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Is God a self – a being capable of consciousness, knowledge, and choice, like us, but infinitely greater? Or is God a community, or a something-we-know-not-what?
Dr. Holmes’s language in his book The Quest for the Trinity made me think that he would answer: yes, God is a self, and not a community, or a mysterious Something. I took him to be a one-self trinitarian, and I ask him about that issue here. Is he? Well, it’s complicated!
We also discuss the idea that humans are made in God’s image and likeness, pro-Nicene trinitarianism, Proverbs 8 and John 17:3.
You can also listen to this episode on youtube.
This and the last interviews are interesting contrasted with my two episodes with Dr. William Hasker, episodes 27 and 28. There is also a relevant series of posts here at trinities from 2010.
Thanks to Dr. Holmes for a couple of really substantial discussions!
This was a fascinating episode. It brought me back to my days studying with Colin Gunton in England (Steve studied under Colin too). I could never track with Colin’s Barthian reticence to speak about three centers of consciousness in the Trinity.
As for Steve and this interview, he seemed to be especially concerned about the limitations with understanding God and our likeness to God in terms of reason. With that in mind, I wonder if you could have made progress by setting aside the “self” question and presenting the query in the terms of Nagel’s “something there is like to be” criterion. Is there something it is like to be a bat? God? The Second Person of the Trinity?
I find it tough to deny that there is something it is like to be the Father which is in some sense different from what it is like to be the Son. (E.g. Jesus stubbed his toe on a rock and now has the memory “I stubbed my toe on a rock.” The Father has neither the experience nor the exact same memory.) It also seems to me there is something it is like to be God simpliciter (the shared content of the three?). And that’s where I’m going to stop before I get into trouble.
Hi Randall – thanks for the comments. I can imagine that maybe one self has multiple points of view simultaneously, so I would think that multiple points of view would be neutral between one-self and three-self interpretations. But it seems right to me that any Christian would says that Jesus remembers, and the Father doesn’t remember, being crucified. (I’m talking about first-person memories.) But if they differ, then it follows by the indiscernibility of identicals, that they are two, non-identical, yes?
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