SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Final Reflections (DALE)

Congratulations to both debaters on a fight well fought. (Here’s all the commentary.) Plenty of punches, thrown hard, relatively few low blows – two worthy opponents. Certainly, the fight must be decided on points, as there was no decisive knockout. Both debates are in different ways very impressive, and I learned a lot from both.

Kudos to C. Michael Patton and Parchment and Pen for hosting the debate.

I hope you readers out there enjoyed my commentary on the debate. I sometimes got naggy or nerdy, and always expressed myself with typical lack of tact, but I tried to be helpful, and to show the helpfulness of philosophy and logic in thinking through these things.

In this last post in the series, a few concluding reflections on the debate.

Looking back on this debate, I see that I’ve ended up where I began: wondering what Bowman thinks the Trinity doctrine is. This, after all the debate was about whether or not the Bible teaches that.

Burke argued that the Bible teaches what I call humanitarian unitarianism (he calls it “biblical unitarianism”) – roughly, that the one God of Israel is the Father, whereas the Lord Jesus is a human being and his unique Son, and the Holy Spirit is God’s power. I understand what Burke argued for, and if it is true, then nothing that can claim to be an orthodox Trinity theory is true. But I don’t, in the end, understand Bowman’s view.

I flagged this issue at the start. As the debate wore on, I settled on the interpretation that each of the Three just is (is numerically identical to) God, and yet each of the three is not identical to either of the other two. I stuck with this interpretation, all the way to the bitter end. And yet, I never did like this interpretation - Bowman is a smart guy, and it is not charitable to interpret anyone, much less smart guys, as (even implicitly) contradicting themselves. Still, it seemed to best fit his claims, his lists of propositions he offered as definitions of the doctrine, and his defense of the apparent contradictoriness of the doctrine in the comments following Burke’s last post.

Why, then, does Bowman think of the “persons” as three something-or-others in some sense “in” God? These “persons”, he insists, are not selves (thinking and acting things, things each with a first person perspective on the world), because they are not things/entities/substances, and every self is a certain kind of entity. Bowman wants to say that God isn’t in this sense a “person”, though God is “personal” in that God “contains” three “persons”. What is such a “person”? He doesn’t know. I don’t either.

I might have guessed that Bowman is, like some theologians, a modalist – holding the “persons” to be ways God is, lives, or acts. (This is common – in eschewing “modalism” most theologians mean only to deny that the persons never overlap in time, or that they are merely appearances.)

But this interpretation doesn’t make sense either. It seems Bowman considers God to be a self, and Jesus to be a self. And, Jesus and God are one and the same (numerically identical). Same what? Same god, same divine self. That’s the point of all the divine titles, deeds, honors, etc. – those can only belong to the one god, God. If they belong to Jesus (as Bowman urges) that’s because God is who Jesus is. And yet, surely he assumes that Jesus just is the Son of God. But the Son of God is one of the three “persons” in God, and so is not a self, not a thinking and acting thing. I don’t get it. I wish I did.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face that the Bible teaches X. But if I don’t grasp what you mean by X, I can never be persuaded by you. Burke argued that the Bible teaches Y, and it is clear enough that if Y then not-X, and Y consists of claims A, B, and C, each of which I understand. Still working on X, though. Thus, Burke wins the debate, in my view.

I understand this much about Bowman’s position – he’s defending evangelical talk about God and Jesus. And thinking (sometimes?) of Jesus as just being God himself. And he holds that only his view remains faithful to the Bible – to all of it, and that this is the only humble view, whereas others proudly and unjustifiably discard some of what the Bible says.

But is it humble to rest in an apparently contradictory interpretation of the various texts? This comment by Bowman was telling:

As a debater, I could be pleased by the approach that you took to this debate, since in terms of the debate your approach has played into my hands. …Consistent with anti-Trinitarianism in all of its forms, over a third of your closing statement focuses on what you correctly describe as “the argument from reason.” In addition, four of the ten bulleted points articulating the superiority of Unitarianism to Trinitarianism with which you begin your closing statement are rooted in this argument from reason. Yet the debate is supposed to focus on which of our positions best reflects the teachings of the Bible.

Bowman thought that Burke had wasted much of his closing statement on concerns about what is consistent, as if this were irrelevant to interpreting the Bible. But normally, for all of us, Bowman included, that an interpretation is apparently contradictory is a weighty reason to avoid it. Why, then, accept it here? I think a factor in many people’s thinking is the idea that what Bowman was urging is the majority report of Christianity through the ages. There’s a kind of complacency that comes from being in the mainstream… or at least thinking you’re in the mainstream.

But the evangelical habit of putting things in terms of who “is God” is inherently unclear (because, oddly enough, of that innocent looking little word “is”) and does no justice to the rich history of debate on the status and relations between especially the Father and the Son of God. As we saw in round 5, 2nd & 3rd century guys thought Jesus was “divine” or shared the divine substance, but clearly distinguished between him and God, holding him to be lesser than God in several ways (power, glory, authority, time of existence, even goodness). Again, in the 4th c., as my co-blogger J.T. Paasch so clearly lays out, they didn’t identify Jesus and God. (See e.g. his concluding post.) True, evangelical spirituality involves thinking of Jesus as God, and evangelical apologists like Bowman speak out for “historic Christian orthodoxy”, but the realities of the catholic tradition are what they are, immovably laid down in black and white, and they refute the idea that the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus is numerically identical to God. But we should already have known that – some things are true of one, that are not true of the other!

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