I recently received a friendly note from Daniel Eaton, head moderator at Theologica: a bible, theology, politics, news, networking, and discussion site. It seems they’ve set up a whole section devoted to Trinity discussions, here. Check it out.
Daniel sort of asks me a few questions:
…it would make an interesting discussion as to whether or not [...]
What I call positive mysterianism about the Trinity is the view that the doctrine, as best we can formulate it, is apparently contradictory. Now many Christian philosophers resort to this in the end, but only after one or more elaborate attempts to spell the doctrine out in a coherent way. On the other hand, some [...]
Thanks to Ed Feser for some interesting dialogue on the topic of mysteries in Christian theology. This post is just a bunch of miscellaneous responses to his thoughts posted last week, here and here.
As he mentioned, Ed and I knew each other briefly as students at what is now called Claremont Graduate University. I remember [...]
Has Richard, after these 21 chapters so far of Book III of his On the Trinity (De Trinitate) only succeeded in proving that there are at least three gods? In chapter 22, Richard argues for a negative answer.
First, he refers back to the doctrine of divine simplicity, which is common coin for medieval theists, even, [...]
In the preceding chapters, Richard has been arguing for the impossibility of only one divine person. If there’s one, there must be more than one; more than that, there must be at least three.
To do this, he’s used Anselmian perfect being theology – arguing that since God is absolutely perfect, and it would add [...]
Now, for a quick break in our Richard of St. Victor series, so that I can explain the point of my implausible yarn about a gnome. Tertullian, Irenaeus, and other late-2nd and early 3rd century catholic thinkers subscribed to what we can all the Logos theory. This christological theory has three main elements:
God’s internal Word (logos) [...]
Little known fact: overwork causes one’s neck to become invisible!
After an embarrassing amount of time, I’ve finally finished my encyclopedia entry on the Trinity for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (as well as lengthy supplementary documents on the history of Trinity doctrines, Judaic and Islamic objections, and unitarianism).
Since I can’t thank them in the entry, [...]
STAGE 2. In this stage, Richard tries to show that perfect charity must be directed at another person. Here’s the quotation:
‘no one is properly said to have charity on the basis of his own private love of himself. And so it is necessary for love to be directed toward another for it to be charity’.
In this series of posts, I’ve been discussing the view of Arius that the Son is created from nothing, and the view of Athanasius that the Father begets the Son. All of this illustrates two basic issues that any classical account of the Trinity has to face when it tries to explain how one divine [...]
Last time, I explained that Athanasius has not made it clear how the Son ‘inherits’ divine properties from the Father. Yet even if Athanasius could explain how the Son ‘inherits’ properties from the Father, there’s still another problem. Like Arius, Athanasius believes that the Father is simple, and so anything ‘in’ the Father is, strictly [...]
In the last two posts, I looked at Athanasius view that the Father begets the Son much like how human fathers beget human sons. But Athanasius’ view raises some interesting questions.
One of the things Athanasius likes about natural procreation is that sons get their natures from one of their ingredients, namely the substance they get [...]
Last time, I explained that Athanasius thinks human fathers procreate sons by giving a part of their substance to the mother, and that bit of substance then becomes an ingredient in the zygote, and the zygote inherits its human nature from that ingredient.
Athanasius thinks this basic model applies to God too, though he is careful [...]
In the last two posts, I explained that Arius believes the Son is created from nothing. Athanasius, for his part, denies this. As he sees it, the Son is begotten, and here, ‘begetting’ (or ‘generating’, as it’s also called) is a technical term for the natural process of procreation, as when living organisms produce offspring. [...]
Last time, I explained that Arius believes there can only be one unproduced producer, and that’s the Father. The Son, by consequence, is produced, but there’s nothing controversial about saying that. Arius gets controversial when he tries to explain how the Son is produced. As Arius sees it, if the Father produced the Son with [...]
So far, we’ve established that something is created from nothing if it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients (see this one for a quick summary). Arius, for his part, believes that the Son is produced in just this way. In this post, I want to start looking at Arius’ argument for this conclusion.
In the last two posts, I explained what I mean by ‘pre-existing ingredients’. In the first of those two posts, I said that an ‘ingredient’ in a product is something that is (i) in the product, and (ii) not identical to another ingredient or to the whole product. In the second of those two posts, [...]
In the last post, I explained that something is ‘created from nothing’ when it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. I also explained that by ‘ingredient’ I mean any sort of constituent which satisfies the following two conditions: first, it exists in the product; and second, it bears its own properties, i.e., it has features that [...]
As I said last time, Arius maintains that the Son is created from nothing (ex nihilo), but Athanasius denies this. Much of the discussion depends on what these authors mean by ‘creation’. Before we go any further then, it will be helpful to establish a working definition for ‘creating something from nothing’. This requires some [...]
This series is extracted from a paper I delivered at the APA in Chicago last month. I’ve basically just cut up the paper into smaller chunks.
As we all know, the doctrine of the Trinity states that God is three persons: the Father, Son, and Spirit. Further, two of these persons, the Son and the Spirit, [...]
I’m giving a talk tonight (3/1/09) in Amherst, NY, with the above title. Here are my slides. (Or pdf form.)
Here is the event flyer, if you’re in the Buffalo area.
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