On the subject of Trinitarian humor, have you seen the most recent xkcd?

I’ve come across this early use of the term in my own reading of primary texts from the 16th and 17th centuries. But there’s also a good entry on this in the OED, under “Trinitarian” (you’ll need to consult the full version, not the Shorter Oxford). The OED traces the history of the word’s use, with examples from the 16th and 17th centuries (where “Trinitarians” are heretics), and from the early 18th century (where the orthodox become the “Trinitarians”).

Hope that helps!

Nonetheless, perhaps, Ben Myers and you can advance this 5-year ban for precisely the motivation advanced by Ben:
…the use of the word “trinitarian” in much contemporary theology – as a generic slogan, applied willy-nilly on any occasion – has become an obstacle to real theological thinking.

Now let me backtrack a bit to the related topic of implicit faith. I’m wondering if your saw this blog post by Alexander Pruss about two months back: http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2008/06/orthodoxy-and-ordinary-believer.html … I’m glad that he asks, “What about the ordinary believer?” - because, that’s where I’m at. I’m hoping to hear even more about the ordinary believer here at the Trinities blog. I mean, what is a parent supposed to tell their child about the Trinity? That’s my million dollar question. Thanks again for this blog series, keep it going.

Another “paradox”?

Not all intuitions are created equal. If I find one wavering, coming and going, changing, then it’s a pretty weak one, and will give me at best a weak reason for concluding things are how it seems (in that intuition), i.e. that doctrine D really is contradictory. I agree that the concept of a moon is somewhat vague.

The thing is, in philosophy we have no choice but to trust our (firm, steady, clear) intuitions, all the while admitting that we could be mistaken. I’ll be interested to hear where you come down when I distinguish positive from negative mysterianism (yes, it’s an ugly term!) - hopefully within the next few days.

I think his book is well-written, and it is compartmentalized enough that you don’t need to read it straight through. In the later chapters, he pushed the dialectic between him and me a little further. Also interesting are his comments on why he rejects various of (what I call) rational reconstructions of the Trinity. So don’t be afraid to dip in!

Hi Dale,

I also take the line of rejecting (C). But I’m not crazy about the ‘mysterian’ appellation. The reason to reject (C) in my view is that many of our intuitions are not especially well-informed, even intuitions concerning common concepts. To borrow an example from Roy Sorensen, take your concept of ‘being a moon’. Pretty common. But it is not difficult to show that we don’t have a clear concept of ‘being a moon’. Suppose Jupiter’s moon, Io, itself acquired a moon. Would the moon of Io be a moon of Jupiter? Who knows? I’ve never considered whether ‘being a moon’ is transitive. But the concept of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence are much more complicated than the concpet of being a moon. We just have not considered all of the hypothetical contexts which might illuminate these concepts for us. So I’d deny that we know enough about the content of these concepts to trust the deliverances of ‘careful reflection’.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: In my initial posts, I said having (only) implicit belief in a claim X isn’t a way of believing X, because one needn’t grasp any of the content of X at all. e.g. I “believe”whatever Einstein does about physics. As Brandon pointed out, a belief is best thought of as a tendency to think in a certain way. Well, maybe I do have this tendency with respect to Einstein - because (just imagine) I’m a brilliant youngster who actually would be inclined to agree with Einstein, were he or someone else to instruct me. So may I DO have a tendency to believe X, but it’s a higher-order power - the ability to get the ability to think the world is the way X says. Now I threw in a complication with my Stalin post: maybe I’m a brilliant, physics-capable youngster but I’m not so inclined that I would agree with Einstein in exposed to the relevant evidence, etc. Maybe I’d disagree with some of it, or maybe it is now indeterminate what I would do - I could make choices so that I’d go either way. As some Catholic thinkers noted in another post - the notion of having an implicit belief in X is very vague - it’s not clear really what state of mind that is, not clear quite how the implicit believer needs to be related to X. My main concern about implicit belief in a doctrine X is that theologians talk about doctrine X like it’s a really important bit of information, which will serve as a guide to other beliefs, to action, to devotion, to social action, etc. It’s not clear that a merely implicit belief in, say, the Trinity can play those roles.

People also talk about having “implicit faith” not in a doctrine (or bunch of them) but in an institution - really, in the people past and present who have run it. The Catholic Church has in no uncertain terms demanded a kind of unquestioning trust in whatever they say - see the statement of the first Vatican Council of 1870. To me, it isn’t rational to adopt that stance with respect to them, to have “implicit faith” in them, in that I’ll commit to whatever they should say. Their track record in doctrine and in general holiness are the main issues to me. But again, even if one says and fully intends to believe whatever Mother Church says, whether or not you are really committed to what she says depends on what tendencies you actually have. This can only be know, I guess, in retrospect, i.e. I find out she says Y, and even find out her main reasons for Y, and yet, I don’t believe Y. Then, my implicit faith in Y was an illusion - perhaps even a bit of self-deception.