Her starting point is this argument:
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. Therefore, the Father is the Son. (p. 1)
She (I think, justifiably) brushes aside “relative identity” escapes from this argument. (I won’t open this can of worms here; the curious can see here.) She argues that a theologically adequate theory of the Trinity must meet four conditions:
(i) secure the distinctness of the Persons, (ii) maintain monotheism, (iii) affirm that each… Person of the Trinity is God and (iv) affirm that the Trinity of Persons is God. Arguably Sabellianism as I shall understand it meets all these conditions and [in contrast to relative identity theories] does not require any ad hoc philosophical commitments. (p. 2)
Next time: What is this wonderful “Sabellianism”?
I’m afraid you’ll be hard-pressed to find theologians past and present who have a consistent and non-contradictory explanation of and model for the trinity. They’re diverse, few and far between and I don’t see how Dr. Baber’s contribution will be any different from those of Barth, Pannenberg, Schoonenberg, Kuschel and others who have also attempted at comparing models. And whichever model Dr. Baber will prefer and expound upon will simply be yet another preference, agreeing with some and dismissing other theological and philosophical designs. They’re so disparate, they’re logically irreconcilable. And if a “unifying” model is arrived at, what then? How will you break the preferences and sentimentalities some theologians will have for their favorite models? There will undoubtedly be those who’ll protect their sacred cows and strike at Dr. Baber’s [heretic, according to them] “programme.” It will be a battle of the trinities and 20 years down the line yet another philosopher will take a shot at this doctrinal Rubix cube…utterly, utterly futile.
Why only that church? Why not the pre-Nicene churches with their wider list of writings? Or the various North-African and Eurasian Orthodox Churches? If a unifying trinity model is to be sought then dismissing some challenging source material would certainly not do the trick.
Beats me too…I could add, why not the Hebrew or Jewish Christian churches such as the Ebionites?
As I’ve pointed out, some of these models have restrictions and conditions in certain areas which make them simply contradictory and irreconcilable in those areas. This will be seen most clearly in comparing these to Arianism and even to non-preexistence Hebraic models.
That is indeed very challenging. Not only to formulate a unifying, all-encompassing trinity super-model, but, once arrived at (which “unifying” properties I’ll seriously doubt) will have to be reconciled with ancient writings – canonical, non-canonical, Patristic and Philonic. It will also be interesting to see which epistemological categories you’ll use for entities such as GOD, PERSON, FATHER, SON, SPIRIT, etc. Hopefully you’ll be able to improve on the classical equivocating and oscillating classifications of GOD as both a mass noun and a count noun, as both a self and a non-self, as both a quality and an identity, etc. Or maybe you should consider resorting to mythological creatures such as Cerebus (or some other character found in nightmare material) as Bill Craig recently did (to the embarrassment of millions…).
I don’t know…and I don’t want to discourage you either, but I think eventually some pan-trinitarianism will be final compromise in which the exact relation between Father, Son and Holy Ghost will best be ignored and the acknowledgment of their existence will simply be confessed…which will be exactly the place where you left off…All this confusion just because a slight deviation in thought – the little gap necessary for the camel’s nose – in which functionality had to give way to ontology. Suddenly GOD became a contradictory, vague, transferrable and nebulous entity which, like in quantum physics, appears on our plane as either Father, Son or Holy Ghost. This was completely alien to the ancient revealed model of God as seen in the Church’s holy writings.
Very interesting: I’m being pushed here on meta-theological issues that I have’t really thought about.
I suppose my goals are modest. I’m not interested in challenging any religious position or in deciding amongst them. I’m interested in seeing what machinery it takes to work out the various Trinity doctrines.
It isn’t that the question of adjudicating between churches is boring, or that I’m skeptical about whether it’s possible to figure out which to choose. It just isn’t my question.
Harriet,
Interesting. Is that because you find the question of which church to prefer boring? Or are you skeptical that there is any way to figure out which church to prefer? Or something else?
Scott
Really I’m not into this stuff I’m doing preferring the Trinitarian Church to the Arian Church. I just want to see how the various views can be made sense of. If the project I have in mind pans out I’d like to see what kind of metaphysics it takes to make sense of Arian doctrine. And on the Christology side, how Nestorian and Monophysite and other accounts could be developed philosophically.
Hi Jaco,
“Church is a reliable source of what?”
Information about theological matters.
“Which church?”
The church that decided or discovered the canon of scripture.
“Why prefer the Trinitarian Church to the Arian Catholic Church?”
I don’t know.
Church is a reliable source of what? Which church? Why prefer the Trinitarian Church to the Arian Catholic Church? Both are ancient…
@Scott H, the issue isn’t infallibility vs. some more manageable standard. What I suggested was that the Church, by which I mean the mereological sum of liturgy, people, buildings, silverware, ceramonies, hymns, incense, etc. is the data of which doctrine purports to be an explanation, or justification. And the Bible is just part of that aggregate of religious stuff.
Yes. Scripture – canonical, apocryphal and pseudepigraphal, even Philo – provides very little to arive at the trinity doctrines of centuries since the apostles’ demise. Eventually an alien concept of God with points of agreement found in Scripture, but not a fully reconcilable, biblical doctrine.
A cybernetic approach might be good in appreciating the state of the church as it compares to its scripture. Perturbations in the past lead it to adjust accordingly and a dynamic system has evolved. But no-one denies the fact that the trinity in itself is a perturbation in the church as it threatens another of its foundation stones, namely its sacred Text. The trinity is a perturbation, precisely because it poses a difficulty in understanding the relationship between “the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” This can be alleviated, I think, not by redefinitions of those characters or by redefining normative language, but by gradually redesigning doctrinal formulae to fit an understandable, relatable and satisfying concept of strict monotheism and representative of functional deity.
Even with the Hebrew apocrypha and the later pseudepigrapha a beautiful and consistent picture of strict monotheism and functional deity by created agents is maintained. An adoration of God in irreconcilably alien concepts was the hurdle the church has centuries later not seemed to have managed to cross…
Hi Harriet,
“I hate to bring up the old chestnut, but how can Scripture be the ultimate authority since the canon was selected by the Church from amongst lots of available candidates?”
What about attempting to do it this way?
You say that the Church is reliable, but not infallible. Then you say that all you need for knowledge is reliability and not infallibility. Then you say that the Church says that scripture is infallible. So you can say that you know scripture is infallible since a reliable source told you it was. But you are not pressed to say that the Church is infallible too. So scripture is the ultimate source of authority and the Church is not.
Scott
Brutal honesty can be quite invigorating, I find. One faint bleat, though.
I assume that when the canon was chosen, the documents selected represented what the Church considered to be a fair representation of what Christ and his apostles taught, as well as what the Church then believed. I fondly hope that they were right.
Those documents mention three something-or-others. One is God, also called the Father. The others are called the Son of God and the Spirit of God. Not a tri-une God, to be sure, but a God who carried out his purposes through his Son and by the power of his Spirit.
At the moment, I think that is a biblical doctrine. Or theory. Or something.
But I’m listening.
If you hold that Scripture is the ultimate norm you are not going to get very far with formulating any doctrine of the Trinity because the doctrine isn’t Biblical. But I don’t, and wasn’t in the passage cited, suggesting that the divinity claims in question derived from Scripture. Rather the suggestion was that they are derived from the Church. And by that I don’t mean that they are promulgated by councils or other doctrinal authorities, but that they figure in liturgy and in the pious practices of Christians–like crossing yourself saying “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”
I hate to bring up the old chestnut, but how can Scripture be the ultimate authority since the canon was selected by the Church from amongst lots of available candidates?
I’m not too sure about this. This “explanary hypothesis” is ultimately needed if a certain understanding and assumption of what it means to “be” God is to be maintained. The epistemological shift from functional identity (such as imitation, representation, reflection, etc.) to ontological identity (one of the Persons being God in himself) is the first assumption not to be derived from Scripture. The second shift is the hypostatisation of “God” and the “nebulization” of God from a concrete Self in Scripture to some nebulous quality to be shared by more than one Person. To uphold these two epistemological moves requires fallacious leaps in themselves and is the basis for the equivocating concepts of who and what GOD is according to the Trinity. But these moves are preferred by trinitarians, hence their need for a different conceptualisation of God.
“CarolJean – so, you read “is” in 2 and 3 as meaning “is a mode of”? 4 would not follow then (read as the “is” of identity). Logically, I see no obvious problem; the rub will come, I think, in reading the scriptures in a way that fits this. Stay tuned…”
Just for further clarification…I wouldn’t say that Father and Son are modes of God. The modes of God are Spirit and Man, the ways that God exists. The words, Father and Son, denote relationship not mode of existence, although Father would speak to God’s existence as a Spirit and Son to God’s existence as a man.
And the “identity” of #4 is in a category all its own. God is the type of person (divine) that can function through two distinct consciousnesses without division or multiplication. If God can hear every prayer of every believer at the same time and keep them all straight, I don’t see the problem with Him becoming a man and simultaneously existing transcendent to his incarnation.
I also think that God did not become the Father until the conception of Christ and the NT writers are speaking anachronistically when they speak of the Father in the OT or as the God of the OT. I would define Father as the omnipresent Spirit and Son of God as a Son according to Luke 1:35.
My problem is that I can see no scriptural reason to think that 3 can be understood as an identity.
But I, too, am looking forward to the discussion. With two such benign gladiators (neither of which I agree with TOTALLY) in the arena, I can sit in the bleachers and eat popcorn.
But I reserve the right to cheer loudly when someone uses the “sword” well.
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I forgot to mention that Dr. Baber is also the author of a high-quality encyclopedia article on the Trinity, here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/trinity/
Like many analytic philosophers, she deals with the puzzle as constructed by widely accepted catholic creeds. There is however a wider array of well-motivated views to be discussed: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/unitarianism.html
Her very first sentence – “Christians believe that God is a Trinity of Persons…” needs qualifying, in my view. But she’s dead on correct with this statement: “we may regard the Trinity doctrine as an explanatory hypothesis, which purports to make sense of divinity claims concerning the Son and Holy Spirit without undermining the Judeo-Christian commitment to monotheism.” What is important here is that one can’t deduce any Trinity doctrine from the sources. If any Trinity theory can be supported from those, it’ll be because it best explains their contents. Any such theory is a theoretical hypothesis, and must be evaluated as such.
CarolJean – so, you read “is” in 2 and 3 as meaning “is a mode of”? 4 would not follow then (read as the “is” of identity). Logically, I see no obvious problem; the rub will come, I think, in reading the scriptures in a way that fits this. Stay tuned…
Marg – you are reading 1-2 as involving the “is” of identity, and 3 as the “is” of description. Read that way, 4 would not follow.
One has a bigger problem if, I think like a lot of present day evangelicals, one also reads 3 as the “is” of identity – because then 4 follows.
Dale
I’m totally ‘at sea’ when it comes to identity notation, but perhaps you could clarify something.
If a = b
it follows that b=a
BUT
I was recently challenged by someone who said ‘ what happens if ‘a’ is Coca-Cola and “b’ is ‘beverages’?
I replied that in this case ‘a’ is a sub-set of ‘b’ – so there is an exception here as relative identity does not apply to sets.
Is this correct?
Sorry to be so ‘pedestrian’!
Blessings
John
I would argue that the #4 is false because Father and Son are different modes of existence of the one divine Person. Therefore Father and Son are not the same but in regard to mode of existence but they are the same in regard to Person.
I’m looking forward to the discussion!
I think that the three premises are not sufficiently precise. The word “God” might refer to THE God – that is, the only true God (John 1:3) – and in that case only 1 and 2 are true
Or it might refer to the quality of “godness,” which would make #3 true (John 1:1). But then the conclusion would not mean much, it seems to me.
However, I don’t know what “relative identity” means, so I look forward to the next post.
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