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SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 5 – BURKE – Part 1

Burke’s fifth round opens some interesting cans of worms.

First, he reiterates that the Bible doesn’t explicitly talk of any triple-personed god, but instead calls the God of the Jews the Father. His Son is Jesus, and they stand in a hierarchy as two persons – the Son “under” the Father – over the realm of angels. He says that “Scripture never includes the Holy Spirit in this hierarchy”, but this begs the question – Bowman’s fifth round focused on passages which he thinks puts the Spirit at the top of the hierarchy alongside Father and Son. Again, I complain about the format of the debate, which forces the debaters to talk past one another.

Second, he cites numerous passages to show that his unitarian take on the Trinity is consonant with apostolic teaching – with their language but also with their concepts, to throw the burden on the trinitarian. About the triadic passages Bowman focuses on, he says only this: “all three were recognised as sources of apostolic authority… It is therefore natural that they appear together in ways which reflect this relationship…” Sources? Like, authorities (selves possessing authority)? I think this needs more spelling out, to make it clearly consistent with Burke’s other views, and to show that it is well-motivated. I read something interesting on this recently. 🙂

Can of worms #1: early catholic theology. The most famous of 2nd c. catholic theologians were subordinationists – they held that Jesus was “generated” by the Father through a mysterious act of will prior to the creation of the cosmos. Although they thought of this as the expression of God’s internal and eternal “word” or thought, this is incompatible with later orthodoxy, because the Son isn’t eternal, and is arguably not “fully divine” – as he exists because of something else – God. At times, they even call the Son “a second god”. Burke observes:

None of these early church fathers were Biblical Unitarians – but they weren’t Trinitarians either… even as late as the 4th c…. Christians were hopelessly confused… [even then] the Trinity was still not a fully established doctrine. …Rob is vague about the point at which he believes the church embraced true Trinitarianism, but I receive a general sense that he perceives an implicit Trinitarian Christology within the NT which quickly gave rise to fully-fledged Trinitarianism. …But the history of Trinitarianism… reveals an excruciating mess of debate, controversy, and confusion… How can Trinitarianism be the doctrine once preached by the apostles…? …It is contrary to reason, antagonistic to Scripture, and undermined by the record of history.

So Burke’s point is that trinitarianism can’t have been part of the apostolic message. How does Bowman respond to this blast? Tune in next time, in which I discuss his long response in a comment, and bring up some other relevant historical information.

Can of worms #2: Could a fully divine Jesus have been tempted? A fully divine being can’t sin. Bowman holds that Jesus is and has always been fully divine. So, there can never have been any possibility of Jesus sinning. But, counters Burke, the Bible says outright that he was tempted. And a being which can’t sin, can’t really be tempted. Saith Burke: “the statement ‘Jesus could be tempted but was not capable of sin’ is both self-refuting and utterly meaningless.” (BTW – he should stick with the first – that statement is not meaningless – apparently contradictory statements have meaning, which is how we can tell they are contradictory.) Moreover, the NT says that he could be tempted and could have sinned.

Bowman fires back in a lengthy comment, #18. He says some interesting things regarding this issue, but the gist is that Burke “confuses capability with moral capacity”. Jesus was capable or sinning, but never had any moral capacity to sin. Bowman here makes a move here akin to what compatibilists about human freedom say – that a choice being free doesn’t require ever having had an unconditional ability to choose otherwise, but only conditional abilities – one would have chosen otherwise had various other factors been otherwise. (Factors over which one never had any control!) This is worrisome – in my view compatibilism (about determinism and human freedom) has been refuted by van Inwagen’s famous “consequence argument”. Many philosophers would agree with me, although philosophers are heavily divided on this.

Suppose that tomorrow, a voice boomed from the heavens, “No more dynamite explosions!” And lo and behold, all dynamite in the world was, by the hand of God, rendered inert – incapable of exploding. Either God has changed the laws of nature, or he’s just determined to constantly intervene. For the time being, your dynamite collection is ruined. No more redneck fishing for you and your buddies.

But on a street corner, you’re seduced by the promise of a black market explosives dealer – “I promise, son, that I’ve got some explodable dynamite here.” You examine it – it really is dynamite, and purchase some. You find that it won’t explode. But the salesman says “I meant it had the capability of exploding – not the actual capacity of exploding. It has what it takes to explode were God to rescind his decision to disallow dynamite explosions.” You feel that you’ve been deceived, and you and your redneck buddies proceed to kick the salesman’s derrière – but the fact is, what he said was consistent. By “explodable” he meant only that in some possible, non-actual situations, this stuff gets set off – never mind that those situations are ones inaccessible to us (unless we change God’s mind).

Contrast this, though, with what Bowman is saying. Jesus is God. Are there any possible situations in which God sins? No. So, Jesus sinning is no more possible than it being true that 2 + 2 = 5 – Jesus exists no matter what, and is essentially perfect in every way. Bowman says

Jesus had the capability, physically speaking, of committing sins (e.g., he had a mouth and knew enough to lie; he had hands and was physically capable of stealing)…

But none of those, or even all put together are sufficient to make Jesus able to sin. That he has capacities which other beings might be able to sin with is irrelevant. God has these, but we (most of us) say that God can’t sin. (e.g. smiting power, which God shares with murderers) To say that a person can do X only if some contradiction is true (or if some absolutely impossible situation is actual) is just a way of saying that it is absolutely impossible for that person to do X. Bowman holds that Jesus can sin. But supposing Jesus to sin is, in his view, to suppose that a being which is essentially impeccable sins – which is a contradiction. Could, say, a ping-pong ball sin? By this sort of reasoning, sure! I has no actual capacity of sinning, but if it were a self with moral knowledge (which I take it is not possible for this little plastic globe) then it could. Could a potato perform a waltz? Sure – if it here a living human being. (But wait – that’s not possible…)

In short, Bowman is urging that we believe in abilities or powers or capacities which in principle can’t be exercised or realized – in philosophical lingo, such that in no possible world does the being in question actualize it. This, however, is absurd – the notion of an absolutely (or in principle) unrealizable potentiality. Such a thing isn’t a potentiality at all – we’re being urged to believe in a sort of property or characteristic – one which is and isn’t a potential for being a certain way. Let’s not dignify this with the title “paradox”; it is but a lowly contradiction, and one that in any other application we would all dismiss out of hand. Also, notice that this point has nothing to do particularly with theology. It is a serious cost if a theology needs such a questionable claim.

Bowman here urges a false dilemma – either his view of Christ is true, or (if Burke is right) Jesus might have at any moment sinned, thus imperiling God’s whole plan. But this is a mistake. Being able to sin at some time or other isn’t the same as being able to easily sin at any moment. Thus, nothing about Burke’s view commits him to a shaky, easy-to-fall-away Jesus. Nor is it obvious that Jesus or God would have to be 100% certain that Jesus would never sin – it depends on one’s theory of divine providence. Molinists and others would urge that they could be certain of that, even if Jesus was free to sin.

In his comment, Bowman helpfully formalizes the argument:

The anti-Trinitarian argument, superficially, looks unassailable:

P1. God cannot be tempted.
P2. Christ was tempted.
C. Therefore, Christ was not God.

Bowman argues that “being tempted” is equivocal. If it mains actually giving in to a temptation, that P1 is true but P2 is false. But if it means a certain feeling or quality of experience, then P2 is true but (I take it) P1 is false – God can experience that feeling. He urges that James 1:13 can be reading as having to do with giving into temptation.

Be that as it may, what if “tempting” is putting one into a situation in which one has the ability, in that situation, to as it were say yes to a desire to do something wrong? In that sense, Bowman must say that P2 is false. Problem is, this is the sense most readers are going to see in the texts talking of Christ being tempted. I suspect that his merely experiential sense of “being tempted” has been concocted to save his theology – can he point to any case in the Bible or anywhere in the ancient world where “being tempted” is merely experiential (i.e. it merely describes a certain felt quality of experience), and doesn’t imply some actual capacity for and actual pull towards sin?

Finally, Bowman probably holds, like I think most evangelicals, that after our glorification – after you and me are resurrected, and living in the presence of God in the new heavens and the new earth –  we won’t be able to sin. But if he grants this, he grants that a normal human may, by the action of God, be rendered incapable of sinning. So even if he’s right that Jesus was incapable of sinning, that doesn’t show or suggest that he was divine. Moreover, if he grants this, he can’t complain about the alleged weirdness or obscurity of Burke’s claim that Jesus was made able to completely avoid sin by the Holy Spirit. So, does he grant this – that a human may be rendered impeccable?

Next time: history.

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21 thoughts on “SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 5 – BURKE – Part 1”

  1. Geez – is that THE Rob Bowman of CRI fame?

    He and I met over the anhypostasia and his denial of the man Christ Jesus thereby – it wasn’t pretty – he did not looking into that black abyss at all – but he put himself there – I did not!

  2. The grammar issue is clear, surely. There is nothing in the grammar – or in the lexicon, for that matter – to prevent “apart from sin” to mean an exception to the inward temptation of desiring something sinful.

    That, to my mind, makes sense of the fact that he was sinless – in thought as well as in deed.

    Is it a misake (grammatically, lexicographically or theologically) to consider a desire for “something wrong” to be a desire for “something sinful”?

  3. Marg, I’m not sure what you mean by ‘grammatically permissible’ – I don’t see what the grammar issue is. There’s an issue of lexicography, namely, the meaning of the word ‘sin’ (hamartia). What’s the grammar issue?

  4. Thank you, Kenny. What you say expresses exactly what I have in mind.

    Jesus was “tempted” with hunger. He desired food.

    I agree with you. That was NOT a wrong desire.

    But Satan was tempting him (outwardly) to do something on his own, independent of God. Had Jesus desired THAT, it would have been a wrong desire. And a wrong desire is sinful, surely.

    If Jesus obeyed the greatest commandment, which is to love God with all his being, then his desires were always absolutely compatible with his love for (and subjection to) his Father.

    And if HE didn’t obey that great commandment, how can I hope to?

    This is what I count on Jesus for: the power to be holy, even as God is holy.

    I do not count on him to sympathize with my wrong desires. But I DO count on him to sympathize with my human weaknesses. Any of his followers who are forced to experience extreme hunger can count on his sympathy in their ordeal, because he has experienced the same thing.

    In any case, since you didn’t directly answer the question, I assume that you think it IS grammatically possible to understand Hebrews 4:15 to mean that he was tempted the way we are, but with one exception: he was not tempted through his own wrong desires.

  5. Marg – There is no reason to restrict sin in that passage to outward sin, so the passage teaches that Jesus didn’t have any inward attitudes or desires which are themselves sinful. Surely Jesus teaches that inward attitudes and desires, and not just outward actions, can be sinful and/or a result of sin, so there are some inward attitudes and desires we have that Jesus didn’t. But we should also note that somehow, before there was any sin in the world, it was possible for Adam and Eve to be tempted to sin. So according to Hebrews, Jesus must have been subject to at least that kind of temptation.

    Note that Jesus certainly experienced, e.g., hunger and thirst, and in the story of his temptation in the desert his hunger is appealed to. Being hungry is an inward state that is not sinful (after all, it’s involuntary), but it can lead to sin, and the text clearly suggests that it would have been sinful for Jesus to turn the stones to bread. So Jesus desired food in a circumstance where it would have been wrong for him to get food (at least, by the means suggested), and in that sense desired something wrong. But that desire is not itself a sin.

  6. Let me rephrase my original question so that it can be answered on grammatical grounds.

    Is it POSSIBLE – just POSSIBLE – for “tempted in all points as we are without (or apart from) sin” to mean that – thanks to the “qualities, powers and privileges that Jesus possessed” – he was tempted (outwardly) in every way, but without any inward response?

    I understand and agree with Willard’s interpretation of Matthew 5:28.

    But I have a real problem with the idea that Jesus had to fight “desires to do something wrong.” In fact, I can’t see the difference between a desire to do something wrong and a desire to sin.

    And how many “wrong things” can we allow a sinless person to desire? Can a pedophile expect sympathy for his desires to do something wrong, on the grounds that Jesus was tempted in all points the way he is?

    It seems to me that if I fully obeyed the greatest commandment, and loved the Lord my God “with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my mind,” I would have no desire to do something wrong.

    I suppose we aren’t going to see eye to eye on this point. But my question remains:
    Is it grammatically POSSIBLE for the phrase “apart from sin” to mean an exception from the inward temptation to sin, rather than an exception from falling into sin?

  7. Dave – that sounds like a plausible principle. I don’t think I said anything about potentialities. Surely being tempted requires being free to sin. I don’t see why, on compatibilist assumptions, freedom should require potentiality, and if one can be free to sin without having the potentiality to sin, then I don’t see why one shouldn’t be able to be tempted without having the potentiality to sin. (I’m personally not sure about compatibilism; in fact I lean against it. But this was the first line of thought that came to mind and I think it’s an interesting and plausible one.)

  8. Dale – on your view, how do we preserve divine freedom in general? For instance, is God free to create a world with enormous amounts of genuinely gratuitous suffering? If not, how do we avoid the Spinozistic conclusion that the universe just ’emanates’ from God rather than being freely created?

    It seems to me that there should be some sense in which God is free to sin, though surely this is not the same sense in which we are free to sin. But I think this issue is closely related.

    I do think the issue of counterpossibles is closely related. Suppose we say:

    S is morally capable of φing iff, in some possible world, S intentionally φs.

    If all counterpossibles are vacuously true, then (treating my definitions as stipulations) anyone who is morally incapable of performing an action will count as free to perform that action, on the definition we’re considering. But if some counterpossibles are false and others are non-vacuously true, and this definition of freedom is accepted, then someone can be free to perform an action while being morally incapable of performing it. This seems to me to be just the kind of thing we want to say about God (not just in the incarnation, but in general): God is free to sin, but morally incapable of sin. It also seems like a plausible response to the worries about Christ’s temptation.

    To motivate the idea intuitively: suppose that I am so constituted that I just couldn’t intentionally beat a child to death with a baseball bat. I am not psychologically capable of having that intention. Furthermore, suppose that this aspect of my psychology is fundamental to my identity to such a degree that anyone who was capable of having this intention would not be me. Yet I have all the right kinds of powers: I can acquire baseball bats, I can swing them, I can find children, I can recognize when children are dead, etc. There is no power missing, except the power to form the intention. Does this make me less free?

  9. Hi Kenny,
    Thanks for pressing me on this.

    “S is free to ? iff if S willed to ? S would ?.”
    and let’s not forget to add:
    in no possible world does S will to ?

    This, to me, is a perverse definition of “free”. I still hold that the notion of a power/potentiality such that it can’t possibly be exercised/actualized is a contradiction.

    I think this is independent of the issue of counterpossibles, isn’t it?

    What could be true, on Bowman’s views, is that nothing in Jesus’ human nature precludes his sinning. Still, he or it (take your pick) would be unable to sin, because of his divine nature. If there’s no possible circumstance in which someone can sin, he absolutely can’t sin. Who cares if this is because of one of its components, and not because of the other?

  10. Kenny, that’s what it would look like if we always successfully resisted temptation because we couldn’t sin. But we don’t always successfully resist temptation, and we can sin.

    The fact is that Trinitarians try to drive a wedge between Christ and those he came to save, whereas the apostles repeatedly insisted that Christ was the same as those he came to save. Hebrews says that Christ was tempted in exactly the same way we are, Trinitarians say no he wasn’t.

  11. According to the theory under discussion, this is exactly what it looks like when we successfully resist temptation: if we willed to sin, we would sin, but we don’t will to sin, so we don’t sin. To say that Christ was tempted in the same way we are, and was yet without sin, is just to say that he was free to sin in the same way we are, and had all the same reasons for sinning that we do, but he never in fact sinned. What more do you want?

  12. Kenny, the main problem is that what you suggest just isn’t what we read in Scripture. On the contrary, we find that Scripture says Christ was tempted in exactly the same way we are.

    Trying to wedge qualifications into that statement only demonstrates an attempt to reconcile it with preconceptions. This is typical of the Trinitarian approach. Scripture describes Christ, and the Trinitarian says what it really means is Christ Plus(tm).

  13. I’m not sure Bowman’s line about Jesus being able to sin is so lame after all. Suppose we say that Jesus was able to sin in the sense that he was free to sin, but unable to sin in the sense that it was logically impossible that he should sin. Are these incompatible? Not necessarily. Suppose we take freedom, in a compatibilist vein, as counterfactual or counterpossible dependence. Merricks has argued (in Objects and Persons) that if there aren’t non-vacuously true counterpossibles, most metaphysical arguments are meaningless. So let’s assume that some counterpossibles are non-vacuously true. Now we say:
    S is free to φ iff if S willed to φ S would φ.
    So for Jesus to be free to sin we need it to be true that if Jesus willed to sin, he would sin. This, one might claim, is a non-vacuously true counterpossible, since it is impossible that Jesus will to sin.

    Is there anything incoherent about this position (other than the general problems with compatibilism)?

  14. Marg – I agree with fortigurn. Christian thinkers as diverse as Dallas Willard and Peter Abelard have pointed out that merely have a desire to do something wrong isn’t a sin (something for which one could be punished by God). Jesus’ talk about “committing adultery in one’s heart” should be understood as being about willingly entertaining and cultivating wrong desires, or as willingly resolving to act on a desire should one get the chance.

  15. Dale:

    About the triadic passages Bowman focuses on, he says only this: “all three were recognised as sources of apostolic authority… It is therefore natural that they appear together in ways which reflect this relationship…” Sources? Like, authorities (selves possessing authority)? I think this needs more spelling out, to make it clearly consistent with Burke’s other views, and to show that it is well-motivated.

    Good point; I should have been clearer. I had Matthew 28:19 in mind at the time.

  16. Marg, you’re equating temptation to sin, with actual sin. Scripture differentiates between the two. Your term ‘desire to sin’ is confusing. Do you mean ‘willing intention to sin’ (which is certainly sinful), or ‘temptation to sin’ (which is not).

  17. Dale:

    Moreover, if he grants this, he can’t complain about the alleged weirdness or obscurity of Burke’s claim that Jesus was made able to completely avoid sin by the Holy Spirit.

    I do not claim that Jesus was made able to completely avoid sin by the Holy Spirit. Where is this idea coming from? You won’t find it in my argument.

  18. The last comment in Round 3 Re-evaluated asked a question about “Can of worms #2” that nobody answered. I hope it’s kosher to post a summary of it again.

    I think it is logical to conclude that being “prone to sin” would include the desire to sin. (Who is tempted to do something he doesn’t want to do?) But such a desire would itself be sin, according to Jesus’ own standards.

    Can I expect Jesus to sympathize with the sinful desires I have, on the assumption that he had the same sinful desires?

    I think not. He didn’t have those desires if he was sinless.

    Jesus was a real and complete human being, just like us. He was tempted in all points as we are, but apart from sin.

    Is it POSSIBLE for this to mean that – thanks to the “qualities, powers and privileges that Jesus possessed” (regardless of the question of pre-existence) – he was tempted (outwardly) in every way, but APART FROM the sinful desires that actually constitute temptation to sin?

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