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 that X has manifested as it really is, really being S. Or it could mean that X appeared to be (whether or not X really is) S. But given the Catholic theological tradition, I assume the first is meant here. God has appeared as a human baby, meaning, at least at that time, he really was a baby. This is not to comment on a quality or property he has; rather, the idea is that he was numerically identical to this baby. This baby, this little human self – was the same self as God. The one true God, that is, the Father, just was certain baby.

But doesn’t the Father differ from the Son, and from the Spirit? Sure. The child just is the Son. And this is a “guise” of God/the Father. The Son is a different guise than the Father, and both are different guises from the Spirit. Which is just to say, these three ways God acts are really three such ways.

The view seems to be this: God is a single self: the Father/Son/Spirit – call him what you will. Any two of those are the same god as one another, and so the same self as one another. If considered as guises, as ways of appearing to us, then they are different – the Father-guise is not the Son-guise, etc. But it is one and the same self who may, as it were, put any of them on.

Coincidentally, the Pope brings up St. Francis, saying that

Francis loved the child Jesus, because for him it was in this childish estate that God’s humility shone forth. God became poor. His Son was born in the poverty of the stable. In the child Jesus, God made himself dependent, in need of human love, he put himself in the position of asking for human love – our love. (emphases added)

Again, the baby (and so, the Son) is a guise of God – a way God appears and is. He continues with a bit of traditional human-reason-bashing, and then back to his main point:

…if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our “enlightened” reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness. … We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions – the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby. (emphases added)

Suppose that a priest named Len is very learned. Yet when among simple folk, he adopts the persona of a simple man, so as to relate better to them. Learned Len conceals himself in Simple Len – for there is far more to Len than we see in Simple Len. In those moments, Len really is Simple Len – that’s really him, using simple words, eschewing the airs and manners of a scholar – he is really acting in that way. And yet, that way, that guise, is inherently misleading; it would naturally lead one to think Len to be unlearned. One could call Learned Len a “guise” of Len too, though it doesn’t tend to mislead about how he really is.

Simple Len and Learned Len aren’t two men any more than the Father and Son, in the Pope’s view, are two gods. They “are” the one God. Or more accurately, he thinks that God, the Father, appears as a human – the Son, the human being, is a guise of God. Of course, there’s more to God that we see in this baby (child, man) but that’s while God conceals himself, that is, certain features of himself, by appearing to us in this way.

This view of God and Jesus is arguably a theological disaster.

But am I right that this is the current Pope’s view? Can anyone point us to some other relevant statements by him?

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!

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?

It is obvious that there were plenty of wordy hotheads back then too, and yet it was in some ways, because of the Enlightenment, less of a reason-hating era. So, there were many interesting, sometimes even mutually respectful arguments, and David James, a Baptist minister, had read most of them. And, he pulled this off without coming to hate any of those involved.

It’s a bit depressing how little has changed since then, except for the worse! Obfuscation and confusion abound, for many reasons, and the positions James clearly lays out are oftentimes not clearly distinguished in people’s minds. The book is a testament to plain speaking, brevity (102 pages!), real and not feigned modesty, and unpretentious reasoning.

Eventually, you find out what his view is. Put you have to read carefully for it, and it comes towards the end. He explains his fairly simple, scriptural grounds for rejecting the other views, but he rejects those views without trashing them or those who believe them.

In a way, he thinks that these theories make less of a practical difference to the Christian life than some suppose. (pp. 72-6) And he has an interesting Appendix on worship and idolatry. (77-102) In the end, he thinks that scripture is sufficient to guide Christian worship, and that Christians should be careful in going beyond what is written. (40, 102) Like many early modern Protestants, he’s wary of appeals to mystery, the memory being fresh of Catholics appealing to mystery in defense of transubstantiation. (49, 68)

Is it a perfect book? No. For my part, I’m not persuaded by all of his arguments, and he doesn’t consider all the possible views, or all the views which are out there nowadays. Still, it’s a worthy little book, and deserves to be read. Here are some of his words from near the start of the book:

It is well known, that the doctrine of the Trinity, from the fourth century to the present time, has been the occasion of much debate and enmity among Christians.

…Christians are not yet agreed whether the one God whom the worship be one person, or three persons, or neither, but one essence; whether Jesus Christ be a mere man, or Almighty God and Man united in one person; or neither, but a super-angelic spirit made flesh; whether the Holy Ghost be a distinct spirit from the Father and the Son, or a mere attribute and energy of the Father.

Perhaps the divine being has permitted these differences as a part of men’s trial; that the lazy and implicit believer might be discriminated from the serious and inteligent enquirer, and that christians, in maintaining their several opinions of the trinity, might have an opportunity of exercising the virtues of meekness and candour, toleration and benevolance towards each other. To accomplish this desirable end, [in this book] the several tenets of Tritheists, Sabellians, Trinitarians, Arians, and Socinians are made to pass in review before the reader. The advantage proposed from this review is the attainment of a precise and determinate idea of what the doctrine of the trinity is in itself, as received by those who have been generally approved for their learning and soundness; and what the extremes are on either side of it. It is certain, there are many among the unlearned who are very zealous for the doctrine itself, without any specifick idea of what it is; while those who have such ideas… run into the extremes… many of those who use the same orthodox terms to express the doctrine, entertain opposite notions of it.

…The great difficulty is to keep clear of these several extremes in our ideas of the Trinity. If this difficulty were perceived, in a perspicuous manner, it seemed probable to the author, it would do more towards promoting a spirit of candour and benevolence among christians of different opinions on the subject under consideration, than a thousand pious exhortations, however just and proper, to that end. …In the apprehension of the author, it seems hardly possible for a person of an ingenious, unbigotted, and intelligent mind, who clearly perceived the facility of erring… could seriously believe that all who were not of his persuasion were either fools, or knaves, and that, without doubt, they should perish everlastingly.

The controversy relating to the Trinity is become very voluminous. …the truth of God needs not passionate invectives and malignant reproaches for its support and defence. The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. The end of the commandment is charity. Every man is to examine and judge in the best manner he can for himself, as every man is to stand or fall to his own master. “The lowest understanding,” (to use the words of Dr. Dodderidge) “the meanest education, the most contemptible abilities, may suffice to give hard names, and to pronounce severe censures; a harsh anathema may be learnt by heart, and furiously repeated by one that could scare read it, and as was in the truth the case in some ancient councils, may be signed by those that cannot write their Names.” (David James, A Short View of the Tenets of Tritheists, Sabellians, Trinitarians, Arians, and Socinians: Intended to assist plain Christians in forming a general Idea of the principal Opinions held on the Trinity, and of the Difficulties attending them, and to promote Candour and Charity among those who differ in their Apprehensions of that Subject, pp. 5-11, bold added)

How’s that for a title?

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.

The way that the catholic Athanasius addressed this syllogism was to ask what might we mean by saying ‘ungenerated’. Perhaps we mean ‘does not come into existence’. If that is what we mean by ‘ungenerated’, then (says Athanasius) we can say that the Son is ‘ungenerated’ in just this sense. Hence, the syllogism doesn’t go through.

Now, Dale has (for awhile) raised the question, ‘is God a self?’ And, if we answer in the affirmative, then it looks like there is just one God-self, and that’s the Father. It seems to me that this question that Dale has been asking (again and again) is analogous, for the catholic Christian at least, to Arius’s apparently straightforward syllogism (i)-(iii). Athanasius’s response is to deny (ii) if by (ii) we mean “the Son comes into existence.”

Athanasius had to work out some possible definitions or meanings of the term ‘ungenerated’ in order to figure out which premise of Arius’s syllogism to reject. Along these lines I’ve wondered, ‘what does Dale, or anyone, mean by the term “self’?”‘ I hope in the future to write something about this. It seems to me that in addition to exegetical concerns of the NT, Dale is transfixed by this question, at least from my catholic point of view, much like Arius was transfixed by his syllogism.

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.

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!

(click for image credit)

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.

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:

This council said that we must confess that the Son is homoousion with the Father.
What did it mean? Same ousia. Does that clear it up?

OK, here’s more: same being-or-substance-or-essence-or-nature-or-something!

Whatever it was supposed to mean the “Arians” didn’t like it, and at the time, that was good enough. It was supposed to imply that Son, like Father, was “true God”, of divine status – however, unlike the Father, from true God.

Some were concerned in the immediate aftermath that the new formula was somehow modalistic (“Sabellian”). Aside from that fact the the word was first used by a modalist in the 3rd century, you can see why. If ousia is taken to mean individual entity, then it can be read as asserting Father and Son to be numerically identical – so that anything true of one has to be true of the other. However, it’s far from clear that at the time most took it that way.

When they translated the Nicene creed into Latin, homoousion became consubstantialem. In older English translations of the Catholic missal, this was “consubstantial“. But in the post-Vatican II era, there was an urge to clean up, modernize,  and clarify liturgical language. Thus, since 1970 they’ve been saying (in English language masses) “one in Being with the Father”.

Some criticize this for suggesting modalism. (Nothing new under the sun, people!) In any case, this translation is on its way out.

For some time, they’ve been fighting over how traditional liturgical language should be. For the obsessive, here’s a whole blog devoted to the missal-update.

The new version will go back to the old rendering:”consubstantial”.

People are criticizing this as being unfathomable to the average Catholic in the pew. Maybe so. But what translation isn’t?

A priest quoted in the New York Times story is more optimistic:

Father Hilgartner said, “We know that people aren’t going to understand it initially, and we’ll have to talk about it. I’ve said to priests, we will welcome and crave opportunities for people to come up and ask us about God. It’s a catechetical opportunity.” (emphasis added)

This, of course, supposes that the priest knows what it means!

One attempt I’ve seen, doesn’t inspire confidence. Here’s the exposition on “consubstantial”:

The Eternal Son, who was born of the Virgin Mary, is neither “like” the Father nor “practically the same substance” as the Father. The Eternal Son enjoys the very same substance as the Father. The Son possesses fully the Godhead of the Father.

Ehh… so it means that the Son isn’t like the Father? But he completely has the Father’s… “Godhead”? Clear as mud, I’m afraid.

Here’s a none-too-convincing argument that the new translation is better. Yes, much, much better.

And here’s an odd argument that the old “one in Being” just had to go.

“‘One in being’ is vague and open to misinterpretation,” said Father Roy. “The Father is the source of all being. He is the sole Being whose essence is his existence, and he gives all of us our being and existence. So, to a certain extent, we’re all ‘one in being’ with the Father. That doesn’t say anything unique about Christ.”

But if God is the source of all being, why would it follow that we’re “one in Being” with him? Unless, we’re talking about pantheism!

From the same piece, a priest makes a better point, though I’m not sure it really supports the change in question:

“Just because ‘one in being’ is three simple words in a row doesn’t mean that the average person understands what the phrase means.” (emphasis added)

That’s right. Apples noodle currency.

Maybe they should just be glad they didn’t change it to “of the same substance”.

But wait – if that phrase is even less intelligible, maybe it’d be all the more suitable! Check out another priest’s argument:

“When people first hear they’ll be saying ‘consubstantial,’ their first response is, ‘I don’t know what that means. Why can’t we use a word I understand?’” said Father Hilgartner. “But we’re talking about a mystery that no one fully understands and that can’t be fully articulated. In some ways the use of the word helps us confront the mystery, to stand before the mystery.”

I sort of agree with the spirit of this remark. Some initial confusion can be a good thing, if it stimulates inquiry and learning. But that “initial” is important!

Dear new Christians – beware. Patton is sincere, but misinformed. He thinks the Bible obviously teaches what he’s asserting, and reasons that any prior Bible-loving Christians must’ve thought likewise.

But having studied a vast amount of historical writings by Christians, I can assure you that this is demonstrably not so, even if we stick to “mainstream” Christians (so ignoring, e.g. “Arians”, Marcionites, etc.) I take no pleasure in pointing this out, and I wish it were as simple as Patton says. But facts are facts.

I’ve discussed his sort of take on the Trinty before. It is not, as Patton says in a comment, “what the Bible teaches and Christians for 2000 years have believed.” It is what (some? many?) theologians at Dallas Theological Seminary think about the Trinity. How widespread these views are, I’m not sure. But the many evangelical and other theologians riding the “social trinitarian” bandwagon would not agree with what Patton says.

Regarding what Patton holds forth as “the best we can do”, take care lest you fall into inconsistency.

You should know that some of the most brilliant Christian thinkers in the last 100 years have held many different views on just how “the” doctrine should be understood. Unfortunately, these theories are, for the most part, not consistent with one another.

Patton asserts that

The doctrine of the Trinity has been held by all orthodox Christians throughout all of church history

This is either trivial or false.

If by “orthodox” we mean, ones accepting the “ecumenical creeds”, and “the doctrine” here is what those creeds say, then it is true by definition, and also trivial.

But whatever “the doctrine” is thought to be, if  “orthodox” here means all mainstream Christians (proto-orthodox/catholic, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, anabaptist, pentecostal), then it is false. He’d like to think that only spoil-your-Saturday-morning-by-knocking-on-your-door cults have opted out, but this is not so. Some mainstream Christians have basically ignored creedal Trinity claims. Others deny them, on the grounds that the Bible doesn’t really teach them. Others never heard of them, and literally never thought about them. Other emphasize them, but interpret them in various ways.

But don’t take my word for it! I’m just some random guy you found on deh internets, right?

Pick up any catholic (proto-orthodox, mainstream Christian) theologian from c. 150-200 CE. You could start with Justin Martyr. You can read all we have from him in maybe a week. Is he selling what Patton is selling? Or take Irenaeus, Athanagoras, Origin, Tertullian. (Hint: review what Patton says about “subordinationism”.)

Too hard? No problem. Read this guy; he shows in great detail what these folk were up to, and why it is a mistake to count them as trinitarians. It’s a good read.

Don’t trust him, because he’s a unitarian?

Fine. Then, read Roger Olson, a respected and fairly mainstream evangelical theologian, on Justin Martyr, et. al. Do they teach thee co-equal divine persons within one God? You be the judge. Don’t just trust any cool cat you come across.

About divine attributes: reading Patton’s chapter, you’d never guess that many generations of theologians firmly believed a doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which (roughly) God is utterly simple (without parts or components), doesn’t have any non-essential attributes, and it’s a mistake to think that God has multiple intrinsic attributes at all. (Yes – these are dark sayings, and many Christian philosophers, including me, deny them. But others defend them.)

Actually, Patton’s whole list of “non-essential” attributes is idiosyncratic. Does he hold it possible for God to be non-gracious, non-loving, not a Trinity? Normally in philosophy nowadays, a non-essential attribute is one which a thing could possibly exist without. In ancient times, the idea was more that a non-essential attribute wasn’t a defining one (though some were such that you couldn’t be without them). But in ancient and medieval times, as I said, God was thought to be utterly simple (partless and without any internal multiplicity). Yes, it’s a mystery how anyone thought this was compatible with thinking of God as tri-personal.

If you’re a new Christian – great! You should love God with all you’ve got, and follow Christ in all things. There’s no other way to live. About the Trinity, I don’t have any simple answers for you. Patton is certainly right in holding that we must all follow as best we can, knowing that there’s a lot we don’t know, and that there are countless truths about God which we’ll never know. Part of loving God is devoting your mental energies long term to carefully thinking through these things when you can, as best you can. Keep going!

The Trinity is a biblical doctrine, but let’s admit it: There’s something annoying about how hard it is to put your finger on a verse that states the whole doctrine.

The Bible presents the elements of the doctrine in numerous passages, of course: that there is only one God; that the Father is God; that the Son is God; and that the Spirit is God. We can also tell easily enough that the Father, Son and Spirit are really distinct from one another, and are not just three names for one person. If you hold all those clear teachings of Scripture in your mind at one time and think through them together, the doctrine of the Trinity is inevitable. Trinitarianism is a biblical doctrine and all the ingredients are given to us there: Just add thought and you have the classic doctrine. (emphases added)

Hmmm…. I would have thought that the elements of “the” doctrine included that the three are same substance or essence (homoousios). And that the there are co-equal, and co-eternal, uncreated, though the Father timelessly generates the Son, and the Spirit proceeds from him (or if you’re Western/Latin – from both Father and Son). Maybe something about their having one “divine nature” as well.

It isn’t that Sanders is unaware of any of this; he’s aware of all of it. It’s just, he’s writing in a popular, devotional vein, and so he’s sticking to what, in his view, the Bible straight up teaches, and to what is edifying to the average pew-dweller, or at least, to the average Biola alumnus. This is kind of standard, for conservative theologians to not mention the confusing stuff when dealing with non-scholars.

But it strikes me that his approach is typical of American evangelicalism generally. Most evangelicals don’t really care (or really, know) about creedal or theologically precise Trinity doctrines. (Hence, efforts like this.) They think of “the” Trinity doctrine as just the all-important claim of “the divinity of Christ“, plus a bit more (i.e. same claim, whatever it is, for the Holy Spirit). It’s really the “divinity of Christ” / aka the claim that “Jesus is God” which is the focus in evangelical spirituality, in its preaching, in its pop theology. (Notice, that’s not really a historical, creedal Incarnation doctrine. Yes, for evangelicals he’s both God and a man, but they’re not too hip on discoursing on the two natures or the hypostatic union, and so on.)

Back to the Trinity, all Sanders adds really, to this standard way of thinking is that this doctrine is not supposed to be some sort of modalism (e.g. one divine person who lives or appears in three different ways).  This is an important caveat, for I think that many  understand by “Jesus is God” that Jesus and God are one and the same, i.e. numerically one. And Jesus is a person, and God is a person (that is, a self), so they must be the same person (i.e. Jesus is God himself). Of course, when you say that “the” doctrine doesn’t mean that, it’s pretty unclear what it means. Like those Dallas Theological Seminary guys, Sanders’s approach leaves you scratching your head.

There are, of course, exceptions to this, among evangelical theologians and philosophers. But here at least, Sanders is adopting the common approach. He’s assuming, correctly, that what he says above is compatible with what various evangelical intellectuals think, e.g. “social” trinitarians. Problem is, thanks to that wonderfully ambiguous word “is”,  it’s compatible with just about any Christian theology.

In Sanders’s view, the virtue of this doctrine not being in one verse is that it is instead “a massive, comprehensive, full-Bible doctrine that serves to expand our minds as readers of Scripture.”

Sweet! How does that work?

After quoting a few passages in which the three are mentioned, Sanders says that “entire books of the Bible are structured by the same Trinitarian logic“. No, he’s not really talking about logic here.  His idea is that you can see a pattern of  the Three, in some sense working together; you see a co-operation of three agents.

In Galatians, for example, Paul proves his gospel of faith against salvation by works in a three-part argument: The Galatians received the Spirit by faith, God promised Abraham that he would justify the Gentiles by faith, and Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. The great arc of Romans runs from the Father’s judgment through the Son’s propitiation to the Spirit’s deliverance.

This prepares is for

…the biggest Christian thought of all: The whole Bible is one complete book that reveals the Trinity. That fact is what the ancient church fathers meant when they summarized the Christian faith in the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father … and in his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ … and in the Holy Spirit.” (emphases added)

But any unitarian can fully endorse the Apostle’s Creed. And in the 2nd c., when various shorter forms of what eventually was called “The Apostles Creed” were floating around, most catholic Christians were just not trinitarians at all. Many, at least of the catholic intellectuals, were Logos theologians, holding that some time before creation, God externalized his Word, which is to say that he created a helper, an agent alongside himself, the pre-existent Son. The status of the Holy Spirit was at this point unclear.

Or take the 17th c. English unitarian John Bidle. (aka Biddle)  He denied any Trinity doctrine; for him, as for the Logos theologians, the one God just is the Father. A long time ago, he created the Son and Spirit. Would he have any problem with Sander’s “Trinitarian logic”? No – he too sees a pattern of three cooperating agents in all those texts.

I say all this not really to criticize Sanders – I recognize he’s writing a pop piece here – but rather the mainstream American evangelical tradition in which he’s swimming. In that lake, you’d never get the idea that Trinity doctrines were controversial (till Mormons and JWs came around), are that there have always been dueling, incompatible forms of them, and that anything that could be characterized as a trinitarian theology was pretty controversial among Christians from roughly 150-400, and from about 1520-1880. No (assumes many an evangelical) this must just be obviously right there in the Bible, since our views are all based purely on the Bible, and we believe in the Trinity.

Sigh.

There’s one thing I would criticize Sanders for. It is merely spin to claim that it’s a good thing that the doctrine isn’t clearly taught in any one place in the Bible. Even if it is correct that what Sanders calls “the” doctrine is the best reading of the Bible, all things considered, it still would be more clearly a teaching thereof, and so less disputed and less confusing,  if it were expressed, as it were, in one breath.

But, it is not. So, argue we must – about the meaning of the various texts, and about which Trinity theory, if any, makes the best sense of them? Which, if any, as Sanders says, is “the key to the entire book.”

Update: here’s a positive review of Sanders’s recent book. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but evidently he argues that in some sense evangelicals are “most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church”.

Having said that, I’m a conflicted fan. I tend to agree with Swinburne on philosophical issues, but not with his take on the Bible, and so, I often find myself disagreeing on subjects like the Trinity and Incarnation. He has very developed views on both, by the way. See the five-part trinities series here, or my summary of Swinburne’s Trinity theory here.

So, Is God a Self? What saith Swinburne? Check out his brief interview by Robert Kuhn here (click the blue “Play Video” button) and then click here for my take ->

In another interview with Kuhn, where the question is “What is God like?”, Swinburne gives a good overview of his conception of the Christian God – at least, in the context of his works in natural theology and philosophy of religion: God is “a personal being… someone with whom we interact… a person is someone with powers”, and eternal being who is omnipotent, omniscience, omnipresent, perfectly free, and perfectly good. Kuhn points out towards the end of the interview that the idea here is that the concept of God here is that of  a very special person/self. Swinburne says he’s describing “the simplest sort of person there could be”.

Here, he repeats all of this, about the Christian God, that “He’s a person”, as are we - “person” here meaning not a human being, but rather a self – a being with powers to intentionally act, and so beliefs and motives. God is a non-physical self. He goes on to say that fundamentally, God is a being with unlimited intentional power, and moreover, he’s the simplest sort of self there could be.

Great – it seems that the answer to our question is an unqualified “Yes”. But, what does the name “God” refer to here? Swinburne surely isn’t equivocating. He must, in these discussions, mean some one being by the name “God”; he must be using that term in a consistent way. In a Christian context, there are pretty much four possibilities:

1. the Father
2. the Son, Jesus
3. the Holy Spirit
4. the Trinity

Can’t be 2, as he says without qualification that God lacks a body.

Doesn’t seem to be 3 – nothing he says indicates this.

He must mean 1 or 4. Which?

In this context, he’s talking about the Christian God, or God as understood by mainstream, small-c catholic or small-o orthodox Christianity. Most would say that “God” for such Christians names the Trinity. So, it must be 4, right?

Wrong. For Swinburne, the Trinity is not a self. It is composite substance, composed of three selves, but it isn’t itself a self. It has no first person point of view, performs no intentional actions. He’d add that it (the Trinity) could be said to do such things, simply because its parts do. (Compare: a group of people “deciding to eat cheeseburgers”.)

The only option left is 1 – he’s talking about the Father when he talks of “God” here, right? This is a natural interpretation, as this is how the writers of the New Testament mainly use “God” (Gr. ho theos). The Father, for Swinburne, is all those things described above. And yet, this can’t be right, can it?

Here’s a different way to put what’s bothering here. Consider this inconsistent triad:

• The Christian God is a self.
• The Christian God is the Trinity.
• The Trinity is not a self.

If you assume any two of these, it logically follows that the third is false. Go ahead – try all the combinations… I’ll wait. (For those trained in standard logic, the three would be: Sg, t=g, and -St – convince yourself that all the arguments are valid.)

Swinburne clearly affirms the third. So, he must give up one of the first two. But which will he give up?

Here, it seems, not the first. But then, he must deny the second. The Christian God is the Father, and the Father isn’t the Trinity, so the Christian God isn’t the Trinity. In short, he’s a unitarian – someone who thinks the one God just is the Father.

But wait, he’s a trinitarian, right – a social trinitarian? Mustn’t he thus affirm the second, and deny the first? But there’s no hint of that here.

What gives?

On such theories, it turns out that the one “God” is a group – a group of equally divine selves (aka gods – though they don’t like that term in the plural). This is surprising to be sure - is not the God of the Bible a super-duper self? One who is all-knowing, who loves and hates, carries out plans of action, smites and heals? Moreover, theism is usually explained as belief in one perfect, non-physical self, creator off all else.

Social trinitarians have of late been pushing back. “God isn’t one person, he’s three! We Christians have never said – or at least, never should have said – that God is a person. He’s not a person, though he’s personal. And that makes our view monotheistic.”

(A similar dialectic occurs with “social” theorists who don’t say that Father, Son, and Spirit are a mere group. Instead, they constitute or are within some one thing – but this thing is not a self.)

Now I think this response is wrongheaded in several ways, and am working on at least one paper responding to it.

But for now I note that a number of these “social” theorists are evangelicals, and thus many of them tend to take positions in other areas which push in the opposite direction.

• Christology. Who is Christ? God. And Christ is a self – one with two natures. Thus, God is a self as well – the same one as Christ.
• Theistic piety or spirituality. God is a he, not an it. He’s someone you can talk to, someone who loves you, someone who sympathizes with the downtrodden. He’s far from being an it – a force, “being itself”, or the other high-falutin’, abstract things people have imagined. Which brings us to:
• “Worldview” apologetics. Eastern (Buddhist, Hindu) views of ultimate reality are often criticized for their “impersonal” take on the ultimate. Theism – seemingly belief in a perfect, provident self – is argued to be more reasonable, and perhaps more practical as well.

In this series, we’re going to have fun with video – with interviews with some philosophical theologians, Christian and otherwise. Each time I’ll like an interview clip, and comment on the guy’s answers.

These are from the TV series Closer to the Truth, which I believe airs on some American PBS stations. The interviewer has a pretty impressive resume. He asks each interviewee: “Is God a person?”

The question, I take it, is not whether or not God is a human being – but rather, is God a self – a subject of consciousness, what Descartes calls a thinking thing, something with will and intellect.

Next time: Jewish philosopher-theologian Neil Gillman.

Kudos to theologian James Anderson (blog) for significant correspondence – he’s intellectually honest, smart, tough-minded, and humble – a pleasure to discuss things with. Thanks also to my colleagues for enduring multiple drafts and re-writes.

In this paper, my main task is evaluating the mysterianism of James’s book. My view may be more nuanced that some would guess, based on my earlier work. I concede that in principle it can be reasonable to believe an apparent contradiction. I’m not optimistic about the actual prospects of having such beliefs, though.

It seems that James and I mostly disagree about the Bible, not about epistemology – he strongly endorsing, and me eschewing apparently contradictory interpretations of it regarding God and Christ.

The paper, especially the first part, has a lot to do with this long series here at trinities, though it is more focused.

I hope it’ll be a book chapter some day.

He noted that one may easily have a false belief about what one believes, and he noted that there can be strong social pressures to believe that one has beliefs one doesn’t (and that one lacks beliefs one in fact has). As an example, he noted that every Biola University employee’s continuing employment requires that they yearly affirm, I assume in writing, Biola’s doctrinal statement.

As an aside, here’s the core part of their statement on the Trinity:

There is one God, eternally existing and manifesting Himself to us in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This sounds like an expression of modalism - one great self, with three aspects or personalities (“Persons”), and yet Biola’s statement  goes on to describe Jesus as a man, and surely no man is a mode of anything, but is instead an entity/substance, and no mode is a substance or vice versa. Surely, they’re assuming the identity of the second member of the Trinity (the Son) with Jesus. So, it looks paradoxical.

But that isn’t what concerns me here. In our recent debate coverage, we noted that  most evangelicals assert that Jesus is God. And by that, it seems that most mean that Jesus and God are numerically one being, one magnificent self, one divine person. They confess and assert this. But do they believe it?

I wonder (seriously – I really wonder – this is not a sarcastic pseudo-question). See, I assume that most hold the two to qualitatively differ. How they differ depends on one’s views on the Trinity. God has three persons, or centers of consciousness, or rational faculties in him. Jesus doesn’t. God has never not been omniscient; Jesus has. God sent his Son. Jesus didn’t. God is like a loving community, Jesus is not. So, when it is time to confess, they say “Jesus is God”. But their actions – specifically, the way they talk about Jesus and God in various non-argumentative contexts – show that they don’t believe that. Or do they?

Is this self deception (falsely believing yourself to believe Jesus to be God) or is it inconsistent belief (you believe they are one, and that they are two)? Or does it vary by person?

Here’s one angle on it. Consider these three claims:

1. Jesus and God are numerically one.
2. Numerically one things can’t differ.
3. Some things are true of Jesus which are not true of God, and vice-versa.

If you believe all 3, you have inconsistent beliefs. I would guess that a lot of evangelicals hold 1 as a central belief, don’t notice too often that they also believe 3, and actively ignore 2. I think that’s were I stood, before I started reading the recent philosophical literature on the Trinity.

But how does one tell three inconsistent beliefs from two consistent ones and an imaginary third (which is inconsistent with the conjunction of the first two)?

Go back to Gregg’s example of the old lady who falsely believes that she believes all races to be equal. That she’s self-deceived is one interpretation of what we observe.

But maybe in church she thinks that, but out about town, she doesn’t. If a belief is a tendency to think a certain way, maybe she believes both that blacks are inferior and that blacks are as good as whites – but different circumstances trigger each tendency in her, and she conveniently ignores the obvious inconsistency of the resulting thoughts and claims. (It helps that everyone at her church is white.)

But back to 1 – Could it be that many believe both 2 and 3, and believe that they believe 1, even though they do not?  Given that they know 2 and 3, they’re also aware at some level that 1 is false. And yet there is tremendous social pressure to verbally affirm the words of 1.

Imagined train of thought:

But of course I believe 1 – anything less is denying Christ. And I don’t deny Christ. I believe him, and in him. If were a Christ-denier, I wouldn’t be a Christian, but I am. And I’d be going to Hell – but I’m not. So, surely I do believe 1. How could I not?

Christian philosophers (philosophy PhDs), interestingly, are different. They’re trained to ferret out inconsistencies – at least, to expunge inconsistencies from their statements and thoughts. (But I reckon we’re about as prone to self-deception about our beliefs as people generally.) A good many, I would guess most conservative Christian philosophers, deny 1. (In fact, while I was an undergraduate at Biola I distinctly remember a philosophy professor clearly and firmly denying 1 in class.) This is surprising, but I think they are able to do this because they continue to say the words “Jesus is God” meaning something other than 1. (But, disconcertingly, they are aware that others understand those words as 1.) Others deny 2. I think the average evangelical pew-dweller would be befuddled by this, but at least on the surface, it is consistent (accepting 1 and 3 while denying 2.) I’m not aware of any who deny 3; both the Bible and the catholic tradition imply it.

In any case, for those of you who like me are offspring of the American evangelical world – are either of my diagnoses above accurate,when it comes to evangelicals in the pew, in your experience? I confessed to having had inconsistent beliefs (having believed 1-3 above), but I suspect that some more mature, more reflective evangelicals are forced into self-deception as described above.

(Commenters: If you comment anonymously, I will respect your anonymity. I don’t have the slightest interest in endangering jobs or reputations.)

While you’re thinking about it, here’s some more gratuitous Styx.

I’ve been reading I Told Me So (review) by Gregg Ten Elshof, a USC PhD who who teaches and chairs the Philosophy Department at my undergraduate alma mater. He’s been thinking about this topic for a long time (part 2) and so far, I really like the book. It is clearly written, insightful, and he trains his guns on self-deceptions by Christians in particular. Some of it is directly relevant to things we’ve been discussing here.

One point he makes in chapter one is that we can easily deceive ourselves about what we believe. He gives the plausible example – many of us have actually known people like this – of a respectable, elderly Christian woman who believes that she believes all people to be equal in God’s eyes, and yet her behavior clearly shows that she considers black people inferior to white people. (pp. 18-19) It’s hard to admit you’re an Archie Bunker when you’re part of a social group where it is unacceptable to be such.

But what might this have to do with theological beliefs? Ten Elshoff says,

Every year, I’m given a fairly detailed statement of Biola University’s doctrinal position. Each year, my continued employment is contingent upon my re-affirming belief in these various doctrines. I’ve got three small kids and a mortgage. Laurel, my wife, is a stay-at-home mom right now, and the job market in philosophy is atrocious. Of course I still believe all of this stuff! Imagine the stomach it would take to admit to myself and others that I don’t believe these things anymore! It would mean the immediate forgoing of economic stability – not to mention a kind of alienation from a significant chunk of my social group.  (p. 19, link added)

Mind you, he’s not confessing hypocrisy here. Rather, his point is that there are strong non-rational pressures on him to think and believe that he believes those things, whether or not he actually does. This is a real, and significant price that institutions like Biola pay for their apparent (and mostly real?) doctrinal uniformity, and Gregg has the guts to point out this somewhat uncomfortable fact.

Next time: Do evangelicals believe that Jesus is God?

Update: Finished the book, still liking it. It is very Willardite (Willardian? Willardesque?), and I mean that in a good way. (I can forgive the social trinitarian flourishes.) It is a great example of popular, applied philosophy, and you can confidently give it to any Christian friend. The writing was superb – not an ugly sentence in it – and it is spiced with interesting examples from literature and elsewhere. It is insightful about the human condition, and promotes both a proper understanding of and a proper pity for humanity. And, it is short. I can see occasionally re-reading this one, and I don’t normally do that.