Unlike Redirectors, Revisers don’t change the subject. Unlike Resisters, they don’t claim we should just “live with the tension”. Unlike practitioners of Restraint, they don’t think we can put off the issue. Like Resolvers through Rational Reinterpretation, they have a solution. But they don’t think tricky, new, more careful formulations are what is called for. Rather, something must go out on the rubbish heap. Revisers are usually accused of arrogance, lack of respect for tradition, biblical ignorance, idolatry of human reason, not being Christians at all, and of hating babies and cute little puppies.

Open theists are Revisers about divine (unchanging and unincreasable) foreknowledge and human freedom. Many Christian philosophers who are trinitarians Revise traditional theology by denying medieval doctrines of divine simplicity, which seem incompatible with multiple persons “in” God. John Hick is a Reviser about the Incarnation and about traditional Christian non-pluralism. Socinus Revised with respect the Incarnation, the Trinity, and other matters. Luther Revised many medieval Catholic doctrines which he thought contrary to scripture and/or reason (he emphasized the former).

I divide Revisers into two groups: Reforming revisers, and Reinventing revisers. The former want to change accepted Christian doctrine to bring it into better accord with some authority or which it is (supposed to be) founded, and from which it has despite itself sadly strayed – such as the Bible, reason, the apostolic tradition, the church Fathers, or all of these. In contrast, Reinventing Revisers think that Christian theology is something which ought to be remade by each generation, or anyway, but us, because of some important developments in other areas of human knowledge, usually the almighty Science. They either de-emphasize core, un-negotiable Christian beliefs, or deny that there are any such. “Liberal” theologians such as Hick are Reinventers. Luther and Socinus were Reforming Revisers. So, I suppose, were the Catholic leaders at the famously revisionary Vatican II council.

The price? The Reviser is a heretic with respect to his base community, the one he urges should change – he denies something they affirm as essential. This is a main difference between the Rational Reinterpreter and the Reviser – the former is kind of/sort of/arguably/maybe orthodox, while the latter is confessedly not. Say what you will, Revisers pay the price for their conviction. Because of this heresy issue, offended traditionalists don’t see a lot of difference between a Hick-type reviser and a Luther-type one – a heretic is a heretic. The Vatican II guys, of course, didn’t face this problem; being at the top of the hierarchical heap, there was no one above them to thunder down condemnation – only hacked off traditionalists who were then marginalized. It’s good to be the King.

I would argue that in general, Revision should be considered a last resort, or at least, something one considers only after trying out the various Rational Reinterpretations and perhaps some sort of Resistance. It seems to me that we ought to assume that our forerunners were on the right track, until the evidence compels us to deny this.

I’m an open theist, but before I became one, I was as eager as anyone to show the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. I became an open theist as a grad student at Brown, after I read through all the various schemes which allegedly show how traditional (unchanging, all-encompassing, certain) divine foreknowledge was compatible with human freedom. It seemed to me that all such solutions faced some steep philosophical problems, and biblical ones as well – ones which eventually made open theism look plausible by comparison. The mysterian Resistance views I previously held (as well as my previous habits of Restraint and Redirection) seemed more and more lame, the more I (1) looked very carefully about all the Bible did and didn’t say on the issue, and (2) looked into arguments for the logical incompatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge (as traditionally understood). (BTW – beware of philosophers peddling the notion that these arguments all involve some logical fallacy or other – most do not!)

Is Revision reasonable? It all depends on the specifics of the case. With that unsatisfying and trivially true conclusion, I end this over-long series.

If you defend a problematic doctrine as a Mystery, you’re asserting that it to some degree lacks what I call “understandable” content. “Understandable” content is a proposition (thought, claim) that positively seems consistent to you. A claim may fail to be understandable for one of two reasons.

First, it may fail to be understandable because I don’t grasp the meaning of it (or barely grasp the meaning of it). I call this “negative mysterianism“. Concerning the Trinity, it seems to me this is the predominant form of mysterianism from the time of the church Fathers up until the early modern era. To exaggerate a little, classical theologians think that we can barely think about God at all – our concepts can just barely be stretched enough to be put to use when it comes to discourse about the divine. They held the Trinity, etc. to be mysterious because of a lack of content, and this stance was buttressed by an entrenched tradition of Platonist philosophy, which reigned in late classical/early medieval times, and in many ways held its grip on theology through the middle ages.

In contrast, the positive mysterian holds that a doctrine is a mystery because of “too much” content; the content of the doctrine seems to include or imply some pair of claims like this: P and not-P. I emphasize the “seems” because the positive mysterian thinks his mysterious doctrine is true, and assumes (justifiably, in my view) that no contradiction is true. (Believe it or not, a few contemporary philosophers deny this.) Hence, any true set of claims is self-consistent. Hence this doctrine lacks “understandable” (i.e. apparently consistent) content; to the contrary, its content (firmly and not fleetingly) seems inconsistent. It seems to me that an undeveloped positive mysterianism is pretty popular among contemporary theologians. James Anderson is a positive mysterian, and (I think uniquely) has a developed epistemology to go along with and support it.

Why I’ve occasionally found a pre-modern theologian mentioning some sacred Mystery as apparently contradictory, it seems to me that positive mysterianism only became popular in the early modern era. Starting in the sixteenth century, Socinians and other unitarians were wont to claim that (what they held to be unbiblical dogmas like) the Trinity, transubstantiation, and the Incarnation were not only unbiblical, but contradictory as well.

In the face of this onslaught, you, the Defender of Orthodoxy have three options:

1. Try to show that the doctrine is in fact consistent, by offering a philosophically precise rational reconstruction (exposition, interpretation) of it.
2. Accept that it is apparently contradictory, and defend it as a positive mystery. (More on how this works later in the series.)
3. Don’t argue that the doctrine is consistent, but rather urge that the Socinians (or whoever) haven’t proven it to be inconsistent.

Some philosopher-apologists such as Leibniz, do all three. In any case, negative mysterianism helps with the third strategy – you urge that the doctrine is too slippery to get a hold of well enough to prove it inconsistent. Bishop Stillingfleet (d. 1699) pulls this move in a 1691 sermon:

But it is said that…there is [a contradiction] in the Mystery of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is strange Boldness in Men to talk thus of Monstrous Contradictions in things above their Reach. The Atheists may as well say, Infinite Power… and God’s… other unsearchable Perfections are Monstrous Paradoxes and Contradictions. (“The Mysteries of The Christian Faith Asserted and Vindicated”, London, 1696, p. 18, bold added)

The idea is that no human can show this Dogma to be contradictory, because no one can understand it well enough to see it is so. On the face of it, this is a risky move; one is insisting that to a large degree, one doesn’t know what one is talking about. It also risks making an unjustifiable claim: how could we know (or justifiably believe) that no human could (or could in this life) better grasp the content of the Dogma in question, so as to be reasonably sure whether or not it is consistent?

The positive mysterian admits that he doesn’t fully understand the Dogma in question, but he does grasp it well enough, on the basis of divine revelation, to see that it is an apparent – and a merely apparent – contradiction. Positive mysterians generally come off as far less skeptical or pessimistic about the ability of humans to think about God. Positive mysterianism must leap this hurdle: if this Dogma resolutely appears contradictory, doesn’t that give us a strong reason to think it false? How then, this admission be part of a defense of the rationality of believing in this Dogma?

Next time: Mysterious, yet biblical?

Technorati Tags: mystery, mysterian, mysterianism, positive mysterianism, negative mysterianism, James Anderson, paradox. dialetheism, dialethism, contradicton, consistent, inconsistent, contradictory

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

Many recent Christian philosophers have offered what I call Rational Reconstructions of apparently contradictory doctrines such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. Though I’m presently exploring criticisms of such views, let me emphasize that I don’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing, and I think that people with philosophical skills who are Christians ought to use them in any way which is helpful to the Christian community. At bare minimum, these folks are exploring possible views, possible ways to understand the Trinity (etc.). Getting clear about what the options are, and the costs and benefits of each, is an important kind of theoretical progress. Moreover, it shows intellectual integrity and courage, and concern for the truth.

At the end of my last post in the series, I noted that Rational Reconstructors often don’t believe their new version of the Doctrine. In any case, I’ve never seen one that insists that their version is the one which all Christians ought to believe. This latter isn’t surprising – we professors simply don’t have any authority to lay down a theory as required by any Christian community. But it is surprising that these folks are exercising some immense intellectual energy, and writing very involved and difficult pieces expounding views to which they do not commit? What is going on?

Short answer: apologetics. They’re deflecting bullets, as it were, with the theoretical equivalent of Wonder Woman’s super-duper bracelets. They have in mind an opponent of (small-c catholic, orthodox, or “historic”) Christianity who holds that the Doctrine in question is obviously contradictory, or even demonstrably contradictory.

They’re arguing like this:

We can’t rule out that the Doctrine ought to be understood as X.
X might be thought weird, but
X isn’t obviously contradictory, and
X isn’t demonstrably contradictory. (i.e. There’s no argument that X is contradictory such that any sane adult human will regard it as obviously valid and sound.)

Notice, they’re not telling you what the Doctrine means, or what the best way to interpret it is. In a sense, they’re not even, necessarily, revealing what they think this great and true Doctrine is. Rather, they’re showing that the traditional formulas which are taken to express the doctrine can be understood in at least one consistent way, which way they have carefully, with a Philosopher’s skill and precision, laid out, perhaps for the first time.

There are a couple of unsatisfying things about this genre of writing.

1. For one thing, they’re often mere defense. (Not always – sometimes the author does hold forth his new-fangled theory as something we ought to believe.) They just don’t give the inquiring mind anywhere to rest.

2. The opponents are largely imaginary or uninteresting, or they wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be satisfied with the above style of argument. Permit me to belabor this point (which applies more to non-philosophical apologetics than to the work of philosophical theologians).

• Atheists don’t generally think much about the Trinity or the Incarnation. Why should they? They don’t even believe in theism, and they certainly don’t accept the Bible (or the Church) as an instrument of divine revelation.
• Other supposed opponents are “cultists” and “rationalists”. Now sure, sometimes Jehovah’s Witness or whoever lob an accusation that some Doctrine is patently contradictory. But it’s rare to find a careful thinker or scholar from said group who can make a case for this, a case worth rebutting. The “Rationalist” is a sort of bogeyman who appears in some apologetic and theological writing, who proudly refuses to submit his reason to divine Revelation, and so consequently rejects the Trinity or Incarnation, etc. This generic term is probably meant to cover three kinds of people who engage in theology: the Liberal theologian, the Unitarian, and the Deist. But the first and last simply don’t believe that the Bible (and/or the Church) is (or is a means of) divine revelation. So they just aren’t concerned about doctrines allegedly based on those sources, and pay little attention to the Doctrine. Besides, there basically never has been a sizable Deist movement.
• If “Unitarians” means Unitarian Universalists, they are simply not a Christian movement, and so pay little attention to questions of Christian theology. So, who cares what they think about, say, the Trinity? If this means other (non-UU) unitarians (i.e. people who identify God with the Father) there were, in the 17th to the first half of the 19th c. many sophisticated unitarian Christians, some of whom argued that the Trinity (etc.) is contradictory, but these have fallen almost entirely off the map of current Christian theologians, philosophers, and apologists, basically because there are no large (non-UU) unitarian groups nowadays, in contrast with the late 18th-early 19th centuries, and in any case, these unitarians, just like contemporary “biblical unitarians”, emphasized the (alleged) lack of biblical support for the Trinity and Incarnation doctrines, rather than their (alleged) inconsistency. Note that they hold out for biblical support – they reject appeals to ecumenical councils, or the teaching magisterium, etc. So, their objections aren’t primarily “rationalistic” – but rather exegetical and methodological. But apologetics judo doesn’t and can’t help with those sorts of difficulties. In my scheme of R’s I classify them as Revisers.

3. The biggest limitation, to my mind, is this: It is no great victory if some belief of mine fails to be obviously or demonstrably contradictory. Call this sort of unfortunate claim a Whopper of a Contradiction.

• For one thing, a potential belief may not be a Whopper Contradiction, but there is little to no reason to believe it, or some reason to believe it, but more to disbelieve it.
• Again, a belief may be apparently contradictory to me without being a Whopper of a Contradiction. It may be that every time I carefully consider it, it seems this way. Still, it may not be an obvious or demonstrable contradiction. But it seems I ought not believe it.
• Again, if a say words that are unintelligible, or have a vague belief, what I say can’t be a Whopper of a Contradiction.
• Arguably, no substantial religious beliefs turn out to be a Whopper. If something was obviously contradictory, few intelligent people would believe it. And philosophers know that few things are demonstrable (provable) – when we keep in mind the technical sense of “demonstrable” explained above. Usually, the argument won’t get very far before there’s a premise which a reasonable person could deny.

In sum, these arguments (that said Doctrine is not a Whopper Contradiction) are generally pretty effective, because they aim so low, but they are not terribly helpful to the thinking Christian trying to decide what to think of the Doctrine, i.e. to decide on its proper meaning and justification. At the end we’re left with only a possible contender for a way to understand the Doctrine in question (if you can get your head around it).

Next time: one last problem with Resolution through Rational Reinterpretation.

Technorati Tags: 4 R’s, contradiction, Rational Reinterpretation, Resolution through Rational Reinterpretation, unitarian, biblical unitarians, deism, liberal theology, Unitarian Universalism, Whopper of a Contradiction, contradiction, Bible

Last time we highlighted one problem with Resolution through Rational Reinterpretation – often, only a metaphysician could love the new-fangled (but precise and seemingly consistent) version of the Doctrine in question. A second concern is that many believers think this “new version of” the Doctrine just ain’t that doctrine at all, but a knock-off – something similar, but different, and moreover, not genuine.

Consider these pronouncements of the First Vatican Council of 1869-70:

…that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.

May understanding, knowledge and wisdom increase as ages and centuries roll along, and greatly and vigorously flourish, in each and all, in the individual and the whole church: but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding

…

4. On faith and reason … 3. If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.**break* (emphases added, source)

Note that it doesn’t say the new way of understanding, e.g. the Trinity, must be incompatible with the old way. Rather, it is bad enough that it is different! And these rational reconstructions basically always are, being more precise than what certain 2nd, 4th, 5th, 13th, 16th (etc.) century bishops or other theologians had in mind. Further, attempts to show that certain historical theologians or councils really meant this new-fangled thing are generally unconvincing. (e.g. Swinburne’s and Wierenga’s attempts to square their social trinitarianism with the Constantinopolitan and “Athanasian” creeds, or Peter Geach’s attribution of relative identity trinitarianism to Thomas Aquinas)

That is one problem that some conservative believers and theologians have with Rational Reinterpretation – the mere newness of it. If you think the actual and entire (understandable) content of the doctrine was revealed at some past time, then there’s little positive theoretical work for clever folks nowadays to do. This sort of attitude recalls medieval Muslim terminology for heretics – they call them “Innovators”.

But many Christian thinkers seem to take a view that God led the Church into the correct language, and sort of in the right direction conceptually, so that things might indeed be sorted out and made more precise later (although probably not by some smarty-pants American Christian philosophy professor – surely an august council of bishops would be called into action – or at least a long-winded German theologian).

But others aren’t so extreme – they admit the possibility of theological progress in these latter days. They rather object that the Rational Reconstruction is in fact unorthodox. Keep in mind that all such aim to be orthodox and advertise themselves as such (or at least, as not obviously unorthodox). But many object that the new-fangled version of the doctrine in fact falls into some historical heresy – modalism, trithesm, monophysitism, etc. Or one may argue that the Reconstruction in fact leaves out part of what the Bible teaches. For example, in this worthy book, theologian James Anderson repeatedly uses this hammer on a raft of recent attempts at Rational Reinterpretation.

Finally, some object that the Rational Reconstruction wrongheadedly “removes the mystery”. This, I take it, is an objection given by people devoted, more or less, to a kind of Resistance, which I’ll discuss a few posts from now.

But there’s an interesting little dance that people often do when offering a Rational Reconstruction – they say that they don’t intend to “remove the mystery” from it – or at least all of it. This is partly an admission that there are still serious difficulties left, even if their new theory is on track. But they also often hint or outright say that they don’t believe their own Rational Reconstruction at all, or at least, they don’t consider it to be the only or the obviously best way to understand that doctrine?

Which raises the subject of my next post:

Why care about Rational Reconstructions? (What are these guys doing, if not offering something we Christian ought to believe?)

Technorati Tags: 4 R’s, Rational Reconstruction, Resolution through Rational Reconstruction, James Anderson, Mystery, removing the mystery, theological innovation, Innovation, Innovators, heresy

What, if anything, is wrong with with the strategy of Resolution through Rational Reinterpretation? And why are most theologians so cold towards this strategy, while most Christian philosophers love it? Consider this quote by Moses Stuart on one of Leibniz’s takes on the Trinity:

The celebrated Leibniz was requested by a Loefler, who had undertaken to refute the writings of a certain English Antitrinitarian, to give him an affirmative definition of the persons in the Godhead. He sent for answer the following: – “Several persons in an absolute substance numerically the same, signify several, particular, intelligent substances essentially related.” On farther consideration, he abandoned this, and sent a second, which was, – “Several persons, in an absolute substance numerically the same, mean relative, incommunicable modes of subsisting.”

If Leibniz actually understood this, I believe he must have been a better master of metaphysics than any person who has ever read his definition. In fact, he does not himself appear to have been satisfied with it; for, not long after, he wrote as follows: – “We must say, that there are relations in the divine substance, which distinguish the persons, since these persons cannot be absolute substances. But we must aver, too, that these relations are substantial. At least, we must say that the Divine Persons are not the same Concrete, under different denominations or relations; as a man may be, at the same time, both a poet and an orator. We must say, moreover, that the three Persons are not as absolute substances as the whole.”

This is somewhat better than either of his former attempts, inasmuch as it is confined principally to description of a negative kind. Yet, after all, I obtain by it no additional light upon the subject which is important. (Channing vs. Stuart on the Trinity and the Incarnation, part 2, pp. 37-8, emphases added)

Leibniz, by the way, was a very great metaphysician and logician (and more). But Leibniz’s new-fangled (as of the late 17th c.) take on the Trinity is something, arguably, that only a metaphysician could love. Stuart, a very smart man (and practitioner of what I call Mysterian Resistance), looks at Leibniz’s words and pretty much draws a blank. I, a philosophy professor who works on philosophy of religion and early modern philosophy, couldn’t do a whole lot better. Further, it is not clear that Leibniz’s claim that relations can be substantial is consistent with his own views about relations and substances, as this recent book mentions. (pp. 157-8) So if Leibniz has scored any victory here, it’s one that pretty much only he could appreciate, and maybe not even him! (This is why he tries out a lot of other moves as well…)

I should hasten to add, though, that a few rational reconstructions do end up being fairly popular, at least within certain highly educated circles. This, then is one problem with Resolution through Rational Reconstruction: it takes quite a lot of tutoring for people to understand the claims being made, and many, be they laymen or theologians (or even other philosophical theologians) just don’t understand the new version of the doctrine being offered. Or maybe they do understand it, but find it about as problematic as what we started with. (Stuart’s confession that he “gains no additional light” from Leibniz’s speculations could mean either or both of these.)

But the difficulties don’t stop here.

Next time: Theological Innovation: bad or good?

Technorati Tags: Leibniz, Antognazza, Trinity, Incarnation, relations, Moses Stuart, 4 R’s, absolute substance, relative substance, Resolution, Rational Reinterpretation, Resolution Through Rational Reinterpretation

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.

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