J.P. Moreland is a well-known and prolific Christian philosopher and apologist, as well as a Willardite writer on spiritual formation.
Back around 1992-3 I was privileged to take a few classes with him as an undergraduate at Biola. He’s a hard working, straight shooting, and forceful person, yet with an obvious spiritual side. I’ve read and profited from a lot of his stuff. Not that I can keep up!
Is God a person? Watch Moreland’s interview here (blue button) then, click here for my take –>
I think that the answer, given Moreland’s brand of Social Trinitarianism, is a straightforward no.
Moreland, however, wants to soften the blow, so he says that God is and isn’t a person – depends what you mean by “person”. I don’t think this is right – in his view, God is personal (God is a being which in some sense contains persons) but not itself a person/self. But there’s no common, relevant meaning of “person” on which God, as Moreland understands it, is a person. I noticed that throughout, Moreland helps himself to personal pronouns – God is a “he”. This is a bit weasly – he knows that this will cause many to infer that he holds God to be a self, which he does not.
He does clearly say that in his view God is tri-personal – “three persons in one being” – a person being a “center of consciousness”. God is one being, with one essence, one what-ness, one set of essential attributes. But within this one being, there are three persons/centers of consciousness, forming a community. I was surprised at his Platonic talk of “participation” of all of us humans “participating in” the universal humanity, and of these “centers”/persons “participating in” divinity.
The interviewer asks if a good analogy would be one dog with three heads . Moreland replies, with perhaps a hint of irritation, that “some have used that analogy”, and that he’s got no problem with it. “Some”? 😉 I’ve been told that the Trinity chapter in this book was written by Moreland’s co-author, Bill Craig. Perhaps Cerberus wasn’t Moreland’s choice… or perhaps he’s had second thoughts.
The interviewer hints that this amounts to three gods – for these three are just such that one word (or maybe one concept) applies to all three of them. But Moreland’s having none of that – he holds that there really is one universal present in all three.
That doesn’t get to the heart of the worry, of course – even if there are universal properties, that would still suggest that we’ve got three gods here – just as three instances of humanity imply three human beings, don’t three instances of divinity imply three gods?
There are some sidetracks about the incarnation and about dualism. Moreland takes the view, as do I, that you and I are souls – we use our bodies, but we are not our bodies, and they aren’t even parts of us. This isn’t terribly surprising if theism is true, for God too is a soul, a non-physical self.
But wait – that can’t be right – his social trinitarian theory requires that the one God is indeed one thing, and a soul too, but NOT a self. Instead, it is a thing which in some sense contains three selves, three centers of consciousness within it. Moreland catches himself here, while expounding on the theme that if theism is true, there could be at least one self even if there were no physical cosmos: given theism, “the fundamental being… is a person, its… he is personal” i.e. he – really, it – contains these “centers of consciousness” / persons / selves.
But he says here that God (presumably the triune God, not any of these mere “centers” any of which could be mistaken for a god) is capable of thinking & feeling. Presumably, though, on his own views, this community-containing substance doesn’t literally do those – only its members do. Again, misleading.
It seems to me that this is inconsistent with monotheism, contrary to Moreland’s intentions. Like a number of other evangelical, philosophical social trinitarians, in apologetics contexts, he talks as if God were a self (e.g. see the conclusion of his Kalam argument). But when the Trinity comes up, no sir – we never said God is a self!
:-/
One way to clarify things, I think, would be for these social trinitarians to make scare-quote motions with their fingers when using “He” or “Him” etc. for the triune God. Works for “person” too.
Seriously.
Dale,
So far, I’ve read your language criticism of claims that the trinity is personal, but I hope to also look at the subject in the context of biblical studies. I understand that you’re a philosopher, and by definition you primarily look at things in the context of language. However, I’ll never be able to pull together a synopsis of the subject without more biblical studies. For example, I don’t recall the Bible using the pronoun “it” for God or Lord. And I don’t see the Bible describing God as a thingy.
I understand your criticism that any social trinitarianism that refers to God as “three separate persons” is tritheism, but I’ve trouble pulling together a synopsis of the impersonality or personality of the trinity while considering both language and biblical studies. Could you help with that?
By the way, your choice of graphics for this post was accurate in the context of the subject, but I suppose the severed foot was the straw that made it disturbing for me.
… and, likewise, there is good ground for affirming that Hegel, who systematically applies the dialectical “negatio negationis”, had Meister Eckhart as one of his main sources of inspiration, which takes us back to Pseudo-Dionysius, which takes us back to Neoplatonism.
AFAIAC, while Plotinus, in his Enneads, criticized the Gnostics, the only essential difference between Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, is that for the former the material world is evil, for the the latter it is “depotentiated spirit”.
That “beyond” move has deep roots in neoplatonism. For example, the medieval Christian neoplatonist Eriugena asserted that God neither exists, nor doesn’t exists – rather, he “more than exists”.
But if that doesn’t imply that he exists, I have no idea what it means.
J.P. Moreland plays, more than a bit ambiguously (even dishonestly, IMO), with the word “person”.
He is certainly NOT on his own, in this respect. The famous Catholic (well, sort of …) theologian Hans Küng, embarrassed by both “personal” and its dialectic negation, “im-personal”, came up with the Hegelian synthesis: “trans-personal”.
A question I have for Moreland would be this: if divine omniscience and omnipotence are grounded in the divine essence such that the persons have these attributes by virtue of having the divine essence, then what grounds a person’s having ‘consciousness’?
(And, what precisely is it to be conscious? It is well known that ‘being conscious’ in the contemporary literature might mean different things. It is simple awareness of an occurrent act (of thinking), or is it introspection, or something else?)
Moreland says that psychology is at the bottom of everything, but I would have thought that metaphysics stands under or behind it such that one may presume an ontology of consciousness when talking about consciousness. In any case, it’s not obvious to me what Moreland’s ontology of conscious amounts to. And, it is precisely his response to this question of ontology that would address the ‘why are there not three gods?’ question
Hey James – sorry – I thought it was eye catching. I picked it because it is of three men joined at the head – an image similar to the Cerberus analogy that Craig and Moreland have used. It’s supposed to show one human with three centers of consciousness – although Dan Howard-Snyder has persuasively argued that such a thing would instead by three men with overlapping bodies.
I think the artist cut off the foot ’cause he ran out of room. It’s the top of a coffee table.
I’m still trying to get past the incredibly disturbing painting of triplets before I can comfortably read your post. Am I the only one that uncomfortable with the graphics near the title of the post?
Textbook doublespeak. Eric Blair would be proud!
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