From prolific philosopher-theologian Keith Ward’s God: A Guide for the Perplexed:
[The so-called Athanasian creed] is usually not now said in churches. One reason for this is suggested by my own experience the last, and only, time I tried to get an Anglican congregation to recite it aloud in church. When they got to the phrase, [...]
He’s baaaaack. A smokier, bluesier, dirtier “Trinity Schminity”. Now in basement music video form! Apparently there’s been some big shakeup in the band. Their website says “we are now a Christian father and son band”. Mother and daughter, we hardly knew ye.
Thankfully, they’re still “100% monotheist”. And they still ROCK.
Get it? Winter has [...]
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 [...]
H.O.G. - is that you up there? I’m getting my B.B. gun.
MMM indeed! Henry of Ghent doesn’t spare the medieval lingo, and as Scott points out, it seems he never met a trinitarian theory he didn’t like - emanation, psychology, relations - it’s all good! Thanks to its being Thanksgiving break - and let me [...]
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 [...]
I’m giggling so hard, I can’t see straight to make a comment. Just skip to about 1:20 for the Trinity stuff. Enjoy.
My favorite comment from the Youtube page: “Somehow you make modalism rock… it’s still wrong, but you made it rock.”
His band’s page is here.
Props to the first commenter who can stop laughing, get beyond [...]
Time to close out this long series with a brief summary of my own observations on and objections to Trinity Monotheism. These aren’t all the one’s I’ve mentioned, but only the ones I think are the most relevant. And I should say that Joseph has raised some others as well, both in his guest post [...]
Last time we looked at Daniel Howard-Snyder’s published attack on Moreland’s and Craig’s Trinity theory they call “Trinity Monotheism“. Bill Craig, never one to duck a fight, fired back. (”Trinity Monotheism Once More,” Philosophia Christi 8:1, 2006, 101-13)
Are you feelin’ lucky, punk?
To fully understand a philosophical theory, one needs to understand not only the content of it, but the reasons for which it is held. This is why I’m patiently going through how Moreland and Craig reject what they see as the competing Trinity theories, before giving their own.
As we’ve seen, they consider themselves to be [...]
Before going into objections to “Trinity Monotheism”, I thought it’d be a good idea to say a bit more about their long, meaty chapter in which they (eventually) set out their own theory, in this book. This’ll take a couple of posts, and we’ll allow time for discussion between them. Theologians in particular should find [...]
Here’s a later (partisan, 20th century Unitarian) account of one of several trinitarian controversies in early modern England, started by men within the Church of England who would have considered themselves Christians and trinitarians, but who rejected mainstream medieval trinitarian thinking, especially as embodied in the “Athanasian” creed. During this controversy, these dissenters started using [...]
Now for another historical interlude - I’ll get back to current philosophy shortly. Regular readers will note that I’ve been insinuating for a while now that the way many people understand the mainstream, so-called “Latin” trinitarian position amounts to a certain variety of modalism (which entails S-modalism, to which I’ve objected). Some of you know [...]
I’ve been reading Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity lately. He’s a Reformed kind of guy, and like many contemporary theologians, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about Karl Barth. Now it’s well known that Barth in many places denies that he’s a “modalist” about the Trinity, and yet he says many things like these [...]
It turns out that Brian Leftow, whose work on the Trinity was the subject of a recent 4 part critical exposition here at trinities, is just about to publish some further thoughts on the subject, in this book, currently slated to come out in March 2007. Further, his chapter there is on the exact issue [...]
Two installments ago, we looked at Brian Leftow’s setup of the issue, and last time we surveyed his distinctive “Latin” trinitarian theory. This time, we’ll wrap it up.
A rather obvious and potentially serious objection to Leftow’s theory is that it makes the doctrine of the Trinity out to be modalism, for plainly, in his view, [...]
Last time, we saw the set-up from Leftow. He’s aiming at orthodoxy, which to him means theorizing in the tradition of the great medieval Latin-speaking theologians. He’s spent a good amount of ink defending the consistency of supposing that a person might travel back to the past, so that she, as it were, acts together [...]
Brian Leftow is recognized as one of the most important living Christian philosophers. Formerly of Fordham University in NYC, he now holds the prestigious Nolloth Chair of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oriel College, Oxford. See Trent Dougherty’s comments here for a list of some of his publications. In person, Leftow is very [...]
Apparently, modalism like Geisler’s is fairly common in the world of evangelical apologetics. Here’s an example I stumbled upon today, this post by Steve Cowan.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not the view that there are three gods. Neither is it the absurd view that there are three gods and one God at one time. [...]
As promised, I now hope to run (walk, crawl?) through the gamut of theories of the Trinity propounded by recent analytic philosophers. My aim is to bring these articles to a wider audience, so I’ll try to write clearly, and focus on the what I think is important about the piece. I’ll try to omit [...]
