“Father, Son, Holy Spirit”? Or “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier”? The editors of the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism weigh in here: Blessed Be the Name of the Lord | Christianity Today
While I share the editors’ irritation with politically correct revision of liturgical and theological language, I think their reasoning in this opinion piece is poor. (Read their editorial, then see if you agree.) Continue Reading »
Congratulations to trinities contributor Joseph Jedwab, who is in the process of finishing his PhD at Oxford, under Richard Swinburne. It’s been a good spring for Joseph. First, he lands a prestigious post-doc at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. Then, he lands a job at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, where he’ll start in the Spring of 2009. Way to go, Joseph!
I only hope we can get him to post more often after his PhD and big move are wrapped up.
“Gee Hank, it sure is swell that communism won out.
This house belongs to all of us!”
In the last post, I pointed out some of the problems faced by an Athanasian sort of derivation view. If you found such problems to be decisive, then alternatively you could opt for a generic view. In this post, I would like to introduce the generic view.
As I mentioned in the first post, the generic view claims that Divinity belongs equally to the three persons, similar to how three people might jointly own the same house. Divinity thus belongs to no one divine person any more than another. The generic view (let’s call this GV) rejects DV in favor of this:
(GV) Divinity belongs equally to each divine person.
For both the derivation and the generic views of the trinity, Divinity is an entity that’s shared by the persons. On (the Athanasian version of) the derivation view, this shared entity just is the Father, but on the generic view, this shared entity is not the Father. The Father isn’t shared, Divinity is.
I’ve always been interested in not only what intellectuals think about the Trinity, but also about what ordinary Christians think. Thus, this is an interesting find - five helpful wikites step in to wiki-answer the following important questions:
WikiAnswers - What is the trinity and could you be a Christian and not believe in the trinity
I’ll save you some trouble, distilling the answers down into 80-proof folk-wisdom, taking the second question first. Continue Reading »
At BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - The Nicene Creed - A somewhat gassy and academic but nonetheless listenable discussion. Here’s the Real Audio file link. (I thought I listened to this in another audio format, but I can’t find any such files at the moment.)
Then we’ve got “Great Moves of God: The Nicene Creed” at the Australian Sight magazine. This story spins the Nicea council as being the arch-logician, perhaps rationalist scripture-twisting Arians vs. the modest, faithful upholders of Christ’s deity.
An authority is quoted here as saying: “The participating bishops merely affirmed the historic and standard Christian beliefs…”.
I think this last statement is not just misleading but demonstrably false. Further, the whole account is warped by the author’s allegiances, although the article contains some good information as well, which is why I pass it along.
Was that council, or part of it, or its resulting creed a “Great Move of God”? Read Hanson (if you have a lot of time), Ayres (if you have a good bit of time), or Rubenstein (if you have a few hours), and decide for yourself. If you’re interested in the Arians as such, the best place to start is probably with Wiles.
Technorati Tags: Nicene Creed, Nicea, Constantinopolitan Creed, Constantinople, Creed of Constantinople, Ayres, Hanson, Rubenstein, Maurice Wiles, Creed of Nicea, BBC Radio 4, In Our Time
Here: Logic Matters: Philosophy of Religion 3: The Trinity Philosopher/blogger/Analysis editor Peter Smith of Cambridge discusses his reading of this book by Rea and Murray, which I’ve been looking forward to seeing. He’s, um, not terribly sympathetic, and tends towards a harsh and dismissive tone. But, he does (I assume, accurately) summarize their conclusions, and their main lines of argument. So the reviews are at least useful for that.
Also relevant: his take on the chapters on Incarnation, and the Liar, Lunatic, Lord argument for the divinity of Jesus. See the lively and lengthy discussion on this last one, with substantial contributions by Mike Rea, Mike Almeida, Victor Reppert, and others.
It’s very interesting to read another philosopher’s take on one’s colleague’s new textbook. It’s a sort of book review with the gloves off. On the other hand, I don’t relish the thought of my own work getting this kind of treatment, especially if it should be for a student or popular audience.
Technorati Tags: Mike Rea, Michael J. Murray, Peter Smith, incarnation, Trinity, Mike Almeida, Victor Reppert, Liar Lunatic Lord, Logic Matters
Alex @ Alexander Pruss’s Blog urges that even non-social trinitarians can make a priori arguments for their trinitarian theology based on the concept of perfection.
I don’t think these sorts of arguments work, as I explain in a comment there, but check it out - Alex is always worth a read, and maybe I’m all wet.
(I recently gave my own take on those sorts of arguments here, here, here, here, and here.)
Technorati Tags: Alexander Pruss, love, perfect being theology, Latin Trinity, Anselmian theology
No, that’s not a pic of me in high school, though it’s not far off!
Quick note to my fellow bloggers: I use this, and highly recommend it. Here’s their real homepage.
It’s free, and the new 2.1 is much improved. It makes a lot of little things easier. You have to use Firefox, but you were doing that already, right? Works in the new Firefox version 3 as well.
I compose in it, then post it to this blog as a draft, then quickly preview it in Wordpress’s own editor before posting.
Only one word of caution - if you’re not careful with its distinction between Notes and Posts, you can accidentally delete an already published Post from the blog, thinking you’re just axing a (saved on your own computer) Note.
“You were filming that?”
In the last post, I explained that for Athanasius’s version of the derivation view, when the Father generates the Son, the Father shares his substance with the Son. That means, I took it, that the Father himself becomes a constituent in the Son, similar to the way that a lump of bronze is a constituent in a bronze statue.
One of the things Athanasius wants to do with this idea is explain how the Son is divine/God. The basic idea is that the Father shares his substance, i.e., Divinity, with the Son, and so the Father shares his properties with the Son. That is, to put it the other way around, the Son inherits properties from the Father. This is supposed to account for how the Son gets divine properties. However, this is where we start to run into problems.
Remember Moreland’s and Craig’s Cerberus analogy for the Trinity? (background here, whole series here) Daniel Howard-Snyder objected, come on, that’s clearly three dogs with overlapping bodies, not one dog with three centers of consciousness or with three minds. And they don’t want to say that the Trinity is three overlapping gods, so ditch the analogy already. The discussion degenerated into pointing at pictures and saying “Clearly one turtle with two heads” vs. “No, clearly three turtles with overlapping bodies”. I sided with Dan, citing good old Eng and Chang, among other things.
Now I’ve learned of some unusual Siamese twins - ones so conjoined that people can refer to them as “the girl with two heads”. But pretty plainly, their friends and teachers think of them as two persons with overlapping bodies. See for yourself - a living, breathing human Cerberus (OK 2/3 of a Cerberus - and much nicer, I’d say).
The word “girl” may refer to an organism, or to a person.
Now Q comes with spring arm action
and dyno bud (optional)!
The Nicene Creed claims that
(Q) The Son is begotten from the substance of the Father.
The term ‘begotten’ is just an older English term for ‘generated’. In the ancient world, ‘generation’ was a technical term for biological reproduction (e.g., when humans make baby humans, when trees make baby trees, and so on). In this post, I want to describe how Athanasius takes Q to imply a derivation view of the trinity.
“I hate wearing this stupid hat.
They didn’t make me a bishop anyways.
At least the cape’s pretty cool.
It’s got St. George’s Cross going on.”
In my last post, I gave some basic definitions for the ‘derivation view’ and the ‘generic view’ of the Trinity, and I said that the historical background for the ‘derivation view’ rests in the Nicene Creed’s claim that
(Q) The Son is begotten from the substance of the Father.
Of course, the meaning of ‘from the substance of the Father’ is not exactly clear, not in a philosophical sense anyways. What exactly is Q supposed to mean? In this post, I want to explain what one interpreter, namely Athanasius, felt was at stake with Q.
– “Daddy, why do trees branch out?”
– “So you can climb in them, Jimmy.”
Patristic scholars tell us that the doctrine of the trinity was really developed in the 4th century. The question is: what exactly is the ‘development’? If you read many of those scholarly big books on patristic theology, you’ll occasionally come across the idea that there were two major theories of the trinity floating around in the 4th century: the ‘derivation view’ and the ‘generic view’. But what exactly are these two views, and who held them? Continue Reading »
Read it ‘n weep, Arius!
Not sure what it’s doing on LiveScience.com, but it’s a decent article.
We covered this in more theological detail some time back.
The trinity occurs at :55 and 1:13. Even sorta looks like a church. There’s other rich trinitarian imagery there as well, for those with eyes to see.
I Can’t Stop Loving You - actually, it’s worse than that - I can’t not love you!
Alexander Pruss is an excellent philosophy of religion dude at Baylor. His second PhD dissertation was on possible worlds. Don’t ask me to explain what his first one was on! 
He’s got about a million original ideas on almost as many topics, a lot of which get posted at his creatively-titled blog, Alexander Pruss’s Blog as well as at The Prosblogion.
He recently weighed in (comments #8-9) on my attempted argument against social trinitarian arguments. Here are the most relevant bits: Continue Reading »
Impossibly beautiful. Literally. (image credit)
Check it out: a whole site and blog devoted to art featuring impossible objects!
I can’t help but think that the picture above had a trinitarian inspiration: according to the babelfish, it means “You must in such a way live”. (German speaking readers - feel free to correct the translation.) I read this as addressed to the Trinity.
If so, this pic would be an expression of what I call “positive mysterianism” about the Trinity - that the doctrine is, unavoidably given our current epistemic situation, apparently contradictory.
Related: a website where you can print and build your own “impossible” object. (HT: Matthew Mullins) Note to modal logic newbies: necessarily, if it is actual, then it is possible as well. Still, this shows that note everything which seems logically impossible really is.
Technorati Tags: impossible, impossible figures, mystery, mysterian, impossible Trinity
Mike, reloaded - before the smoke has even cleared.
More from Mike Almeida about a premise in an anti-social-trinitarian-argument argument I’ve been exploring. Also, (sorry Mike - actually, sorry everyone) I continue my cheesy cowboy theme. (But as a native Texan, it’s my sacred right, Pardn’r. )
Here’s a summary in (attempted) ordinary English of his thoughtful post on infinitely increasing properties @ his PhilRel Blog, followed by my response, which I posted to his comments section.
“Don’t mess with Texan metaphysicans, pardner.”
In a recent series of posts (uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco), I’ve been chewing on some philosophical arguments that “social” trinitarians have used for their doctrine. Been finding more gristle than meat.
In my latest installment, I was privileged to get some penetrating critical feedback from fellow philosophy of religion bloggers located in my home state of Texas - Alexander Pruss of Baylor and Mike Almeida of UT San Antonio (here, comments #2, 7-9) These guys are extremely sharp and are doing a lot of creative work in the field, by the way. About perfect beings - I’ve come to find out that Mike has thought a lot about this!
This post is my attempt to process Mike’s feedback
So that’s where the magic is.
People interested in ancient heresies - you have to check out this, by “Probably the world’s greatest systematic theologian cartoonist.”
Jack T. Chick has got nothing on our friend Fred! Nice work, Fred.
Background: Fred is goofing on a long-extinct sect that was famously embraced by St. Augustine (354-430 CE) prior to his conversion to Christianity. Augustine left them after discovering that their much-vaunted wise men simply didn’t have answers to his questions. If only those guys had the benefit of cartoons - “It’s all so simple!” 
Technorati Tags: Fred Sanders, Christian cartoons, Manichaeism, Mani, manichean, Augustine, St. Augustine, Augustine of Hippo
