I posted on this very phenomenon back in 2008.

I agree with all the examples Paul gives of philosophers / analytic theologians whose work should not be ignored by any serious investigator – not because they’re my peeps – but because their work is disciplined, insightful, well motivated, clearly argued. In short, it has things you want if you’re serious about getting to the truth of the matter.

Why do systematic theologians do this?

Maybe there’s no deep answer. Maybe: (1) they’re not familiar with this large genre, (2) philosophy is hard, (3) they can ignore it – a portion of the intended audience won’t notice. They won’t get any letters protesting the ignoring of Plantinga, Craig, van Inwagen, or Leftow.

To those of us who are philosophically literate, in most cases philosophy-ignoring work just isn’t going to answer our questions. It’s not a matter of style, taste, or preference – but of substance. This is hard to convey to people who aren’t so trained. Here’s an analogy. Imagine you’re a public policy wonk – you have highly developed views on things like zoning laws, taxation, trade, and such. You want to know who to vote for, so you go to a speech by a politician, who breaks out his well-worn lines about Freedom, the American Way, Baseball, and Apple Pie. Or maybe he gets more specific – he gives you his Republican riffs about smaller government, lower taxes, and Reaganesque optimism. This is closer, but you really wanted to know whether he thought the payoff of a certain environmental protection ordinance was worth the economic costs of implementation – and you leave the speech disappointed. You assume that surely he must address this pressing issue, so you buy his book, search his website, scour his public statements. No, nothing there. Move along.

Now settle down – no, I’m not comparing theologians to politicians. I’m comparing the imaginary wonk’s experience to my disappointment after sitting down with some expensive new book by a theologian to see what he says about, say, the Trinity.

As more people learn to think about theology in ways disciplined by analytic philosophy, theology which ignores it will be less relevant. If you’re going into theology, my advice is to get a BA and/or an MA in philosophy in a solid, analytic or mostly analytic department which employs at least one specialist in philosophy of religion, and at least one specialist in the history of philosophy and at least one in contemporary metaphysics. Get some good advice on departments, or if you can’t do that – read their stuff, and see if it is serious, helpful, and comprehensible (vs. trivial, obscure, jargon-ridden. Unless you do this at a religious school, the department will be 50-80% atheists and agnostics, but don’t worry, you’ll probably learn a lot from them. A portion, maybe 50% of such will actually be very interested in arguments about God, evil, divine providence, human nature, free will – things you care about. Such a degree will teach you to navigate the vast and challenging literature of philosophy, and will enable to recognize well crafted arguments. It will give you some skills it would be fairly hard to get by just reading some books on the side.

I do buy and profit from theological books which ignore analytic theology. But on many topics, like the Trinity and Incarnation, time, divine providence, certain divine attributes, free will, I go in knowing that they’ll be too unclear to be helpful – in delineating their preferred theory, in taking on the best objections to it, and in arguing for their preferred theory. Their statements will suggest more than one incompatible precise theory – some theory fairly well worked out, usually,  by someone trained in philosophy (though their terminal degree may be in another field).

Enough of that – time to lighten up with another post by Paul.  PS – Yes, in a recent podcast, Craig recounted rebutting Muslims’ objections to the coherence of the Incarnation by citing Avatar. But that’s another post for another time. And it would require my finding one heck of a weird picture.

Forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy: my review of

Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology, by Thomas McCall.

Thanks to Tom for his feedback on my first draft of this, which saved me from several errors.

This is a unique, stimulating and yet unsatisfying book which should be widely read. The answers to the questions in the title, respectively: (1) either a “social” or a constitution theory, (2) Richard Bauckham’s. McCall is a theologian well versed in analytic philosophy. This book attempts, with some success, to bridge the cultural, intellectual, and institutional divides between Christian philosophers and theologians. McCall notes that the book “will at points be less than satisfying to partisans in both camps.” (8)

In chapter 1, he nicely summarizes much recent positive work on Trinity theories by Christian philosophers, as well as some anti-“social”-theory arguments. In the next two chapters he sets out to correct the oversights and misunderstandings of various of these philosophers by endorsing Richard Bauckham’s thesis that the earliest Christians “understood [Jesus] to be included in the identity of the one God” (57). New Testament era Judaism was “strictly monotheistic”, and yet Christians properly worshiped Jesus. In my view McCall is too confident that the New Testament supports all these claims. His treatment of the source material (56-72) is perfunctory, and will be unsatisfying to those familiar with competing interpretations. The last part of chapter 2 gives helpful expositions of what ancient Arianism and modalism really amounted to (as contrasted with the ways some philosophers have thrown around those heresy-terms).

In chapter 3 McCall rejects the apparent modalism of Barth and Rahner (87-9), and returns to the theories of chapter 1. Utilizing the fruits of chapter 2, McCall rebuts Leftow’s charge that a “social” theory is “Arianism”. (95-8) McCall admits that it is unclear how well this “social” approach coheres with the Western tradition, especially the “Athanasian” creed and theories of divine simplicity. (98-103) He rejects relative identity theories because in his view they don’t get us far enough from modalism and metaphysical antirealism, while he dubs the Rea and Brower “constitution” theory “promising” (109); in his view it faces no theological problems, but a few philosophical ones. He rejects Leftow’s “Latin” theory on the grounds of unclarity, misfit with the Bible, and that it likely can’t avoid modalism. (111-21) In chapter 3 and later in the book, McCall defends what most would call a “social” theory; we’ll return below to this positive thrust.

Chapter 4 sympathetically critiques theologian Robert Jenson’s Trinity theory, founded on this non sequitur (in Jenson’s words): “…since the biblical God can truly be identified by narrative, his hypostatic being, his self-identity, is constituted in dramatic coherence.” (132) Thus, “the one God is an event; history occurs not only in him but as his being” and “God is the event of the world’s transformation by Jesus’ love…” (ibid.) McCall points out what is plausibly a confusion about identity underlying Jenson’s project. (132-55) Jensonians will want to take a close look at McCall’s friendly suggestions for amending the theory.

Chapter 5 sympathetically critiques the theological font of much recent social-trinity theorizing, Jurgen Moltmann. McCall convincingly argues that Moltmann’s doctrine of “perichoresis” (applied by him both to intra-Trinity relations, and to God-world relations) “either does ‘not enough’ or does ‘too much’ (157) – that is, it doesn’t do enough to show how the three divine persons amount to one god, and it amounts to a God-world relation that is too close. To help, McCall urges that there are two kinds of perichoresis – one for inter-Trinity relations, and the other for God-cosmos relations, which he defines. (170, 172) This reader was unable to see how these constitute two species under any shared genus.

Chapter 6 enters the recent debate among evangelical theologians concerning whether or not the Son is eternally “subordinate to” the Father. This thesis, he argues, is either trivial or inconsistent with the creedal claim that the two are homoousios. (175-80) Further, proponents like Grudem and Ware on unclear about which version they really want to defend. (188). In the end McCall pleads that this issue be held separate from debates about the proper roles of women in church life.

Chapter 7 discusses Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas’s claims that “nothing in existence is conceivable in itself… since even God exists thanks to an event of communion” (190), “there is no true being without communion” (191), and “love … is constitutive of his [God’s] substance”. (192) McCall discusses these startling claims under the banner “Being as Communion”. They seem to entail that it is metaphysically impossible that there be only one thing, and that it is impossible for there to be a self not in a personal relationship with at least one other self. McCall might have demanded arguments to back these claims up, discussing prima facie counterexamples (respectively: God, a lifelong human hermit atheist – say, Christopher Hitchens raised by wolves).

McCall too is entranced by this picture of God as fundamentally an eternal, perfect, three-way friendship. Thus he accepts “Being as Communion” but argues that it is in conflict with another thesis to which Zizioulas is committed, what McCall dubs the “Sovereignty-Aseity Conviction”. This is the claim that God and only God exists a se – independently, or solely through himself, everything else depending on him. In Zizioulas’s view, only God – that is, the Father – exists a se, and he is radically free – not only creation, but even the existence of the Son and Spirit depend on his free choice. Thus, the Trinity exists contingently, and dependently on the Father. (193, 196)

McCall argues that this ascription of aseity only to the Father amounts to an objectionable subordinationism. In his view, “Traditional affirmations of subordination have revolved around the ‘function’ of the Son.” (198) He argues that Zizioulas should keep the “Being as Communion” thesis, as it is “central to the teaching of Scripture and the Christian tradition.” (205) But he should ascribe aseity not to the Father alone, but rather to the Trinity, holding it to be implied by the property divinity. (207) Further, the notion of aseity should be clarified – we should re-define it to mean a lack of dependence on anything which is not divine. (209) Thus, both the Trinity and each of the Persons exist a se. But, preserving the “Being as Communion” theme, each person depends for his existence on the other two – existing as a person only because of their relation to another.

What happened to the patristic “generation” and “procession” claims, which seem to entail that the Son and Spirit both exist because of the Father? McCall’s response is to redefine the sentence “the Father eternally generates the Son”:

…eternal generation refers us to (a) the incompleteness of the persons as individuals and (b) their complete and irreducible uniqueness in relation to the other persons. Seen this way, the doctrine of eternal generation emphasizes that to be a person – even a divine person – is to be incomplete “alone” or in oneself. (212-3)

Chapter 8 is McCall’s manifesto for trinitarian theology, some “theses for scholastic disputation”. (219) I’ll highlight just a few. We should think critically about alleged social and political implications of trinitarian doctrine. (225-7) Appeals to mystery can’t atone for doctrines which are “obviously inconsistent” (228); Trinity doctrines must be “coherent (or at least not obviously incoherent)” (229) as well as biblically and creedally kosher. But theologians “need not undertake to show how God is three and one. Indeed, to attempt to do so reeks of hubris.” (232) This seems inconsistent with his friendliness towards any attempt to construct a coherent metaphysical model of the Trinity. Doesn’t a response to the threeness-oneness problem entail an answer to the “how” question?

Another important assertion is that “Christian theological commitments should receive priority… if our intuitions about “theism” and “monotheism” conflict with the central elements of Trinitarian doctrine, then so much the worse for our intuitions about such things!” (233) It is hard to argue that if something is known to be divine revelation, it may be reasonably believed even if it conflicts with our prior commitments. But exactly what are these central elements?

McCall nowhere explicitly advances his preferred Trinity theory. But the outlines are clear enough. “The” Trinity theory, for McCall, involves three distinct “centers of consciousness and will” (12, 87-9, 236) – what I would call so many selves – capable of personal relationships with one another. Their status is absolutely (ontologically) equal, and each depends for his existence as a self on the others. These, in some sense are the one, triune God. This “God” is not a self, though it is “truly personal” (93-4), and so it has personal properties – or at least, it has parts which do. (Misleadingly, but following other recent social theorists, McCall refers to it throughout using personal pronouns.) But are not three equally divine selves three gods? No, for it is only Bauckham’s idea (which McCall agrees is also the first century Jewish idea) of monotheism which is relevant and Bauckham thinks it (this special New Testament era ‘monotheism’, the content of which is never spelled out) is consistent with trinitarian developments (233-6), we assume, even “social” ones.

Here most philosophers will balk; Bauckham’s claim cries out for clarification. Is not Jesus portrayed in the New Testament as someone other than God, someone who prays to and depends on God, who does God’s bidding? On the other hand, isn’t Jesus supposed to be “God incarnate”, God himself, in human form? Is God who Jesus is? Bauckham often writes as if God and Jesus are the same self. And yet, Jesus is in his words “included in the identity” of God, which suggests that they are not. He sometimes suggests that the Father is also so included. Through this cloudy lens, McCall would have us view the New Testament witness about God and Christ. But this claim, no less than speculative flights about perichoresis, is in need of careful analysis and evaluation. McCall himself, not holding God to be a self, won’t say that God and Jesus are the same self. In what sense, then, is Jesus “in God’s identity”?

McCall makes some excellent points about monotheism and the Trinity. It won’t imply monotheism, he says, to say merely that there’s one generic divine essence, that there’s only one divine “family”, that there’s only one font of divinity (the Father), or that the Three are united by a mysterious relation of “periochoresis”. (241-2) Amen to all that.

My biggest criticism of the book is its friendliness towards theoretical solutions which crucially depend on bold, arguably ad hoc redefinitions. Yet it is clearly written, sober, insightful, and rich with argument. As intended, it gives theologians and philosophers some important things to argue about together.

It is well known that silhouetted people are far cooler that non-silhouetted people.

Philosophy Compass is a unique philosophy journal which only publishes survey articles, pieces which aim to summarize recent work. Its aim, as editor Brian Weatherson explains, is to enable people to keep up with a vast, overspecialized, fast-moving, and only somewhat accessible world of philosophical research.

What’s more exciting – they sell the pdfs of the articles for $1.99. They’re trying to be the iTunes of philosophy.The registration process is pretty standard, and the web-based system works well, though not one tenth as slick as the iTunes interface. At $70 / year for 6 issues, I’m tempted to subscribe.

I downloaded a piece on the metaphysics of the Incarnation, by Robin Le Poidevin. On the whole, it was well done – written in plain, clear language, and  fair-minded, although oddly it led with a brief discussion of “non-realist” views of the Incarnation. It seemed to me, having read much of the recent literature on this, that a number of things were missing – off the top of my head: work by Davis further pressing the kenotic strategy, Plantinga on abstract vs. concrete understandings of Christ’s “natures”, Hick’s objections to two-minds theories, Merricks on embodiment.

But there was a lot that was good – a summary of Chalcedon, a painless introduction to the relative identity strategy, Senor’s objection to the compositional model of Leftow and Stump, some philosophy of mind objections to the two-minds approach, brief discussion of how four-dimensionalism and the “extended mind” theory might be brought into play.

One problematic assertion Le Poidevin makes is that “fully entering into the human condition includes the possibility of extinction.” (p. 713) I’m not sure why anyone should think that more than the epistemic possibility of one ceasing to exist would be required for Christ sharing our lot – that is, that one can’t rule out one’s future extinction.

But on the whole, it was $1.99 well spent. If you’re a non-philosopher, or a philosopher with another specialty, looking for a path into the recent discussion of the incarnation in philosophical theology, this is a good start

Kudos to the team at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for

1. their recent radical re-design, done by Josh D. May. Notable improvements include a nice print-friendly page feature, and the entries sorted by topic. Here are the Philosophy of Religion ones.
2. their new entry “Incarnation”, by University of Wisconsin Madison PhD David Werther, who teaches in their division of Continuing Studies. He does an excellent job of keeping it simple; it’s a brief and clear introduction to the Incarnation as treated by analytic philosophers, and is by design pretty ahistorical.

Missing in #2 are references to, if not summaries of, Tom Senor’s work, particularly his criticisms of the Stump/Leftow property-borrowing approach, and of the hoary qua-move. Maybe a couple of references to Hick would be appropriate as well, e.g. his criticism of two-minds theories. Positively, maybe a reference to van Inwagen on relative identity. But on the whole, I thought it was well done – congrats to David. And I hope we see more philosophical theology in the IEP.

One quick reflection: the piece is, like analytic philosophy tends to be, rather narrowly focused. There’s a problem of consistency while trying to stay in the bounds of orthodoxy – that’s it. I think there’s rather more to it… biblical interpretation in particular, and also the Incarnation in relation to Christian spirituality, and to wider issues in theology (e.g. atonement theories). I’m not criticizing the piece – a summary of such a rich and carefully wrought bunch of arguments should be tightly focused. My point is rather that we Christian philosophers need to approach these doctrine as thinking Christians, and not merely as philosophers – people who accomplish a narrow task (see – not provably inconsistent!) and then punt on all other issues (not my job, pal). Philosophical theology can take in a wider set of concerns without ceasing to be philosophical.

There is only one.

Up to this point in Book 3 Richard has told us several things about love (caritas). We have wondered at his saying there isn’t a perfectly good person if he doesn’t love. We have sorted through some necessary conditions for love such that we wonder whether a perfectly good person p must love another person q if p is to be perfectly good. You might say we’ve been contemplating some divine ethics, or aesthetics, or whatever.

In the previous post I suggested how we might interpret what Richard means by saying (two) divine persons are equal and similar to one another, namely the divine persons have the same disposition of love and the same acts of love (see [T4’] and [T5’]). In the next part of Richard’s argument he returns to his metaphysics of the divine substance which he discussed in Books 1 and 2. (In the English translation the term ‘plenitudo’ is translated as ‘fullness’, which might be misleading because it is a technical term in contrast with ‘participation’ (participatio). So I stick with ‘plenitude’.) In Book 3.8 Richard reminds us that

R1: In mutually loved and mutually loving persons, in order that supreme love might exist worthily, there must be in each both supreme perfection and the [plenitude] of all perfection.

In Book 1 Richard distinguished between ‘plenitude’ and ‘participation’.

R2: If p has a plenitude of X, then p has X independently of all other substances.

R3: If p has a participation of X, then p has X dependently on another substance.

Think of the plenitude of X as the original X, and participation as contingently having a likeness of X. So,

R4: If each divine person p and q has the plenitude of supreme love, then p and q have supreme love independently of any other substance.

In Book 1 Richard argued that there can be only one substance that is eternal and causally depends on no other substance; all other existing substances are either sempiternal (roughly co-eternal) causally from another substance (e.g., angels), or temporal and causally from another substance (all material creatures); there is no substance that is temporal and not causally from another substance.

Given R1, R2, and R4, it looks like there are two persons that have numerically the same substance. But what level of generality or individuality is this substance? Some (Aristotelian secondary) substances are quite general like animal, and some are quite specific like human. Even still, there are individual humans like Dale, Joseph, and JT. So, on what level ought we to take the divine substance? Well, none of these. Instead, in Book 2.12, which I consider to be one of the most overlooked and under-appreciated sections of Richard’s De Trinitate, he declares that some substances by definition are singular, non-repeatable, non-instantiable (I explain ‘instantiable’ and ‘non-instantiable’ a bit more in the next post). That is, if we consider the person Daniel, he is constituted by the substance Danielitas (Richard borrows from Boethius’s Platonitas). If a person is constituted by Danielitas, then he is the person Daniel. Having made this distinction Richard applies it to the divine substance by calling it divinitas. If a person is constituted by divinitas, then he is a divine person. (I return to the ‘constitution’ issue in the next post.) Notice that divinitas is a substance and there cannot be further instantiations of it. So, the two divine persons (at this point in the argument) have numerically the same singular substance called divinitas.

Next Richard gives us some rhetorical helps. Consider a human person. On Richard’s view she is composed of two substances: a bodily substance and a rational substance, and yet she is one person. Why think it impossible then if in God there is one substance and yet more than one person? Crazier things happen….

“Explain to me, I implore you, how there is personal unity in so great a dissimilitude and diversity of substances, and I will tell you how there is a substantial unity in so great a similitude and equality of [divine] persons. You say, ‘I do not grasp it; I do not understand; but even if the understanding does not grasp it, nevertheless experience itself per suades me.’ Well said indeed and rightly too! But if experience teaches you that something exists in human nature that is above understanding, should it not also have taught you that something exists above your understanding in divine nature? And so a person can learn from himself, by way of opposites as it were, what he ought to think concerning those things which are proposed to him for believing concerning his God.” (Book 3.10)

Before moving on to Richard’s initial argument for why there must be a trinity and not a duality of divine persons based on what he takes as the nature of perfect love I want to mention one hitherto overlooked issue in contemporary Trinitarian discussions. This issue will certainly be discussed after this current series on Book 3 of Richard’s De Trinitate. That is, Richard’s apparent constitutional Latin trinitarianism [= CLT] which I take as a different stream of Latin trinitarianism than the one Brian Leftow has called “a Latin Trinity” or “the Latin Trinity”. I take Richard and those who rightly interpret him or agree with him (e.g., Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus) to follow CLT, but those who are less interested in Richard’s own view or just misinterpret him to satisfy Leftow’s LT, or what I would call non-constitutional Latin trinitarianism [= NCLT]. If this is right, as I believe it is, then Brower and Rea have some new (non-Dominican) comrades.

Your average theologian’s response to recent Rational Reinterpretations.

Let me take four recent books off my shelf by current theologians. Now I’ll search through them to see if they have any reference at all to some of the more important Rational Reconstructions in the last 25 years or so, namely:

• Tom Morris’s (1986, 1989) or Richard Swinburne’s two-minds approach to the Incarnation (1994)
• Swinburne’s social trinitarian theory (1994)
• Leftow’s earlier Latin Trinitarian speculations (1999, 2004) and his exploration and penetrating criticisms of various social theories (1999)
• Peter van Inwagen’s relative identity construals of the Incarnation and Trinity (1995)

(To new readers – you can find many earlier posts on Swinburne and Leftow using the search box, below right.) I’m limiting myself to (1) uncontroversially top-notch work, (2) by prominent Christian philosopher-theologians, masters of their craft, that (3) has been out for a while, and which (4) is pretty well known among Christian philosophers. Now, for the search:

McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 4th. ed. (2007)

• Basically, a complete miss. A passing reference to Swinburne as a great philosophical theologian. McGrath does mention “kenotic” approaches to the Incarnation, which are certainly Rational Reconstructions, but his discussion ends in the 19th century.

Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God (2004)

• Complete miss. But we’ve got Hegel and Schleirmacher! (Sigh – philosophy has come a long way since then.)

Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (2007)

• Despite the fact that all the aforementioned philosopher-theologians have lived their entire lives so far on the Globe, a complete miss. This is the more bitter because of the coverage lavished on some surprisingly bad theories. Kenosis is mentioned a few times.
• Towards the end of the book, he says: “…I would call for a much more sophisticated analysis of the relation of threeness to unity than has been done.” (393, emphasis added) My friend, this has been going in earnest since at least the late 80s, among philosophical theologians, with the pace picking up more recently.

Olson and Hall, The Trinity (2002)

• Granted, this is introductory, but: a total miss. The end point of theorizing here? Zizioulas’s 1983 book.

Mind you, these are all (1) recent books, by (2) theologians specializing in the Trinity, which (3) aim at comprehensiveness, i.e. showing the student where she ought to look further.

None of these are bad books – I’ve found all them useful in various ways, particularly the McGrath. I’m not criticizing these four gentlemen (one deceased) but rather the professional standard they’ve all followed. Folks, this is like biologists ignoring recent and relevant work in chemistry. (Yeah, I know: some theologians think it’s more like astronomers ignoring “developments” in astrology. )

Instead of just complaining about this, I’ll speculate on why theologians, even ones who focus on the Trinity seem completely uninformed about important work in philosophical theology. (Yes, I’m aware of a few exceptions – usually younger guys – but they are rare exceptions, as far as I can tell - I’d like to be wrong about this.)

1. Theology is backward-looking, and this stuff is too recent to be on the radar.
2. Theologians aren’t trained in philosophy, and so find the aforementioned authors very difficult to understand; hence, they avoid them.
3. These writers are not academic theologians, not professors of theology, but theologians are academically insular, in the own little world.
4. They’re spending so much time batting around the unclear work of Rahner and Barth, and other imprecise and long-winded thinkers, they just don’t have time to read philosophical theology.
5. Theologians are simply not very worried about inconsistency or irrationality (or conversely, consistency and rationality), at least concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation.
6. But insofar as they are concerned with consistency, Mysterian Resistance and Redirection are firmly entrenched in academic theology.

Regarding #2 – I believe that systematic theologians should be trained in Philosophy, at least to the equivalent of a B.A.. Also, as more popular level and reference sources cover this stuff, it’ll be inexcusable to be a least a little familiar with it. All the sources I mention are complex but rigorously clearly written.

Regarding #3 – Are philosophers equally insular? I dare say we (who work in philosophical theology) are not. For my part, I’ve got a shelf full of recent books by theologians on the Trinity, but they rarely address issues in which I’m interested. Or if they do, the treatment is… inadequate in various ways. Philosophers developing Trinity theories, in my experience, are often following up on undeveloped leads from recent theologians – particularly in the social camp. And we have no excuse, for there are abundant decently short and clear secondary sources. (Theologians – this will soon be true of philosophical theology as well!)

Regarding #5: I think this is true. Why it is true is another question, and most of the possible answers are not pretty.

Regarding #6: This is a big reason why I think Mysterian Resistance is worth looking into (next post, btw).

So young theologians: if you’re going to work on the Trinity, surf this site, and follow up by reading some of books and articles discussed here. If you stick with standard theology sources, you’re missing out on a whole world of exciting, challenging, relevant stuff. Frankly, your elders have, collectively, let you down by ignoring obviously relevant material. You must, unless you’re working with one of the aforementioned (rare, and usually young) theology profs who are up on recent philosophical theology, fend for yourself.

Next time: the next “R” – Resistance!

Technorati Tags: philosophical theology, theology, Trinity, Grenz, McGrath, Olson, Hall, Trinity, Kärkkäinen, rational reinterpretation, apparent contradiction

The more you think about hard stuff, the more opinions you get. I’ve taught philosophy of religion, modern philosophy, logic, and metaphysics courses, and so I have some fairly developed views. Based on theoretical (and non-theological considerations), here are some things I don’t believe in, because I think they’re impossible:

relative identity relations
constitution relations
group minds
time travel to the past
properties (whether tropes or universals) – yes, I’m a nominalist
persons/selves which are or are “constituted by” relations or relationships
multiple selves that count as one self because they’re so intimately aware of one another’s thoughts

I’m not going to argue these points here. My point is simply that in light of the above metaphysical convictions, I can’t believe in various Rational Reconstructions of the Trinity doctrine. In order corresponding to the above list:

Peter van Inwagen’s or Peter Geach’s relative identity trinitarianism (these we haven’t yet discussed here at trinities)
Brower’s and Rea’s constitution theory
group mind Social Trinitarianism as discussed by Brian Leftow in his “Anti Social Trinitarianism”
Leftow’s version of Latin Trinitarianism
ditto
misc. medieval theories, such as Henry of Ghent’s
some recent versions of Social Trinitarianism

General rule: when any philosopher looks at a Rational Reconstruction of some Christian Doctrine, he finds that Reconstruction unsatisfactory for various reasons. Other than the Two Minds approach to the Incarnation, I can’t think of exceptions to this rule. Anyone? Note that this isn’t even bringing in considerations about the Bible or how the new-fangled theory fits with Tradition.

In sum, one can’t help but admire the cleverness and ingenuity of Rational Reconstructors. Sadly, non-philosophers generally don’t understand such theories or the motivations for them, while other Christian philosophers mostly reject the Rational Reconstruction in question. This is disappointing and disturbing.

Before I move on to Resistance, though, I’d like to ask one more question:

Next time: Why do contemporary theologians ignore all recent Rational Reconstructions?

Technorati Tags: 4 R’s, Rational Reconstruction, Resolution through Rational Reconstruction, Geach, van Inwagen, Rea, Brower, Leftow, Davis, Henry of Ghent, relative identity, constitution, group minds, social trinitarian, time travel, properties, perichoresis

We’ve looked so far at two ways Christians may respond to apparently contradictory doctrines: Redirection and Restraint. We now move on to a third strategy: Resolution. In brief, the Resolver holds that the apparent contradiction can be banished, made to disappear. She doesn’t change the subject (as the Redirector), or claim ignorance of the doctrine’s meaning (as with Restraint).

But how is the seeming contradiction smoothed away? Take the Incarnation doctrine: Jesus is both God and man, which seems to imply being God and not, and being a man and not. The Revising Resolver just denies part of the Doctrine in question – here, either that Jesus is God, or that he’s a human. Problem solved – apparent contradiction resolved! But, many believers will consider this change way too radical – a cure worse than the disease. I’ll come back to Revising Resolvers later in the series. Here I want to focus on Resolution through Rational Reinterpretation.

This way of responding to apparently contradictory doctrines ought to have the official SCP seal of approval, for many prominent Christian philosophers have employed it liberally. Interestingly, I see little awareness of, appreciation for, or sympathy for their considerable efforts among theologians. I believe this is because the theology crowd is in the habit of Redirection and Resistance, and still suffers from the crippling 19th century denigration of the place of reason in the spiritual and theological life, as well as from the many bad habits of modern German philosophy. But I digress. In the rest of this post, I’ll just cite some famous examples – well known to Christian philosophers, but not to theologians or to wider Christian public.

Basically all the recent Trinity theories we’ve covered here – Leftow, Swinburne, Brower and Rea, Moreland and Craig, fall into this camp. (New readers – to find these previous posts, just use the Search box on the right hand side of this page.) Another example would be Peter van Inwagen’s exploration of relative identity trinitarianism, briefly discussed in my Unfinished Business paper, p. 14-5. The basic pattern goes like this: yes, at first glance, the Doctrine looks inconsistent. But, why not understand the Doctrine as X? X seems consistent, and moreover pretty defensible.

Philosophers believe in the power of reason, and these are attempts to solve theological problems by the application of metaphysical and logical ingenuity.

Another famous example we haven’t discussed would be the “two minds” approach to the Incarnation doctrine. Jesus has the divine nature, as well as a complete human nature, body, and soul. But, there is one person there – not two or three. And this one person is the Son, the second member of the Trinity. This bristles with problems, of course, and Morris gamely takes them on one by one in his deservedly famous book, The Logic of God Incarnate. The central move, is to say that Jesus’s having two natures amounts to (1) his having two minds, a divine and a human one, where the first has complete access to the second, whereas the second has limited access to the contents of the first, (2) and his having one set of causal and cognitive powers. This version of the Incarnation doctrine, whatever its final merits, seems consistent. (Or, at least it doesn’t seem inconsistent.) So, problem solved, right?

Next time: problems with Rational Reinterpretation.

Technorati Tags: 4 R’s, Rational Reinterpretation, Resolution, Resolution through Rational Reinterpretation, Incarnation, Tom Morris, Trinity, Society of Christian Philosophers

Happy Valentines Day! What an appropriate day to discuss what it means to be “perfect in love”!

Stephen T. Davis is a much-admired veteran Christian philosopher, who has long taught at Claremont McKenna College in lovely Claremont, in southern California. Many have read his Logic and the Nature of God. I also particularly enjoyed his Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection, his recent Christian Philosophical Theology, and his personal Christian testimony here. I have fond memories of his exciting Philosophy of Religion class that I took when I was a Master’s student at the Claremont Graduate University back in 1994. He’s a very kind and helpful man, and he’s been a help and an encouragement to me several times since then. But back to his work: his writing has an attractive clarity, forthrightness, independence, and brevity – not unlike his one-time colleague John Hick, but he’s more sober and irenic than Hick. Some things that, to me, make him stand out among analytic Christian philosophers are his thoughtful engagement with the Bible, with biblical scholarship, and with academic theologians.

Davis has his own take on the Trinity, which he calls “Perichoretic Monotheism”. He considers it a form of Social Trinitarianism, and I believe he first developed it after reading Brian Leftow‘s aggressive attack on all “social” Trinity theories in his 1999 article, “Anti Social Trinitarianism”, in  this book (co-edited by Davis). I’ll post on Davis’s full theory another time.

Here I want to consider Davis’s argument for social trinitarianism. He doesn’t claim to be super-original here – he acknowledges similar reflections by Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, Richard Swinburne, and C.J.F. Williams. But he can claim to have put this train of thought into an admirably clear (and thus evaluable) form. He first tentatively put out a simpler version of this argument in “A Somewhat Playful Proof of the Social Trinity in Five Easy Steps”, Philosophia Christi 2:1, 1999, 103-5. In Christian Philosophical Theology he offers it as a straight-up proof. I guess it’s no longer playful, but the earlier title was a good excuse to use a somewhat playful kittie pic.

Here, then, is the argument:

1. Necessarily, God is perfect, and perfect in love.
2. Necessarily, if God does not experience love of another, God is imperfect.
3. Therefore, necessarily, God experiences love of another. (1,2)
4. Necessarily, it is possible that only God exists (i.e. that God does not create).
5. Necessarily, if ST [social trinitarianism] is false, there is no ‘other’ in the Godhead.
6. Necessarily, if God alone exists, and if ST is false, then God does not experience love of another, and thus is not perfect. (2,4,5)
7. Therefore, necessarily, ST is true. (4,6) (Christian Philosophical Theology,65)

This argument is more modest than some other attempts – he aims to prove not that there must be exactly three divine persons, but only for

“divine plurality or robust differentiation (‘otherness’) among the Persons… to the effect that God is something like a community.” (66)

The argument seems valid to me. Still, I don’t think this is a successful proof, even of that limited conclusion. Some critical points:

• Why believe (2)? Here’s the whole reason offered:
  

“It seems that a God who does not and cannot love another has missed out on something high and wonderful; there would be a deficiency in God. God would be less than perfect. (The same would be true of any great good that can logically be experienced by an omnipotent and perfectly good being; if God were not to experience beauty or justice, that would be a deficiency in God.)” (66-7, emphasis added)

• This sort of argument would prove too much. It is a great good to be the heavenly Father presiding over a loving community of worshipful human beings. If God didn’t create, he’d lack this good. But Davis and I would agree that God would nonetheless be perfect. Again, it’s a great good to be the source of a gorgeous, amazing cosmos, teeming with life, which one beholds with satisfaction as “very good”. But we don’t want to say that God would be imperfect if he’d made nothing. There’s a non sequitur in Davis’s reasoning. Were God to have “missed out on something high and wonderful”, it doesn’t seem to follow that there would be “a deficiency in God”. Not all goods, not even all great goods, are such that their absence would render one imperfect, or even, less than perfectly well off. Some goods one doesn’t need for those things – for being perfect and/or happy/well off.
• To believe (2), we a reason to think the following scenario is contradictory:
  • A uni-personal, perfect God exists, and decides not to create.He’s just there, timelessly beholding and loving himself, but not anyone else. He’s a perfectly loving being – just as much as he would be were he to whip up some creatures, so as to have an object of love beyond himself. He’s all-knowing, and so can perfectly imagine what it’s like to love another. But, he doesn’t experience an such relationship, as only He exists. God is perfect, but perfectly alone.
  • We have to ask: where’s the contradiction here? There doesn’t seem to be one. Nor has Davis pointed out one.

• Davis urges, and rightly so, that it’s possible that God should not create – that is, he didn’t have to create anything. (67-8) There’s no reason to think that an only-God scenario is impossible; better to hold that “God is totally self-sufficient, and does not need to create.” (68) And obviously, if this would have been, and if ST were false, then God “would not have experienced the great good of love of another”. (68)
• Just as obviously, I would add, if God were not in any personal relationship (love which isn’t self-love), he would want to be. Why? Because love of another is a great good, and God is rational. It doesn’t follow, though, that God would, in such a state, but unhappy, disturbed, lonely, or otherwise incomplete. No, he might still be perfect, it seems.
• Re: premise 5. It’s not clear we should accept this. What is meant by an “‘other’ in the Godhead.”? He says a [relationship-worthy] “other” is a “separate centre of consciousness, will, and action”, and I take it he means three non-identical somethings within the divine nature or within God. Why, we can ask, does this require a social theory? Why, for instance, wouldn’t the “subsistent relations” of some “Latin” theories count, or Leftow’s three “streams in God’s life”? Might not those be “centres” as well? To be fair, Davis ultimately doesn’t think there is much different between so-called “Latin” and “social” theories. But my point is that the impact of the proof, even if it had no other problems, is lessened by the unclarity of at least two terms in (5): “other” and “ST”.
• Finally, an aside about premise (1). All theists, or at least all Christian ones, hold that God is perfect. But what is it to be “perfect in love”? The obvious meaning would be: a being is “perfect in love” just in case it enjoys a maximally loving character, that is, being disposed to act for the benefit of others – and this without deficiency. I wonder if some confuse this with the idea that God must be perfectly loving – i.e. loving as much as, or in all the important ways that he can.
  • Such a person might infer (2) from (1). But Davis doesn’t do that – he offers (2) as an independent premise.

Technorati Tags: Stephen T. Davis, social Trinity, social trinitarian, perichoretic monotheism

Richard Swinburne is an Emeritus professor at Oriel College, Oxford University, and is widely considered one of the greatest living Christian philosophers. He’s done original work in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and general metaphysics, but is perhaps best known for his work in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. He has a way of squarely facing tough issues, and treating them in original and principled ways. He’s particularly well known by philosophers for his arguments for mind-body dualism, for his cumulative case for the existence of God, and for his bold social trinitarian theory, which I’ll cover in this series. I particularly enjoy his takes on moral matters, where I think he has a really fine touch. But I’d be hard pressed to say what my favorite book of his is. All I can say, is that I’ve learned a lot from him. I have fond memories of seeing him defend dualism in a most manly fashion, about ten years ago in California, in front of a very hostile audience of several hundred philosophy professors and students. In a sense, much of his philosophy of religion work is an exercise in apologetics – be he’s no mere verbal jouster, no lawyerly defender of the party line. He strives to go deep into the issues, and base his moves on well thought through philosophical positions. It takes a bit of work to see why he says all he does, but that’s what this blog is about – trying to give you a leg up.

Swinburne’s The Christian God contains his trinitarian theory. This theory is carefully crafted, and is notable for its clarity. Unlike many self-professed “social trinitarians”, he doesn’t content himself to say “God is sort of like three men, and sort of not” (never quite telling you in what ways the analogy does and doesn’t hold), or just “God is sort of like three men, but he’s really infinitely unlike three men” (whatever that means). No – he steps up to the plate, and boldly sketches out a theory which you can understand well enough to either agree or disagree with. And he’s certainly taken the heat for his clarity. He’s not unlike Moreland and Craig in this respect.

As with his other books in philosophical theology, Swinburne starts out by laying out some fundamental philosophical claims, which he then applies to the issues at hand. In this case, he has chapters on the concepts of necessity, substance, time, causation and “thisness”. In this series, in the interest of brevity, I’ll skip straight to his Trinity theory, explaining his purely philosophical claims only as needed.

As we haven’t discussed “social trinitarianism” here yet, let me say a few general things about it. There’s no precise definition of “social trinitarianism”. Indeed, many such theologians think they only differ in emphasis, or even just verbally from what they call the contrasting “Latin” tradition. (We’ve looked at a well-developed recent example of that in Leftow, and perhaps Brower and Rea can be put in that broad camp as well.) I would list the following as concerns distinctive of those in the “social trinitarian” camp.

• A concern to preserve the interpersonal relationships among the members of the Trinity, particularly the Father and the Son.
• Closely related, a desire to do justice to the New Testament, specifically its idea of Christ as a mediator and his loving personal relationship with the Father
• Suspicions that the “static” categories of Greek philosophy have in previous trinitarian theology obscured the dynamic and personal nature of God.
• Concern that traditional or Western trinitarian theology has made the doctrine irrelevant to practical concerns, such as politics, gender relations, and family life.
• The idea that to be Love itself, or for God to be perfectly loving, God must contain three subjects or persons.

I see the first, second and last of these in Swinburne, as well as one more concern, found more in philosopher social trinitarians – a desire that the doctrine be visibly consistent. He’s not content to leave apparent contradictions in place, unlike some social trinitarians, who also endorse what I call “mysterianism”. But that’s another topic.

Next time: Why there are three dudes on the cover of The Christian God.

We turn finally to Trinity monotheism, which holds that while the persons of the Trinity are divine, it is the Trinity as a whole that is properly God. If this view is to be orthodox, it must hold that the Trinity alone is God and that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while divine, are not Gods. (589, their section 3.2.2)

Leftow, in the essay we mentioned last time, gives a complicated objection to this whole approach, which Moreland and Craig represent in the following helpful chart. (p. 590)

Leftow’s point is that no matter how you develop Trinity monotheism, you end up with an unacceptable theory – one of the things at the bottom of the chart. So take your pick – from left to right – four gods, the persons aren’t divine (contrary to orthodoxy), the persons are divine but God ain’t (contrary to orthodoxy), or what Lefton contentiously calls “Plantingian Arianism”. (This is the social trinitarian theory propounded by theologian Cornelius Plantinga, which on Leftow’s view involves greater and lesser ways to be divine, the Father being held as the origin of the other two, and so divine in a greater sense. So it isn’t properly speaking “Arian”, but Leftow calls any theory including degrees or levels of divinity “Arian”.) Or (far right side of the chart) one can abandon Trinity monotheism.

How do Moreland and Craig respond? Like this – I’ve doctored up their chart to represent their reply.

The Trinity Monotheist, they urge, should not make the inferences I put a “X” on, and should make her stand where I put the asterisk (*). In other words, Moreland and Craig want to say that there are two ways to be divine, yet this doesn’t implicate them in any objectionable “Arianism”. More on this next time.

So how do they head off the Quaternity problem? Simple. Only the Trinity is an instance of the divine nature, as the divine nature includes the property of being triune; beyond the Trinity “there are no other instances of the divine nature.” (590) So if “being divine” means “being identical with a divinity” (i.e. being a thing which instantiates the nature divinity), then none of the persons are “divine”. But they don’t put it that way. They want to say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each “divine” in another sense, and they labor to make that clear.

Technorati Tags: William Lane Craig, JP Moreland, Trinity Monotheism, Leftow

As we’ve seen, they consider themselves to be “social trinitarians” (last time we looked at their rather vague definition of that term). They then adopt Brian Leftow’s taxonomy of social trinitarian theories, and decide that the first of these is the most promising. (This is from Leftow’s 1999 article, “Anti Social Trinitarianism”, in Stephen Davis et. al. ed. The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, New York: Oxford University Press, 203-49. While this long and rich article deserves discussing, here I’ll stick with what Moreland and Craig say about it, and so the following page numbers are for their chapter, not for Leftow’s article.)

What these approaches are doing, in different ways, is trying to show how three numerically distinct persons ought to be counted together as the one God. Functional monotheism (their section 3.2.1) says that the three count as one god because they can’t but cooperate in everything – that is, because they function as one. (587-8) This, they seem to agree with Leftow, is simple polytheism, and so must be false. Richard Swinburne in this book is the target. They also pounce on Swinburne’s view that there are causal dependence relations among the three (the Son depends on the Father, and the Spirit depends on the Father and Son), asserting this to be inconsistent with Christ’s full divinity.

Group Mind Monotheism (3.2.2) says that the three persons are each “subminds of the mind of God”. (588) We mustn’t say that (as with the Borg of Star Trek) there are several minds here, which combine to form a fourth, greater Mind; this would be positing a divine Quaternity (Father, Son, Spirit, and also God) rather than a Trinity.

“Jesus has been assimilated.” A tempting trinitarian analogy but… Quaternity!

This is a difficult theory to comprehend, but they do an excellent job summarizing it:

In order to render [Group Mind Monotheism] intelligible, Leftow appeals to thought experiments involving surgical operations in which the cerebral commissures, the network of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, are severed. …Patients sometimes behave as though the two halves of their brain were operating independent [sic] of each other. The interpretation of such results is controversial, but one interpretation… is that the patients come to have two minds. Now the question arises whether in a normally functioning human being we do not already have two separable subminds linked to their respective hemispheres that cooperate together in producing a single human consciousness. In such a case the human mind would itself be a group mind. (588, emphasis added)

To this they object that we can’t say that the persons of the Trinity are mere “subminds”, as that would rule out their “existing in I-Thou relationships” with one another. (588) Such relationships are between two self-conscious persons – not between two states of a single person. This seems right. But in a highly compressed passage, which I don’t really get, they suggest that Group Mind Monotheism might best be “construed dynamically, as the process in which the subminds emerge into self-consciousness to replace the single trinitarian self-consciousness.” (589) In any case, they ask, are persons just minds – are those two names for one thing? If not, then the theory seems to say that there’s one person – God – who has three minds (or subminds), which “falls short of the doctrine of the Trinity”. (589) Yup – that’d be a kind of modalism. On the other hand, if “minds” or “subminds” just are persons, then it looks like tritheism, and so must be rejected as inconsistent with monotheism. So on the whole, this route doesn’t seem promising.

Next time: taking a crack at rehibilitating what Leftow calls “Trinity Monotheism”.

Technorati Tags: Trinity Monotheism, Group Mind Monothesim, Functional Monotheism, Swinburne, Leftow, modalism, social trinitarian, borg, Moreland, William Lane Craig

In section 1 (575-7), Moreland and Craig give what has become a standard evangelical apologetics account of the biblical basis of trinitarianism. Basically, Jesus “put himself in God’s place”, and there’s one God, but the name “God” is applied to each of the three. So “God is not a single person… but is tripersonal.” (575) This is pretty boiler-plate stuff, so even though I think it bristles with exegetical and other problems, here I’ll let it slide.

In section 2.1, they discuss the Philo-influenced logos-Christology as propounded just Justin Martyr and other 2nd century apologists. On this theory, “certain aspects of [God's] mind become expressed as distinct individuals.” (578) They seem to not notice that this is a variety of modalism, which is odd, as in section 2.2 they discuss modalism, although they stick to the serial, Sabellian kind. (578-9) They also plunge into the murky realm of Tertullian interpretation, claiming that “Tertullian clearly thinks of the the, Son, and Spirit as individuals capable of employing first-person indexicals [e.g. "I"], which entails that they are self-conscious persons.” (580) They also think, though, that we should concede that his doctrine was implicitly Arian. (ibid.)

Section 2.3 is a pretty decent, though one-sided account of the Arian controversy of the 4th century. Bottom line – Arians made Christ a creature, and that’s bad. Their take on the emerging orthodoxy has a marked social trinitarian spin.

While hypostasis does not mean “person” [in the modern, psychological sense] nevertheless a rational hypostasis comes very close to what we mean by a “person.” …Gregory of Nyssa’s illustration of three hypostaseis having one substance is Peter, James and John, all exemplifying human nature. (582)

Even Athanasius, we’re told, was a social trinitarian (583), the central claim of which is that “in God there are three distinct centers of self-consciousness, each with its proper intellect and will.” (583) In a feisty mood, they try to counter Leftow by re-labeling what he calls “Latin trinitarianism” with their term “anti social trinitarianism”! (583) This is a little silly, but they can use whatever terms they want. At least the “Latin” term highlights that fact that this sort of (at very best close to modalist) view increasingly became mainstream within Catholicism. And although they quote Gregory approvingly at first, later on they (I think) destroy his approach, showing that his moves to block tritheism just don’t work. (583-4) This section is worthy of more unpacking, be we should do that when we’re focusing on social trinitarianism per se. (Hey Tom McCall – you out there? Want to post on that section?)

Augustine, they claim, is commonly misinterpreted. He doesn’t, they say, identify the persons of the Trinity with features of God’s mind. (memory, understanding, will, etc. – 584-5) And although the persons’ mutual relations may be essential to them, on their reading Augustine doesn’t identify the divine persons with any “relations subsisting in God”. (585) Theologians interested in Augustine would find some interesting claims to chew on here. While Augustine, in their view, isn’t quite an anti social trinitarian, Aquinas is, however, they argue that his view is self-contradictory. (585-7) In sum, “Anti social trinitarianism seems to reduce to classical modalism.” (587) Well no, gents, not Sabellianism, but rather another kind of modalism, where the persons are eternal, intrinsic properties or aspects of God.

Next time, their interactions with Brian Leftow’s arguments against various kinds of social trinitarianism.

Technorati Tags: Moreland, Craig, Trinity Monotheism, social trinitarian, latin trinitarian, Leftow, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Arius, tritheism, modalism

1. Brian Leftow, “Divine Simplicity” – no Leftow never tackles easy problems. It’ll be interesting to see how he tries to defend that now widely rejected doctrine.
2. Alan R. Rhoda, Greg Boyd, and Thomas Belt, “Open Theism, Omniscience, and the Nature of the Future” – I read this as a draft. Good paper, well informed and argued, though I disagree with its main thrust. Essential reading for those interested in open theism. And in the Jan 2007 issue:
3. Katherin Rogers, “Anselmian Eternalism: The Presence of a Timeless God” – she here defends the (dubiously coherent) combination of libertarian freedom and four-dimensionalism about time.
4. Yours truly, “Three Roads to Open Theism” – I worked really hard on this paper, and am glad it’s finally out. I hope it proves helpful. I hereby apologize for its technicality.
5. Tom Senor, “The Compositional Account of the Incarnation” – I’m really looking forward to this one. Anything I’ve seen before from him has been insightful and worthwhile. He’s commenting on work by Leftow and Stump. I’ll post on this whenever we really get around to Incarnation issues here.

Kudos to Bill Hasker for what look like a couple of good issues.

Technorati Tags: Leftow, Hasker, Senor, Katherin Rogers, Rhoda, Boyd, open theism, Incarnation

I’m very pleased to introduce Joseph Jedwab, who has some interesting comments on Moreland’s and Craig’s understanding of the Trinity. I haven’t had the privilege of meeting him, but given how he spells “center”, I gather he’s English. Joseph is currently teaching philosophy and finishing his dissertation at Oriel College of Oxford University, on the metaphysics of the Trinity and the Incarnation. And he’s working under the supervision of one of the greatest living philosophers of religion, Richard Swinburne. Hiring committees take note – he goes on the job market next year! – Dale

I agree this is a clear account. I’m a bit worried about how the discussion might influence terminology. Moreland and Craig describe their view as Social Trinitarian and contrast this with an Anti-Social Trinitarian view. This is a mistake. Leftow’s title indicates his paper is against Social Trinitarianism (ST). It’s not supposed to be the name of a Trinitarian view. As you know, the name of the view Leftow defends is ‘Latin Trinitarianism’ (LT). Further, they say that the main commitment of ST is that there are three centres of consciousness, but it’s not clear what a centre is.

Is it a mental subject (i.e. a subject of mental properties, like you and me)? But what difference is there, if any, between a mental subject and a mental substance? If a substance just is an entity that has a causal power, then it seems ‘mental subject’ and ‘mental substance’ are equivalent, in which case if the one mental substance constitutes three additional mental subjects there are four mental subjects/substances in all. If a substance isn’t just an entity that has a causal power, what is it such that the mental subjects in the Trinity aren’t substances?

If a centre isn’t a mental subject, then is it a bundle or composite of conscious mental events that stand in some unity relation to each other alone? But then it’s not easy to see why that should imply there are three persons (i.e. rational mental subjects) and so why this view should qualify as a version of ST, where presumably the persons must at the very least stand in social relations to each other. For such bundles are not persons and we’ve been given no reason to think each bundle constitutes a person.

Finally, they say the contrast with LT is that on their view God has three faculties of intellect and will. But this depends on how one individuates faculties. Perhaps one might individuate according to the one mental substance and say there’s one such faculty or individuate according to the persons and say there are three. One might even do both, having faculties of different kinds or faculties in different senses.

The best way I can see to make sense of their view is to use some Lockean metaphysics. Say there’s one infinite spirit (a substance in the sense of a basic item in one’s ontology that is a concrete object, i.e. has a causal power) and say because it has three consciousnesses it constitutes three persons. This makes the view a bit like Merricks’ analogy in ‘Split Brains and the Godhead’, in which case it’s not a million miles away from Leftow’s LT. It’s clear in some ways but could do with a bit more spelling out.

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

A rather obvious and potentially serious objection to Leftow’s theory is that it makes the doctrine of the Trinity out to be modalism, for plainly, in his view, each of the Persons is a mode of God – a way God is, within a certain strand of his life. Leftow is very aware of this objection, and what he does in replying to it is instructive.

But before we turn to that, we should be a little more precise – in what sense, for Leftow, are the divine Persons “modes” of God? Each person is identified with a “complete” life God leads – with one of the three “strands” in God’s life. This is to say that these “persons” just are certain events, events the component substance/subject of which is God himself. Leftow doesn’t stress this point, and sort of smoothes it over by saying that each person “just is” God (i.e. that person-event just is God eternally having an intrinsic property). (e.g. 314) I’m assuming here that an event is just a substance/entity having a property/feature at a time (or timelessly).

Leftow essentially says (my paraphrase follows): “What is ‘modalism’? Let’s consult some standard theological reference works. As these theologians define the term my theory doesn’t amount to ‘modalism’ at all.” (326-8)

There’s something eminently reasonable about this strategy – surely we philosophers can rely on our colleagues in theology to have properly thought through the issue of modalism, and properly diagnosed what is wrong with it – why it should be considered unorthodox. Well, I wish it were so. The fact is, theological sources are less than precise on this issue – through their lack of precision, they’ve let us down. Just look at the ones Leftow quotes. (327)

…standard theological dictionaries… describe Modalism as holding that all distinctions between Persons are impermanent and transitory, or “are a mere succession of modes or operations,” that “the one God becomes Trinitarian only in respect of the modes of His operation ad extra,” that “God is three only with respect to the modes of His action in the world,” that “the one God… has three manners (modes) of appearance, rather than being one God in three Persons.” [And] that for Modalism, “the three Persons are assigned the status of modes or manifestations of the one divine being; the one God is substantial, the there differentiations adjectival… the Modalist God metamorphosed Himself to meet the changing needs of the world,” and so there is “a Trinity of manifestation, not even a Trinity of economy, still less a Trinity of being.”

Note that the word “modalism” here is just a label for a certain heresy – the content of that problematic doctrine seems to slide around between the sources. Is the dastardly doctrine that God is only Three qua related to creatures (so that if there were no creatures, He wouldn’t be Three?) (first two quotations) Or is it that God’s Threeness is only an appearance, and not an intrinsic feature? (third quotation) Or is the problem that the Persons are made modes of a substance and so robbed of substantival status themselves? (quotation four) Or is the problem that “modalism” implies that God changes (by adopting these three modes one after the other), whereas we must hold that God doesn’t change? (quotation four) Or does “modalism” make the Persons mere appearances, and not even so much as ways that God acts? (quotation five)

By instead using the term “modalism” as a descriptive label for views about one or more of the Persons, we can throw some light on the situation. It seems that what the theologians above are talking about is what I call sequential, phenomenal, non-essential FSH modalism. That is, each of the Three Persons is identical to different mode of God, but these modes succeed each other in time, and none is essential to God’s nature, and moreover each is an appearance, a way that God appears to something (someone) else, and isn’t an intrinsic property of God or an event in God that involves his having some intrinsic property. In other words, if you had a lot of knowledge of these successive Persons, you wouldn’t thereby know anything substantial about how God really is, or about God’s essential nature.

Leftow well understands what the theologians are rejecting. Hence, he says of his own theory,

Nothing in my account of the Trinity precludes saying that the Persons’ distinction is an eternal, necessary, non-successive and intrinsic feature of God’s life, one which would be there even if there were no creatures. (327)

That seems correct, which is to say that Leftow’s theory doesn’t amount to the above kind of modalism, but rather, to non-sequential, noumenal, essential FSH modalism. Unfortunately, that implies S-modalism, and I’ve argued here and here that S-modalism and any theory which implies it should be rejected by people who think the New Testament is accurate. Leftow, I take it, is one of those people. Hearing the footsteps of these sorts of objections, he briefly tries to head them off, in the following highly compressed passage.

The question is sure to come, though: aren’t your Persons still “modes,” if not modes of appearance, “adjectival” rather than “substantival”? One reply is that one the present account, each Person is as substantial as the one God is, since each Person is God in a different “part” of His life. If an infant isn’t a mode of a substance, neither is a Son. Again, arguably a person could be a substance despite having identity-conditions that depend on events… (328)

I’m not sure I understand this reply. God is the substance which lives. The three “persons”, on Leftow’s account, just are certain events – God’s living in certain ways. It doesn’t follow, then, that such “persons” are as substantival as God is – they aren’t substantival at all! Is “an infant” a mode of a substance? No – presumably an infant is identical to (just is) a substance. The event of Al being an infant would be a mode of Al – just as, on Leftow’s account, the event of God’s eternally living “sonishly” (my term) is a mode of God – and this mode, this life-event I called God’s living sonishly – this just is the Son, on his theory.

Leftow goes on to suggest that substances may “supervene” on certain events – that is, necessarily, whenever events of type X,Y,Z occur, a substance of type S exists. So maybe the Father, Son, and Spirit are real substances because of certain events within God’s life (or his multiple “life-streams”). Well, maybe. I thought Leftow was identifying the Persons with those life-events, not saying that the Persons supervene on them. In any case, I don’t think Leftow wants to say that they are substances at all; if he does, his account will include four divine substances: God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – which would take him pretty far outside the Latin tradition of trinitarian theorizing. I suppose his point is rather that the three Persons are… something like quasi-substances – substantial enough to avoid modalism, but not substances in the primary sense of the term. He admits at the end that he hasn’t addressed the issue of “what sorts of persons [the three divine] Persons are”. Well, to his great credit, he’s said more about the Persons than many Latin trinitarians have. He has said that they’re certain events, with God as their component substance. Hence, whatever else they are, they’re modes of God – ways God is. So as best I can tell, however the account is developed, it’ll still face the previously-noted problems for S-modalism. To get around those, he’d have to show, among other things, that it makes sense to think of these event-persons having personal relationships with each other, and with human beings.

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

All these preliminaries accomplished, Leftow plays his hand, showing how he thinks the time-travel thought-experiment is relevant to theology:

There is one Jane [the time-travelling Rockette], but she was present many times over in the chorus line. At one point in our lives, many discrete maximal episodes in her life were co-present. …discrete in that along Jane’s own personal timeline, they did not overlap (they were strictly successive). …Suppose, then, that God’s life has the following peculiar structure: at any point in our lives, three discrete parts of God’s life are present. But this is not because one life’s successive parts appear at once. Rather, it is because God always lives His life in three discrete strands at once, no event of His life occurring in more than one strand and no strand succeeding another. In one strand, God lives the Father’s life, in one the Son’s, and in one the Spirit’s. The events of each strand add up to the life of a Person. The lives of the Persons add up to the life God lives as the three Persons. There is one God, but He is many in the events of His life, as Jane was in the chorus line: being the Son is a bit like being the leftmost Rockette. (312, original emphasis in italics)

Of course, being the Son is also somewhat different – this threefold structure to God’s life is supposed to be eternal and natural, and each Person-constituting “strand” of God’s life is supposed to (in some sense) count as a “complete” life (though for any one of the three, there’s more to God’s life than that). (312)

Leftow also thinks that just as the many stages of Jane’s life are united into stages of Jane by their being causally connected in the right way, so too, analogously, the lives of each of the three Persons count as being the “strands of” the life of God, because of the mysterious but somehow causal inter-trinitarian relations (the Father “generating” Son, and the Father and Son “spirating” the Spirit). (313-4, cf. 321-2)

What are the “Persons” on this theory?

…they are whatever sort [of "person"] God is – the Persons just are God… The Persons have the same trope of deity. Numerically the same substance generates their mental episodes. (314, original emphasis)

One and the same thing, that is, can truly think “I am the Father” and “I am the Son”, though these true thoughts must occur at different “points in His life”. (315) Again, “…facts about events in God’s life are what make Him triune.” (315) Specifically, he wants to say, along with Thomas Aquinas, that the event of God understanding himself just is the event of God’s (or the Father’s?) “filiation of” or “generation of” the Son. So “the Persons are distinguished [from one another] solely by relational properties” which God has solely because of his own eternal acts. “God the Father is God fathering [the Son].” (315) And

“God the Son is God… being fathered. The Persons simply are God as in certain acts – certain events – in His inner life. …none [of these events] are in time. …God just eternally does the acts which constitute His life; these acts render Him triune.” (316, original emphasis in italics)

Leftow wants to show what is wrong with the following argument:

1. the Father = God
2. the Son = God
3. God = God
4. the Father = the Son (from 1-3)
5. the Father generates the Son
6. God generates God (from 1,2,5) (305-6)

The point, of course, is that orthodoxy requires 1-3 and 5, yet 1-3 imply the unorthodox 4, and 4 and 5 seem to imply the unorthodox statement 6. So what to do? Leftow holds that his theory shows how this argument is invalid – that is, why 4 and 6 don’t really follow after all. This is the big payoff.

Passing over a somewhat technical discussion (316-324), it’s supposed to work like this. Leftow believes the above argument to be doubly invalid; that is, 4 doesn’t follow from 1-3, and 6 doesn’t really follow from 4-5. How can that be? By the logic of identity, (Dale says) those inferences are plainly valid. Leftow makes some (I think questionable) points about “temporary identities” and “phased sortals”, but in keeping with the non-specialist aims of this blog, I’ll resist commenting on that part of the paper. I believe (and if I’m wrong, perhaps Brian will be kind enough to correct me), that what he’s really urging is that the above statements need to be carefully analyzed, and when they are, we’ll see that 1, 2 are not identity statements. And so interpreted, the resulting argument is invalid. So if I understand him, his point is that than 1-6 above are properly understood as:

1. God, in and only in strand 1 of his life, lives in a Fatherly way.
2. God, in and only in strand 2 of his life, lives in a Son-like manner.
3. (From the standpoint of any one or more strands of his life,) God just is God (is self-identical).
4. Strand 1 of God’s life (the Fatherly one) just is (=) strand 2 of God’s life (the Son-like one).
5. There’s a timeless “generation” relation between strand 1 of God’s life, and strand 2 of his life.
6. (From the standpoint of any one or more strands of his life,) God generates God.

(Even if we don’t alter 3 or 5, if we simply analyze 1 & 2 as Leftow suggests, the argument is invalid.) In something like this way, then, he suggests we “index Trinitarian truths to appropriate sets of events” [i.e. those sets composing God's various life-streams] (326), thus showing anti-trinitarian arguments to be invalid. Certainly, Leftow is correct in thinking that the argument just quoted is invalid, as he urges, at steps 4 and 6.

I end this segment of the review with a teaser. The last section of Leftow’s paper is: “The menace of Modalism“. Next time we’ll look at how Leftow tries to slay that beast.
Technorati Tags: Leftow, Trinity, Latin Trinitarian, Latin Trinity, Logic, Identity

After quoting part of the Athanasian creed, Leftow remarks “Such odd arithmetic needs explaining.” (304) His aim, then, is to show how those claims are in fact “coherent” – neither contradictory nor meaningless, but something Christians may reasonably believe to be true. He’s trying to show that his “Latin trinitarianism” is “monotheist and orthodox” as well, in contrast to “social trinitarian” thought. (307) At the start, he reiterates some of his previous language (304-6) – here, he’s going to further clarify his position. I think he succeeds in doing that.

Now come the metaphysical fireworks. Here is Leftow’s central “thought experiment” – a supposedly possible event which will by analogy help us to understand how God can be three Persons in one being or essence.

Suppose all the Rockettes but one called in sick. But the one healthy one, Jane, secures a time-travel machine. Using this, she puts on a great show, one which is normally done with three dancers. She simply performs the left role, then jumps into the machine, comes out, puts her arm around that other stage of herself dancing the left role, and dances the center role. Repeat again with the right role, and the show is saved.

[The time-travel machine] lets the one Jane be present at one time many times over, in many ways… It gives us one Jane in many personae. If we give the name “Rockette” to what we see many of, it lets the one Jane be (or be present in) many Rockettes. [The time-travel machine] does this by freeing the events composing Jane’s life from the general order of time.” (308, original emphasis in italics)

Of course, the million-dollar question is, “Is time travel genuinely possible?” (308) I’d say that many different metaphysical committments arguably prevent one from thinking it is – many committments that I have, and that I’d argue are the default or “common sense” ones. That is, if you believe certain things, it logically follows that our time travelling is contradictory. These include theories like presentism, the belief that we endure rather than perdure (so that we lack temporal parts), belief in an “open” future, and belief in incompatibilist freedom. To you non-metaphysicians, I apologize for the preceding load of jargon. My point here is a simple one: it is far from clear that time travel is non-contradictory, that it could even possibly happen. As far as I know, Leftow is consistent; he doesn’t hold any theses which clearly entail that time-travel is impossible. But many philosophers, like me, do. It isn’t too clear, then, what Leftow is really accomplishing. Isn’t this a case of trying (and failing) to illuminate the obscure by using something even more obscure?

It’s important to see how “low” Leftow is aiming in this piece.

I want to suggest by analogy with a time-travel case that it is possible that God be a Latin Trinity. That is, I want to suggest that for all we know, this is how it is with God in some metaphysically possible world. …my claim is only that a Latin doctrine of the Trinity has likenesses to something found in some metaphysically possible world. (309)

He isn’t exactly, then, offering a model of God’s nature. He’s just saying – here’s a cosmos-situation which seems possible, and for all we know, God’s nature is somewhat like that. This is centrally a defensive project. As we’ll see, he’s content to leave much of the “mystery” intact. So no, he’s not saying that God is himself a time-traveller. (310) I don’t think Leftow is merely defensive, though – as we’ll see next time, there is positive content to his claims. A little later in the paper, he ratchets down his aims even lower.

…even if pastward time travel is impossible, talk about it may help us clarify other, genuinely possible things. (311)

I’m not so sure about the utility of admittedly impossible thought-experiments, but the technically-minded can see his appeal to an example involving intuitionist logic. (311)

Back to time-travel, Leftow acknowledges that a big threat to our thinking it possible is as follows. If we traveled back to our past, it seems we’d have all the powers we enjoy now. We’d be able, then, to kill our earlier self. But that’s contradictory – if we died back then, how’d we exist in the future, so as to be able to travel back and committ that odd sort of suicide we’re imagining? As an example, suppose that Howard Dean decides today that he’s proud of his infamous scream – so proud, in fact, that he wishes it were his last act – he wants to end on such a high note, thus securing his place in history. So, he time-travels back to the celebration of his glorious third-place Iowa primary “victory” in early 2004, and kills his earlier self, right after said scream.

Leftow says sure – but only because we’re supposing that Dean has libertarian (incompatibilist) freedom. But it’s possible for there to be creatures much like us, except without that sort of freedom. And it’s possible that they exist in a deterministic world which is so arranged that time-travellers may not kill their earlier selves. Hence, it is possible that time-travel occurs. In philosophers’ lingo, there’s a “possible world” in which someone travels in time. (309-10)

Another much-discussed difficulty is the issue of “causal loops”. He gives an example that involves a knife-fight among the Jane-stages in the above Rockette scenario. (310) But here’s what I think is a more vivid example. Suppose I tell you that I’ve learned how to build a time machine. You ask how I learned that, and I tell you that my future self from the year 2020 travelled back in time to inform me. So the later Dale learned from the earlier Dale… and vice-versa! It seems that my knowledge of time-machine-building hasn’t been explained at all, though! So it looks like time-travel opens up the possibility of bizarre causal loops which lack an explanation. Leftow says, if you think they need an explanation, how about this: God upholds the “loop” in which later-Dale informs earlier-Dale, and is also informed by earlier-Dale. (310-1) I told you this guy was tricky! So again, we can’t say that time travel is impossible. But even if it were, as he’s noted, that’s ok. Next time: OK, what’s the payoff of all this when it comes to the Trinity?
Technorati Tags: Leftow, Latin Trinity, Latin trinitarian, Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Toledo, time travel, causal loops, theology

Leftow’s essay “Anti Social Trinitarianism” (in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins, eds., The Trinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) – linked at the lower right of this blog’s main page) is commonly recognized among Christian philosophers as one of the most important pieces on the subject recently (and I’d say, ever) written. His main point is that social trinitarianism “cannot be both orthodox and a version of monotheism.” (p. 203) I’ll come back to this challenging piece some time when I get around to discussiong social trinitarian theories. Here, I’m going to cover only the start of the essay, where Leftow sets the agenda for his own “Latin” trinitarian theory (LT).

Here’s what he says about his own preferred version of the doctrine:

In LT, there is just one divine being (or substance), God. God constitutes three Persons, but all three are at bottom just God. … [as Aquinas says,] ‘…God begotten receives numerically the same nature God begetting has.’
To make Aquinas’ claim perfectly plain, I introduce a technical term, ‘trope’. Abel and Cain were both human. So they had the same nature, humanity. Yet each also had his own nature, and Cain’s humanity was not identical with Abel’s… A trope is an individualized case of an attribute. Their bearers individuate tropes: Cain’s humanity is distinct from Abel’s just because it is Cain’s, not Abel’s.
With this term in hand, I now restate Aquinas’ claim: while Father and Son instance the divine nature (deity), they have but one trope of deity between them, which is God’s… bearers individuate tropes. If the Father’s deity is God’s, this is because the Father just is God…(203-4, original emphasis in italics)

This part seems clear enough. He’s drawing a contrast; he goes on to point out (204-5) that whereas social trinitarians posit three tropes of divinity, because they posit three numerically distinct Persons, LT posits only one trope of divinity, as it holds that the Father just is (that is, is numerically identical to) the Son (etc.). If this was all he’d said, then I’d say it was modalism, and moreover a kind which is refutable. What would he say, I wonder, to the following argument?

1. For any X and Y, if they share a trope of any property, then X = Y.
2. The Father and Son share a trope of divinity.
3. The Father is numerically identical to the Son. (1,2)
4. Whatever is true of the Father is true of the Son (and vice versa). (3 & Leibniz’s Law)
5. The Son was crucifed. (New Testament)
6. The Father was crucified. (4,5)

Leftow seems committed to 1 & 2. 3 follows from them. 4 is self-evident. Hence, he’s committed to 5 & 6. But this shows that at least one of 1-2 is false – LT just won’t fly.
This doesn’t settle the matter, though, for Leftow goes on to say some other things, which cast doubt on whether he actually accepts 1 & 2, things which I think he develops in a later paper. Immediately following the above passage, he continues:

In LT, then, the numerical identity of God is secure, but one wonders just how the Persons manage to be three. For in LT, the Persons are distinct but not discrete. Instead, LT’s Persons have God in common, though not exactly as a common part. In [Social Trinitarianism], the Persons are distinct and discrete. There is nothing one would be tempted to call a part they have in common. What they share is the generic divine nature, an attribute. (204)

I’m not sure what to make of this passage. But I believe that what he had in mind was something like this (though I don’t think he’d want to use these terms). The Father and Son are both modes of one and the same God. That God is self-identical entity, and has only one trope of divinity, and the Father and Son equally “have” him in the sense of being ways that he lives or exists. The both “are” (are modes of) him, but neither is identical to him; a mode is never, or at least needn’t be, identical to that of which it is a mode. So Father and Son are numerically distinct modes, but they’re modes of one and the same thing, God. So Father and Son are, as he says, “distinct but not discrete”. If this reading of Leftow’s paper is right, then he denies premise 2 of my objection-argument above – neither Father nor Son is the bearer of the trope of divinity. Rather, they’re both modes of the bearer (God) of the one trope of divinity.

If this is right, then in my view, there are still plenty of reasons to reject it. Presumably, on this theory both Father and Son are events. And arguably, events can’t be in loving relationship with one another – only persons (personal substances/entities/individuals) can – and persons are not reducible to events. In general, theological incoherence looms at every turn, once we accept any kind of S-modalism. Further, if being “divine” means being identical to a god, to a certain kind of individual, then in that sense he’s denying that either Father or Son is divine.

Again, in fairness to Leftow, his main purpose in this essay is to bring on the pain for social trinitarians – he isn’t trying to fully develop what he calls LT here. But he does return to that positive task with a vengeance in a later paper, which we’ll look at next time.

Technorati Tags: Latin Trinitarian, LT, Brian Leftow, Trent Dougherty, Trinity, Aquinas, Social Trinitarian, ST. modalism, modes, identity