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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: Is he right about this?

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of all the ancient catholic “fathers” I’ve read, Origen (c.185-254) is the most impressive as a scholar.

It’s not that I usually agree with him – any non-Platonist is going to choke on many of the dishes he’s serving, and I think that most today would take issue for some his ways of interpreting the Bible. But he has vast knowledge, he makes pretty careful distinctions, he knows how to argue, and is just a much more developed and original thinker than most. Any contemporary who was going to square off with him either did or should have considered him a formidable opponent.

He wrote, or rather dictated, a vast amount – evidently, he did little else. Some think he may have been the most prolific person in antiquity. We still have a fair number of texts from him.

He’s historically important for many reasons, but for this post, what’s most important is that in the 3rd century he was considered a stalwart of mainstream (“catholic”, or “proto-orthodox”) Christianity.

Lately I’ve been reading Origen’s Commentary on John, as translated by Ronald E. Heine, who by way, I have found very helpful. He too is a first-rate scholar.

Evidently, passage here is directed against certain monarchians who thought (or at least, were alleged to think) that the Father = the Son, i.e. that the Son is the Father himself and vice versa. This passage struck a nerve with me, as it reminded me of conversations I’ve had.

The references in brackets are from Heine’s footnotes.

Those, however, who are confused on the subject of the Father and the Son bring together the statement,

“God… raised up Christ…” [1 Cor 15:15]

and words like this which show that him who raises to be different from him who has been raised, and the statement,

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” [John 2:19]

They think that these statements prove that the Son does not differ from the Father in number, but that both being one, not only in essence, but also in substance, they are said to be Father and Son in relation to certain differing aspects, not in relation to their reality. For this reason, we must first quote to them the texts capable of establishing definitely that the Son is other than the Father, and we must say that it is necessary that a son be the son of a father and that a father be the father of a son.

After this, we must say to them that it is not strange for him, who admits that he can do nothing except what he sees the Father doing, and who says that whatever the Father does, the Son likewise also does [Cf. Jn 5:19], to have raised the dead [cf. Jn 11:43-44] (which was the body), since the Father, who we must say emphatically has raised Christ from the dead, grants this to him. Commentary on the Gospel According to John, Books 1-10, sections 246-7, pp. 309-10).

Ah, modalism bashing. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, no? Both relaxing and fun. And there’s no chance that bullet will ricochet back.

Let’s make it more interesting. It’s abundantly clear from all of Origen’s works that I’ve seen, that he doesn’t believe in a tripersonal God. Rather, the one true God, Yahweh of the Old Testament, is none other than the Father of Jesus. (In the present book, see pp. 41, 79, 83, 302-3.)

Thus, Origen’s passage above is also an argument that Jesus isn’t God.

Yes, he thinks Jesus can be called “God”, and is in some sense “divine”. Many a latter-day reader seizes on these undisputed facts, and adopts the comforting reading that Origen is an almost-trinitarian, or a trinitarian with a few unseemly subordinationist elements. But he’s not a trinitarian at all – he’s a unitarian. The one God just is a certain self (the Father), and so is “unipersonal”, as many nowadays put it.

(Did I mention that he thinks the Holy Spirit to be created by God through the pre-existent Christ? (pp. 114) This may be an eternal process, but Origen may think that about the material cosmos as well.)

Back to Jesus, for Origen, he’s most certainly not the one God himself, the Almighty. (As for the differences between them – he’s very consistent – but that’s another post. In brief, only the Father is divine independently.)

I’ve seen the sorts of arguments Origen refutes here many times.

• The argument goes like this: Text 1 says God did X. Text 2 say that Jesus did X. Therefore, God and Jesus are one and the same (numerically one, numerically identical).
• This, as it stands, is an invalid argument.
• Thus, the more careful add: And surely X is something which only God himself could do.
• Now, the conclusion follows. (Also, this makes the premise that God did X unnecessary – do you see why?)
• But Origen knew this conclusion couldn’t be true, as some things are true of one, which aren’t true of the other. Also, he knew the premise to be false – you don’t have to be God to raise the dead – a man empowered by God can pull that off!
• Thus, assuming the texts to be consistent, Origen finds a way in which both God and Jesus did this action (raising Jesus from the dead), but in different senses. In essence, his point is that the Father did it through the Son – the Son is the instrument of the ultimate agent (i.e. God himself), being empowered by God, and freely cooperating with him.

So he’s made a common philosopher’s move – making a distinction, to get away from a contradiction. And note that his distinction arguably isn’t ad hoc; it’s well motivated – even apart from this issue, there is abundant reason (in the Gospel of John alone) to think that Jesus’s miraculous acts are empowered, enabled by the Father, who works through him.

It’s hard to find anything wrong with his impressive refutation of the claim that Jesus is God himself. I told you he was a pro!

Note that his core point (that it is false that f =s) doesn’t depend on his unitarianism. A present day “social” trinitarian like, say, William Lane Craig, can, would, and should agree with Origen about that. Where Craig, et. al. would disagree is on whether Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, is numerically the same as the Father. (Origen would have plenty to say about that!)

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!

I remember going out for a walk one day around our neighborhood in Claremont; it was probably the dead of winter, but, you know, 55 degrees, since this was Southern California. I was praying, and I saw in someone’s front yard a sapling that had been tied of straight with a couple of stakes and cables, forcing it to grow straight. I knew that my own mind was enthusiastic but undisciplined, and I prayed that God would send me teachers to make me grow straight.

Of my twelve applications, I got into to three places, and I ended up  going to Brown University for my Ph.D. I had a great time there; no complaints at all. I’ll cover my time there in two posts.

The two who most influenced me were my dissertation adviser James Van Cleve and Victor Caston.

Victor is a ridiculously smart ancient and medieval specialist, interested particularly in philosophy of mind. I served as his Teaching Assistant for his ancient philosophy class, from which I learned a ton, and I attended Greek reading groups with him. Later, he would meet to read Aquinas with me in Latin. Urbane but not over-polite, with a smile he would simply call you out on your inconsistencies. He knew all the wiles of the species Homo Academicus, and he had an excellent way of ratting out bad philosophy, such as people parading a pet theory, skating by on the abuse of abstract nouns, or simply not reading a text carefully enough. This last one was a biggie. Having written his dissertation on Aristotle (and, on one of the most obscure issues in Aristotle), he was acutely aware of how medieval philosophers and 20th c. Thomists would misread Aristotle through the lenses of their own theories. He had an intense work ethic and attention to detail. I teased him about his caffeine intake, and about his paper with 400 references at the end. But I also tried to imitate his seriousness and precision. At one point, perhaps half way through, after reading a term paper of mine he informed me that I’d turned a corner in my development as a philosopher, and that meant a lot to me.

Van Cleve, who we students referred to as “JVC”, is another unique and dear man. Terrifically smart, he’s naturally humble and soft-spoken, but not easily swayed. He’ll sit there and listen through some big-shot philosopher’s paper, taking notes, then raise his hand, and without the slightest pretense puncture the whole thing with one soft spoken, sincerely asked question. He’s an early modern philosophy specialist, and honestly, I should have taken more with him than I did. One year he did a great graduate seminar on the philosophy of Thomas Reid. From a Caston course, I’d become interested in the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, and had plunged into the literature on that problem, as well as the literature on what philosophers call logical fatalism. With Van Cleve, I read some fascinating work by logicians on temporal logics, work which was in large measure inspired by the traditional discussions. He has great patience in working through technical, dense material.

There were few Christian students at Brown (except my friend Michael Pace) and no openly Christian professors, and no philosophy of religion specialists. But I came to think this was good for me. Rather than immediately attaching myself to some great Christian philosopher and becoming his mini-me, I was forced to develop my own views. Happily, Caston and Van Cleve were both interested in many questions of philosophy of religion. And also, Brown was more theist-tolerant, I think, than some top programs, due to its most famous recent philosopher Roderick Chisholm (who retired just before I went to Brown – never met him) being somewhat of a closet theist. I think Brown’s philosophical culture at the time – tough-minded, but somewhat restrained, polite, was in large measure due to him. I’ve heard stories of other places literally making a sport of devouring visiting speakers. At Brown they’d refute you, but leave your dignity intact.

I also much appreciated Ernest Sosa. He too was an admirable intellect, a profound and original epistemologist. I took and greatly enjoyed a couple of his seminars, but ended up veering away from epistemology, and towards the history of philosophy and philosophy of religion. He too was kind and helpful to me. At the time, and I assume still, he was an ex-Christian agnostic, but being friendly with folks like Plantinga, he took the view that theists and non-theists can learn a lot from one another. I agree.

There were others who helped me too, but I’d better get to the Trinity part. Towards the end of my career at Brown, I started to think about the Trinity. At some point, two friends and I – my best Christian friend in the program and another friend who was a former Christian and agnostic, decided to read through Richard Swinburne’s The Christian God. Wow! Richard knows how to argue. These years later, this is still the most careful, most philosophically sophisticated presentation of social trinitarianism.  I was much impressed, though not entirely sure I believed it. I was soon aware that Ed Feser and Kelly James Clark had argued in print that Swinburne was a tritheist. But I thought, well, this doctrine is pretty important. So what if it is tritheism? Maybe trinitarianism just is the right sort of tritheism. I mean, his Persons necessarily cooperate, can’t disagree. They are all divine and they function as if they are one agent.

At some point, as was my habit, I was digging around in the bowels of Brown’s excellent library, and ran across a book by a theology Ph.D. named Thomas Pfizenmaier, on Samuel Clarke‘s views on the Trinity. I read it, and was fascinated. In brief, it was a lot like what Swinburne was saying; the persons of the Trinity were really persons/selves. All are called “God” in the Bible, but the Father was (in some mysterious sense) the source of the others, and Clarke argues, he’s called “God” in a higher sense of the term. Plainly, Clarke had done his homework. I obtained a copy of his massive Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, in which he numbers and sorts every verse in the New Testament that has to do with the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. He then quotes (in Greek or Latin) pre-Nicene church fathers on these, and translates those quotes, and in the end summarizes what he says is the biblical Trinity doctrine in 55 propositions. Amazing. Why is this book out of print? Why have these arguments been ignored by academic theology for the last 200+ years? The more I read, the more I wondered. Eventually I reprinted it myself.

In short, Swinburne made me a social trinitarian, though I didn’t call it that at the time. And Clarke too, I saw, had a three agent, three self view of the Trinity. I saw that this was in a sense a point of logic. If each “Person” really is a person, and some things are true of each that aren’t true of the other two, then we really do have three here. Modalism is out. I can’t remember if it was at Brown or shortly thereafter, but at some point I read articles by Cornelius Plantinga making a plausible case that “social” Trinity theories were what the 4th c. Greek fathers meant all along.

And I was becoming aware that one’s theological theories really shape how one interprets the Bible, to an alarming degree. This was an application of what I learned from Victor Caston. I realized that I needed to really revisit the whole issue, looking at the Bible on its own terms, and finding a consistent way to understand it. I’d had experiences in church of the preacher reading a text, and basically saying, with little shame, “Well, we can see here that it seems to say P. Of course, we all know that not-P is true.” And then he’d move on! There’s no integrity in that, I decided, and I just can’t be that smug, that complacent in what my tradition tells me it is supposed to say.

I also started to realize that despite the similarities, there were some pretty important differences between Swinburne and Clarke.

Next time: a book that changed my life.

A sample:

Not only is philosophy shunned as speculative and troublesome, many Reformed… disparage some of the tools those in this discipline specialize in utilizing. Logic and analytical rigor are shunned and not trusted. …Theologians and philosophers each do their own thing, neither mining the work of the other. Theologians find the philosophers speculative and often unorthodox. Philosophers find the theologians unclear, dogmatic (in a negative sense), and holding to beliefs based on faulty reasoning and supported by poor argumentation. This state of affairs is odd considering how many theologians of the past made use of continental philosophy.

Past and present, I would say. Check out the whole post. It’s mildly depressing, but to be expected – humans, and academics, are territorial creatures. If only Bugs could mediate this feud – we could all “bow to the gent across the hall”.

His abstract:

There are two general routes that Augustine suggests in De Trinitate, XV, 14-16, 23-25, for a psychological account of the Father’s intellectual generation of the Word. Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, in their own ways, follow the first route; John Duns Scotus follows the second. Aquinas, Henry, and Scotus’s psychological accounts entail different theological opinions. For example, Aquinas (but neither Henry nor Scotus) thinks that the Father needs the Word to know the divine essence. If we compare the theological views entailed by their psychologies we find a trajectory from Aquinas, through Henry, and ending with Scotus. This theological trajectory falsifies a judgment that every Augustinian psychology of the divine persons amounts to a pre-Nicene functional Trinitarianism. This study makes clear how one’s awareness of the theological views entailed by these psychologies enables one to assess more thoroughly psychological accounts of the identity and distinction of the divine persons.

Godspeed on the dissertation, Scott!

(Link to Scott’s posts.)

But inquiring minds want to know: what did they believe, what statement or statements of faith did they sign, and are the beliefs therein necessary and sufficient for being a real Christian? This time, we’re digging a little deeper.

Their website saith,

World Vision U.S. hires only those who agree and accept to its Statement of Faith and/or the Apostles’ Creed. (source)

Interesting! Note the “and/or” – employees must affirm either one or both. As we’ve noted before here at trinities, nothing in the so-called Apostles’ Creed requires belief in either the “full deity” of Christ (whatever that may mean) or any sort of trinitarian theory. Go ahead – click their link above and read it.

• Did the three fired employees disavow the Apostles’ Creed?
• Or did they affirm it?
• Suppose they accepted it with no reservations… doesn’t that mean they could not be fired? If not, why not?
• Or did they accept it with reservations?

Here’s the relevant portion of World Vision’s statement of faith.

We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory. (emphases added, source)

I’m afraid this is typical American evangelical theological mush, featuring the weasel-words “in” (first sentence) and “deity” (second item).

The “in” phrase is current shorthand for some Trinity theory or other, but honestly, a resourceful unitarian could accept both of the above statements.

Our imaginary unitarian employee of World Vision could defend herself as follows:

Keep in mind that “person” means something like a mask, role, or personality – we’re not necessarily talking about the modern concept of a self. So, I believe in one God, the Father, who express himself in three persons. First, his own persona, as Father to Jesus and to all believers. Second, through the man Jesus, his special Son and servant. Third, through the guise of his own active power, which can seem like a third party. Do I believe in the deity of Jesus? Certainly. He’s the Son of God. He was sent by God, and empowered by God’s spirit. In all these senses, he was a divine man. And yet, he was a man.

Further, “one God, eternally existent in three persons” is probably most naturally understood as modalism – one self, acting or living in three different ways, in three different personalities. And a resourceful social trinitarian like Richard Swinburne could no doubt accept the formulas as well. The words in their doctrinal statement, then, fail to clearly express any precise views about God and Jesus. It seems to me that a lot of evangelical talk of the “deity of Christ” (or him “being God” or “being fully God” or “100% God” etc.) functions primarily as a sort of shibboleth, and that’s what is going on here. Their statement also owes something to a distinctively American anti-creedal tradition, which goes back to the founding of our country – but that’s a story for another time. The result is a distinctive sort of Christian tradition zealous to police itself for correct beliefs, but without interest in making precise distinctions.

Thanks to Google, a few more tidbits on our story, from a sort of newsletter by an interested (but uninvolved) lawyer:

Sylvia Spencer, Vicki Hulse and Ted Youngberg (the “Employees”) were all employed by World Vision. Like every employee, they attended daily devotions and weekly chapels held during the workday. However, at some point, the Employees stopped their attendance. World Vision interviewed each Employee as to why they stopped their daily devotions. Their responses were not recorded by the court, but World Vision concluded that each employee had they denied the deity of Jesus Christ. Even though the Employees denied this conclusion, World Vision nevertheless terminated their employment. The Employees sued World Vision for firing them, claiming that their terminations were based upon their religious beliefs. (source, emphases added)

This suggests that the three opted out of some required activities – something unclear in the CT story, which seems to add that they’d been given permission for some alternative. But more importantly - the three who were fired denied the denial? Really? (Imagined conversation: “Ya’ll are denying the deity of Christ!” “No we aren’t!”) What is going on here?

• Are they trinitarians who hold that Father and Son are numerically distinct, but claim that the Son is divine? e.g. Are they social trinitarians?
• Are they unitarians? Subordinationists? Jehovah’s Witnesses?
• Do they subscribe to kenosis theory?
• Are they dastardly liars, secret admirers of the Jesus Seminar, masquerading as evangelical Christians?
• Or do they neither affirm nor deny the vague thesis?
• Are the employees interpreting the statement of faith one way, and the management another?
• Or is the dispute about interpretations of the Apostles’ Creed, with World Vision taking the hopeless position that it clearly requires beliefs that Jesus is “fully God” and that he’s a member of the Trinity?

Slap me and call me “Curious George”, but I’d like to know. If this denial-denial part of the story is true, this is a big complicating factor which CT never should have left out of its story.

Congratulations to both debaters on a fight well fought.

Kudos to C. Michael Patton and Parchment and Pen for hosting the debate.

I hope you readers out there enjoyed my commentary on the debate. I sometimes got naggy or nerdy, and always expressed myself with typical lack of tact, but I tried to be helpful, and to show the helpfulness of philosophy and logic in thinking through these things.

In this last post in the series, a few concluding reflections on the debate.

Looking back on this debate, I see that I’ve ended up where I began: wondering what Bowman thinks the Trinity doctrine is. This, after all the debate was about whether or not the Bible teaches that.

Burke argued that the Bible teaches what I call humanitarian unitarianism (he calls it “biblical unitarianism”) – roughly, that the one God of Israel is the Father, whereas the Lord Jesus is a human being and his unique Son, and the Holy Spirit is God’s power. I understand what Burke argued for, and if it is true, then nothing that can claim to be an orthodox Trinity theory is true. But I don’t, in the end, understand Bowman’s view.

I flagged this issue at the start. As the debate wore on, I settled on the interpretation that each of the Three just is (is numerically identical to) God, and yet each of the three is not identical to either of the other two. I stuck with this interpretation, all the way to the bitter end. And yet, I never did like this interpretation - Bowman is a smart guy, and it is not charitable to interpret anyone, much less smart guys, as (even implicitly) contradicting themselves. Still, it seemed to best fit his claims, his lists of propositions he offered as definitions of the doctrine, and his defense of the apparent contradictoriness of the doctrine in the comments following Burke’s last post.

Why, then, does Bowman think of the “persons” as three something-or-others in some sense “in” God? These “persons”, he insists, are not selves (thinking and acting things, things each with a first person perspective on the world), because they are not things/entities/substances, and every self is a certain kind of entity. Bowman wants to say that God isn’t in this sense a “person”, though God is “personal” in that God “contains” three “persons”. What is such a “person”? He doesn’t know. I don’t either.

I might have guessed that Bowman is, like some theologians, a modalist – holding the “persons” to be ways God is, lives, or acts. (This is common – in eschewing “modalism” most theologians mean only to deny that the persons never overlap in time, or that they are merely appearances.)

But this interpretation doesn’t make sense either. It seems Bowman considers God to be a self, and Jesus to be a self. And, Jesus and God are one and the same (numerically identical). Same what? Same god, same divine self. That’s the point of all the divine titles, deeds, honors, etc. – those can only belong to the one god, God. If they belong to Jesus (as Bowman urges) that’s because God is who Jesus is. And yet, surely he assumes that Jesus just is the Son of God. But the Son of God is one of the three “persons” in God, and so is not a self, not a thinking and acting thing. I don’t get it. I wish I did.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face that the Bible teaches X. But if I don’t grasp what you mean by X, I can never be persuaded by you. Burke argued that the Bible teaches Y, and it is clear enough that if Y then not-X, and Y consists of claims A, B, and C, each of which I understand. Still working on X, though. Thus, Burke wins the debate, in my view.

I understand this much about Bowman’s position – he’s defending evangelical talk about God and Jesus. And thinking (sometimes?) of Jesus as just being God himself. And he holds that only his view remains faithful to the Bible – to all of it, and that this is the only humble view, whereas others proudly and unjustifiably discard some of what the Bible says.

But is it humble to rest in an apparently contradictory interpretation of the various texts? This comment by Bowman was telling:

As a debater, I could be pleased by the approach that you took to this debate, since in terms of the debate your approach has played into my hands. …Consistent with anti-Trinitarianism in all of its forms, over a third of your closing statement focuses on what you correctly describe as “the argument from reason.” In addition, four of the ten bulleted points articulating the superiority of Unitarianism to Trinitarianism with which you begin your closing statement are rooted in this argument from reason. Yet the debate is supposed to focus on which of our positions best reflects the teachings of the Bible.

Bowman thought that Burke had wasted much of his closing statement on concerns about what is consistent, as if this were irrelevant to interpreting the Bible. But normally, for all of us, Bowman included, that an interpretation is apparently contradictory is a weighty reason to avoid it. Why, then, accept it here? I think a factor in many people’s thinking is the idea that what Bowman was urging is the majority report of Christianity through the ages. There’s a kind of complacency that comes from being in the mainstream… or at least thinking you’re in the mainstream.

But the evangelical habit of putting things in terms of who “is God” is inherently unclear (because, oddly enough, of that innocent looking little word “is”) and does no justice to the rich history of debate on the status and relations between especially the Father and the Son of God. As we saw in round 5, 2nd & 3rd century guys thought Jesus was “divine” or shared the divine substance, but clearly distinguished between him and God, holding him to be lesser than God in several ways (power, glory, authority, time of existence, even goodness). Again, in the 4th c., as my co-blogger J.T. Paasch so clearly lays out, they didn’t identify Jesus and God. (See e.g. his concluding post.) True, evangelical spirituality involves thinking of Jesus as God, and evangelical apologists like Bowman speak out for “historic Christian orthodoxy”, but the realities of the catholic tradition are what they are, immovably laid down in black and white, and they refute the idea that the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus is numerically identical to God. But we should already have known that – some things are true of one, that are not true of the other!

Some people  have wondered what my view of all this is. Some point later this summer, I’m intending to do a series about the evolution of my views on the Trinity, so stay tuned if you’re curious.

But on one level, my view is that both Bowman and Burke believe in God, and endeavor to follow God’s Son, in all aspects of their lives, in community with other disciples. I assume then, that both are children of God, reborn, destined for eternal life with God and his people. Yes, they have conflicting theories about God and his Son and Spirit/spirit, and they interpret the Bible somewhat differently. I assume that God doesn’t view either as an idolater or unbeliever, and that he looks at each a good bit less harshly than each (sometimes) looks at the other. Someday, over a nice beer ale, we’ll be able to sit in a pub somewhere with Jesus at the table, and he can enlighten either Bowman or Burke (or both – their positions are contrary, not contradictory – both can’t be true, but logically, both could be false) about where they went wrong. At least one will be profoundly embarrassed, probably shed a tear, but Jesus will be gentle, and if there is a “winner” he won’t rub it in, and in ten or maybe ten thousand years perhaps it’ll largely be forgotten.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that both views are true (that’d be too much paradox for any of us), or that they are equally reasonable, or that this debate doesn’t matter, or that one’s views on the Trinity have no important practical consequences. I firmly deny all these things.

What I’m saying is that this is an argument between siblings, and so is not like the showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. Our older brother, then, is at bottom a friend of both sides, and we should gladly follow him in this, whatever our theories may be. The contempt that so easily slips in – we should let it go. Argue on, brothers.

First, he tweaks his formula (here’s the previous version):

The doctrine of the Trinity is biblical if and only if all of the following propositions are biblical teachings:

1. One eternal uncreated being, the LORD God, alone created all things.
2. The Father is the LORD God.
3. The Son, who became the man Jesus Christ, is the LORD God.
4. The Holy Spirit is the LORD God.
5. The Father and the Son stand in personal relation with each other.
6. The Father and the Holy Spirit stand in personal relation with each other.
7. The Son and the Holy Spirit stand in personal relation with each other.

The only theological position that affirms all seven of the above propositions is the Trinity. However, each of these propositions finds affirmation in at least one or more non-Trinitarian doctrines.

I think the changes are verbal, not substantial. But he’s doing a couple of things here. First, he wants to show that he’s not presupposing any Trinity doctrine, but just inferring it from what the Bible clearly teaches. Thus, he makes the point that each of 1-7 is affirmed by at least one non-trinitarian theory. Second, he wants to show that his theory is most faithful to the Bible, of the available theories.

When I first saw this, I thought he was re-formulating to get around the problem that this theory is apparently contradictory. But I don’t think this is his aim, as at best, the contradiction is slightly papered over. If 5-7 are true, then f, s, and h must each be selves (capable of being in personal relations) and since by “personal relation” we assume Bowman means friendship with another (not with oneself), then f, s, and h must be three – none can be numerically identical to either of the others. And yet, 2-4 seem to say that each is numerically identical to one thing, the self who created (1). And things identical to the same thing, are identical to each other – ’cause they’re just one thing, after all. So, each of the three is and isn’t God; in my view, the battleship remains sunk.

BUT, to his credit Bowman puts up a manly and forthright defense of positive mysterianism (comment #3 here). He smacks down a misinterpretation of John 4:22, and makes the excellent point that it is irrational to dismiss a theory at the first sight of an apparent contradiction. One must be patient enough to work through things – oftentimes those contradictions turn out to be merely apparent.

Mind you, I don’t agree with positive mysterianism, and I’ve explained in gruesome detail what I think is wrong with it. Moreover, I think Bowman is mistaken in saying that catholic Christians have always held paradoxical views about God (e.g. in the NT “mysteries” have nothing to do with apparent contradictions), and he doesn’t seem to recognize the crucial difference between a belief which merely strikes one as implausible, and one which appears to be contradictory. Moreover, he attacks a straw men (that believable theological claims must be proven consistent, and that to believe that something is so one must understand how it is so). But he here expresses a view popular with a good many Christians, and with evangelicals in particular. And IF this defense is reasonable, then it is not enough to merely point out the apparent inconsistency of Bowman’s views. Point, Bowman.

In the rest of his closing statement, Bowman

• Gives a pretty fair summary of Burke’s biblical points.
• Insists that he’s shown his interpretations of the passages to be better, including some surprising ones, e.g. 1 Cor 8:6, which he reads to assert Jesus and the Father to be one self.
• Denounces as “slanderously false” Burke’s claim that trinitarianism somehow compromises the genuine humanity of Jesus. Although I think Bowman lost the debate about temptability, I think not enough in this debate has been said about the consistency or inconsistency of incarnation theories. Burke would need to show that on Bowman’s view of the incarnation (whatever that is), Jesus can’t be a man, or the right sort of man. Bowman points out in a comment (#7) that Burke hasn’t done enough to definitively show this.
• Objects to Burke’s claim that Jesus is the “literal” Son of God.
• Asserts that he creamed Burke re: Philippians 2.
• Ditto on John 1. I agree that Bowman points out some apparent inconsistencies in Burke’s position, but he seems blind to the difficulties of his own reading. (To wit: Isn’t Pr. 8 the background here, as well as some statements in the apocrypha about the non-literal incarnation God’s law? And what would it mean to say that the logos both is God and is with God? Burke has a natural answer here – Pr. 8:27, 30 And strangely, Bowman’s reading has “God” being applied, confusingly, in short order to the Father (“with God”) and to the Son (“was God”) and then quickly (v.2) back to the Father.)
• And the NT obviously teaches Christ’s existence before his conception. Plus, Bowman accuses Burke of quoting out of context “Mowinckel, who “shows that the Jewish ‘Son of Man’ was really (not ideally) pre-existent.” It seems that Dave was mistaken about Mowinckel’s overall position; but this sort of “gotcha” doesn’t advance the discussion, in my view, though it may delight partisans. On a close look, though, Burke didn’t say or imply that Mowinckel agreed with his overall view. It’s fair to point this out, but Burke has no obligation whatever to draw attention to the fact.
• Finally, Christ in various places receives “divine honors” and “divine names” – and not just in any old way, but in “religious contexts” (whatever those are!) which show that the disciples etc. took Jesus to be God himself. Religion scholar James McGrath shows up in the comments are pertinently asks what “religious” worship consists in, and what Bowman makes of an interesting OT text. (Comments 1, 10, 19, 67, 69)
• In a long, labored comment (#4) Bowman accuses Burke of deliberately distorting the “Athanasian” creed, when Burke says that it does and doesn’t teach three Lords. Bowman confidently pounces because the creed explicitly denies there are three Lords. Well, sure. But Burke wasn’t saying that the creed has an explicit contradiction (asserting “P” and asserting “not-P”) but rather that it is implicitly contradictory – explicitly saying there aren’t three, and yet implying that there are. I got Burke’s point. (More here.) Bowman should be slower to accuse his opponent of bad faith. Clear implicit contradictions are just as obviously false as explicit ones. Bowman also objects that Burke is begging the question, but Burke is only assuming self-evident truths, which one may reasonably assume in any context. Bowman needs to state and defend his controversial assumption of relative identity relations. Point Burke.
• In the rest of that long comment, Bowman tries to deduce the Trinity doctrine (understood paradoxically as above) from the Bible without using the word “person”. He asserts that the concept of a person is just the concept of “someone other than” one or more selves. (That can’t be right – the notion a solitary person/self isn’t contradictory.) In any case, as he reformulates “the” doctrine, he comes up with “There is one God, i.e. one divine Being, existing in three Persons… But now I notice that the word “Person” in the above statement cannot be identical in meaning to the word “Being” without resulting in a contradiction. Thus…” (he none too clearly asserts that in this context two things can be different “persons” but the same being). But why the sudden dislike for apparent contradictions? Embrace the mystery, my friend – don’t go rationalist on us at this late date.
• The comments on Bowman’s post are cantankerous and interesting. Bizarrely, at one point (#65) a Bowman partisan assures him that he should quit, that further discussion would be a waste of time (too many unitarians involved!) To his credit, Bowman discusses historical matters (#14-15, 63) and the objection about why the NT weren’t more up front with their views on the Trinity (#66 – to me, his answer is unsatisfying ). Points to Bowman for patient and thorough follow-through.

On the negative side, here’s Bowman’s final reply to McGrath re: worshiping Jesus as an agent of God:

…I agree that in a limited sense, the Israelite king (David or Solomon especially) functioned as God’s “agent” in that they ruled Israel on his behalf. I even agree that this motif establishes some precedent for the NT teaching that Christ rules from God’s throne. In the NT, however, what was a very limited, circumscribed agency with regard to the Israelite king is expanded to include Jesus Christ in the very identity of God.

In the last sentence Bowman repeats a confused trope from contemporary theology. But that’s not essential to his case; if Jesus just is (is numerically identical to) God, then we don’t need any talk of his being “in God’s identity”, whatever that might mean.

Though not every punch lands, Bowman fights hard and on many fronts in this round, and I’m awarding the round to him.

Score through all six rounds:

Bowman: 1
Burke: 3
draw: 2

Next time: some concluding reflections on the debate.

From reason: The Trinity doctrine, argues Burke, is inconsistent with itself. The “Athanasian” creed presents us with three, each of whom is a Lord, and yet insists that there is only one Lord. As some philosophers have pointed out, it is self-evident that if every F is a G, then there can’t be fewer Gs than Fs. So if every divine person is a god, then there can’t be fewer gods than divine persons. (Burke leaves out this: Why say that this creed presents us with three? Because each one differs from the others, having at least one feature the others lack.)

Since the Trinitarian Jesus is believed to be God, everything in Scripture which applies to God must necessarily apply to him.

Right. If the “two” are really one and the same, whatever is true of one must be true of “the other”. That is, nothing can differ from itself at any given time. Bowman does seem to identify Jesus and God, even while he thinks some things are true of one but not of the other. Point, Burke.

But note that many trinitarians to not identify Jesus and God. Almost no evangelical philosophers do, for instance, and arguably none to almost none of the ancient catholics do. Sharing a nature with isn’t the same as being numerically the same as, nor does the first obviously imply the second (unless the “nature” is a haecceity).

Unfortunately, this section features repeated distractions concerning words. Burke complains that “Trinitarianism requires unique definitions of words.” So what. Theories often require us to coin new definitions. Similarly, Burke demands evidence from the Bible that the word “person” should be used as trinitarians  use it. But the Bible doesn’t have rules about word definitions – at least not this one! Burke is trying to press the point that trinitarianism makes arbitrary and maybe inconsistent claims, and ones which ill fit the Bible, but these are not the ways to press points like that.

A more substantial point:

[Bowman] accepts the Trinity as “three persons”, when it suits him, but at other times he wants to count the three persons as one (ie. one Yahweh, or one Lord). He does this by effectively treating the three separate persons as a single unipersonal being, which is logically inconsistent…

I agree – it seems to me that like the rest of us, Bowman normally thinks of God as a magnificent self. But he doesn’t want four divine persons, so he sometimes thinks of God as… well, not a self, but some sort of thing which in some sense has three divine selves within it. But, Bowman finally addresses this in a comment in this last round… stay tuned.

From scripture: Mostly, Burke gives a good recap of his overall scriptural case. At one point, I think he goes too far:

Jesus and his apostles were adamant that everything people needed to know about him could be sourced directly from the OT. There was no “progressive revelation” about the Messiah; there was no new doctrine concerning his nature and identity; there was no change from OT to NT. (emphasis added)

I don’t think this is true. An important counterexample is Christ’s second coming, or the distinction between the first and second comings. I think it is a mistake to be hostile to any doctrine of progressive revelation. Why can’t something which is obscure later be made clear? e.g. what happens after death, how many times the messiah will come, how God will bring in people from all nations to his family. I think Burke rejects progressive revelation because he thinks it requires the later revelation to contradict the earlier. But the later might instead be correcting not what the earlier says or implies, but rather mistaken conclusions people are liable to draw from what it says and implies. e.g. that when one is all the way dead, one has ceased to exist

He effectively presses his point about Acts, which arguably conspicuously lacks any teaching of the “fully divinity” of Jesus or of any tripersonal God.

But where is the uproar [in Acts] against the notion of a Messiah who is also a God-man? Where is the backlash against a triune God? There is no such uproar; there is no such backlash; there is no outcry against Trinitarian concepts. On the Trinity and the deity of Christ, the preaching record and the Jewish response are both silent. In light of the Jews’ response to the Gospel message, this is inexplicable unless proto-Trinitarian doctrines were not preached at all. And if they were not preached, why weren’t they preached?

Irritatingly, this section has some scattershot charges – that trinitarians commit a lot of fallacies, that their readings of the Bible are convoluted, that their readings are marred by their love for their theory, which they always presuppose. This is just a fancy way of saying “look how ridiculous they are” – and it is about as effective as that charge. Best to stay on the subject at hand – the substance of Bowman’s case, not the alleged shortcomings of trinitarians in general.

In reiterating his case, I a few times noticed that he overstates it. Thus,

We saw that throughout the OT, God’s Holy Spirit is described as something that belongs to Him, like a property or a power. We saw that the NT follows this model exactly, without deviating in any way from OT teaching. There is no new revelation about the identity of the Holy Spirit.

This point can be argued, but it is too much to say that the “NT follows this model [of the Holy Spirit as an attribute] exactly”.

Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God.” (Acts 5:3-4, NIV, emphases added)

As I explained before, this usage of “the Holy Spirit” (as a singular referring term, referring to the Father) needn’t bother a unitarian. Overstating the case makes it easy for one’s opponent to reject it out of hand.

Moving on, Burke asks some pertinent questions:

Why did God allow His chosen people to believe He is only one divine person instead of three, right up until the Christian era? Why did He conceal His triune identity? What was the rationale behind this divine deception? When and where was the new revelation first made clear? Rob claims it is “implicit”, but why only “implicit”? All the other key apostolic doctrines are explicitly preached. How can divinely inspired church leaders fail to provide an explicit teaching of the triune God if that is what they genuinely believe? Jesus told his disciples that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth (John 16:13); why didn’t it lead them to Trinitarianism?

I believe that Bowman stonewalls on all these through the whole debate. (Have I missed any answers?) I assume his view is just that we can’t understand God’s ways. But if so, better he should say and defend that answer. He loses points by refusing to answer. The audience he’s used to may not think much of them, but this is a more mixed audience.

On to history: Burke argues that the earliest material is “biblical unitarian”, while much (most) 1st century catholic theologians are subordinationist unitarians. He holds that:

Historically, doctrine always develops from the minimal to the complex, evolving as it is exposed to new influences and adapting in response to perceived heresies. Thus, the simplest doctrinal statements are more likely to be the earliest and most authentic. It is therefore significant that the earliest Christian creedal statements are Unitarian.

Is trinitarian theology, or subordinationist unitarianism more complex than humanitarian unitarianism? Maybe (it may depend on which Trinity theory we have in mind – some professed trinitarians simply hold that there’s one god with three ways of living, and that at least as simple as biblical unitarianism, isn’t it?). Are the early statements unitarian? One might not want to say they are explicitly so – as they are not written in reaction to any Trinity theory – but rather that they are compatible with, and a good fit with unitarianism, as they seem to assume that God and the Father are numerically the same. But if Bowman is right, we would not expect them to be this way.

In his summation, Burke urges us to lay aside the docetic thinking which dogs trinitarianism and embrace a Jesus who really shared our lot. Further,

…Christianity began as a Jewish religion. …Biblical Unitarianism calls for a return to those Jewish roots. I urge you to rediscover Israel’s God; the God Whom Jesus himself worshipped; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — not the God of Justin Martyr, Arius, or Basil the Great.

Some will wonder what is so important about “getting back to our Jewish roots”? I mean, Judaism is a different religion, is it not?

More importantly, don’t these last three (or at least the last two – see below) also worship the god of Abe and Jesus? I think Burke oversells his theory, suggesting that unless you buy this, you may be worshiping another god. How likely is this, I wonder, for current day Christians?

Suppose I have a friend who thinks I (1) have huge muscles, (2) speak Chinese in addition to English, (3) love the New England Patriots, and (4) am half space alien. (He’s kind of a weird guy.) This friend is mistaken on all four counts – but he’s still my friend. These false beliefs about me may throw up somewhat of a barrier to our friendship, in certain situations. I’ll wish that he was better informed, but I’m not going to reject him for his false beliefs about me, even if he’s culpable for them. There are limits to this – it’s hard to see how I could be friends with someone who thought I was a wallaby, a donut, or a pair of socks.

Justin Martyr and Arius think, like Burke, that the one true god is the Father. So… they believed in Israel’s God, no? Even if they think he created the world by means of a newly formed, divine helper or two. (Basil is another case… if  I understand him, he identifies God with an ineffable, simple divine nature.)

Again, consider Bowman, if Burke is right. Bowman worships the Father, considering him to be the one true god. That he, if Burke is right, is confused about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, doesn’t take this fact away. Doesn’t Bowman love the things God loves, in particular, Jesus? Are Bowman’s beliefs inconsistent? If so, this isn’t a good thing, but it won’t prevent his worshiping God and serving him.

In sum, Burke recaps what has been a pretty strong case. But he makes some points which, though they delight the choir (other unitarians), either beg the question (assume what needs proving), or are not very relevant when debating a non-unitarian. These too aggressive reaches are a debating mistake; one thinks one is going in for the kill, but in reality, hostile and some neutral listeners tune out.

Next time: Bowman’s closing statement.

Buckle your seatbelts – this post isn’t a quickie.

First, to review – in this whole debate, Burke has argued that all the NT writers were humanitarians. But if this is so, one would expect there to be a bulk of humanitarian unitarians in the times immediately after the apostles. Here, as we saw last time, Bowman pounces. All the main 2nd century theologians, he urges are confused or near trinitarians. (Last time, I explained that this is a dubious play on the word “trinitarian”. My term for them is non-Arian subordinationists.) There’s not a trace, Bowman urges, of any 1st c. humanitarians – with the exception of some off-base heretical groups, like the Ebionites.

We’re talking about mainly the 100s CE here, going into the first half of the 200s. The general picture, as I see it, is this. Early in the century, we find the “apostolic fathers” basically echoing the Bible, increasingly including the NT (the NT canon was just starting to be settled on during this century). However, some of them seem to accept some kind of pre-existence for Christ (in God’s mind? or as a divine self alongside God?), and they’re often looser, more Hellenized in their use of “god” (so even though as in the NT the Father is the God of the Jews, the creator, Jesus is more frequently than in the NT called “our God” etc.) But clearly – no equally divine triad, no tripersonal God, and in most, no clear assertion of the eternality of the Son. In the second half of the century, starting with Justin Martyr, we find people expounding  a kind of subordinationism obviously inspired by Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish Platonic theologian who was a rough contemporary of Jesus. How do we know this? They use his metaphors and adopt some of his interpretations of the OT – and like him, under pressure of Greek philosophy, they were very worried about taking parts of the OT literally, and about sort of shielding God from the corruption of the material world. (This is a big subject – I’ll post on Philo another time. But for the intensely curious, there is a very helpful discussion in Norton.)

Is Bowman right about the total absence of evidence for 2nd c. humanitarians? I don’t think so, though this is a dark subject. We have to remember that much of what he have is works by highly educated guys – Tertullian, Justin, Irenaeus, Origen loom large – who are tireless polemicists for the catholic (aka “proto-Catholic”) movement. It is not clear to what degree the views of a guy like this, at any given time, reflect the views of catholics all together of that time. In this post, some general thoughts, and a few bits of relevant evidence.

First, a Christian like Bowman (and also, like Burke, or like me for that matter) has no good reason to consider proto-Catholics the only real Christians in this era – that is, that group of Christians united behind the bishops, who as the century went on increasingly claimed apostolic authority for themselves collectively. Why? Because we all think that they were off base on many things  – notably the authority of bishops, but also things like baptismal regeneration, (later on) infant baptism, the claim that Plato got all his truth from Moses, universalism in the case of Origen, etc. Thus, when surveying the opinions of genuinely saved folk in the first c., it is too quick to dismiss the views of any non-catholic. Thus, it is not clear that the Nazarenes and Ebionites are irrelevant to this dispute. But still, let’s assume they are irrelevant.

In the rest of this post, I’ll cite 3 pieces of evidence that there were humanitarian unitarians in the 1st c. – possibly, a lot of them, within the broad realm of the catholic movement.

First, an exchange from Justin‘s mid 1st c. Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (which was discussed by Biddle, Christie, and Priestley) ch. 48-9:

And [the Jew] Trypho said, “…Resume the discourse… For some of it appears to me to be paradoxical, and wholly incapable of proof. For when you say that this Christ existed as God before the ages, then that He submitted to be born and become man, yet that He is not man of man, this [assertion] appears to me to be not merely paradoxical, but also foolish.”

And I [Justin] replied to this, “I know that the statement does appear to be paradoxical, especially to those of your race… Now assuredly, Trypho,” I continued,”[the proof] that this man is the Christ of God does not fail, though I be unable to prove that He existed formerly [i.e. before his conception] as Son of the Maker of all things, being God, and was born a man by the Virgin. But since I have certainly proved that this man is the Christ of God, whoever He be, even if I do not prove that He pre-existed, and submitted to be born a man of like passions with us, having a body, according to the Father’s will; in this last matter alone is it just to say that I have erred, and not to deny that He is the Christ, though it should appear that He was born man of men, and [nothing more] is proved [than this], that He has become Christ by election. For there are some, my friends,” I said, “of our race [i.e. Christians], who admit that He is Christ, while holding Him to be man of men; with whom I do not agree, nor would I, even though most of those who have [now] the same opinions as myself should say so; since we were enjoined by Christ Himself to put no faith in human doctrines, but in those proclaimed by the blessed prophets and taught by Himself.”

And Trypho said, “Those who affirm him to have been a man, and to have been anointed by election, and then to have become Christ, appear to me to speak more plausibly than you who hold those opinions which you express. For we all expect that Christ will be a man [born] of men, and that Elijah when he comes will anoint him. But if this man appear to be Christ, he must certainly be known as man[born] of men; but from the circumstance that Elijah has not yet come, I infer that this man is not He[the Christ].” (emphases added)

There are a couple of interesting things here. First, Justin concedes that Jesus can be the Messiah without his being divine or pre-existent – those points are independent of each other, and nothing about being Messiah logically implies being divine or pre-existing. So he insists that his arguments that Jesus is the Jewish messiah will work even if he can’t show Jesus to have pre-existed, or to be anything but a “man of men”, i.e. not Virgin-born, but with two human parents.  Second, Justin seems willing to concede that people who deny his logos theory may yet be Christians – catholic Christians, we assume. Third, there’s a translation problem in the last sentence of the first paragraph – on some renderings, such as the one cited by Priestley, it sounds like Justin might be grudgingly conceding the popularity of the humanitarian view.

I do not agree with them, nor should be prevailed upon by ever so many who hold that opinion… (Priestley, p. 6.)

And a unitarian translator has,

To whom I do not assent, though the greatest part of them should say that they have been of the same opinion. (Christie, p. 209)

But the latest translation I’ve seen, by a trinitarian, essentially agrees with the first above. Priestley notes that Irenaeus also declines to condemn humanitarians who accept the virgin birth. Priestley observes,

This language has all the appearance of an apology for an opinion contrary to the general and prevailing one… [he] even speaks of the pre-existence of Christ… as a doubtful one, and by no means a necessary article of Christian faith.” (Priestley, pp. 6-7)

By itself, this doesn’t count for much - perhaps Justin is merely over-eager to concede all he can for the sake of argument.

But consider a second piece of evidence, noted by Christie (pp. 211-2) – a passage from Tertullan’s Against Praxeas, ch. 3:

The simple, indeed, (I will not call them unwise and unlearned,) who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation (of the Three in One), on the ground that their very rule of faith withdraws them from the world’s plurality of gods to the one only true God; not understanding that, although He is the one only God, He must yet be believed in with His own [economy] . The numerical order and distribution of the Trinity they assume to be a division of the Unity; whereas the Unity which derives the Trinity out of its own self is so far from being destroyed, that it is actually supported by it. They are constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods, while they take to themselves pre-eminently the credit of being worshipers of the One God; just as if the Unity itself with irrational deductions did not produce heresy, and the Trinity rationally considered constitute the truth. We, say they, maintain the Monarchy (or, sole government of God). And so, as far as the sound goes, do even Latins (and ignorant ones too) pronounce the word in such a way that you would suppose their understanding of the [Monarchy] was as complete as their pronunciation of the term.

What Justin is noting, is that average pew dwellers were in his day constantly objecting to the logos theology. Why? Presumably because logos theology was (1) new, (2) never before popular (at least outside of elite circles), and (3) because they understood their “rule of faith” to be inconsistent with it – specifically, its monotheism. What is the rule of faith? Probably, something like a primitive, shorter form of what we call the Apostles’ Creed. Countless unitarians have pointed out that the so-called Apostles’ Creed seems unitarian, identifying God with the Father, and may reflect a (mid? early?) 1st c. consensus. Tertullian in his On the Veiling of Virgins, ch. 1 says:

The rule of faith… is altogether one, alone immoveable and irreformable; the rule, to wit, of believing in one only God omnipotent, the Creator of the universe, and His Son Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary…

Finally, what to my mind is the most important of the evidence: monarchians. Back in the 18th c., patristic heavyweight Nathaniel Lardner opined that at least some of the so-called “patripassians” were in fact humanitarian unitarians. These Christians – such as Noetus, Praxeas (possibly a pseudonym for Callistus I, bishop of Rome) and later on Sabellius and Paul of Samosata,

…were grouped in Rome, and had a dominant influence over the affairs of the Roman church, as can be seen by the manner in which Pope Callistus regarded the defense of the Monarchian cause as simply the preservation of the integrity of the ancient Roman tradition in the face of new innovations from the Logos theologians (especially Hippolytus). (“Monarchianism” in The SCM Press A-Z of Patristic Theology, p. 226, emphases added)

In other words, the Monarchians claimed that their view of Christ was the ancient, majority opinion within catholicism, at least at Rome (and like all catholics, they claimed their tradition to be apostolic, and geographically uniform). What was their view of Christ? As best I can tell – at least for Praxeas and Noetus, that he was a man,  the messiah, virgin born but not pre-existent or divine. I’ve scoured Tertullian’s Against Praxeas and Hippolytus’ Against the Heresy of One Noetus, in which they blast their opponents for holding the Father and Son to be one and the same. (I think I know, by the way, how they’d object to Bowman’s christology!) But if you look carefully at the statements and arguments attributed to their targets (Praxeas, Noetus) they sound roughly like the sorts of things a humanitarian unitarian would say! It’s not too hard, in my view, to spot the confusions of their critics.

One is this. The “monarchians” read the “logos” of John 1 as being not an agent alongside the Father at creation, but just God’s wisdom. The logos for them  just is (a mode or attribute of) the Father. Now, what is the divine element of in the man who was crucified, which is responsible for his divine actions, such as his miracles, and moreover just is the Son of God? Tertullian thinks: obviously, the logos. But these idiots think the logos is the Father – so they must think that Christ is the Father! They must be “patripassians” (Tertullian invents this taunt) – holding that the Father suffered on the cross. In other words, Tertullian reasons that they’re doomed by this argument:

1. l = f
2. l = s
3. Therefore, f = s.

Tertullian thinks they should deny 1 like him, but what he doesn’t see is that they would deny 2. This was hard for the logos theorists to get their heads around – they were so fixated on the ancient, quasi-divine logos, instrument of the Father’s creation, that the man Jesus (either the complete human nature or the conglomerate of the logos plus a human nature) was of less interest. Indeed, the massively influential logos theologian Irenaeus holds that our salvation was effected by the incarnation of the logos – not so much, it seems, by what Christ did during his earthly ministry!

There’s a lot more that would need to be said to justify my controversial reading of these obscure figures, whose writings are almost totally lost.

But if I’m right that many or most of the so-called “monarchians” were in fact some sort of humanitarian unitarians (which would make them modalists about the Spirit and the logos – but not about the Son of God, whom they took to be a virgin born man – but not “modalists” as theologians usually define it nowadays), and they were correct in asserting themselves to be old and numerous, then Bowman’s assertion that there’s no evidence of (any decent number of) humanitarian unitarians in the 1st century is mistaken. And, Burke has more support for his view – not only subordinationist unitarians, but humanitarian ones, nowadays called “biblical unitarians” were there in the 1st c.

Both sides fought valiantly this round. I thought Bowman landed some punches on the triadic passages. Burke did better on the temptation of Christ issue. Both sides ran into some trouble with the concept of identity. Burke raised a number of issues, whereas Bowman put all his eggs into one (important) basket. Both fought valiantly in the comments, including more issues than I could comment on. I’m calling this one a draw.

Score up through round 5:

Bowman: 0
Burke: 3
draw: 2

Next up: the sixth and final round.

1. 2nd c. catholic theology was predominantly subordinationist.
2. If the apostles had taught the Trinity, this wouldn’t have been so.
3. Therefore, the apostles did not teach the Trinity.

In a long comment (#23) Bowman objects,

For some reason… anti-Trinitarians think it is bad news for the doctrine of the Trinity if second-century and third-century church fathers were not consistently Trinitarian in their theology, but that it is not bad news for them if their particular non-Trinitarian brand of theology is completely missing from those centuries.

It is true that many of the church fathers in the second and third centuries held to some form of ontological subordinationism. However, a fair-minded reading of these church fathers shows that this was a deviation within a generally trinitarian theology. They were not Arians, and by that I mean that their theology was distinctively different from Arianism and far closer to Trinitarianism. …in general what we find are theologies that might fairly be described as defective or immature forms of Trinitarianism. None of them is anything close to a Unitarian. None of them is Arian, though as you correctly state some of them have tendencies in their theology that one could describe as leaning that direction.

…it is a history of Trinitarianism, from the moment the apostle John died right through the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon and beyond. It is a history in which the belief that Christ had existed since before creation as God was almost universally accepted among religious groups professing to be Christian. It is a history in which almost everyone agreed that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are divine. And it is a history in which Unitarianism is glaringly absent. (emphases added)

Yes, pretty much every historically informed unitarian who comes along reads the “apostolic fathers” and the extant mid to late 2nd c. catholic theologians, and finds support there. For example: Biddle, Clarke, Christie, Norton, Lindsey, Priestley, Webster, Lamson.

Why? A unitarian is one who identifies (considers numerically identical) God and the Father, and who doesn’t so identify the Son or Spirit. In other words, for a unitarian, God just is a perfect self – the Father – and he doesn’t have any “persons” within him. Whatever it is to be “fully divine”, unitarians hold that there is one such self. Unitarians differ among themselves about whether (1) the Son pre-existed his conception, and whether (2) the Holy Spirit is a person/self. Subordinationists (sometimes misleadingly called “Arians”) answer yes to both of these, while humanitarians answer no to both. Subordinationists disagree among themselves about whether there was ever a time when the Son and Spirit were not – that is, whether or not their generation and procession were in time.

In my list above, Biddle, Clarke, and Webster are subordinationists. Christie, Norton, Priestley, and Lindsey were humanitarians. Christie and Priestley were first subordinationists, but after thinking about it more, switched to humanitarian unitarianism. This was pretty common in the late 18th to early 19th c. Also common were the two sorts of unitarians getting along fairly well. The chief point for both is that the Father just is God – they’re concerned to save monotheism, and to preserve the unique honor of the Father. They agree that in some sense or other the Son exists because of, and so is subordinate (ontologically and functionally) to the Father. And they unite in holding especially the “Athanasian” creed sort of trinitarianism as unscriptural and contradictory.

I note that this was all common knowledge in educated circles c. 1800 in America and elsewhere. That it is not now, is a testimony to the in-house mindset of Catholic and Protestant academic theologians of the last 100 years or so. They are, for whatever reasons, just not interested in these debates. This attitude is deeply entrenched among today’s academic theologians. Being trained in philosophy, this mystifies me; we’re taught to always look high and low for the strongest arguments for theories, and also that you don’t really understand a theory until you try out some really tough objections on it, and see how it holds up (i.e. how holders of that theory could reply). As the proverb says, the first one to speak seems to have a slam-dunk case, until his opponent comes along and cross-examines him.

Back to unitarians. They look at the 2nd century catholics, and see people who appear to identify God and the Father. And they don’t speak of God as in any sense containing, including, or being composed of the three persons. They’re unitarians, and because of their logos theology speculations, they’re subordinationist, not humanitarian unitarians. Right? (The 19th c. humanitarian Lamson is especially forceful on these points.)

Wrong, says Bowman. They were in fact immature, somewhat confused trinitarians. Or maybe, almost-trinitarians. Not only does he think this, but he thinks it is pretty obvious – something any unbiased look will reveal. Why? They weren’t “Arians”, and their views are more like trinitarians’.

But that they were not Arians is irrelevant – 4th. c. Arianism and some sort of trinitarianism are not the only possible views. We also have the unitarians who think Jesus to be eternally generated, or who hold a logos theory which may feature an eternal Son (if it is possible that a self used to be a property). Why does Bowman think that they are close to being trinitarians, or are even defective or immature trinitarians? Looking at his quotations, I don’t know, except that he’s impressed by the same sorts of triadic mentions of the Three as we find in the NT. Considered by itself, that’s pretty weak.

But let’s try to help him out. Why consider these guys proto- or almost- or defective trinitarians? I can think of two reasons. First, that their views were part of a historical sequence which inevitably led to full-blown trinitarianism. Second, they hold all or most of the essential beliefs of trinitarianism. (Commenters: are there other reasons?)

On the first point: this development doesn’t look inevitable. Read (for beginners) When Jesus Became God, or (for the patient) Hanson’s book. If you want to say it was inevitable, you should go Catholic, and hold that God infallibly guides the bishops, who possess the mantle of the apostles. I assume Bowman doesn’t want to go there.

On the second point: are any of these essential to “the” Trinity doctrine?

• That the three are equally divine.
• That God is tripersonal.
• That the Son and Spirit always were.

I think Bowman would agree that all three are essential to it. But the first two are uncontroversially absent from this early material, and the third is arguably so, for most of the late 2nd c. and early 3rd c. catholics (though arguably not for Origen). One has to be careful, because the late 2nd c. logos theologians say a lot of things that can mislead you into thinking they hold the first two points. They hold that the Father’s divine nature (or a portion of it) was by him, sort of spread out or distributed into two other, new persons, prior to or at the time of creation. So the Son and Spirit “share his nature”, but while he’s divine because of himself, they are so because of him. As to the second point, the one God just is the Father, and so for them God is not tripersonal. This divine nature thing may be in some sense tripersonal, but they don’t put it that way. In sum, starting with Tertullian, they talk of a “Trinity” but this consists of: God, God’s Son, and the Holy Spirit; the Trinity isn’t God, but rather, God’s a member of it. (And the two other members may be called “God” as well.)

Just as a quick illustration of the first point (that they don’t hold the three as equally divine) Origen – the most educated and one of the most influential of this bunch – holds that

…he, who would pray as he ought, must not pray to him who himself prays, but to Him whom Jesus our Lord taught us to invoke in prayer (namely, the Father)… it is not according to reason for a brother to be addressed in prayer by those who are glorified by the same Father. (De Orat. 15, quoted in Lamson, 185)

They generally try to soothe concerns about monotheism by emphasizing the primacy of the Father. The later ones, and less clearly the earlier, believe that in some sense Jesus pre-existed, and many call him “God”, “our god”, “my god”, etc. – which isn’t as surprising as some of us assume. The later ones speculate on how the Son may have a divine nature because of the Father (as opposed to the Father, who is divine of himself).

If Bowman thinks Origen and Justin etc. are confused trinitarians, then he must think Clarke is one as well. I encourage him to read Clarke, and decide if he really wants to maintain this. If so, he’ll be in disagreement with most of the trinitarians of Clarke’s day. Clarke spins his subordinationism as the true, early catholic version of the doctrine (and he’s very well read in those 2nd & 3rd c. guys, and quotes them at length, both in the original languages and with his own English translations), but he’s against the Athanasian creed, and would deny #4 and #5 of Bowman’s six propositions. For both Clarke and Bowman, Origen, Irenaeus, etc. are “trinitarians” – but for Clarke, they are the truest kind, not an inferior kind. Clarke holds that the Son is divine  – he has all essential features of divinity, but aseity, for he eternally exists by an ineffable act of the Father’s will. Same with the Spirit. But the one god, for him is the Father Almighty – just as with these 2nd century guys.

So, is unitarianism glaringly absent in this period? No – the subordinationist kind is there in force, esp. post-Justin Martyr. Bowman insists that it is really “trinitarian” or close to it; I say, let him embrace Clarke as a near or immature trinitarian brother, or else admit that he’s merely spinning with the label “trinitarian”. If, depending on the writer, 2 of the 3 or all 3 of the essential points of “the” Trinity doctrine, we’re just polemicizing in insisting that the guy is a “trinitarians” or nearly so.

But what about Burke’s kind – what I call humanitarian unitarianism, and what goes by the name “biblical unitarianism” in recent days? Is that wholly absent? Tune in next time.

What about Burke’s argument, at the top of this post? I’ve argued that 1 is true. 2 is plausible (still, I think more needs to be said about it). But then, it is plausible that the argument is sound. Or maybe the argument should be weakened with a “Probably,” at the start of premise 2, and a “probably” after the “Therefore” in the conclusion. Understood this way, the argument would just put pressure on the NT reader to come up with a non-trinitarian reading of the apostles’ doctrine; this is what Burke is doing.

How can Bowman respond? He could accept the argument – that 2nd c. subordinationism was unlikely, but nonetheless it is just too clear that the apostles taught the Trinity. (Not a plausible line – philosophers call this “biting the bullet“.) Or, he could challenge premise 2. Would he be willing to do this? And on what grounds? A story about the corruption of Christian theology by Platonism? Or…?