“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). [...]
Who’s up for a little trinitarian comedy?
Thanks to reader Mike K. for this hilarious link. They beat me to the punch - I’ve been sitting on a post for some time on this exact theme. (Stay tuned.)
I posted a comment asking about this bit:
It’s interesting to note that the English term “Trinitarian” was first used, [...]
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 [...]
Your average theologian’s response to recent Rational Reinterpretations.
Let me take four recent books off my shelf by current theologians. Now I’ll search through them to see if they have any reference at all to some of the more important Rational Reconstructions in the last 25 years or so, namely:
Tom Morris’s (1986, 1989) or Richard Swinburne’s [...]
Don’t you dare do what dastardly Donald does.
Our friend Alan Rhoda, the mighty Alanyzer, has some interesting thoughts on what he calls the “Theologian’s Fallacy”, or “Trumping”.
I see his point, though I don’t like the names
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, [...]
“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 [...]
Mmmm… baby soup - the delicious end to any traditional baptism.
“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 [...]
“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 [...]
“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 [...]
– “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 [...]
Not a person? Well, at least he had the foresight to bring an umbrella. (image credit)
Dallas Willard is one of my favorite authors, and I don’t normally go in for criticizing what he writes. But I found a great example in this (good) book (p. 122) of an idea that is fairly widespread, and which [...]
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 [...]
“If I think of pork-products, is that a self-conscious act of thinking?”
What follows is the first of a two part post.
Part 1: The Divine Word as Divine Practical Knowledge
Part 2: If God Weren’t a Trinity, then Creatures Would Necessarily Be Created.
Part 1
In pre-Nicene days (and post-Nicene days) there was much debate about the [...]
“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 [...]
“My god Spock! Is this the apex of human intellectual production?” “No Captain, look within, do you smell that?”
I apologize for the delay in posting. I have been busy with, among other things, my own work.
In the previous post, I enumerated 40 lines of premises and conclusions that generally summarizes Henry’s philosophical psychology of [...]
