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

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

Many thanks to J.T. Paasch, Scott Williams, and Joseph Jedwab for their excellent posts! And thanks to the many great commenters here; we’ve had some vigorous discussions, and only very rarely have things gotten a bit too “hot.” You folks are awesome.

A few hastily chosen highlights, in no particular order:

• Some introductory posts on “The” Doctrine: 1, 2, 3.
• The Orthodox Formulas (scroll down).
• Some thoughts on heresy.
• A long series on Richard of St. Victor, source of the social trinitarian arguments that there can’t be just one divine person.
• Some answers about modalism.
• Islam-Inspired Modalism.
• Scott Williams’s posts on the theory of Henry of Ghent.
• Judging a debate been evangelical apologist Rob Bowman (mysterian) and Christadelphian (humanitarian unitarian) Dave Burke.
• “Trinity Monotheism” – the “social”  Trinity theory of J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig.
• Is God a self?
• A few exercises in, um, creative writing: Gnomes, some weird sects, confused World Vision sponsorees, and Stalin’s USSR.
• J.T. Paasch on Arius and Athanasius.
• Sarah Hutton on Plato and the Trinity
• Randal Rauser puts a bullet behind the ear of the time-wasting “Rahner’s Rule”.
• Nothing new under the sun.
• Identity.
• Dealing with Apparent Contradictions.

As always, comments never close. What have I left out?

What sorts of posts to you find the most useful? What can we do to make trinities better? Shorter posts? More contributers? More frequent posts? More linkage? Fewer or more stupid pictures? More or less historical stuff?

Please sound off in the comments.

Click the link at the bottom of this page to see the mobile version.

No guarantees if your phone resembles one of these two.

What if

By “posts”, of course, we mean “posts or comments on posts”.

Read it, live it. Patton is very insightful there.

I speak as one sinner to others.

There’s something about human nature… if we’re convinced that we’re right about some important subject-matter, we start to think we’re entitled to pour scorn and contempt on those without this supposed insight. (This happens especially in matters of politics and religion.) But, we are not so entitled. The fact remains that God loves those people, and expects us to. And we would not like to be treated that way.

What way? Just take notice when others start to get heated up over your comments. It could be that you’ve touched a nerve, i.e. raised a devastating criticism. It could be that they’re spoiled, immature, and over-sensitive. Or, it could be that you’re rude. Judge yourself, lest you be called to account for your words. Usually, we know and take pleasure in online bomb-throwing/groin-kicking/eye-poking. Other times, we’re just operating with less stringent standards, like we’d used with friends via email, or face to face. But whether the damage is intentional or not, it’s damage, and the behavior is thus too rough.

Saith Grok: “Love thy neighbor, and buyest thou all thine goods at WalMart.”

Is Allah God? Are Christians and Muslims talking about (numerically) the same God? We’ve previously linked and joined in with discussions with Jeremy Pierce and with Kevin Corcoran.

To further the discussion, I present a tale to explain why I think it doesn’t matter whether or not “God” (used by Christians) and “Allah” (used by Muslims) refer to the same being.

A kind and generous woman named Sophie decides to sponsor two children through World Vision. She offers to give to children from “wherever the need is greatest”, and weeks later, a letter reveals that she is the new sponsor of two brothers from some third-world country she’s never heard of. Their names are Goofus and Gallant, and they are identical twins.

Each month, Sophie sends off a generous check, along with a note. She’s not sure about the boys’ religious affiliation, so she sticks with good general advice, which she hopes will apply no matter what. “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” “Forgive others, just as you are forgiven.” “Love and serve the Creator.” “Love one another.”

She also sends kind little notes every so often. “I love you.” “You’re growing to be so big!” “Hope to meet you some day.”

Sophie doesn’t know this, but Goofus and Gallant are rather confused about their benefactor. They (correctly) believe that their benefactor is a rich, English-speaking being who lives far away, but some silly playground talk, the occasional television show, and some translation problems leads them to believe the following things about their benefactor – about the source of their support and the occasional notes and letters:

1. He is a space alien with green tentacles, who must wear a bulbous glass helmet when visiting the earth.
2. Once, probably, he killed a kitten. Or something like that.
3. He and his planet mates once invaded the Earth, but were repelled by a bartender wielding a board with a nail in it.
4. He’s a shape-shifter. In addition to his usual form, he could appear, say, as a middle-aged caucasian American woman.

Goofus and Gallant often discussed their benefactor, whom they referred to (no one knows why) as “Grok”. They had very different attitudes about Grok. Gallant loves Grok and is grateful to him. He hopes that some day he can somehow return Grok’s love, and eagerly desires to meet him. Every week he writes Grok a letter, telling Grok about his day, and writing out his hopes, dreams, and fears. He has a large stash of these, saved for a hoped-for future delivery to Grok.

Goofus hates Grok. His dark imagination conjures up some evil motives which he attributes to Grok (something about WalMart, global hegemony, and soylent green), and each of “Grok’s” (in fact, Sophie’s) letters to Goofus are greeted with (1) spit, (2) toilet paper usage, and (3) burning (of course, always in that order). Goofus ignores the copious benefits flowing from “Grok”, ignores or maliciously reinterprets the monthly notes, and in fact hates Grok so much that he will try to kill anyone who so much as says a good word about Grok.

Ten years pass this way, and Goofus and Gallant are now graduating from high school. Sophie decides that she’ll surprise “her boys” by attending their graduation. She buys a ticket to their country, and boards the plane with presents, a loving heart, and ten year’s worth of longing.

When she arrives, will she care whether or not “Grok” (spoken by Goofus and Gallant) refers to her? No.

• If not, she’ll accept Gallant’s letters as if they were written to her. This country is very backwards, so she doesn’t blame Gallant for his mistaken beliefs about the imaginary “Grok”. She’ll treat Gallant as if he’d loved her, and not the imaginary “Grok”.
• If “Grok” has all along referred to her, she’ll accept Gallant just the same.
• Either way, she’ll find Goofus unacceptable. Has he hated merely an imaginary character? If so, still, he’s made himself the sort of person who would hate Sophie if informed that she were in fact his World Vision sponsor. Or was Gallant’s hate directed at Sophie all along? (i.e. when Goofus thought and spoke about “Grok”, he thereby referred to Sophie) She will not force her love on him, and so will pass him by.

Sophie has generously dished out benefits for ten years; she’s fishing for someone who will return her love. Because she’s looking for the right sort of person, it is inconsequential to her whether or not someone has actually successfully referred to her, or recognized her as the source of blessings.

It’s going to be long month! “Just one little post, one little post!”

Seriously, I completely understand Bill’spain. Blogging can prevent one from following up on and developing ideas all the way through – as in all the way through to publication. I would like to find a way to have blogging feed and encourage my more serious writing. How might that actually work though? This is what I’ve determined so far.

1. Resist posting every day. This hurts the readership, I’m sure. But one a day, I’m guessing, becomes twice and three times a day. And that probably entails a lot of web-surfing.
2. If you’re an academic blogger, don’t pay to much attention to readership. You’re about truth (let us hope), not the number of eyeballs witnessing your posts. If you really wanted the latter, you’d be posting gossip about movie stars.
3. It’s easier to stay at your work when your blog is narrowly focused, like this one. Then at least some of your posts will be somehow relevant to what you’re doing, now or later.
4. Develop that idea by doing a whole stinkin’ long series on it. But keep each post short.
5. Group blogging is better. Let others drive. Riding still takes time and energy, but less.
6. Share the love. Not every post has to be some sort of virtuoso display of your own abilities. Don’t take it too seriously. When you see some fellow blogger doing something interesting, say to yourself – “Mmmm… that looks like some good Linkage.” Then, link it. Quick post. Now back to work.

I’ve thought of posting paper drafts. But that sort of violates the writing standards of this medium… Ladies and gentlemen – other suggestions? Prosblogion dudes?

I noticed that a few readers were linking some of our posts on Reddit. I thought it’d make it easier to link us on social bookmarking sites, so I installed and activated the Sociable plugin for WordPress – the result is that little string of icons at the end of each individual post page.

Readers – if you don’t see the icon for your favorite social networking site, leave a comment here – I can probably activate it. And thanks for the links!

Congratulations to trinities contributor Joseph Jedwab, who is in the process of finishing his PhD at Oxford, under Richard Swinburne. It’s been a good spring for Joseph. First, he lands a prestigious post-doc at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. Then, he lands a job at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, where he’ll start in the Spring of 2009. Way to go, Joseph!

I only hope we can get him to post more often after his PhD and big move are wrapped up.

No, that’s not a pic of me in high school, though it’s not far off!

Quick note to my fellow bloggers: I use this, and highly recommend it. Here’s their real homepage.

It’s free, and the new 2.1 is much improved. It makes a lot of little things easier. You have to use Firefox, but you were doing that already, right? Works in the new Firefox version 3 as well.

I compose in it, then post it to this blog as a draft, then quickly preview it in WordPress’s own editor before posting.

Only one word of caution – if you’re not careful with its distinction between Notes and Posts, you can accidentally delete an already published Post from the blog, thinking you’re just axing a (saved on your own computer) Note.

update (5/27): There’s a bug in either Scribefire 2.2.5 or in WordPress 2.5 – I can’t post pics from Scribefire, at least in Windows. >:-( Have to use the first “Add Media” icon in the (new) WordPress post editor.

So far, the Survey of Trinitarian Belief (background) has been a failure. We simply have not been able to get enough people to take it.

We chose as a target population seminarians, hoping that enough theology profs would want to participate with their classes in the survey (profs get to see the aggregate results for their classes, which makes a neat discussion starter). This hope was in vain. After maybe 2000 emails, and sending letters to literally every seminary in the US and Canada, exactly 9 profs registered courses, but most of them didn’t follow through, as we got only 20 seminarian respondents, from all their classes combined. This is disappointing – we hoped the profs would be curious enough to follow through. Not so.

So while we’ve had 200 respondents so far (as of 1/11/08), only 20 of those have been from our target population.

In sum, it looks like we’ll never get usable results without an injection of $, to provide some necessary motivation. Problem is, we have no funding whatever. Hopefully, I’ll be putting in a proposal or two for funding some time this spring.

In sum, the Survey site is still open, through at least Spring of 2008. (Simplified URL: http://trinities.org/survey) If you’re a seminary prof and want to join in, please contact me and I’ll send you step-by-step directions. If anyone has funding suggestions, please contact me. Everyone is welcome to take it, as we’re interested in more than seminary students, ultimately.

Technorati Tags: Survey of Trinitarian Belief

Ring around the ro… WATCH OUT DUDE!

Trinities is going group.

I realized that some of the frequent commenters are so good, and have so much to say, that sometimes I’d rather “ride” than “drive”. Some of their “comments” are as long and substantial as my posts! So I’ve invited a few to join in as contributors, as often as their other duties allow.

The first of these, Scott Williams, will shortly be doing a series on the medieval theologian/philosopher Henry of Ghent & other recent work on medieval theories. Scott is a PhD student, who is on the Theology Faculty at Oxford University, though he’s presently a visiting student at Notre Dame, which recently acquired his supervisor Richard Cross.

It isn’t that I’m out of ideas for postings – that’ll never happen! It’s just, I can only post so much so fast, and I think we can all learn a lot from guys like Scott. So, welcome aboard, Scott!

Blame a lot of MMM on this guy – the Hip’ster.

I feel some need to explain and justify what is going on here, as I have divided loyalties.

On the one hand, the stated purpose of the blog is to make recent research on trinitarian theories available to the wider public, in relatively brief, understandable, jargon free form.

On the other hand, this blog’s most faithful readers and commenters are specialists in medieval philosophy & theology, or in recent analytic philosophy of religion, and they can really get into dialogging in the way that PhDs (and to-be-PhDs) in these fields do – which is to say - highly abstract, jargon filled, argument-heavy discourse, that only a scholar can love. Being a scholar, of course, I love it, and have no desire to stem their exploration of historic trinitarian theories. They are all, in various ways, doing cutting edge work, and I learn a lot by listening in, and by joining in. And I know that other philosophy profs appreciate these discussions as well.

My solution? Have it both ways. I just want to try to build a bridge for non-academic readers, to help them, maybe, be able to get something out of this recent Medieval Metaphysical Mayhem (MMM). So I’m going to try to give some relevant background information.

Here goes: all this medieval stuff assumes the inviolable authority of the standard formulas – so you may wish to review these.

Another seminal, authoritative source for these Latin speaking guys from the high middle ages, is that most influential Latin “church father”, Augustine of Hippo, pictured above (d. 430), author of the massive On the Trinity. While this book emphasizes our inability to understand God, the book is also famous for its several examples which later authors call his ‘psychological analogies’ of the Trinity. Augustine reasons that if we can’t catch intellectual sight of the Trinity directly, at least we can see reflections, images, or indications of the Trinity in the created realm, above all in the highest part of human beings (the mind), who are made “in the image and likeness of God”. In the human mind we may encounter several “trinities”, given here in the order that they somehow correspond to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: lover, loved object, the lover’s love for that object, the mind, its love, its knowledge, the mind’s remembering itself, understanding itself, and willing itself, memory, understanding, and will, and the mind’s remembering God, understanding God, and willing God. These are taken to be ‘images’ of the Trinity, with the final two being in some sense the most accurate.

Although he apparently considers the contemplation of these to be helpful in the pursuit of God, in the last section (Book 15) of De Trinitate, Augustine emphasizes that even these are “immeasurably inadequate” to represent God. The main reason is that these three are activities which a person does, whereas God “just is” his memory, understanding, and will; the doctrine of divine simplicity thus renders the mental analogies at best minimally informative. Further, temporal processes seem ill-suited to represent the nature of an essentially immutable God.

Words which are predicated ‘accidentally’ of creatures, such as good or wise, are predicated of God essentially. Applied to us, these words signify properties we happen to possess, and which we might have not possessed, but applied to God, they all indicate the same thing, God’s simple essence. What about terms such as “Father” and “Son”? As God can’t have accidental features, these can’t be predicated accidentally. But Augustine doesn’t want to say that they are essentially predicated either. He
suggests that they rather indicate relations, not between God and anything else, but between God and himself. He explores but ultimately rejects the idea that all true predication of God is relational. (Books V-VII) He finally holds that some terms apply equally to each of the three divine persons, whereas certain relational terms apply primarily to one of the three.

Hence, the origin of P, Fi, and Sp, discussed in the last couple of posts.

I never said this was going to be easy – only interesting. There’s more MMM to come.

Technorati Tags: Augustine, MMM, Latin Trinity, Latin trinitarian

Ah, back to teaching. Adios to the sabbatical, and to the summer. Been swamped with teaching and writing, but there will be a lot of posts eventually coming out of what I’ve been doing…

My thanks to the many excellent commenters who’ve kept the discussion alive. I’ll post something relevant to their discussion soon, and then hopefully make a last post or two on Swinburne.

Sadly, because of mounting responsibilities, I’m going to have to forego recovering more past comments, as promised below. I apologize for this, and I’m resolved to back up more often.

As a penance, I’ve chosen a not very clean bucket.

I apologize for accidentally deleting your recent comments! A few misguided clicks in this blogging tool, and I accidentally deleted the third and fourth Swinburne posts (now mostly restored below), comments and all. I was able to recover most of the content of my posts, but I can’t see any way to recover the dozen or so comments. Rest assured that it won’t happen again, and know that I greatly appreciate and enjoy your feedback, both when I join in, and when I just sit back and “listen”.

UPDATE: 9/1 – Took the bucket off – whew. Restored most posts – will restore more comments later, esp. the more substantial ones.

UPDATE 10/10 – Sorry – just no time, given my other commitments.

It nearly came to this.

Been away from blogging for several days. Among other stresses: a software error caused a file of mine to be overwritten with random data. The result? Three weeks of hard, grueling writing down the drain. Yes, I know about file recovery programs – didn’t work, as the file was actually over-written, not merely deleted. Yes, I usually back up often. Learned a hard lesson about that. And I normally use programs which auto-save every couple of minutes, but I hadn’t been lately. Learned a hard lesson about that too. Kind of under the gun to finish that writing now.

We are as yet far from having enough data. The Survey will thus continue through Summer 2007 and the Fall.

We need seminary and university professors to join in! Only by enough professors asking their whole classes to take the survey, can we get a decently random sample of students. If you’re a professor in a seminary, or teaching Christian theology at the graduate level, please email us using the form on the Help page above, and we’ll send you instructions on participating. What’s in it for you? You get to see the Survey data from your classes (individually AND all together), as well as the data from all respondents so far, in an easy to read graphical form. This is a great item for class discussion, or for simply stimulating your own thinking about the Trinity.

Technorati Tags: Survey, Trinity, Survey of Trinitarian Belief, theology

Anyone can register and take the survey. That’s fun and thought-provoking, but that won’t give us a valid random sample. So we’ve decided to focus on an interesting population: seminarians (and anyone else studying theology at the graduate level). This first phase of the survey, which will last the rest of this semester (until the end of May) is an attempt to find out what they think. If there are future phases, maybe we’ll do other manageable groups. (Pastors? Students and Christian colleges? Mega-church members?)

To do this, we need professors! We’re in the process of spamming contacting hundreds of randomly chosen professors at schools in the US and Canada. What, you haven’t received such an email? If you’re a professor at a seminary, or if you teach students focusing mainly on Christian theology at the graduate level, and you wish to have your students participate in the survey, please email my research assistant Joel Valvo, at this address: Email from your academic email address, and provide a link to your academic page, so that we can verify that you’re a legit professor, instructor, or tutor, etc. He’ll send you the info you need to get started. (Anyone can register and take the survey, but profs need some special info from us in order to register their classes.)

It’s very easy for profs to participate – you basically (1) register yourself and your courses, (2) give each class a sheet of directions (which we email you) on how to take our web survey, and (3) check back, and see their (aggregate) answers as they come in, in a neato graphical form (like this).

(That’s just bogus testing data, by the way.) Anyone who takes the survey can see this data (and they can return at a later date to see it again) and participating profs can see (1) the answers by everyone so for, (2) for all their classes combined, or (3) for each individual class.

It’s really neat how it works, and I have to thank my ingenious programmer friend and seminary graduate Mike Gerholdt for making it happen.

We’re doing this without any funding – zilcho, nada, nil – so we can’t pay people to participate. Thus, we’re hoping that people will join in because it is so interesting.

If you want to help us spread the word, the real URL is

http://www.fredoniaportal.com/trinity/Home/tabid/53/Default.aspx

but an easy to remember alias (which takes you to the above URL) is

http://trinities.org/survey

My recent exchange with Brandon Watson got me to thinking. This is going to be boringly methodological, but I need to think about this issue, as it’ll come up again and again. As a philosopher, I’m interested in evaluating theories on their merits – consistency, fit with the evidence, coherence with what else we believe, explanatory power, and so on. When I look at the history of theological debate, it is very often marred with the ugly weapons of rhetoric - speaking to coerce (your opponent and/or the rest of your audience), rather than to rationally convince. Some ways of talking about and labeling one’s opponents are ways of expressing mild to moderate contempt for them. For instance, Jehovah’s Witness are often referred to as “cultists”. Now, there can be a point to that, in some contexts, depending on what’s mean by “cult”, but I think that in the context of a theological debate, just refute them, if you can. Don’t try to score cheap points with the insinuation that they’re mind-numbed robots. Similarly, “heretic”, “conventional”, “fundamentalist“, and “liberal”.

My first (knee-jerk) reaction was to say “no negative terms” – only descriptive ones, or at least ones which the labelees will happily accept. The problem is that sometimes negative terms (e.g. “anti-trinitarian”) seem apt, and sometimes they’re also enthusiastically adopted by the people in question. And sometimes, self-chosen terms are so chosen precisely because they’re misleading. (e.g. “pro-choice”)

So on further reflection, it seems there are just distinct desiderata for classifying theories. We should satisfy as many as we can, but they sometimes do conflict, and choices must be made. I’d list the following.

1. Choose terms that the theorists themselves would choose, or at least tolerate.
2. Choose descriptive terms – ones which relate in easy to remember ways to the content of the theory itself.
3. Avoid negative terms. (e.g. non-X, anti-X, X deniers)
4. Avoid terms which are commonly used to express contempt.
5. Avoid terms which (unfairly) associate a theory with a despised “heresiarch”.

What’s really important, I guess, is not the words, but how they’re used. When the above (and any other rules of thumb) are broken, it’s particularly important to be clear about the meaning of the terms.

Can anyone think of more?

As an illustration, consider my use of the term “modalism“ on this blog – as applied to many to whom I apply it, 1 is violated, but I try to be clear that I’m not getting any mileage from the fact that the term is commonly used to label a certain family of heresies (4). The term is so apt, because there’s no better one, and it respects 2 and 3 and 5 above.

I imagine that some people will object to 5 – it just seems too useful, at least for apologetic purposes, to call Jehovah’s witnesses “Arians“, and United Pentecostals “Sabellians“.

Perhaps an egregious example of violating 5 from the past will help. Archbishop Tillotson (English, 1630-94) was a famous “latitudinarian”, and on the Trinity, as I understand, he was sort of a mild subordinationist, who upheld the idea that the Father is “the font of divinity”. In 1693, he published some older lectures of his, with the express aim of distancing himself from the Socinians or (as they preferred “Unitarians”) of the time, who were the subject of an intense controversy. For his efforts, apologist Charles Leslie (1650-1722) wrote a tract a few years later mercilessly blasting Tillotson as, you guessed it, a “Socinian“.

Sorry, but that’s fighting dirty. I also think it’s fighting dirty to call JWs “Arians”. Their views are based on a sort of school of Bible interpretation, not on some theory of the 4th century. Lumping people into these categories unfairly suggests that they’re so stupid as to be making some old error which everyone now knows is a ridiculous, uninformed error made only by rank amateurs. Well, maybe. But better to just skip to the evidence showing why their views involve egregious error.

Technorati Tags: heresy, apologetics, Trinity, Arian, Sabellian, modalist, Socinian, Unitarian, Trinity

Technorati Tags: Leftow, Trinity, Latin Trinitarian, Latin Trinity, Modalism