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

There is much art celebrating the love of these two.

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

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

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

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

Around 4:20am (Friday morning) September 16th, I woke suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of the name of “Krishna” being uttered in some way, as if someone was present in my room and had spoken his name out loud. Upon waking I immediately had a most profound sense of Krishna’s actual presence in my bedroom, a presence no less real than the presence of another living person in the room, though I was alone at the time. I responded to this felt presence, first through my thoughts that repeated Krishna’s name (and inquired of his presence), and then verbally out loud by uttering Krishna’s name twice: Krishna, Krishna. I was seized at this moment with a most sweet feeling of completeness and joy. I felt as if Krishna was there with me in my room and actually heard my voice, and that my response had completed a process that began with his name within my mind. I pondered this experience for several minutes, while at the same time continuing to experience a most blissful serenity and feeling of oneness with God, not unlike I had experienced on many occasions in the past in my relationship with the Lord Jesus. It was a most profound sense of both awe and intimacy with God in the form of Lord Krishna.

I should add, and I think this is very important, that I felt I was experiencing the same God that I had experienced on many occasions throughout my Christian life. However, I felt like this being was showing me a different face, side, or aspect to Himself, or – better yet – a different mode of my relationship to Him. I felt a certain validation of my spiritual journey, both past and present. I had gone so far in my Christian faith, but it was now necessary for me to relate to God as Lord Krishna.

If I understand him, he’s saying that he conceived of Jesus as a mode of God – not uncommon among catholic Christians – and now he views Krishna as another mode of God, another way God is and appears. Well, presumably God can be and appear in uncountably many ways. As for me, since I hold that Jesus is a different self than God, I must reject that he’s a mode of God himself; Jesus isn’t a mode at all, but rather a self/person. But back to Sudduth:

After my journey to [the California ashram] Audarya… I can only describe my experience as one of being irresistibly drawn to Sri Krishna, overwhelmed with His power and beauty, convinced of his Godhead – in short overflowing with love for Him as the Supreme Personality of the Godhead, and through him love for all beings, as He resides in the hearts of all beings.

One thing I’m curious about is: does his present faith involve, as most forms of Hinduism do, worship of images? If so, how or why did he change his mind about that? I assume that as a Protestant he viewed idolatry as being forbidden by God.

Sudduth’s account is mostly positive, about his experiences and the charms of his newfound theology. But I guess his conversion must have a negative side as well. I take it he rejects the idea of Jesus as being the best, most complete revelation of the character of the one God, and as being a needed mediator between God and humankind. But if I understand him, Sudduth still believes in one God, albeit one who is related to the cosmos somewhat as a human soul is related to its body. This entails rejecting the idea of God as creator, at least in an ex nihilo sense.

Also, I’m guessing there is a sort of acceptance of mythical lore - something traditional Christianity has always eschewed. However, I do know that a good number of Hindus hold Krishna to be a historical person, as well as an avatar of Vishnu.

Update: more thoughts and a link from the Maverick Philosopher. 

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

In his recent Christmas sermon the Pope said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Prothero

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

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

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

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

Well, is.

Again, at one level, 

There is the story of Jesus Himself, the God who is born in a manger… and dies on a cross… (p. 72, emphasis added)

So, “God,” presumably the only God (p. 68), is the man Jesus. The painting above is a portrayal of the day God himself died.

But given that Christianity’s is a “soft” monotheism (pp. 68-9), also

…Christians see God as a mysterious Trinity: there persons in one godhead, or as novelist J.C. Hallman brilliantly put it, “triplets perched on the fence between polytheism and monotheism.” (p. 69, emphasis added)

Prothero dutifully summarizes the Nicene creed on that page, but this discussion may confuse. If Jesus is God, and God is the Trinity, then don’t Christians think that Jesus is the Trinity? Or rather: why don’t they think that?

Given how much Christians care about doctrine (pp. 69-70) it would’ve been better say a bit more about, the fully evolved doctrine of Christ’s two-natures, and perhaps generation and procession, and the catholic view that the pre-human Jesus created the cosmos. Probably more too about why many Christians think that because of the atonement, Jesus must be “fully divine.” These things should get a least a mention, if you’re going to devote a couple of pages to Mormonism in the chapter.

He refers often to mystery, but not to the paradoxical beliefs which have so motivated Christians to employ the tools of philosophy and logic to exorcise apparent contradictions. For example, that the all-knowing God was an ignorant baby, or that an essentially immortal divine person died.

Finally, he’s happy to leave things unclear; but it would be worth pointing out, consistent with his emphasis on the “staggering” diversity in Christianity (p. 66) that some Christians understand the Trinity modalistically – as three ways one divine self lives – and others tritheistically – as three divine selves living in harmony.  To others, yes, as an mostly unintelligible mystery – but many thinking Christians are driven to come up with a more articulated view.

To answer my own questions:

• Fair? Yes, I would say fair enough. He’s more concerned to present Christianity at the popular level, than as believed by theorists. Nothing his says me strikes me as a misrepresentation, much less a malicious misrepresentation. 
• Accurate? It could be more accurate, I would say. He tends towards the view that too much interest in doctrine, in theological theories, in finely articulated and true religious beliefs, is… twisted, unhealthy, weird, maybe perverse. I see this attitude constantly popping up in the book. As someone who does philosophical theology and philosophy of religion for a living, I of course don’t agree! But I suggest he should correct for this, including at least the ideas noted above.

A few minor corrections: It’s no longer true that most Catholic Bibles do, but most Protestant Bibles don’t have explanatory notes. (p. 80) About his assertion that the Bible nowhere so much contemplates lesbianism (p. 95), that probably needs qualifying, in light of Romans 1. Mentioning “suburban megachurches and their confident sermons about how Jesus would vote” (p. 99) – that is, I think, largely an unfortunate stereotype based on exceptions rather than the rule. In my experience, which yes, includes some evangelical megachurches, pastors tend to be circumspect and generally non-partisan about politics, especially in the pulpit. Such culture-war rhetoric is out of place in the chapter.

Finally, I emphasize that it’s a very good book, packed with information, in world full of crappy books about religion. He loves his subject, and it shows. And he shows a proper sympathy for the traditions, and for the people within them. Reading it is like taking that good class on world religions or comparative religion that you wished you’d taken in college.

Which of these is false?

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

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

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

Why then do 27% opt for inconsistency (affirming all three)? I’m not sure.

• It could simply be desire for orthodoxy being stronger than the desire to avoid believing falsehoods.
• Or perhaps some imagine that “human logic” can be ignored; inconsistent claims may each be true, at least about God.
• Maybe it’s clinging to the mysterian hope that this must be a merely apparent contradiction, though no one can make that appearance recede.
• Or perhaps they’re misreading 1, as if it said only that the Christian God is personal - not a self, but somehow self-like or closely related to at least one self. (Compare: being a king vs. being kingly.) If this is the case, then when tutored on how “is” is meant here, such folk should probably pick another option. To avoid this confusion, we could rephrase the inconsistent triad thusly:
  1. The Christian God is a certain self.
  2. The Christian God is the Trinity.
  3. The Trinity is not any self.

  This triad has a different logical form (1. Ex (x=g & Sx)  2. g = t, 3. -Ex(x=t & Sx)), but the three are still demonstrably inconsistent. It’s just that the proof is harder. I think this is actually a better way to formulate the inconsistent triad. (Reading the logic I just gave: 1.  There exists some x which just is God and which is a self. 2. God just is the Trinity. 3. It’s not the case that there exists some x such that it just is the Trinity and it’s a self.)

Let’s run through the other options briefly. I list the poll percentages as of the writing of this post.

• If you deny 1 (29%), you’re probably some sort of “social” trinitarian. You think God is a group, a community, communion, a quasi-family, consisting of three divine selves.
• If you deny 3 (11%), you’re probably some sort of modalist. You think that God, that is, the Trinity, has a first-person point of view. He’s a self all right, though he operates in three different ways, as Father, Son, and Spirit, or maybe Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. He’s group-like perhaps, but is not literally a group. He’s a god, and the only god.
• If you deny 2 (33%), you’re probably some sort of unitarian. You think the one god is the Father, and that the Trinity isn’t a god, but is rather God, God’s Son, and God’s Spirit.

And since one can always tell what is true by consulting simple, tiny-sample internet polls, this shows that unitarianism is true… today.

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!)

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!

Man, if I don’t love youtube. Never thought you’d here the words “modalistic monarchianism” in a rap?

Yo. Check it out this rap “Godhead” by Flame. Comes with bonus sermon excerpts.

My favorite rhyme, from verse 3: “Pentecostalism” with “cost of living”. That was a hard one! Well played. Second best: “Sabellius” with “belly is”. (Verse 2) He really should’ve worked in “Nestorianism” towards the end of verse 3, but I guess that would tax the rhyming skills of Snoop Dog himself.

The concern here is to refute “Oneness” folk. Take that, Winterband!!! Indeed – Sabellius was trippin.

After the break, the lyrics in all their glory, as posted on the youtube page, with the best bits bolded by me.

Verse 1: God eternally exists/ as being three in His personages/ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and each person is/ fully God and there is only one God who subsists/ so chew on this/ cause this is meat and I’m certain of this/ His prerogative could have been to conceal Himself/ but we serve a God who has chose to reveal Himself/ to be certain of who we servin lets search the text/ because its urgent that we worship Him for who He is/ the topic of the Trinity should evoke some emotion/ for those who are chosen/ and also for those who oppose it/ examine close He’s distinctive in His entities/ thats why we contend for the Trinity in serenity/ we have no Christianity if God is not triune/ in that case we are were saved by whom/ then creation was made by whom/ then redemption was made by whom/ the consummation will take place by whom

Hook: Pastor Joe

/T-R-I-N-I-T-Y/ Its the trinity/ its the trinity/ oh blessed trinity

Verse 2: If we could peer in the past and see a system called dynamic monarchianism/ another system modalistic monarchianism/ before the session we gone focus on one of the isms/ modalistic monarchianism/ get to the core or the center where the belly is/ popularized by a guy named Sabellius/ trying to fight for the position of monotheism/ traditionally held by Jewish in they religion/ and that’s true but he started trippin in his position/ and said that God manifested Himself in different/ modes at different times this is real twisted/ thats why a bishop named Athanasisus had resided/ in a meeting in Nicea in 325/ A.D. where they debated was Jesus God/ and if He was, was He the Father the first time/ Jesus the second/ and Holy Spirit the third time/ while affirmed that the Father is God/ that the Son is God/ and the Holy Spirit is God/ good that ain’t gone solve it/ cause the problem is this/ it’s the simultaneousness/ that he denied

Verse 3: Modalism is back and its now packaged as Oneness Pentecostalism/ and it’s growing in numbers now like the cost of living/ and when they hear this I’ll be labeled a Pharisee/ but the Assemblies of God already labeled it heresy/ in the 20th century when it first emerged/ and ever since its birth its been hurting the church/ in conclusion a myriad of questions I ask/ cause its confusing and steering away at the masses/ I pose to you question number 1/ you mean to tell me that the Father is the Son/ well who was He praying to in the garden of Gethsemane/ I guess you’ll say He was prayin to His deity/ so you sayin that His human side/ is prayin to His divine side/ that is Father/ In that case then there are two beings/ in the person of Christ is that what you are seeing/ no that’s not the scriptures that’s confusion/ and it takes stabs at the hypostatic union/ and that’s that the one Jesus/ is 100% man and 100% God/ not 100% Father and 100% Son

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.

“We’re not saying that God is exactly one A and exactly three A’s. That would be a contradiction. We’re saying that God is one A and three B’s. Where’s the contradiction?”

On the face of it, this is a good and reasonable reply to the charge that the doctrine of the Trinity includes or implies a contradiction (and so is false). In general, we must be careful with facile charges of contradiction; often, such claims are easily rebutted.

But it is only an opening move, and it is a shallow one, as I’ll explain. In fact, it leaves you as exposed as our friend with the raised leg here.

Suppose you say that right now there are ten on the field, and also exactly two on the field. By this, you mean ten players and two teams. This is consistent.

How about ten bugs and two players. No problemo.

Now suppose you say that there are now ten players on the field and exactly two human beings? That is not consistent, for each player just is a certain human being.

Thus, the sort of logical point I made at the outset of this post works sometimes, but sometimes it fails. It all depends on what the terms are, and how they are related.

But does this work or not, in the case of the Trinity?

With creedal Trinity claims, as often understood, A = divine being, and B = divine person/self. So we’d be saying that God is one divine being who is (or maybe, in some sense contains) three divine persons.

Now any self just is a certain being; the concept of a self just is the concept of a certain sort of being. So if there are exactly three persons, each will be a certain being, and they can’t be the same being, for we’ve said there are three selves (hence, three beings). Thus, if there are three divine persons/selves, this seems to imply that there are three divine beings. But the creedal doctrine is supposed to include monotheism – that there is exactly one divine being.

D’oh! Not consistent.

Thus, it is not clear that this defense works; it seems to sweep the dirt under the carpet, leaving a large lump showing.

But maybe something’s gone wrong. Let’s try again. Maybe we used the wrong terms.

Here’s another way, much tried: A = divine being, B = personal mode of a being / way of living.

So the doctrine would be: God is one divine being which has exactly three personal modes of being / ways of living.

Consistency achieved. But Houston, we have a problem! Jesus Christ is, in the catholic tradition, identical to the second person of the Trinity. Here, a “person” of the Trinity is understood to be a way or mode in which the one God lives. But wait - Jesus is a self, a living, knowing, agent – a being with intelligence and will. And it appears that such a thing isn’t and can’t be a mode of some being – a way some being lives; no, a self is a being in its own right. Leaving aside that metaphysical point, we seem to have made a loving, interpersonal relationship between Father and Son impossible, replacing it with one self (God) in a certain mode (Father) interacting with himself in a different mode (Son). Arguably, this flies in the face of the New Testament. In short, we’ve lept into a boiling pot of modalism. Bad move!

Here’s another try: A = divine being, B = something, I know not what

So the doctrine would be: God is one divine being in which there are exactly there something-we-know-not-whats.

And yet one of those something-or-others, you hold, is the Lord Jesus Christ. And you think he’s a great and glorious self, and so not some sort of inconceivable thing. Sorry: not consistent.

Which way to go? Unclear. There have been suggested other ways out, but in these two popular second moves I’ve just outlined, one runs straight into a contradiction – not in the resulting Trinity theory itself, but rather, between that theory and something else any Christian is, as such, committed to.

There may well be laziness on the part of the objector here; he hopes for a quick knock-out blow against the Trinity, a proof (compelling, knock-down argument) that it’s self-contradictory. Good luck finding one of those.

Maybe the best I can say for this opening move is that it’s a lazy reply which may fit a lazy objection. I call the reply lazy because it leaves unclear just what the doctrine is. It merely makes a point about the creed using different terms. Moreover, it merrily ignores some other inconsistencies which lie right around the corner, as soon as one tries to clearly say what the doctrine is supposed to be.

One way a doctrine can be patently false is to be formally inconsistent – in terms of propositional logic, asserting P and not-P.

But another way a doctrine can be patently false is for it to include claims P and Q, while it is obviously true that: if P then not-Q. Here, there’s no formal contradiction between the component claims (P, Q), for neither is the negation of the other (e.g. P, not-P). Yet, if it is true that if P then not-Q, the doctrine (P, Q) implies a falsehood, and so includes a falsehood, for it can’t be that both P and Q are true.

Any Trinity doctrine worth is salt ought to be such that its component claims can be understood and examined to see if they’re all consistent each other, and with other things we all know. If so, then the doctrine would appear to be consistent, and so, may appear true, if supported by our sources. But if the claims contradict one another, or if by adding some self-evident truth to the mix we can logically derive a contradiction, then the doctrine would be patently false, whether self-contradictory, or inconsistent with something else which is evidently true.

Who is willing to pony up such a Trinity theory? In my experience: Many a Christian philosopher. Fewer theologians. Even fewer apologists. For the non-lazy, there’s a lot to consider.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet! How does that work?

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

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

This prepares is for

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

The interviewer suggests, and Flint agrees, that it is a “strange” question whether or not God is a person. Why? They don’t say – but I would guess that people may wonder if it is being asked if God is a human person – a dude or a lady. But what’s being asked is not that, but whether or not God is a self – this is a more abstract concept, which would be satisfied by an angel, an intelligent alien, a human, a god, etc.

Watch the interview here – then click here for my take. ->

Flint smartly beats a strategic retreat on the Trinity issue. He wants to talk instead about the generic, philosophical concepts of a person/self, and of God – the idea of God one encounters in philosophical arguments for God’s existence.

Elaborating on the classic definition of Boethius, he says that a person/self is

1. a substance/individual/entity (ultimate bearer of properties & not similarly in anything else), and
2. a mind – a knower, a thing which thinks, and
3. a willer / chooser – someone able to perform free, intentional actions.

God, though, a self, wouldn’t be a self just like us. For one, he’s perfect. Also, Flint points out that God has no extension (spatial extent), parts, matter.

They get sidetracked onto the means of God’s knowledge – Flint sketches the medieval view of God as not any sort of perceiver, but rather he knows all things through himself – through his own representations, perhaps, of what he’ll create (and if Flint is right, from knowing what any creature will freely do in any possible circumstance – in a nutshell, that’s the theory called Molinism. (Flint, by the way, has written one of the best books defending that theory.)

Towards the end, the interview asks: What does it make you feel when you think of God as a person?

Flint thinks of God as loving, involved, responsive – available for a personal relationship with us.
Anything less, he says, would be inadequate on a religious or spiritual level.

This was interesting. I’m with Flint on all of this (except the Molinism). I wondered if he was going to take a more medieval line, and say that God was really not a being at all, but rather “Being itself”, and only analogically a “person”, or something which *we can think of as* a person.

I’m curious about how he understands the Trinity doctrine, and whether it is compatible with what he says here. On most “social” theories, God is not a self. On some others, I think – in particular modalist construals of the orthodox formulas, God is a (single) self. I know he has highly developed, traditional Catholic views on the Incarnation, but I don’t know his thoughts on the Trinity.

But in any case, I give two big thumbs up to what he says here.

Perhaps the clearest picture of this distinction and union [of the Trinity] is Jesus’ baptism, where the Son is anointed for his public ministry by the Spirit, descending as a dove, with the Father declaring from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:13-17) All three persons of the Trinity are present, and each one is doing something different. (p. 2514a, emphases added)

This is an example of the sheer laziness and sloppy reasoning that so mars contemporary theology. Think about it - how exactly is the unity of the Trinity displayed here – either their oneness of an individual essence (godhead, divine nature) or the sharing of a universal property of deity? Where exactly do we see portrayed here the absolute equality of the three, or the “full divinity” of the Son and Spirit.

Would anything in this episode cause trouble for, say, an “Arian”? Nope. Tritheists? No – they should be OK with coordinated actions by the deities. Consider those unitarians who think the Holy Spirit is a force or divine action, not a person in his own right. They won’t have any problem with this “descending as a dove” – which of course needn’t mean that a literal dove (or something that looks just like a dove) dropped from the sky. Finally, consider modalists, who think that each person of the Trinity is really a personality of the one divine person, or a way that person acts. They’ll just say that this omnipotent, divine person can easily pull off these three actions simultaneously: getting baptized as a man, speaking from heaven, and coming down from heaven to empower the man.

The one sort of Christian theology that would trip on this, would be a strictly serial modalism – which holds that God acts, in sequence, as Father, Son, and Spirit, but only one at a time. But who holds this? (Apparently, not even these guys – see #56.)

In sum, this episode, spiritually inspiring and important to christology though it is, is nearly worthless when it comes to arguing for or just finding evidence for any particular understanding of the Trinity. Theologians should be more nervous about just repeating these tropes. A narrative which is compatible with almost any view of the Trinity neither implies, asserts, assumes, nor even illustrates “the” catholic/orthodox/historical mainstream view of the Trinity.

Since I’m posting mildly entertaining nonsense lately, here’s a video from the, ahem, legendary Winterband. (Steve Winter, not Edgar & I assume, no relation), playing to a packed out basement (his own). Click if you dare.

Winterband is a power duo in reality, although Steve plays in three “persons”. (We must use this term, as we have none better.) Steve 1 plays lead and sings. Steve 2 plays rhythm. Steve 3 plays bass. And yet there are not three Steves, but one. And then there’s the mysterious Angel of Steve, aka Junior, holding down the drums. Some think he is Steve, but he is only Steve’s agent. Steve is one, people.

Although, some hold Steve Winter to be a loving community of band members. They play as one, perfectly together, better than Led Zeppelin circa 1971. Only the word perichoresis can capture it, they say. If you click the link above, you will caught up into the life of this group – you will be, in a word, Winterized. (At least, that’s what the Easterners say.)

In any case, the energia is clearly one. The Winter vibe is unmistakable. Turn up the speakers, and prepare to kiss the sky.

The rockin’ fun is somewhat dampened by his insistence that all trinitarians are tritheists who are going straight to hell. (More in depth analysis by Mr. Winter here.) Dang – where’d he get the idea that God is such a doctrinal stickler?

Some readers will be gratified to know, however that in Winter’s view, Jesus is the Only God.

(Finally, something to cleanse the musical palate. This one won’t hurt – I promise.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagined train of thought:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: Do evangelicals believe that Jesus is God?

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

To do this, he considers a dozen triadic passages, in which the Three are all mentioned together in quick succession. Last time, I mulled over his treatment of the “Great Commission”  passage. This time, a few others, and I take a crack at another explanation of this triadic language.

First, as I look at Bowman’s interpretations, some of them strongly suggest that he thinks that asserting the divinity of each just is asserting each to be numerically identical to God. I looked into this more last time, but briefly, this won’t fly, as it’ll make the persons identical to one another. So it is not clear, even if his expositions are right, that really support an orthodox Trinity theory.

Second, I reiterate that Bowman does a good job here, assembling a dozen important passages, in which it is impossible to ignore the triadic language. Suppose the doctrine of the Trinity is just this vague claim: “there are three co-equal persons in God”. If that is true, that would explain why these three are often mentioned together, in a way which can suggest they are on an equal footing. I said last time that any unitarian is obligated to explain these triadic statements in a way which is both compatible with unitarianism, and which is independently motivated (in can’t be that the only appeal of the reading is that it saves one’s theology).

Here’s Bowman’s treatment of one such text:

1 Corinthians 12:4-6

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.
And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord.
There are varieties of activities, but the same God who works all things in all.”

The deliberate parallelism of these three lines practically speaks for itself. If a Jew unfamiliar with Christianity read these lines alone, he would certainly understand “the same Spirit,” “the same Lord,” and “the same God” to be three synonymous expressions for the same Creator. We know from the immediate context that the one whom Paul identifies here as “the same Lord” is Jesus (v. 3). Paul clearly attributes personhood to the Spirit, whose work of gifting believers Paul details in verses 7-10, concluding in verse 11, “But one and the same Spirit works all these things [panta tauta energei], distributing to each one individually just as he wills.” Paul here in verse 11 uses the same language for the Spirit’s working that he used in verse 6 for God’s working (“who works all things in all,” ho energ?n ta panta en pasin). Thus, Paul can speak interchangeably about what the Spirit, the Lord, and God do in relation to spiritual gifts, while still distinguishing the three from one another. We have here at the very least an implicit Trinitarianism.

Bowman is too confident here, in my view. He’s saying that a first century Jew would certainly read those three terms as co-referring. But if a first century Jew would assume some things true of one which are not true of the others, this isn’t so. “The Lord” here is Jesus – a man. And a Jew of that (or any) era would assume that neither God nor the Spirit of God are men. About the personhood of the Spirit – looking at v. 6 along with v. 11 suggests that the “Spirit” which distributes gifts at will just is God. But as I explained before, a unitarian can concede this (which is consistent with holding the Spirit-talk is sometimes about an aspect of God or action of God), and moreover, identifying the Spirit with God isn’t going to help the trinitarian get his three persons within God.

Still, what might a unitarian say about passages like these?

We can get a clue by looking at another passage: Ephesians 4:1-16 (read the whole thing). What is going on here? Paul is forcefully arguing for Christian unity. We know from the whole NT that there were considerable factionalizing forces the apostles fought against. Misguided loyalty to one apostle over others, Judaizers, teachers with “secret knowledge” foisting a holier-than-thou attitude towards those without knowledge, renegade prophets, big personalities. Here’s the crucial bit: “…There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—  one Lord, one faith, one baptism,  one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” As Bowman notes, here is a seven-fold formula, in opposition to the more common threefold one.

So, here’s an alternate explanation which unitarians can offer – actually, any Bible reader can accept it, irrespective of their views on the Trinity: the threefold formulas are a shorthand, something like a slogan – one God, one Lord, one Spirit – asserting the unified nature of all Christian assemblies, or all Christians – they all worship one God, have been saved by one Savior, and sealed, empowered, etc. by one Spirit. They’ve got one hope, one baptism, and so on – they all stand on one footing as a new people, with Christ as their head. One could say it is a standard, short (but expandable) list of fundamental church-unifying factors. It doesn’t imply that the named factors are literally divine, or that the are the same in some metaphysical sense (i.e. equally divine). These statements are compatible with those claims, but don’t imply them. And if my reading is on track, one should not infer the “full divinity” of the listed factors, or their being in some sense “within” God or the divine nature.

But why focus on those three? “One God” unites Christians in excluding polytheists, or even monotheists who don’t worship the God of the Jews. “One Lord” unities Christians as standing behind one man, having one immediate boss (“Lord”) – Jesus – and so not divided among this or that teacher, prophet, apostle, etc. “One Spirit” – unites Christians as against those influenced by the spirits which in the apostolic view inspire, control, and oppress the non-Christian world. And it also prevents the elevation of one gift  over another – it’s all from one Spirit (or one spirit) – God (or God’s).

Mentioning these three, in that order, sort of re-iterates the story of the gospels and Acts. It is one God at work, first by sending his Son, then (after his Son’s resurrection and ascension) by sending his Spirit. So this triadic language is a way of encapsulating, as it were, this whole story of God’ work in these last days.

Will this explanation fly? Is this compatible with unitarianism? Yes. (And really, with any views on the Trinity.) Is it arbitrary? No – it seems well-motivated. Not every such passage is one where Christian unity is at the forefront, but Paul is much-concerned with Christian unity, and he needn’t be read as dropping hints that only a good bit later would be taken as implicit creedal trinitarianism. This unity doctrine, expressed by a triple slogan, seems to a common thread in all known apostolic teaching. Moreover, this explanation keeps us within a mid-1st c. thought world, in which (arguably) theories of divine triunity are as yet unknown, and in which the one God of Israel just is the Father of Jesus – not a complex of the Father and two others. This is an important virtue – letting the texts speak on their own terms, and not anachronistically reading our concerns back into them. Moreover, the explanation is charitable to the NT authors, and is simple.

It bears repeating that one can accept this explanation and be a trinitarian. One must just concede that these triadic formulas don’t imply your version of the Trinity doctrine. They might still be part of a broader set of data which you think your Trinity theory best explains.

Back to scoring: Bowman needs to show that his explanation of these triadic passages is the best. He hasn’t tackled one like that sketched above. And his own explanation at best seems to require a troublingly vague formulation of “the” Trinity doctrine. And at worst, his explanation implies that anything like a mainstream current Trinity doctrine is false, as it simply identifies all the persons and God, and doesn’t show how the former in some sense compose the latter. Still, he gains some points simply by facing an important sort of objection, and for forcefully presenting important phenomena which demand explanation, and for which he arguably has one. How will Burke’s round 5 compare?

[Burke:] “This week I hope Rob will show Biblical evidence for the essential relationship formulae of Trinitarianism:
1. Father = ‘God’, Son = ‘God’ and Holy Spirit = ‘God’
2. ‘God’ = Father + Son + Holy Spirit  . . .

[Bowman] I have already responded to this argument of yours. Your demand that I must prove these two statements “independent of each other” is an absurd demand calculated to place an unreasonable burden on me that you know cannot be met.

As you know, Dave, if statement #1 is true, and if there is only one God (one single eternal divine being), then statement #2 follows. However, you and I already agree that there is only one eternal divine being. Therefore, I do not need to argue for this premise of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Gentlemen, forgive me, but this is confused. We must clarify the meaning of “=” here. I believe that Bowman means  numerical identity in 1. (I’m not sure – I think  his position forces him to be unclear about this – but let that pass.) Let us, then, add the extra premise Bowman mentions (as being held in common). We then get this:

f=g & s=g & h=g

(x)(y) (Dx -> (Dy -> x=y))   [For any x and any y, x is divine only if, if y is divine, then it just is x.]

The first premise is trouble, because it implies f=s=h.

But what to make of “‘God’ = Father + Son + Holy Spirit”. What does the “+” signify? One may (and some will) think of it as the combination of parts, or some kind of conjunction of different things. But this would shift the meaning of “=”. Numerical identity is a one-to-one (actually, always a reflexive) relation – never one-to-many. So if the right hand side is read to mean some kind of conjunction, addition, or combination, then the “=” cannot mean identity. It might mean something like “consists of”, “is a whole constituted by”, or something like that. But whatever it means, it does not logically follow from 1 & 2.

But this interpretation makes 2 irrelevant to 1. It may be that Bowman is thinking this:

Df & Ds & Dh    [Father is divine and Son is divine and Spirit is divine. (This "is" of predication, not the "is" of identity.)]

(x)(y) (Dx -> (Dy -> x=y))

From these, there is no reason to think any interpretation of “g = f+s+h” follows. (First we’d have to clarify the meaning of this latter claim, and then we’d have to add one or more premises, until we had a valid and sound argument.)

But this follows: f =s=h. As Homer Simpson would say: D’oh! Homework for interested readers. Why exactly is this something Bowman can’t accept? (There is more than one reason, I think.) Comment at will.

Bowman then retreats to familiar ground:

What you are really trying to do here is to claim that unless I can show some Bible verses in which the word “God” specifically refers to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together, my case for the doctrine of the Trinity fails.

But that is a red herring. All we need is a seemingly sound argument, for a conclusion with which Bowman agrees, and which is arguably trinitarian! Instead Bowman brings back his apparently inconsistent set of five claims; we’ve looked at those before. Insofar as they seem inconsistent, the argument will not seem sound.

Jesus is MELTING!

Looking for a present for that theology geek in your life?

Wear your modalism in t-shirt form.

(Why is this modalism?)

Is this one also modalistic? Discuss. This one surely is.

“Social” trinitarians may prefer this one.

And: for your skate-boarding needs.

Something for paradox lovers and fans of non-standard logics (explanation). Similarly, for people who also like Escher.

Fan of the multiple personality analogy? Look no further.

Here’s the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (sort of) in shirt form.

Then there’s a glaring theological non sequitur, in mug form. And another one, this time on a shirt.

Babies too. People who need help with spelling. Even anti-trinitarians can get in on the action. Happy little monkeys. And people with non-standard “trinities”.

Props to the commenter who can discern the intended message of this one. Or this one. Or this one.

And there’s wearable proof (-texts) that Jesus is God. Lastly, if Jesus just is God, and it was God who miraculously impregnated Mary, then… (Please, no complaints – I’m just the messenger.)

Wasn’t that a fun bit of time wasting? The internet and capitalism rule.

(PS – None of these sellers are affiliated in any way with trinities, nor do I or we get any cut of the $ – this post is just for our mutual amusement.)

1. There is one (true, living) God, identified as the Creator.
2. This one God is the one divine being called YHWH (or Jehovah, the LORD) in the Old Testament.
3. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is God, the LORD.
4. The Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is God, the LORD.
5. The Holy Spirit is God, the LORD.
6. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each someone other than the other two.

When a philosopher sees this, he quotes that great thinker, Bill Clinton: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” 1 is clear – that is the “is” of existence. 2 is clear – that is the “is” of identity (aka absolute, Leibnizian, or numerical identity). But 3-6 are mushy.

• One option would be to read the “is”s is 3-5 and the “are” as involving identity (affirmed in 3-5, denied in 6). This would be straight up inconsistent. From f = g, s = g, and h = g, it logically follows that f = s = h – but on this reading, this last thing is denied in 6.

• Another option, which I doubt Bowman has in mind, would be to read 3-6 as involving only relative identity. 3-5 would say that the various persons are the same being as God, but 6 would say that no two of them are the same person as each other. This might sound like just what the doctor ordered, but one has to be an uber-sophisticate in logic and metaphysics to pull this off. 2 still seems to involve non-relative identity (numerical sameness, not relativized to a kind). Normally, we understand relative identity talk as really involving absolute identity. “Dubya is the same person and George W. Bush.” This implies that Dubya is a person, Bush is a person, and Dubya = Bush. So if the Father and Son are the same god, this would mean that the Father is a god, the Son is a god, and the Father = the Son. D’oh! A relative identity theorist either has to argue that there’s no such thing as absolute identity (=) or specify how it relates to relative identity relations.
• If I had to guess what he’s thinking, I would guess, based on some things he says about the term “person”: as follows. 2 does involve the concept of identity. 3-6 involve modes of this thing mentioned in 1 & 2. Bowman thinks the Father is a mode of God, a way God is. And so on for the Son and Spirit. And these are three different modes (6). In short, the Trinity doctrine is that a perfect self, God, exists eternally in three different modes, perhaps personalities, or something like personalities.

Bowman then:

• Flies the evangelical flag – inerrancy, sola scriptura.
• Denies not “hyper-Biblicism” (no doctrine is authoritative unless explicitly spelled out in the Bible).
• Heads off the lame-o anti-trinitarian argument that we ought not use any non-biblical language. (Flag – surely this is a straw man in this debate, as is the previous claim above.)
• Argues that the Shema is consistent with unitarian and trinitarian theology. The latter, I think, is unclear. And I don’t think he takes a stand on precisely how he thinks that passage should be understood.

Then, a crucial point:

I could discuss other proof texts that Biblical Unitarians and other non-Trinitarians cite as proof that God is a unipersonal being, but the result will be the same in each case: such texts typically prove that God is a single being but do not address the specific Trinitarian claim that God is a unipersonal being. Non-Trinitarians typically argue, for example, that it is obvious from the pervasive use of singular pronouns for God (I, he, him, his, you [sing.]) throughout the Bible that God is only one person. This argument would be sound if by “person” we meant an individual being. However, in Trinitarian theology, a divine “person” is not an individual being, because God is one being, not three. The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be refuted by assuming that it is false; and this is what non-Trinitarians do when they assume that a person can only be an individual being.

Flag – no, two flags.

• First, Bowman still doesn’t clarify what he means by “person”. Hence, it is not clear what claims he will be arguing is implied by the Bible.
• Second, how is the trinitarian definition of “person” relevant to interpretation of the Hebrew word for “him”, “his” etc. as used by an ancient Jew? I don’t see any fallacious question-begging here by the other side. Suppose you were trying to figure out the views of some local Jedis – what they think this “Force” thingee is. Do they call it “it”, or “him”, or “her”. If one of the latter two, they are assuming it is a self. As Ricky Ricardo would say, Bowman has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. (This, by the way, was not a problem for early catholic theologians, as like NT writers, they identified the one God with the Father of Jesus – which I assume Bowman does not.)

Finally, Bowman beats the mysterian drum. He argues that because God can’t be completely understood, we’ll run into apparent contradictions in thinking about him.

Flag – that doesn’t obviously follow – apparent non sequitur fallacy here. And his examples not having to do with the Trinity don’t seem apt.

He confesses, then, that there are “logical difficulties” in his view – that is, apparent contradictions. If so, then my guess above must be wrong, for it is apparently consistent. But Bowman doesn’t tell us what these are.

Flag – if you admit that your view is apparently contradictory, please say where exactly – this will help us to understand your view! He darkly hints that in 6 above “person” has “a somewhat different connotation as compared to its use for human beings”. I don’t think he means to say “connotation”… but in any case, how do these meanings of “person” differ? I the mundane realm, a person is a self, a thinking thing, a substance with intelligence and will, roughly speaking. What, in contrast, is a divine “person”?

He then inveighs against “approaches to Scripture that a priori disallow all mystery, paradox, or incomprehensibility”. Flag – isn’t this a red herring (an irrelevance, mere distraction)? Is there some reason to think that Burke does this? I assume that Bowman and Burke both agree that apparent inconsistency and unclarity and not good things in a theory, but bad things, and that they should not be lightly allowed.

I am concerned here only to plead that non-Trinitarians not dismiss the doctrine of the Trinity, or any other doctrine, merely because it is difficult to understand. In the context of this debate, I am anticipating and arguing against a priori objections that amount to saying that the Trinity cannot be true regardless of what the Bible may say.

Flag – Straw man? Red herring? Even poisoning the well? He pins all of the above of on unitarian author Donald Snedeker. Well, never mind that – you’re debating Burke here, and Snedecker ain’t Burke.

Of course, if what is meant by “the Trinity doctrine” really is contradictory, then no, it can’t be true, no matter what any person or book says. But, is it? That is, is the trinitarian doctrine under debate here consistent or not? If I really knew what Bowman had in mind, I could venture a firm opinion.

I thought the point here was to expound his positive views and background assumptions. Instead, he’s fired off a lot of rounds, it seems to me, prematurely and haphazardly. Settle that happy trigger finger down, Cowboy!

Daniel sort of asks me a few questions:

…it would make an interesting discussion as to whether or not the definition we have of “traditional Christianity” on our About Page suggests or encourages [modalism].

Here’s the relevant part of the statement, part of the policy that only real Christians are allowed to blog on their site:

What Theologica Bloggers Believe

… I believe God to reveal himself as three eternal persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Yep – sounds modalist to me; I mean, that’s how many or most will understand it. There’s one being, a person (“himself”) who has “revealed himself as” three eternal persons. This part is extra unclear – are the persons only ways God appears? Or both appears and is? Lives? Three ways he self-reveals? Events involving him? Parts of the one god? You’ll never know. But it looks like some form of eternally concurrent FSH modalism. Nothing unusual here – this is the norm in evangelical circles. If you’re a real Christian, in the eyes of many, you are a modalist. I find it interesting – and disturbing – that this is considered “that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all [real Christians]“.

Daniel also says,

I’d also love to hear how, if you were told to define “historical Christianity”, how you would word a definition of the Trinity.

“Historical Christianity” is just a rhetorical term used by evangelical apologists to dismiss or marginalize their theological opponents with one easy stroke, as (to use a Muslim term) “innovators”.

In other words, there’s no such thing. What there are, are more and less popular, connected, related, historical streams of theologizing by various people claiming to be Christians. One can talk about mainstream approaches, of course, and I often call that small-c “catholic” theology – that rough core of theology which is been fairly stable through the history of Catholicism, and which is shared by most Protestants and the Orthodox churches. What is my definition of that, concerning the Trinity? On one level  the creeds.

But these don’t express any one way of thinking about the Trinity. As best I can tell, they give rise to three main approaches: mysterianism, modalism, and something like this (this last, in my experience, never among the laity, but only among sophisticates educated in medieval Catholic theology). And among those versed in recent theology, some “social” approaches – but again, very rarely among the laity.

Among American evangelicals, I believe FSH modalism (or SH modalism) to be the main approach. This is a bummer, as any kind of Son-modalism is ruled out by the New Testament to which evangelicals pledge their allegiance!

There’s a tension here: Theologica’s founder and maintainers, I suppose, don’t want to be responsible for sponsoring dangerous heresy – hence the rule noted above. And yet, they do want a fully open and respectful discussion. I applaud their aim of respectful argument (so often lacking in theological discussion!), and I especially enjoyed this post about Words that Don’t Prove Your Point. Some relevant parts:

Sounds like you’ve been reading X’s heretical garbage.
This has nothing to do with what the person is saying. …

Calvin, Luther, Piper and Joel Olsteen would say you’re wrong.
Ooooh: they’re big and famous and agree with you but, sorry bro, that doesn’t mean your position is right. If there’s equally famous people that disagree with your position then what you’re doing is pretty much name-dropping uselessness.

The majority of Church History would disagree with you so you can’t be right.
Okay, that’s pretty interesting information but it still doesn’t prove the argument wrong. Just because the majority of any group holds a certain position it doesn’t make it right or wrong: it just makes it popular. Now true, the Spirit of God was working throughout Church history but there’s no possible way that you or I can say “Yes, this is most definitely the Hand of God” without some sure sign of heaven.

This last part is a little flip, but I agree with the basic point – that the bolded words don’t constitute an unassailable argument. (I think that they can in some cases be a fairly strong argument.)

But then, why partially exclude (purported) Christians who hold non-mainstream views? I’m guessing that their justification is more a practical than a theoretical one – they want the site to have a catholic focus, and don’t want to have to worry about every Jehovah’s Witness who might become ensconced there.

On the second one, I’m pretty sure, they meant “Osteen”.

And I’m also sure that he’d agree with everything in my post here – and that settles it!

All right, back to reading X’s heretical garbage…