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Cross-Cultural Dialogue: Theologian and Philosopher

A while back I posted on a short, popular piece by Biola theologian Fred Sanders. He’s now responded. I’m going to continue the conversation, I hope shedding light on the differing assumptions and methods of present-day academic theologians and philosophers. I agree with Fred that responses-to-responses are usually boring. Here’s a greater crime: a (long) response to a response to a response. 😛

I guess what set me in motion was his claim, which struck me as unreasonable, that it’s a good thing that there’s no “Trinity verse” in the Bible – i.e. one which explicitly and clearly  states the doctrine.

In fact, up until I think some time in the late 19th c., trinitarians thought they had something pretty close: 1 John 5:7. (Compare the KJV with any modern translation.) This was shown by Isaac Newton and a number of others to be a late corruption. Needless to say, this verse was much appealed to – none of the trinitarians were wishing it gone, so they could instead appeal to the whole Bible.

Surely, I argue, it’d be better if there were such a verse (assuming there is a true Trinity theory), because then Christians wouldn’t spend so much time puzzling and fighting about the matter, as we fairly frequently have through church history.

Now to Sanders’s response:

Tuggy the analytic philosopher working on trinitarianism was interesting to me… Tuggy the analytic philosopher working on anti-trinitarianism drops several notches on my scale of interestingness. Arguments are still arguments, and need to be dealt with on their own merits, of course. But research programs are motivated, and knowing the motivation helps me decide where to invest my study time.

The assumption here, it seems to me, is that all this unitarian-trinitarian stuff was settled long ago, and so anything Tuggy says will only be a tiresome rehash of crummy arguments. I used to assume this, but then I went back and looked at the arguments, the arguments, that is, on both sides. On some core points, the unitarians come out better, as I see it. And I found out that their arguments were not so much answered as smugly forgotten by the mainstream. Don’t take my word for it, by all means; weigh the arguments for yourself.

As to motivations, Fred seems to suggest that my motive all along has been to promote my present views. Not true. I started thoroughly confused (like most evangelicals). Then I was a social trinitarian. Then, a subordinationist unitarian (but sort of thinking this was really trinitarian). Finally, my present view. I’ve been motivated all along to make some orthodox theory or other fly! This is why I set off trying to find a workable version of the doctrine – which is what most evangelical philosophers do. (I’m referring to the theories in the main body of my SEP entry.) Frankly, it was an embarrassment to me that the mainstream did not seem to have a coherent, believable view in mind, in asserting those famous formulas.

I think we disagree already: I think trinitarianism is a spiritual reality, owned by the people of God since the Father sent the Son and the Spirit, and confessed rightly by those without special training. Philosophers and theologians are allowed to work at the task of clarifying and refining it, but they didn’t invent it.

So from the beginning, Christian have “owned” (interacted with?) the Trinity – sure – if there is such a thing. But Fred here seems to assume that they also (imprecisely) believed it all along, i.e. since biblical days. But this is demonstrably not so – by the standards of 500 CE, there were no “orthodox” trinitarians in 170 CE. What there were (in the catholic mainstream)  were unitarians of various sorts! Pretty clearly for many of them, not even that vague picture was there.

Tuggy thinks there is no such thing as “the” doctrine of the Trinity, and that there couldn’t even be one until thought rises above a certain threshold of analytic clarity and terminological precision. I’m all for clarity and precision, and I need collegial help attaining it in my doctrinal thinking. But when I say Trinity, I am not pointing to a successful thought project or mental model. I’m pointing to something real, something given by God, something that Christian devotion and orthodox categories pick out, but sub-trinitarian theologies fail to.

If I understand Fred here, the “something real” is sort of like a mental image or a vague way of thinking, expressed by the standard formulas. I think there is something to this – roughly, that God is somewhat like three selves but those are somehow unified – which often does accompany use of the traditional words. But it is not the sort of thing that can be true or false, or for which one could seek evidence in any form. I think – and please correct me if I’m wrong – Sanders is in the Negative Mysterian camp, which it comes to interpreting the traditional formulas. Yes, to me, this is just one way to read them, a way which must be weighed against the others, others which have been suggested by smart, sincere, and faithful men.

Compare: the claim that God is provident. The Calvinists, Arminians, open theists, Molinists, Thomists, process theists – they’re all understanding divine providence in incompatible ways. I think one can be a mysterian too here, either positive or negative… and perhaps that’s a fairly popular way of interpreting “providence.” Yes, I think that for many purposes, just sticking with the vague idea that “God is in charge” is enough. But some of us are compelled to get more precise.

About “logic,” no I got the point; like a lot of philosophers, I get a bit grumpy with logic-rhetoric. I didn’t meant to offend, or to suggest that Sanders knows no logic. By “logic” here, I think he just means something like structure, not what he says – “principles of demonstration that are appropriate to a subject” – but maybe a point of structure could be a source/principle from which to argue, i.e. the grounds for some premise.

Here’s the pattern, the flow of thought, the drift, of my little article: I wasn’t just “quoting a few passages in which the three are mentioned.” Instead, I was building a pattern of expanding scope. From 3 verses, to 5 verses, to 12 verses, to 6 chapters, to 16 chapters, to a whole gospel, to the whole Bible.

Right – in Sanders’s view, the whole Bible shows a pattern of the members of the Trinity at work together. I don’t think this is true, and if we’re careful with what we mean by “members of the Trinity” here, many through church history would also demur.

In any case, I criticized Sanders is “spinning” an obviously bad thing as a good thing – this lack of any clear statement in the Bible about the Trinity, as opposed to it being (supposedly) discernible diffused through the whole Book.

But I think that in Scripture, God succeeded in revealing the Trinity the way he wanted to. I understand why that seems like “merely spin” to Tuggy, but I mean it in earnest.

Now, I wasn’t accusing him of being insincere. But I think if there was a secure verse like 1 John 5:7, or more specific, Fred would gladly use it as a lead proof-text, and never lament its presence. The key point here is “the way he wanted to.” Because it is this way, and because God is all-provident, Sanders holds this to be the best way. This, in my view, is a serious intellectual vice in present-day theology. Assuming, in theology, that things are as they are because they’re supposed to be that way. This is in practice an all-purpose reason to stay mentally “in the box.”

To be clear: I believe wholeheartedly in divine providence. I’m an open theist, so for me the mechanics of providence will be different, but I think nothing occurs without God’s permission, and that he constantly guides the course of events, above all, those involving the followers of Jesus. But I think lots of things happen that go against his will. For whatever reason, he seems to govern, on a grand scale, with a loose hand.

Think about how this sort of providential conservatism would’ve hurt you in the past:

  • What? Who’s this Jesus guy, teaching all this new stuff. WE KNOW Judaism, buddy. God himself has evolved us Pharisees just how he likes us. This Jesus is a PUNK!
  • What? Who’s this off-the-reservation clown trying to interpret scripture apart from the magisterium of the one holy, catholic church? Why, all Christians are catholic (i.e. Catholic or Orthodox), or, nearly so. Who does he think he is? We have no tradition of reasoning on one’s own – and this is plainly how God intended it.
  • What? This fellow thinks churches should be autonomous? That’s crazy-talk. God himself ordained the system of bishops. If you are not under a catholic bishop, you are not under the headship of Christ, and you are out of God’s will. Opposing the bishop is opposing God.

God is who he is. He’s the same God in charge c. 30 or 1520 CE, and this is but a later stage in the same cosmos. So, we have to leave a mental door open to the possibility that mainstream theology has gotten fairly off track, even on core things. To a Protestant, this should be a trivial point. And yet, this safe, assuring assumption that one’s theories are guaranteed by divine providence is rampant among conservative, Protestant theologians.

Now, this is accompanied by the idea that their own ideas, e.g. about providence, church structure and government, or the Trinity are just sitting right there, obviously in the texts. We thinking Christians should maybe get this verse tattooed on our bodies somewhere, preferably not the face.

The first person to speak in court always seems right until his opponent begins to question him. (Pr. 18:17)

You’ve got to read all sides (or better, the best representatives of what seem the most plausible, well-motivated sides), if you want to really think through any issue: free will, universals, justice, arguments for God’s existence. This is the only way to seriously pursue the truth.

But I don’t see this drive in a lot of theologians. Instead, I see a complacent assurance that they’ve got the truth (about, e.g. the Trinity) and many of them just want to sort of play with it – to celebrate it, talk it up, apply its insights, allegedly, to new fields, such as politics or marriage. All the while, we’re none the clearer about what “it” is – it’s just whatever those traditional creeds were getting at. The text- and history- focused theologians, generally, are more clear-headed about what the Bible does and doesn’t say, and are alive to at least some disputes. And they “play” a lot less.

He really does think there’s never been such thing as coherent trinitarianism, just “trinities” all the way back, and none of them doing justice to the New Testament as Tuggy (and Samuel Clarke) interpret it.

Sorry – this isn’t quite fair. I’m no Ehrman. I think there were humanitarians who more or less got it right, from NT times up through the 2nd c. And I think the unitarian subordinationists still got it right on what’s most important (who the one true God is), from about the 130s up past 325. For a lot of this time, there weren’t nearly as many “trinities” (Trinity theories) as there are now. In sophisticated catholic circles c. 200, as best I can tell, it was basically subordinationist unitarians vs. “monarchians,” at least some of whom where humanitarian unitarians. (In the polemical lingo of the day – “psilanthropists” – mere-man-ers, who thought Jesus had only a human nature.)

There a little hint of sarcasm here – how can this silly Clarke and Tuggy think that only in these latter days, in the early 18th or early 21st c., the truth about the Trinity first came to light? What’s the chance of that? Of course, neither of us thinks that for a moment. Both our views, Clarke’s and mine (which again, are not the same, though both unitarian) are represented in the 2nd c., and by various later folk.

…philosophy can be used for doubting and dissolving as much as for clarifying (which of course philosophers already knew), that chasing definition can be an exercise in chasing the horizon. Once you turn a word plural to indicate that its content is essentially disputed, you’re on the roads to irresolutions. After exploring theologies of the trinities, Tuggys will have to move on to doctrines of the incarnations, and to atonements, by which gods accomplished salvations for humanities from sinses. That’s not a good way forward for theology that answers to God’s self-revelation in Scripture.

I’m not sure what to make of this… Part of the worry seems to be the idea that philosophy, something about its procedure or methodology, is inherently destructive, or leads inexorably to doubt, or to unbelief. I don’t think that is so. It does tend to breed epistemic humility, perhaps. But philosophers, I think, passionately commit to all sorts of things, just as I am passionately committed to being a disciple of Christ. To me, adopting unitarian views has opened up the New Testament, to where I suddenly see what’s going on there. They authors are not, as so many read them, constantly throwing out hints that Jesus is the same self as God, even while treating them as two selves; they are two, and are importantly related. They are not the same god, or parts of the same god, or personalities, etc. They are a man, the most important man, and his God, who is also his Father. This is hard to a explain, but there’s a whole texture to the NT which is obscured by traditional catholic theorizing.

Honestly, I picked “trinities” because it was easy to remember, the domain was available, and it seemed a decent short hand to refer to the various competing theories. But I did not thereby signal that the dispute was irresolvable. Indeed, I don’t think it is! I can see why Sanders might read more into it, though, based on how terms like “Christianities” get used by some.

There’s also a concern, I think, that somehow philosophy must involve not properly submitting to what God has revealed. But that is indeed my aim. Nothing about philosophy traps me in a hopeless plurality of incompatible viewpoints. Just as I have firm views on, say, free will, so I have them here – at least, I have them now, after a lot of painful thinking and mind-changing.

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20 thoughts on “Cross-Cultural Dialogue: Theologian and Philosopher”

  1. Marg
    You are not missing something.
    As I,m sure you know the verse which appears in KJV and earlier bibles was probably an overenthusiastic insertion by someone who lived in the middle ages.
    It was never found in any original text.and has been deleted from most modern bibles.
    At one time however it was regarded as the only specific reference to the trinity in the bible.
    If one looks at the Greek version of the verse, one finds that ‘hen’ is used for ‘one’
    This is the same word that is used in –
    John 10v30 “I and the Father are one”(hen)
    1 Corinthians 3 v 8 “the one who plants and the one who waters are one ” (hen)
    Acts 1 verse 17 “he was one of us” (hen)
    Philippians 2v2 “united in spirit and having a common purpose” (hen)

    Best Wishes

    John

  2. I have never been able to understand why 1 John 5:7 should be considered evidence of tri-unity. If indeed there are there 3 in heaven that bear witness, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that their witness is “one”.

    That, I notice, is the same conclusion that Clarke suggests. Their testimony is one “thing”. It doesn’t suggest that the three selves are one “being”.

    But maybe I’m missing something.

  3. Pingback: trinities - Linkage: On the corruption of 1 John 5:7 (Dale)

  4. My mind boggles when I try to think about a consistent approach to evaluating biblical redaction, glosses, and copy errors. Anyway, I play it safe and never appeal to 1 John 5:7 for Trinitarian doctrine.

  5. Brandon:

    (I) ‘Corruption’ is an obviously tendentious term for it, since nothing is a corruption unless it introduces a deficiency. You could just as easily call it an improvement

    If it’s a deviation from the original text, it’s a corruption no matter how much theological benefit it appears to provide. Your argument is massively subjective.

    No, we could not just as easily call the Comma Johanneum an improvement. What does it actually improve? Nothing that I can see. It makes a claim that John isn’t actually making, and it introduces an idea which is alien to the context.

  6. ^^ That is one of the many reasons why I bought an NET Bible years ago, and never looked back.

    The text may not flow as smoothly as some other versions, and it lacks the poetry of the KJV, but it’s superbly accurate and it’s worth the price for the footnotes alone.

  7. OK – “automatically”. But seriously, has anyone ever defended an interpolation on providential grounds?

    About the “Comma” – I was basically remembering this rightly. I think it’d be misleading to say it goes back to the 4th c. The idea, but not, seemingly, the Greek words in copies of the NT.

    Here’s most of the note from the good folks at the NET Bible (emphases added):

    …the infamous Comma Johanneum, has been known in the English-speaking world through the King James translation. However, the evidence – both external and internal – is decidedly against its authenticity. … This longer reading is found only in nine late mss, four of which have the words in a marginal note. … The oldest ms with the Comma in its text is from the 14th century (629), but the wording here departs from all the other mss in several places. The next oldest mss on behalf of the Comma, 88 (12th century) 429 (14th) 636 (15th), also have the reading only as a marginal note (v.l.). The remaining mss are from the 16th to 18th centuries. Thus, there is no sure evidence of this reading in any Greek ms until the 14th century (629), and that ms deviates from all others in its wording; the wording that matches what is found in the TR was apparently composed after Erasmus’ Greek NT was published in 1516. Indeed, the Comma appears in no Greek witness of any kind (either ms, patristic, or Greek translation of some other version) until a.d. 1215 (in a Greek translation of the Acts of the Lateran Council, a work originally written in Latin). This is all the more significant since many a Greek Father would have loved such a reading, for it so succinctly affirms the doctrine of the Trinity. The reading seems to have arisen in a 4th century Latin homily in which the text was allegorized to refer to members of the Trinity.From there, it made its way into copies of the Latin Vulgate, the text used by the Roman Catholic Church. The Trinitarian formula (known as the Comma Johanneum) made its way into the third edition of Erasmus’ Greek NT (1522) because of pressure from the Catholic Church. …In the final analysis, Erasmus probably altered the text because of politico-theologico-economic concerns: He did not want his reputation ruined, nor his Novum Instrumentum to go unsold. Modern advocates of the TR and KJV generally argue for the inclusion of the Comma Johanneum on the basis of heretical motivation by scribes who did not include it. But these same scribes elsewhere include thoroughly orthodox readings – even in places where the TR/Byzantine mss lack them. Further, these advocates argue theologically from the position of divine preservation: Since this verse is in the TR, it must be original. (Of course, this approach is circular, presupposing as it does that the TR = the original text.) In reality, the issue is history, not heresy: How can one argue that the Comma Johanneum goes back to the original text yet does not appear until the 14th century in any Greek mss (and that form is significantly different from what is printed in the TR; the wording of the TR is not found in any Greek mss until the 16th century)? Such a stance does not do justice to the gospel: Faith must be rooted in history. Significantly, the German translation of Luther was based on Erasmus’ second edition (1519) and lacked the Comma. But the KJV translators, basing their work principally on Theodore Beza’s 10th edition of the Greek NT (1598), a work which itself was fundamentally based on Erasmus’ third and later editions (and Stephanus’ editions), popularized the Comma for the English-speaking world. Thus, the Comma Johanneum has been a battleground for English-speaking Christians more than for others.

  8. A better example with regard to (II) is the ending of Mark: certainly not original to the Gospel, however early it may be. But originalists won’t bat an eye at that. The Johannine Comma is not so securely throned, but it won’t be ruled out automatically for the same reason the ending to Mark isn’t ruled out automatically.

  9. This is precisely what I mean by controversial assumptions.

    (I) ‘Corruption’ is an obviously tendentious term for it, since nothing is a corruption unless it introduces a deficiency. You could just as easily call it an improvement (which it is, if we’re talking literarily; even in Greek Fathers who obviously don’t have it in their text, like Nazianzen, noted that the grammar of the sentence is very poor; the interpolation completely fixes the syntactical problems without changing anything else). Why not ‘gloss’ or ‘redaction’ or ‘supplement’ or even just ‘interpolation’? All of them work just as well, and are as correct as regards the fact, without introducing any tendentious assumption about status.

    (II) And obviously there was an original version of the gloss, so originalism doesn’t necessarily rule it out, any more than it rules out I and II Samuel, or the book of Acts, because they relied on prior sources. The question is whether the original version was inspired; this is not proven merely by showing it joined the rest of the canon later.

    The Johannine Comma goes back at least to the fourth century, though, and possibly to the third, since it played a role in the West in disputes over Arianism; and is in a minority of Greek manuscripts going back at least to the tenth century (although in some cases as a marginal note).

    Also, the story about Erasmus is apocryphal; he seems not to have put it in originally simply because none of the Greek manuscripts originally available to him had it and he was using only Greek manuscripts; but he also seems to have actively looked to find one that did. That it was not in every manuscript was known in the West at least since the thirteenth century, when the Fourth Lateran Council explicitly mentioned the fact.

  10. Inspired corruptions?

    I guess I’m assuming that it was properly speaking the originals which were inspired.

    I think the line you suggest would be a hard sell in the present case. I’m away from my books right now, but I recall that this is the one which doesn’t occur in any pre-modern Greek MS or church father quote. I believe Erasmus was the first to rat it out, but then restored it under pressure.

  11. In fact, up until I think some time in the late 19th c., trinitarians thought they had something pretty close: 1 John 5:7. (Compare the KJV with any modern translation.)

    It’s not relevant to the main argument (with which I largely agree; theologians often allow themselves an absurd amount of looseness), but it should be pointed out that many of us still do; holding the gloss as noncanonical because it is later requires assumptions about the nature of Scripture (and canonicity) that are controversial at the least.

  12. Dave – LOL. I have to ponder this new terminology…

    I propose that apologists should be called Trinitarians or unitarians while polemists should be called anti-trinitarian or anti-unitarian. 🙂

  13. Any idea on what he was talking about

    Again, I think it was just the sight, as it were, of three co-operating persons (or something somewhat like persons?), each of whom in some sense “is” God. One just discerns the reality, I guess, if one has eyes to see. I think something like that is his claim. No, this is not an argument against any non-trinitarian theory. But at least in the original, in-house piece, he felt no need whatever to address any competition. In a sense this is wholly understandable and reasonable. What is not, is the near absence of unitarian views from sources like this.

  14. Why do Trinitarians always characterise every alternative Christology as “anti-Trinitarianism”? I don’t go around accusing them of “anti-Unitarianism.” Perhaps I should.

    Sanders definitely sounds like he subscribes to a form of mysterian theology.

  15. Really enjoyed your post by the way.

    Having read Sanders’ response to your initial response first, I was already frustrated at a number of rather woolly, ill-defined aspects and one rather less charitable one.

    Woolly: for example, on defending his statement that “whole books of the Bible are structured by a Trinitarian logic”, instead of actually giving a reference / example / explanation of what he meant by this in the first place, he just told us what he didn’t mean by logic, vaguely waved a hand at the notion that “logic” needn’t be the strict philosophical kind, muttered something about the logic of cheeseburgers (what?!), and then moved on to justify the “logic” of the overall thrust of his article. I’m still in the dark about these “structures” according to “Trinitarian logic”, which is a shame as they might have been interesting. Any idea on what he was talking about, or was it just the groundless assertion his poor defense of it makes it appear?

    Less charitable: Sanders seemed to be quite content with more than a whiff of ad hominem smear in his article. That, along with his “smug forgetfulness” of the controversial nature of his foundation claim – that the Bible does indeed teach Trinitarianism – supports his final smear, but now of your whole profession!

    Loved your point about leaving the door open to the notion that something’s gone wrong in mainstream theology being something that should be pretty trivial point to protestants. You *should* be right on this one of course, but to so many mainstream protestants I’ve come across they’re now part of such a large and long-established club that it’s become a new orthodoxy. “Sure, something had gone wrong a while back, but luckily we got all that fixed up a while back on the somewhere on the way out of the dark ages”.

    M

  16. Dale,

    I am with you on the primary topic of you post. As a Trinitarian, I think it is lame for a fellow Trinitarian to say “it’s a good thing that there’s no ‘Trinity verse’ in the Bible.” 🙂

  17. In sophisticated catholic circles c. 200, as best I can tell, it was basically subordinationist unitarians vs. “monarchians,” at least some of whom where humanitarian unitarians. (In the polemical lingo of the day – “psilanthropists” – mere-man-ers, who thought Jesus had only a human nature.)

    Hi Dale, as I mentioned elsewhere, since Arius suggested that Alexander and evidently the entire Nicea Council held to monarchianism (Sabellianism), then perhaps earlier labeling of monarchianism was muddy. For example, many proto-trinitarians in the early church could have been labeled as Sabellians while they did not know how to articulate their view that the Son was equal to God while the Father and Son were distinct persons yet one God.

  18. Hi Dale,

    I hesitate to offer a clarification to your post: in Para 3 it could sound like you’re saying that Newton was the one who inserted the “3 in heaven” – whereas of course he showed it to be a late corruption.

    Interestingly in the same context Newton pointed out the lasting disputes on the Trinity both before, during and after the time of Jerome… during which of course he would certainly have appealed to the “3 in heaven” had that been a part of the text at the time.

    Shalom

    M

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