the Old or New Testament, declaring the unity and excluding others, do not exclude the Son, “by whom are all things…” (Daniel Waterland, A Vindication of Christ’s Divinity: Being A Defence of Some Queries, Relating to Dr. Clarke’s Scheme of the Holy Trinity [1719]  in Van Mildert, ed. The Works of the Rev. Daniel Waterland, Vol. I., pp. 279-80, broken into shorter paragraphs, bold added)

Next time: Is he right about this?

I was just within earshot, pretending to read. The girl leaned into her mother, received a kiss on her forehead, and then went back the children’s section of the library. The mother returned to her book.

She was a beautiful woman, with a kind face. How sad, I thought, that all she has is her daughter. She must be a widow, or have been abandoned. Has she no living siblings, or parents? Or has the family been torn asunder by some falling out? How sad. I went back to my book, but was too blue to enjoy it.

A quarter of an hour later, a young boy approached the woman. He looked to be about five years old. She reached out knowingly to him, and he fell into her embrace.

“Jimmy, you’re my only true love,” she said.

I had misunderstood. Just because the daughter is her only true love, it didn’t follow that the son wasn’t also her only true love. They both were.

Was this a mystery, a contradiction of the heart? Did she really only love Mellissa, and also, really only love Jimmy? I decided not. It was just a phrase. I imagined that at home, she probably has a husband who is also her “only true love”. But when she says it to him, I wondered, does it mean something more exclusive? What about when she says it to the dog, or to the cat?

She assembled her children and they approached the counter to check out their books. I think I heard the girl say, of two different books, that each was her “favorite.”

I recently read, and profited much from his “Classifying Mormon Theism.“ Check it out.

It’s part of a book dedicated to the work of the unique Mormon philosopher of religion David Paulsen.

Mosser’s paper is of interest for several reasons:

First, is Mormonism a sort of polytheism, monotheism, or what? You’ll have to read the paper to get Mosser’s answer. But here’s a teaser: “It is inappropriate to classify Mormonism as a polytheistic religion. To do so conveys highly misleading connotations.” (p. 23, emphasis added)

Second, what is monotheism anyway? What is a god?

Third, how did the ancients, including the authors of the Bible use “God” and related terms? For example, how was the Greek theos used? And how does this compare to our usage?

I don’t think I agree with all of Mosser’s conclusions; but there is a lot going on here, and there is much that is useful.

This is my last entry in the discussion; I may or may not comment, but no more posts.

Again, this is what I hear from him:

• Yes, the divine nature is a universal, shared by the Three. But let’s not make any Platonic assumptions about forms/universals being in some other realm than what has them, or being more fundamental.

Indeed, let’s not.

Are the persons parts of the Trinity, for him?

He brings up the Mandelbrot set. This is an abstract object. It doesn’t have parts, but rather members. Is he suggesting that the Trinity is a set, with members rather than parts? That it has infinite members? I don’t know.

Then, a digression about analogy. Of course, my point was: don’t you think God is literally a self? (Not: Is God analogous to a self?)

Perhaps he assumes that all terms that apply to God do so only analogically. I think that’s obviously false; we have terms that express concepts abstract to be satisfied by either God or a creature. e.g. “exists,” “conscious,” “similar to God.”

Or maybe he’s just worried about painting himself into the Quaternity corner.

I think Tuggy is now insinuating that the Trinity devolves into the Quaternity.

There goes that Tuggy again, insinuating things about the doctrine! No, the subject is just: what Steve Hays thinks.

The Trinity would not be a “self” in the same sense that the constituent members are “selves.” The Trinity is not a fourth person, over and above the three persons. Rather, each person is conscious of what the other two are conscious of. Not just that each person is conscious of the other two persons, but conscious of their consciousness.

So no, the Trinity isn’t a self in the same sense each person is. This conveniently leaves it an open question whether or not it is a self in any other sense, and whether it’s literally a self, or only analogous to a self.

But perhaps his final answer is that it (the Trinity) really is an it, not a he.

The “owner” of the “corporate viewpoint” is each member of the Trinity. That’s because each person not only has his own first-person viewpoint, but is also privy to the viewpoint of the other two.

I conclude, then, that in his view there are three, not four conscious beings here, and three points of view. It’s just that each also can (and always does, I assume) adopt the viewpoint of both the others.

About his “data” of revelation; he’s unable to see that some of these are precisely what are at issue. In other words, he begs the question, because he’s not able to adopt the perspective of those he would refute.

Now, finally: I switch to brief criticism:

This looks to me basically like a poorly developed “social” Trinity theory

We have three beings here, each of which fully has the property of divinity. Thus, it looks like we have three gods. Yes, I know that surely he intends it to be monotheistic. So, the theory seems inconsistent.

What is the Trinity? A group? A composite thing? A set with members? A quasi-self? He doesn’t know. But it seems that he wants to deny the one God to literally be a self. If so, he goes hard against the Bible, throughout. God knows, acts, gets mad, makes and carries out plans, stands in an I-thou relationship to Jesus, as well as to disciples of Jesus. Further, I’m willing to bet that like just about all Christians, he interacts with God as a self to a self.

Evidently, Steve hopes that positing perfect mental access between the three deities will somehow imply their being one god. But, that has not been shown. It looks like a picture of three gods with perfect access to each others’ minds.

I think this is all a poor fit with the Bible.

But laying aside that, is it creedally orthodox? Not clear. While the creeds say that all three must be “homoousios”, they also say that the Son is true God from true God. In Steve’s theory, does the Son derive his existence or divinity from the Father? I don’t know. All he’s said is that all three equally and fully possess divinity. So, I don’t know if his theory is orthodox by (small-c) catholic standards.

Update: as of 7/5/11, lots more long posts, with lots of accusations, flailing away to find some obvious confusion in my own views, but never addressing this monotheism objection. To the creedal worry, his answer is that being a Protestant, he doesn’t care if it is creedal or not. Fair enough. I’ve commented quite a bit over there, probably too much.

In sum, the one God is a perfect being, a perfect self, who is the Trinity. He has within himself three parts – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each of these parts fully has the (universal) divine nature, and so, each of the essential divine attributes. Each is a divine self. And these three parts are indistinguishable from one another, or nearly so, though they be numerically distinct.

Steve has now responded twice, here and here. These contain a lot of extraneous material, which I’ll pass by. My question is, what did I get wrong above? Here’s what I hear (bulleted):

• No, the Persons are not exactly alike. Each has a property the other two lack.
• “they share a “numerically identical” nature”

Right – “nearly so.”

Because he says this nature is shared, I’m going to infer that it is a universal – something capable of being had by multiple subjects.

• He wonders why I’m hearing things in terms of part and whole.

Steve, it’s not because you think God has multiple attributes. (Yes, I too reject the classical doctrine of simplicity, though I don’t think God has parts.) Rather, I’m trying to figure out what the relation is, in your view, between God/The Trinity and those three Persons. If it isn’t whole-parts, help me out!

• The Persons are so alike that any one “represents” either of the others.
• I don’t know what Tuggy means by “self.”

Sure you do - this is a rough, vague concept we all have. It is a thing which is conscious (yes, of self as well as other things), which can act for a reason (can choose, has a will), which is intelligent (has knowledge), and which can engage in friendship. If you speak to something, and think it may understand, even speak back, you think it is a self. Thus, I submit that you think God is a self, as I assume you speak to him. You sort of say that any divine person will be only analogous to a human self. Well, sure. But we have a more abstract concept of a self (which doesn’t imply being a human, or even being created, or having a body) which we should both agree is satisfied by, e.g. the Father.

I think I basically got his view right: there are four divine selves: God (The Trinity), the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This is confirmed by what he says after noting that in his view, each  Person of the Trinity has a first-person point of view:

Finally, wouldn’t their individual viewpoints include a corporate viewpoint? If God is a Trinity, then I’d expect the Son (to take one example) to have both an individual viewpoint (“I’m the Son”) and a corporate viewpoint (“We’re the Trinity”). The constituent members would also have a Trinitarian viewpoint, for they collectively constitute the Trinity.

This “corporate viewpoint” must have an owner, a subject, and that can only be the Trinity – that complex self. Why? e.g. the Son is not a we, but a he. But he adds,

Sorry, but I think this is confused. If I think, as an American, that football beats the crap out of soccer, that’s just another first-person point of view. It is just that the explanation for my having it, we’re assuming, is that I’m an American. The analogy would rather be this: just as each American has a first person perspective, so does America. So in his view, if e.g. the Son has a viewpoint as member of the Trinity, that just means that some subjective state of his is caused or explained by his relations to the Father and Spirit. This would be a three-self view of the Trinity, not a four-self view, which I think Steve holds to. But I’m sticking with the four-self interpretation, which is what I take it he thinks, or usually thinks.

He emphasizes that this is theological speculation, which it surely is. But I was asking what this Trinity theory is, which makes such great sense out of the Bible, better sense than any rival theory. I take it that this is it. If he wants to clarify further the relation between Trinity and the members of it, I’m all ears.

But if you believe a particular scholar is a sophist, restrict yourself to analyzing the arguments and let the reader draw the conclusion about your interlocutor’s character. Otherwise you merely create another road block to other people hearing and processing your legitimate arguments. (emphasis and link added)

Well said, Randal.

I would add that Jesus has a relevant teaching here:

Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. (Matthew 5)

(No – I’m not implying that Stark is hell-bound.) I take it that Jesus’s point is about contempt - a settled hatred of, despising of, another. Jesus’ teaching is to leave this behind, even leaving behind (as far as possible) garden-variety anger. These are his standards.

I’m also reminded of this teaching by James:

But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness. (James 3)

This whole attitude is wholly compatible with giving someone’s book or article a thorough refutation. And as Randal points out, a hefty dose of contempt will render your arguments largely ineffective, at least, to the very people you might hope to convince (as opposed to your own cheering section).

Sure, it feels good – but sin almost always does… at first.

Finally, I think of the men who taught me in grad-school – mostly non-Christians, mostly not even theists. They would gladly refute their opponents, and most thoroughly, but would never willingly descend to public abuse. If we are Christians, can our stardards be lower than theirs?

Here, and here.

There’s some heat in addition to light, but it gets better as it goes on, and the inimitable James Anderson weighs in.

We discuss probably the favorite unitarian proof-text, John 17:3, as well as contradictions and methodological things.

Perhaps the most interesting point is Steve’s & James’s desire to somehow separate concern with consistency from exegesis. I think that isn’t, can’t, and ought not be done.

Check it out.

Update: some 4 posts so far. Have left lengthy comments.

Update: next to last installment.

Update: last.

A while back I posted on a short, popular piece by Biola theologian Fred Sanders. He’s now responded. I’m going to continue the conversation, I hope shedding light on the differing assumptions and methods of present-day academic theologians and philosophers. I agree with Fred that responses-to-responses are usually boring. Here’s a greater crime: a (long) response to a response to a response.

I guess what set me in motion was his claim, which struck me as unreasonable, that it’s a good thing that there’s no “Trinity verse” in the Bible – i.e. one which explicitly and clearly  states the doctrine.

In fact, up until I think some time in the late 19th c., trinitarians thought they had something pretty close: 1 John 5:7. (Compare the KJV with any modern translation.) This was shown by Isaac Newton and a number of others to be a late corruption. Needless to say, this verse was much appealed to – none of the trinitarians were wishing it gone, so they could instead appeal to the whole Bible.

Surely, I argue, it’d be better if there were such a verse (assuming there is a true Trinity theory), because then Christians wouldn’t spend so much time puzzling and fighting about the matter, as we fairly frequently have through church history.

Now to Sanders’s response:

Tuggy the analytic philosopher working on trinitarianism was interesting to me… Tuggy the analytic philosopher working on anti-trinitarianism drops several notches on my scale of interestingness. Arguments are still arguments, and need to be dealt with on their own merits, of course. But research programs are motivated, and knowing the motivation helps me decide where to invest my study time.

The assumption here, it seems to me, is that all this unitarian-trinitarian stuff was settled long ago, and so anything Tuggy says will only be a tiresome rehash of crummy arguments. I used to assume this, but then I went back and looked at the arguments, the arguments, that is, on both sides. On some core points, the unitarians come out better, as I see it. And I found out that their arguments were not so much answered as smugly forgotten by the mainstream. Don’t take my word for it, by all means; weigh the arguments for yourself.

As to motivations, Fred seems to suggest that my motive all along has been to promote my present views. Not true. I started thoroughly confused (like most evangelicals). Then I was a social trinitarian. Then, a subordinationist unitarian (but sort of thinking this was really trinitarian). Finally, my present view. I’ve been motivated all along to make some orthodox theory or other fly! This is why I set off trying to find a workable version of the doctrine – which is what most evangelical philosophers do. (I’m referring to the theories in the main body of my SEP entry.) Frankly, it was an embarrassment to me that the mainstream did not seem to have a coherent, believable view in mind, in asserting those famous formulas.

I think we disagree already: I think trinitarianism is a spiritual reality, owned by the people of God since the Father sent the Son and the Spirit, and confessed rightly by those without special training. Philosophers and theologians are allowed to work at the task of clarifying and refining it, but they didn’t invent it.

So from the beginning, Christian have “owned” (interacted with?) the Trinity – sure – if there is such a thing. But Fred here seems to assume that they also (imprecisely) believed it all along, i.e. since biblical days. But this is demonstrably not so – by the standards of 500 CE, there were no “orthodox” trinitarians in 170CE. What there were (in the catholic mainstream)  were unitarians of various sorts! Pretty clearly for many of them, not even that vague picture was there.

Tuggy thinks there is no such thing as “the” doctrine of the Trinity, and that there couldn’t even be one until thought rises above a certain threshold of analytic clarity and terminological precision. I’m all for clarity and precision, and I need collegial help attaining it in my doctrinal thinking. But when I say Trinity, I am not pointing to a successful thought project or mental model. I’m pointing to something real, something given by God, something that Christian devotion and orthodox categories pick out, but sub-trinitarian theologies fail to.

If I understand Fred here, the “something real” is sort of like a mental image or a vague way of thinking, expressed by the standard formulas. I think there is something to this – roughly, that God is somewhat like three selves but those are somehow unified – which often does accompany use of the traditional words. But it is not the sort of thing that can be true or false, or for which one could seek evidence in any form. I think – and please correct me if I’m wrong – Sanders is in the Negative Mysterian camp, which it comes to interpreting the traditional formulas. Yes, to me, this is just one way to read them, a way which must be weighed against the others, others which have been suggested by smart, sincere, and faithful men.

Compare: the claim that God is provident. The Calvinists, Arminians, open theists, Molinists, Thomists, process theists – they’re all understanding divine providence in incompatible ways. I think one can be a mysterian too here, either positive or negative… and perhaps that’s a fairly popular way of interpreting “providence.” Yes, I think that for many purposes, just sticking with the vague idea that “God is in charge” is enough. But some of us are compelled to get more precise.

About “logic,” no I got the point; like a lot of philosophers, I get a bit grumpy with logic-rhetoric. I didn’t meant to offend, or to suggest that Sanders knows no logic. By “logic” here, I think he just means something like structure, not what he says – “principles of demonstration that are appropriate to a subject” – but maybe a point of structure could be a source/principle from which to argue, i.e. the grounds for some premise.

Here’s the pattern, the flow of thought, the drift, of my little article: I wasn’t just “quoting a few passages in which the three are mentioned.” Instead, I was building a pattern of expanding scope. From 3 verses, to 5 verses, to 12 verses, to 6 chapters, to 16 chapters, to a whole gospel, to the whole Bible.

Right – in Sanders’s view, the whole Bible shows a pattern of the members of the Trinity at work together. I don’t think this is true, and if we’re careful with what we mean by “members of the Trinity” here, many through church history would also demur.

In any case, I criticized Sanders is “spinning” an obviously bad thing as a good thing – this lack of any clear statement in the Bible about the Trinity, as opposed to it being (supposedly) discernible diffused through the whole Book.

But I think that in Scripture, God succeeded in revealing the Trinity the way he wanted to. I understand why that seems like “merely spin” to Tuggy, but I mean it in earnest.

Now, I wasn’t accusing him of being insincere. But I think if there was a secure verse like 1 John 5:7, or more specific, Fred would gladly use it as a lead proof-text, and never lament its presence. The key point here is “the way he wanted to.” Because it is this way, and because God is all-provident, Sanders holds this to be the best way. This, in my view, is a serious intellectual vice in present-day theology. Assuming, in theology, that things are as they are because they’re supposed to be that way. This is in practice an all-purpose reason to stay mentally “in the box.”

To be clear: I believe wholeheartedly in divine providence. I’m an open theist, so for me the mechanics of providence will be different, but I think nothing occurs without God’s permission, and that he constantly guides the course of events, above all, those involving the followers of Jesus. But I think lots of things happen that go against his will. For whatever reason, he seems to govern, on a grand scale, with a loose hand.

Think about how this sort of providential conservatism would’ve hurt you in the past:

• What? Who’s this Jesus guy, teaching all this new stuff. WE KNOW Judaism, buddy. God himself has evolved us Pharisees just how he likes us. This Jesus is a PUNK!
• What? Who’s this off-the-reservation clown trying to interpret scripture apart from the magisterium of the one holy, catholic church. Why, all Christians are catholic (i.e. Catholic or Orthodox), or, nearly so. Who does he think he is? We have no tradition of reasoning on one’s own – and this is plainly how God intended it.
• What? This fellow thinks churches should be autonomous? That’s crazy-talk. God himself ordained the system of bishops. If you are not under a catholic bishop, you are not under the headship of Christ, and you are out of God’s will. Opposing the bishop is opposing God.

God is who he is. He’s the same God in charge c. 30 or 1520 CE, and this is but a later stage in the same cosmos. So, we have to leave a mental door open to the possibility that mainstream theology has gotten fairly off track, even on core things. To a Protestant, this should be a trivial point. And yet, this safe, assuring assumption that one’s theories are guaranteed by divine providence is rampant among conservative, Protestant theologians.

Now, this is accompanied by the idea that their own ideas, e.g. about providence, church structure and government, or the Trinity are just sitting right there, obviously in the texts. We thinking Christians should maybe get this verse tattooed on our bodies somewhere, preferably not the face.

The first person to speak in court always seems right until his opponent begins to question him. (Pr. 18:17)

You’ve got to read all sides (or better, the best representatives of what seem the most plausible, well-motivated sides), if you want to really think through any issue: free will, universals, justice, arguments for God’s existence. This is the only way to seriously pursue the truth.

But I don’t see this drive in a lot of theologians. Instead, I see a complacent assurance that they’ve got the truth (about, e.g. the Trinity) and many of them just want to sort of play with it - to celebrate it, talk it up, apply its insights, allegedly, to new fields, such as politics or marriage. All the while, we’re none the clearer about what “it” is – it’s just whatever those traditional creeds were getting at. The text- and history- focused theologians, generally, are more clear-headed about what the Bible does and doesn’t say, and are alive to at least some disputes. And they “play” a lot less.

He really does think there’s never been such thing as coherent trinitarianism, just “trinities” all the way back, and none of them doing justice to the New Testament as Tuggy (and Samuel Clarke) interpret it.

Sorry – this isn’t quite fair. I’m no Ehrman. I think there were humanitarians who more or less got it right, from NT times up through the 2nd c. And I think the unitarian subordinationists still got it right on what’s most important (who the one true God is), from about the 130s up past 325. For a lot of this time, there weren’t nearly as many “trinities” (Trinity theories) as there are now. In sophisticated catholic circles c. 200, as best I can tell, it was basically subordinationist unitarians vs. “monarchians,” at least some of whom where humanitarian unitarians. (In the polemical lingo of the day – “psilanthropists” – mere-man-ers, who thought Jesus had only a human nature.)

There a little hint of sarcasm here – how can this silly Clarke and Tuggy think that only in these latter days, in the early 18th or early 21st c., the truth about the Trinity first came to light? What’s the chance of that? Of course, neither of us thinks that for a moment. Both our views, Clarke’s and mine (which again, are not the same, though both unitarian) are represented in the 2nd c., and by various later folk.

…philosophy can be used for doubting and dissolving as much as for clarifying (which of course philosophers already knew), that chasing definition can be an exercise in chasing the horizon. Once you turn a word plural to indicate that its content is essentially disputed, you’re on the roads to irresolutions. After exploring theologies of the trinities, Tuggys will have to move on to doctrines of the incarnations, and to atonements, by which gods accomplished salvations for humanities from sinses. That’s not a good way forward for theology that answers to God’s self-revelation in Scripture.

I’m not sure what to make of this… Part of the worry seems to be the idea that philosophy, something about its procedure or methodology, is inherently destructive, or leads inexorably to doubt, or to unbelief. I don’t think that is so. It does tend to breed epistemic humility, perhaps. But philosophers, I think, passionately commit to all sorts of things, just as I am passionately committed to being a disciple of Christ. To me, adopting unitarian views has opened up the New Testament, to where I suddenly see what’s going on there. They authors are not, as so many read them, constantly throwing out hints that Jesus is the same self as God, even while treating them as two selves; they are two, and are importantly related. They are not the same god, or parts of the same god, or personalities, etc. They are a man, the most important man, and his God, who is also his Father. This is hard to a explain, but there’s a whole texture to the NT which is obscured by traditional catholic theorizing.

Honestly, I picked “trinities” because it was easy to remember, the domain was available, and it seemed a decent short hand to refer to the various competing theories. But I did not thereby signal that the dispute was irresolvable. Indeed, I don’t think it is! I can see why Sanders might read more into it, though, based on how terms like “Christianities” get used by some.

There’s also a concern, I think, that somehow philosophy must involve not properly submitting to what God has revealed. But that is indeed my aim. Nothing about philosophy traps me in a hopeless plurality of incompatible viewpoints. Just as I have firm views on, say, free will, so I have them here – at least, I have them now, after a lot of painful thinking and mind-changing.

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More from Christian sage Dallas Willard:

The Kingdom Among Us is simply God himself and the spiritual realm of beings over which his will perfectly presides – “as it is in the heavens.”

That kingdom is to be sharply contrasted with the kingdom of man: the realm of human life, that tiny part of visible reality where the human will for a time has some degree of sway, even contrary to God’s will. “The heavens are the heavens of the Lord,” the psalmist said, “but the earth He has given to the sons of men” (115:16, NAS). And as things now stand we must sigh, “Alas for the earth!”

To become a disciple of Jesus is to accept now that inversion of human distinctions that will soon or later be forced upon everyone by the irrestible reality of his kingdom. How must we think of him to see the inversion from our present viewpoint? We must, simply, accept that he is the best and smartest man who ever lived in this world, that he is even now “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5). Then we heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good.

Human life certainly resists the great inversion. To it, the very idea of any such inversion is an insult and an illusion. …The “real” world has little room for a God of sparrows and children. To it, Jesus can only seem “otherworldly” – a good-hearted person out of touch with reality. Yes, it must be admitted that he is influential, but only because he affirms what weak-minded and fainthearted individuals fantasize in the face of a brutal world. He is like a cheerleader who continues to shout, “We are going to win,” though the score is 98 to 3 against us in the last minute of the game.

When this cheerleading approach to the “real world” triumphs among those who profess Christ, they may then have faith in faith but will have little faith in God. For God and his world are just not “real” to them. They may believe in believing but not be able to rely on God – like many in our current culture who love love but in practice are unable to love real people. They may believe in prayer, think it quite a good thing, but be unable to pray believing and so will rarely, if ever, pray at all.

I personally have become convinced that many people who believe in Jesus do not actually believe in God. By saying this I do not mean to condemn anyone but to cast light on why the lives of professed believers go as they do, and often quite contrary even to what they sincerely intend. (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, pp. 90-1, emphases and links added)

Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) was one of the all-time great philosophical theologians. He was a greatly respected Anglican minister, and probably would have become archbishop of Canterbury if he hadn’t published on the Trinity. He was a younger friend of the famous scientist Isaac Newton, and became the main expositor of Newton’s science and the metaphysics and theology underlying it. He was also a wily metaphysician and an impressively learned scholar, capable of wielding a thousand textual facts to mount an argument.

In 1705 Clarke became famous for his still studied classic, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. This is a big, developed presentation of a cosmological argument for the existence of exactly one “necessary” and moreover perfect being. In my view, it is not entirely successful, but it is impressive, and the most developed cosmological argument ever.

For whatever reasons, though probably in part, his interactions with his friends Newton and William Whiston, Clarke plunged into the Bible and patristics, and came up with finely honed views on the Trinity, along the lines of the early (c. 150-350) “fathers.”  This he published in his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, the first edition of which was in 1712. This is his other, neglected, lost classic. It created quite a stir in early 18th c. England. Clarke narrowly avoided losing his job over the controversy. But here I’ll stick to its effect on my thinking.

In the first 35 pages, Clarke lays out some 441 passages in the NT, in which the Father either “is stiled the one or only God” (1), or “wherein he is stiled ‘God’ absolutely, by way of eminence and supremacy” (6), or “wherein he is stiled ‘God’ with some peculiar high titles, epithets, or attributes; which… are (generally, if not) always by way of supreme eminence, ascribed to the person of the Father only” (24). (In this post I’ve modernized Clarke’s words, omitting his early 18th c. use of italics and capitalization.)

After examining all passages concerning the Son and Spirit, and how they related to the Father, as well as all mentions of Father, Son, and Spirit together, Clarke gets theological. There’s a lot I could say about this, but in brief,

There is one supreme cause… of all things [i.e. the Father]; one simple, uncompounded, undivided, intelligent agent, or person; who is the alone author of all being, and the fountain of all power. (122)

And, appealing to some 45 NT texts, he asserts that

The Father alone, is, absolutely speaking, the God of the universe; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the God of Israel; of Moses, of the Prophets and Apostles; and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He defends all these claims by quoting (in the original language, then translating) numerous church fathers, especially Athanasius, Novation, Origen, Justin, and Tertullian. In short, he believes in 3 divine persons, but only one, the Father is autotheos – divine through or because of himself. This one, is the one God of whom the OT speaks, i.e. Yahweh. In a most manly fashion, without yielding an inch, and yet without ungodly nastiness, he defends these ideas against all comers – people I would call mysterians, tritheists (aka Social Trinitarians), modalists, “Latin” trinitarians, and humanitarian unitarians (“Socinians”) – who, interestingly, he takes to be basically modalists. He does this in nine thick follow up pieces, responses to those few of his many critics Clarke thought worthy of an answer.

This is all a lot to digest. But the main effect all this had on me was to drive me back to the New Testament, to see if what Clarke says about it is true. I found that all the New Testament authors very clearly distinguish between God, a.k.a. the Father, and Jesus. With a few exceptions, “God” refers to the Father, and generally in Paul, “the Lord” is Jesus. (This last can be confusing to us.) But what could hardly be clearer is that Father and Son there are different selves. Clarke also shows that for just about any favorite proof text supposedly showing that Jesus “is God,” in the immediate context, we find that the author seems to assume them to be two.

Now the standard answer to Clarke’s point that Father and Son are different selves is this: Sure, they are two persons, but that’s compatible with their being one God. But Clarke explodes this defense numerous times. A “god” in the Bible is always a self – not a substance, nature, or whatnot. Thus, if Father and Son were the same god, they’d also be the same self, which Clarke would explain, is unacceptable modalism, and just makes nonsense of the New Testament. Just to take one point, the Son can’t be the same person he mediates for – if he’s the mediator between God and man (which the NT says he is), then that precludes his being the same self as God.Further, if you think that “sharing a substance” (whatever that amounts to) makes them one god, you need to say why it is that two gods couldn’t share one substance – and Clarke bets that you can’t show this. Keep in mind that he agrees with the claim of Nicea (325) that Father and Son are homoousios – but he argues that we should accept just the original meaning, which is, essentially, that the two are similar, i.e. both divine. Indeed, that very document plainly assumes them to differ, and so to not be numerically identical. (So, not one self, and not one god – for in either case, they would have to be numerically identical.)

Is this “Arianism“? No. For Clarke, Son and Spirit are uncreated, and there are eternally dependent on God.

Is it Social Trinitarianism? No. It has a number of similarities to it, but the one God isn’t any group, but rather the Father. It was Clarke who cured me of “social” Trinity confusions.

Is it monotheism? Clarke argues that it is. Still, it is not obvious that it is. This is a tortured question, and I’m going to dodge it here – I’ll just say that he and his interlocutors had quite an argument about this.

Is this theory orthodox (i.e. consistent with the creeds, or at least, the creeds which truly summarize the Bible)? Clarke thinks so, and enlists a large number of ancient catholic theologians on his side, such as the great Origen. This too is a tortured question – I’ll only say that it depends on just what traditions you take as normative.

Is it trinitarianism? I would say not, although Clarke urges that this is the best and only biblical way to understand the mainstream catholic tradition on God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. It isn’t trinitarian because the Trinity is not the one God, or any sort of god at all. Rather, the one god is (numerically identical to) the Father, and this is the characteristic, defining thesis of unitarianism, be it ancient, early modern, or present day. So, while Clarke has no intention of being “anti-trinitarian,” and while he has no love at all of Socinus and later unitarians, he is in fact one of the most important unitarian Christian thinkers of all time. I call Clarke a subordinationist unitarian, because for him the Son and Spirit are divine but ontologically subordinate to, eternally dependent for their existence and perfections on the Father. They are not, that is, absolutely co-equal, and that is another reason why, arguably, Clarke is not a trinitarian. Of course, for these same reasons, neither are all the other ancient “fathers” mentioned in this post!

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Most importantly, is his the best reading of the Bible, and is it true? In my view, not quite – more on that in future posts.

But his key points are true, and are the key to a non-confused reading of the Bible. The one God of both testaments is none other than (i.e. same self, same god, same being as) the Father. And this Father is supposed to be someone other than Jesus. You can take that to the bank.

The price is that you must reject any theory inconsistent with those two points. But any Trinity theory which is self-consistent is not compatible with them. In the end, it is the Bible vs. catholic tradition. For me, the Bible had to win. So, reading Clarke led me to see the unitarianism (again, just the thesis that the Father is one and the same as the one God) in the Bible, and this  made me a unitarian, though I had no desire to be one, and many reasons to not want either that label or that belief. Without going into details, I’ve had some painful life experiences with cranks and conspiracy theorists, and I have no desire whatever to become one, or even to be thought one. That unitarianism is, at least post 4th c. , a minority report is a strike against it, in my view, a barrier it must overcome.

I was fully aware that my evangelical brethren would consider me a traitor and a non-Christian. I knew I’d be accused of arrogance, of thinking I was smarter than so many Great Christians, while in fact being about as smart as that goldfish in the picture above.

I get a sick feeling reading the ancient “fathers” viciously verbally attacking the so-called “Arians” in furious contempt, accusing them of blasphemy, assaulting Jesus, being sub-human, being closet Jews, and so on. (Not because I’m an Arian, although they are unitarians too – another species of subordinationists.) These words are, to be blunt, a disgrace and an offense against the Lord they claimed to be defending; it’s not to strong to say that many of them hated their subordinationist opponents. This is all about theories, mind you – well, about that plus politics – those “fathers” I’m referring to were catholic Bishops desperate to maintain control over their churches, and to enlist the Empire to help them smash their rivals.

Today, while the rhetoric is somewhat less brutal, many Christian thinkers are quite proud of their various Trinity theories, and many hold “the” Trinity doctrine to be the pride of Christianity, its shining jewel and most distinctive and central thesis. And many react harshly to those who would, as it were, show their theories to be theories, and multiple (and mutually incompatible). That is really what most of my published work has been so far, and I’ve been less than clear about my own views. (This because those views were (1) not strictly relevant to the task at hand and (2) still in the process of being formed, and (3) honestly, I was not eager to start taking fire, as it were. Call this last prudence or cowardice – you be the judge.)

But I have decided in recent months that to be ashamed of these truths would be disloyalty to Jesus, whose disciple I endeavor to be. He too taught that the one God, who is both his God and my God, was the one he called “Father.” (John 17:3, 20:17) So did Paul, John, and Peter. So, kick me in the shins and call me a heretic, but I know to whom I must answer. For the record, no, I don’t think I’m smarter than everyone else, and yes, I admit that it’s possible that I’m mistaken. And no, I’m not a “rationalist.” It is the texts which drive me to unitarianism.

Are there difficult texts for this view? A few, yes. But far fewer than for the common evangelical view that Jesus is numerically the same as God (and, of course, also: he’s someone else). This view makes every NT book self-contradictory.

While Clarke convinced me that the one God is the Father, I wasn’t sure that I was a subordinationist unitarian, as described above. There are another class of Christian unitarians, what I call “humanitarian” unitarians. That’s where I find myself. More on that next time.

I find that I’m still stuck in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was in the late 1990s that I discovered two Christian authors who were to have a big effect on my thinking. In both cases, I’m still processing their thoughts, still going back to them, still re-reading.

In this post, I’ll discuss the first of these: Dallas Willard, professor of Philosophy and USC, and well-known writer on Christian spirituality. While at Biola I’d heard him talk at an SCP, and was vaguely aware that some profs at Biola had studied with him, such the man who introduced me to philosophy, Del Hanson. His philosophical work that I’ve read is well done and helpful. But his magnum opus is his Divine Conspiracy, clearly the product of many, many years of studying and reflecting on the Bible, and learning to live it out as a disciple of Jesus.

I found this book staggering for many reasons. It took me a long time to read it the first time; each chapter required a lot of thought to process, and I’d read one, then stop to think about it for several days or weeks. To call it a book a Christian spirituality is to shortchange it. It is that, but it’s also a theology of the Kingdom of God, and a practical one at that.It is dripping with insights about the New Testament, about Jesus and God, about human psychology and relationships. Name a Christian classic – Augustine’s Confessions. The Imitation of Christ. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I hold that Willard’s book is far superior, and affords far more insight.

Back in the winter of 1999-2000, based on my study of this book, and taking its advice, I went on a spiritual retreat, alone at a Catholic retreat house in Massachusetts. I read through all four gospels, and rededicated my life to God, to discipleship to Jesus. It gave me a huge boost in faith, in trust in God, which saw me through the process of job hunting, c. Oct 1999-April 2000. Most find this process terrifying, but I thought it was fun!

I’ve read it maybe five times or so (I’m reading it again now), and I’ve worked through it with about three groups of people. But I wouldn’t say that I’ve really learned and lived its message. I’m still working on that. Other Christians I’ve read it with have usually either (1) pooped out before the end, or (2) thought it was really neat, but they seemed to go on understanding the message of Jesus and Christianity as they always had – like, in one ear and out the other. These responses, I could never understand.I’d be a happy man if I could be a part of a group of Christians who really got the good news of the Kingdom, and who would throw aside all tradition, if that’s what it took, to get it.

The content of the book is hard to summarize. But he expounds on the good news of the Kingdom of God, which was Jesus’ central message. He shows, I think, how this fits with Paul’s emphases, and with the Old Testament. He provides a reading of the Beatitudes on which they make sense! He expounds at great length on the theme of discipleship to Jesus. He devastatingly critiques the theological Right as well as the theological Left in contemporary America as inadequate “gospels of sin management”. Although Willard writes as an evangelical to evangelicals, in many ways he’s profoundly out of step with them. I don’t think he always realizes to what extent this is so – or at least, he never draws attention to these issues.

Someone – I think it might have been J.P. Moreland – once described Dallas as a sort of Christian Jedi Master. That’s not far off the mark!

One big theme Willard hits is the centrality of God to Jesus’ world view.

Now God’s own “kingdom,” or “rule,” is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his Kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or b y choice, is within his kingdom. …the kingdom of God is not essentially a social or political reality at all. Indeed, the social and political realm, along with the individual heart, is the only place in all of creation where the kingdom of God, or his effective will, is currently permitted to be absent. (p.25)

You can tell here that he’s no Calvinist. In fact, it turns out later that he’s a sort of open theist, though he doesn’t advertise it. He also, much of the time, sounds like a unitarian – someone who thinks God just is a certain self, namely the Father. It’s  important, he argues, that we think rightly about this magnificent self.

You cannot call upon Jesus Christ or upon God and not be heard. You live in their house… We usually call it simply “the universe.” But they fully occupy it. …Only as we understand this, is the way open for a true ecology of human existence, for only then are we dealing with what the human habitation truly is. And the God who hears is also one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us. (pp. 32-3)

To [Jesus'] eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. …Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us. …We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. (pp. 61-2)

Here, as through the book, God isn’t Jesus – rather, Jesus is someone else, someone other than God, a go-between relating humans to God. He’s quite far from the Jesus-is-God-himself strain of thinking that is so prominent in American evangelicalism. When you go to look at the New Testament, you see that this is how it is – Jesus and God are, as it were, two characters. And God is held up as fundamental and central, although Jesus is exalted to his right hand, to sit on his throne with him.

Just like in the New Testament, Willard often uses “God” to refer to the Father. But totally unlike the New Testament, eventually it becomes clear that Willard is a social trinitarian! For him, God is a group, a society which is a close-knit community of divine persons. (e.g. pp. 382-4)

What? How can God be both a group (so, not a self) and a “He” (a self)? Clearly, Willard thinks the one God is both. If he’s a self, though, he must be a thing, a concrete entity, an individual substance. But at times, Willard describes this “God” community as neither a thing nor a self. He seems to think that the fundamental reality is really a group of three realities, a group which isn’t itself a thing.

…the advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity were real… a self-sufficing community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings… In faith we rest ourselves upon the reality of the Trinity in action – and it graciously meets us. For it is there. And our lives are then enmeshed in the true world of God. (p. 318)

What gives with those last two “it”s? I don’t know! Is the one God an it, or a he? It matters! I see the unfortunate influence of late 20th c. “social trinitarian” theologians here, injecting incoherence into what is otherwise a magnificent scriptural picture. It’s pretty hard to read the New Testament and come away thinking that the Father is either a member or a proper part of the one God. The New Testament is firmly on the “he” side, and assumes that the God of Jesus (the Father) is one and the same as the God of Israel.

If you’ve read my philosophy papers, it’ll probably come as a surprise that my favorite Christian book (outside the Bible) is by a social trinitarian. But I’ve found that subtracting the confused social Trinity theorizing from the book leaves it as valuable as it was; in other words, those theories are inessential to nearly all that Willard says. Even Jedis have their bad days.

Next time, another Christian classic which changed my life.

Thanks be to God, later in the Spring of 2000, I was hired for a tenure track teaching job. I paid my dues prepping numerous classes, bought a more serious winter jacket, and really learned how to shovel snow.

In the Spring of 2001, I wrote the first version of what eventually became my “Unfinished Business” paper, and presented it at an SCP meeting in Rochester, NY. I must have sent this at some point to my friend Stephen Davis, because later in the Spring I received an unexpected email from Richard Swinburne saying he’d been told I had a good paper on the Trinity, and asking me if I wanted to attend an SCP conference in, of all places, Moscow, Russia! My paper was a bit… un-Orthodox. (Short synopsis – social theories don’t work, “Latin” theories don’t work… What gives?) Even the old ladies who translated my paper into Russian said, “Duh, it’s a mystery!”, so I decided I needed to think more about that.

At the end of “Unfinished Business” I allude to a theory that I take to be a neglected, but arguably orthodox Trinity theory. I had in mind a view like Clarke’s (who I discussed briefly last time). But that didn’t work out – more on that next installment.

In Russia I had a few interesting conversations with Swinburne. In one, standing in Red Square, not far from Lenin’s tomb and the Kremlin, I objected that if he was right, then God would have deceived the Jews. He replied that evidently, I hadn’t read his book Revelation. I admitted that I had the book on my shelf, but hadn’t read it. I later did. It’s now in a 2nd edition, and I must say that I don’t entirely know what I think about it.

But regarding the OT, his view is that the meaning of a text is context relative. The Church having accepted the old Jewish scriptures into its canon, for the Church, those books mean what they were understood to mean upon being accepted.

His favorite example, which he told me then, and which I’ve heard him give since, is:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us - he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. (Ps 137:8-9, NIV)

For the Church, he says, this means that we should mercilessly kill off our sins or bad habits, or something like that. It is irrelevant, he argues, what the author may have meant when he wrote it.

I can’t bring myself to agree with this, for many reasons. But even granting this, I couldn’t see how it should soothe my worry, which was that in the OT, God revealed himself to be a great and good person, a god, a self. And if social theorists are right, this was evidently a lie, told  by three co-equal, always co-operating divine selves. What the Jews thought was a god, was really a tightly knit group (of divine persons, a.k.a. gods).

I don’t think all lies are wrong (“Yes ma’am, I do think your daughter makes a lovely bride.”)  - but this one appears to be wrong. I’m still thinking off and on about this issue, because of some helpful interactions with philosopher Bill Hasker, and it is clear to me that this sort of argument doesn’t count against all Trinity theories, and that it depends on the claim that the three always act in concert together – a claim which a trinitarian arguably needn’t hold (though it is a popular and much trumpeted assumption, in theological circles).

In any case, this concern about deception was one thing which pushed me away from any “social” Trinity theory. But a more important factor was that when I really dug hard into the Bible, I couldn’t find this wonderful fellowship, this quasi-family of divine persons there. It’s certainly not taught outright there, and I came eventually to think that it isn’t implied there either.

It’s easy to get off track on this point, because the personal relationship between Father and Son is a central theme of all the four gospels. Conspicuously absent are any portrayal of friendship with the Holy Spirit, and the idea that God just is this perfect community or fellowship.

This statement by John is telling in what it leaves out:

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 1 John 1:3, NIV

I also found that historically, this idea of the Trinity as a loving community basically isn’t there, isn’t represented in the mainstream catholic (Catholic-Orthodox-Protestant) tradition. The closest things are the Cappadocians’ occasional use of an analogy of three people, and Richard of St. Victor’s arguments in the high middle ages. But in the many Trinity wars – I mean, theological disputes – of the modern era (c. 1550-1850) this idea just isn’t in play. Maybe something like this view was held by the noted early medieval Christian philosopher John Philoponus, but it was quickly condemned as tritheism.

Back to the deception concern, I also found, in reading early modern philosophical theology after my “Deception” paper was done, that I wasn’t the first to raise sort of objection. More on that reading, including Clarke, and its influence on me, next time.

Happy Easter. For the uninitiated, this holiday really has nothing to do with a bunny and colored eggs. What we’re celebrating is this:

Saturday evening, when the Sabbath ended, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went out and purchased burial spices so they could anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on Sunday morning, just at sunrise, they went to the tomb. On the way they were asking each other, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” But as they arrived, they looked up and saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled aside. When they entered the tomb, they saw a young man clothed in a white robe sitting on the right side. The women were shocked, but the angel said, “Don’t be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Look, this is where they laid his body. Now go and tell his disciples, including Peter, that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you before he died.”
The women fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered, and they said nothing to anyone because they were too frightened. (Mark 16:1-6, New Living Translation, emphases added)

The other accounts differ somewhat. Here’s John’s version (from the Gospel of John movie – verbatim, from the Today’s English Version):

It is possible to make too much of the differences, however.

Of the discrepancies between the empty tomb stories, most (not quite all) can be harmonized fairly easily. Note that the evangelists all agree on what we might call the main elements: Early on the first day of the week certain women, among them Mary Magdalene, went to the tomb; they found it empty: they met an angel or angels; and they were either told or else discovered that Jesus was alive. In addition, there is striking agreement between John and at least one of the Synoptics on each of these points: The women informed Peter and/or other disciples of their discovery; Peter went to the tomb and found it empty; the risen Jesus appeared to the women; and he gave them instruction for the early disciples. – Stephen T. Davis, “Is it Rational for Christians to Believe in the Resurrection? in Peterson and VanArragon (eds.) Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell, 2004), 164-73, p. 169, bold added.

In that book, Davis squares off with atheist philosopher Michael Martin – the exchange is well worth reading. They get into the probabilities, the importance of one’s background beliefs, the evidence of Paul’s letters, alternative hypotheses to resurrection, and so on.

Sometimes difficulties force one to revise one’s beliefs, and sometimes not.

Bonus link: historical / NT scholar Larry Hurtado on how the resurrection was understood in early Christianity.

Just recently, out of morbid curiosity, since it’s available free online, I watched all three hours of it.

Yes, the stupid, it BURNS! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hanks mumbles and lurches his way through the movie, like an unkempt Dennis Miller on downers. He was much better in… just about anything else he’s done.

The movie alternates between competent chase scenes, talky sleep-inducing scenes, and scenery chewing by evil, murderous, self-hating, conniving, comic book Catholic villains.

It’s directed by Opie, no less. And he seemed like such a nice kid!

At the end of the movie, the two main characters are reflecting on Jesus, in light of the cockamamie yarn they’ve just lived through. Saith, Hanks’s character:

The only thing that matters is what you believe. History shows us Jesus was an extraordinary man, a human inspiration. That’s it. That’s all the evidence has ever proved.

Yes, the author Dan Brown knows how to please – telling his audience exactly what they want to hear, and what is convenient to believe. Believe whatever you please. And of course Jesus was just a competent, admirable human. No grounds whatever for all that “Son of God” business. You’re right to ignore all that.

Why does it have to be human or divine? Maybe human is divine. …

Yes, folks, the wit and wisdom of Dan Brown.

In sum, the movie is anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian dreck. Moreover, Brown knows exactly what he’s doing – peddling foolish conspiracy theories to that segment of the public which is ignorant of Christian history, and which for various reasons would like to believe that the Evil Roman Catholic Church has been Hiding It All up till now. I’m well familiar with this segment of the public, as I teach philosophy of religion and religious studies at a state university.  Brown is happy to take their money and make them stupider, while making them feel they’ve been let in on wondrous secrets. I remember seeing an interview with him some years ago, and he very, very carefully walked the line of not quite claiming his novel to be historically accurate, while not denying it either.

If all of this isn’t depressing enough, there is the fact that stupid begets stupider.

I wouldn’t bother posting on this mediocre movie without providing some links to scholars eviscerating its absurd claims.

• Darrell Bock: no, there’s no reason at all to think Jesus was married. No, Brown’s ideas about how the four gospels are chosen is just wrong, and no, there was no close vote on Jesus’ divinity at Nicea in 325, nor was that the first time his “divinity” was brought up.
• Carl Trueman on why people enjoy conspiracy theories.
• Eminent Christian historian N.T. Wright, on what it all means.

Also, a famous demon weighs in. More reputably, some Catholic apologists weigh in. And some Protestant ones.

Finally, for those who prefer their refutations in video form: