“trinitarians”… Fer it… or agin’ it?
Following up on the previous post - the word “trinitarian” may be an adjective or a noun. The Oxford English Dictionary lists four adjective meanings: (here’s my editing of relevant parts of their entry, emphasis added)
2. Theol. Relating to the Trinity; holding the doctrine of the Trinity (opp. to Unitarian). [...]
MACRUE!… Gesundheit
Man, this is getting to be a long series.
This installment is a book review I’ve written of philosophical theologian James Anderson’s Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status. It is forthcoming in the philosophy journal Faith & Philosophy, and is posted by the kind permission of its [...]
Yes, this is the real thing. Really.
And it can be yours for a mere $50.
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 [...]
“And the best thing is, we can take these blocks apart!”
In the last post, I introduced the ‘generic view’ of the trinity, namely the claim that Divinity (that which makes the divine persons God/divine) is shared equally by all three persons and so does not belong to any one divine person more than another. In [...]
“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 [...]
Hi Everybody?
Trinity? Suuuure - I know all about those things!
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 [...]
What’s up with that weird Angel/bird/snake thing? Is that supposed to be Arius?
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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) [...]
You tell ‘em, Joe.
An interesting post & discussion:
Alexander Pruss’s Blog: Liberal theology
I think a lot of liberal theologians don’t have a “high view of reason” - many (not all) of them strike me as lazy drifters on miscellaneous intellectual currents. e.g. Has anyone’s reason really revealed to them, so to speak, that miracles don’t [...]
“I thank thee, O Lord, that Thou hast given me the ability
to quickly read this copy of The Message, and easily discern
what it really means, unlike that jerk Flanders.”
Some interesting and disturbing comments from R.P.C. Hanson, on Bible interpretation in the era of the 4th century “Arian” controversy. This comes near the end of this [...]
Ice, ice, baby. (image credit)
A reader emailed me this question, and I thought others would be interested in my (attempt at) an answer. Also, this is a good chance to review and summarize some of my previous postings on modalism.
I was wondering if you could read [the following] and tell me what I was [...]
“Is there any Son who does not cause His Father to become a Father and vice versa?”
Here I wish to briefly summarize what I take to be Henry’s position on the question: is the Father constituted by the (personal) property of being ‘ungenerated’ (ingenitum)? Henry’s discussion of this comes from his Summa Quaestionum Ordinariarum 57.1.
Henry [...]
Let’s try this again.
Here’s a second application for my Latin Trinity chart (see the first post for what the letters designate). Let’s say that a state of affairs is a thing/substance having a property at a time or timelessly.
The “persons” here are just modes of D, that is, states of affairs involving D. So the Son just is [...]
Greetings, campers. We’ll return to Swinburne in a bit… I’ve been drawing again:
Now it’s all clear, right? RIGHT?!
key:
D = the divine essence
P = paternity
Fi = filiation
Sp = spiration
F = the Father
S = the Son
H = the Holy Spirit
T = the Trinity
In this chart are eight “things” - in the widest sense of “thing”, i.e. something [...]
How the three are tightly functionally unified, in Swinburne’s view.
(See below for the interpretation.)
Last time we looked at Swinbure’s suggested reading of the creeds. They can’t he says, be charitably read as holding that in the same sense there’s only one divinity, and that there’s three. Swinburne comes down on the side of three. [...]
(Picture credit.)
Swinburne isn’t what you’d call a theological liberal. He’s not a conservative evangelical either, given his rejection of things like biblical inerrancy. He was, I believe, a life-long Anglican, until 1996 when he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. As I understand it, at least part of his motivation was his exasperation with anything-goes style Anglicanism [...]
