We had our first post here or 6 / 19 / 06 – over 350 posts ago! Thus, we are 5. Ready for Kindergarden, evidently! 😉
Many thanks to J.T. Paasch, Scott Williams, and Joseph Jedwab for their excellent posts! And thanks to the many great commenters here; we’ve had some vigorous discussions, and only very rarely have things gotten a bit too “hot.” You folks are awesome.
A few hastily chosen highlights, in no particular order:
- Some introductory posts on “The” Doctrine: 1, 2, 3.
- The Orthodox Formulas (scroll down).
- Some thoughts on heresy.
- A long series on Richard of St. Victor, source of the social trinitarian arguments that there can’t be just one divine person.
- Some answers about modalism.
- Islam-Inspired Modalism.
- Scott Williams’s posts on the theory of Henry of Ghent.
- Judging a debate been evangelical apologist Rob Bowman (mysterian) and Christadelphian (humanitarian unitarian) Dave Burke.
- “Trinity Monotheism” – the “social” Trinity theory of J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig.
- Is God a self?
- A few exercises in, um, creative writing: Gnomes, some weird sects, confused World Vision sponsorees, and Stalin’s USSR.
- J.T. Paasch on Arius and Athanasius.
- Sarah Hutton on Plato and the Trinity
- Randal Rauser puts a bullet behind the ear of the time-wasting “Rahner’s Rule”.
- Nothing new under the sun.
- Identity.
- Dealing with Apparent Contradictions.
As always, comments never close. What have I left out?
What sorts of posts to you find the most useful? What can we do to make trinities better? Shorter posts? More contributers? More frequent posts? More linkage? Fewer or more stupid pictures? 🙂 More or less historical stuff?
Please sound off in the comments.
Related posts:
Larry Hurtado on early Christians' worship of Jesus
Jerry Walls: What is wrong with Calvinism?
SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Bowman 1
podcast 105 - Dr. James Spiegel on The Making of an Atheist
a reply to Robert Bowman on biblical monotheism, the Trinity, and the Shema
Who Should Christians Worship?
My diabolical "ruse" exposed - drat!
Congratulations to Joseph
SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Bowman 2
Ignored Analytic Theology
Pingback: Speaking at 2012 Theological Conference in Atlanta, Georgia (Dale) » trinities
Hi James
Sorry for the delayed response. Also sorry if my previous post wasn’t as clear as it seemed at the time (!)
The point I was trying to make about John 5:18, was simply that we cannot view this passage as doctrinally authoritative, in which case I wondered why you treated it as if we could.
Hopefully it’s not contentious to view some scriptural statements as untrue – the classic example being “Ye shall not surely die” – Gen 3:4. I believe this to be an accurate record of a _falsehood_ spoken by the serpent, and suppose that you do too.
With that in mind the point I was making about John 5:18 is that it’s in the context of the Jews seeking to kill Jesus, on account of two points:
1 – “he (not only) had broken the sabbath”
2 – “he said that God was his Father, making himself equal with God”
The point about him (allegedly) breaking the Sabbath is clearly a Straw Man – they _say_ he broke the Sabbath, and therefore deserves death. However as you rightly pointed out, he actually broke their _interpretation_ of the Sabbath, and didn’t break God’s law.
This illustrates that we cannot treat either of the the 2 reasons given here for their seeking to kill him as doctrinally authoritative – instead they represent the Pharisaic thinking, which is subject to error.
In respect of the “equality” Straw Man (as I believe it is), this is especially so as (I think) there’s no evidence Christ actually claimed equality in this exchange – indeed he goes on to point out ways in which he is not equal to the Father, whihc I take to be a refutation of their equality straw man. Whilst you may claim this is functional subordination at work, the lack of a clear “thou sayest” from Christ on any kind of equality makes this a difficult interpretation of this passage for me.
Just think about where these fiercely monotheistic Jews were in their theology – now would have been an ideal point for Christ to confirm his equality / his status as second person of the Trinity, if this were so. Such confirmation is notably absent, and clearly they could have done with some support in getting to that point as presently they believed a claim to equality with God to be a capital crime.
Lastly (for now) on John 5:18, it seems a real stretch from a historical perspective for me to believe that what the Jews meant by “equal” is what you take from it (ontological equality) – in which case we again can’t treat this as reliable doctrinal teaching (of ontological equality).
On your points about what theory may best represent the wider teaching of the NT – these points are valid of course, and clearly we’re unlikely to resolve that question on a consideration of John 5:18 alone. I was merely fascinated that you would view error-prone Pharisaic polemic as supporting ontological equality – indeed that you actively selected it to support that doctrine, out of the whole of the NT.
Shalom
Hi Matt,
A Scripture passage could be both a polemic and a valid theological interpretation. Also, if no other passages taught about the deity of Christ and his role in the creation of the created universe, then I might think that John 5:18 is nothing more than a polemic teaching about Christ’s representational authority.
1. Christ broke the Pharisaic interpretation of the Sabbath but was not a sinner.
2. I have no idea what you mean by “In this case Jesus responds by addressing the ‘equality’ straw man rather than the “sabbath breaker” straw man – presumably he felt it more fundamental?”
3. It looks clear to me that the Gospel of John balanced both the Son’s equality with the Father and the Son’s obedience to the Father in a similar way that I balance ontological equality with my supervisor at work while cooperating with corporate hierarchy.
4. I understand that Samuel Clarke proposed a formidable argument that supports an ontological hierarchy for the Father and Son while Trinitarian ontological equality and monotheism appears more consistent to me.
Do you believe Jesus broke the Sabbath – and hence the Law, becoming a sinner? Same pharisaic polemic, another straw man. In this case Jesus responds by addressing the “equality” straw man rather than the “sabbath breaker” straw man – presumably he felt it more fundamental? Either way it’s pretty clear to me from the following speech that Jesus is refuting the charge that he claimed equality.
James,
Unless I’m missing something, John 5:18 is a piece of Pharisaic polemic – surely not the surest theological foundation?
Matt
Hi Dale,
I agree that many Trinitarians have a flailing view of the Incarnation, but not everybody. Regardless, assuming that John 5:18 teaches that Jesus Christ is ontologically equal to the Father, then I see no deception in Christ not spelling out that his self-limitations were temporary during his earthly ministry, which Philippians 2 helps to explain. Perhaps Christ could have spelled out the temporariness of limitations in Mark 13:32 by saying, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son [during his temporary earthly ministry], but only the Father.” However, that appears unnecessary to me while other parts of the New Testament covered that.
John – yes, I think counterfactual considerations are very important. Sometimes what is not said is very revealing. Some abuse the idea of the fallacy of argument from silence. Silence can be good evidence in cases where we should think it likely that something would have been said, on that occasion, had it been believed. This sort of argument is fallacious only in cases where we should not have that expectation.
And yes, there are deception worries about what was said. A case that a number of unitarian authors press to powerful effect is that statement by Christ that he doesn’t know something. If he really did know it, via his other nature, or in his other mind, wouldn’t that statement be a lie, and not a defensible one? Again, if this doesn’t count as implicitly denying “being God”, i.e. being God himself, or being “fully divine,” then what would count? The ways that trinitarian readers try to understand this passage are very interesting – there’s some real flailing about there!
The downfall of written texts is that they don’t jump up and slap you when you misread them according to a beloved theory. The glory of them is that they pretty much remain the same. So even when generations misread it, the texts stand as what the are, and the next reader can come along and “get it”. This is why you find unitarians strewn through Christian history, but not emanating from some one source, e.g. Socinus.
Dale
I was reflecting recently on what it was that dragged me into the’ non-trinitarian corner’ and the real ‘deciding factor’ was the thought that the NT would have been written completely differently if Christ had declared himself to be God – say at Pentecost.
It would have been the most momentous of all occasions – and reframed almost every debate.
We would not have had all the searching questions such as ‘who do you say that I am?” or statements by Christ about his stated lack of omnipotence or omnicience
You might like to challenge readers to express their views on this subject
Every Blessing
John
Hi, Scott,
Sorry to respond so late. But I just thought I’d add that another difference re the Scholastics and Augustine is that Augustine’s entire book is a response to Eunomian exegesis of Scripture; the famous latter parts of the book are explicitly addressing questions raised in the earlier parts (about how we understand what is said in Scripture). For various reasons, the scholastics all break up this unity into smaller, more easily managed bits; and modern day readers tend to be influenced by some of these bits, and thus have difficulty reading the work as the unity it is, as if Augustine in the middle of the book just took some random fancy to tallying all the psychological triads he could think of in order to find the closest approximation to the Trinity, and as if this could be completely detached from the rest without changing the point (Gareth Matthews’ CUP edition, which is only of Books VIII-XV, pretty much sums up the whole modern (mis)reading of the book). And one effect of this, of course, is that we fail to see how creative the scholastics were with Augustine on the subject of psychological triads, because our reading is merely a deteriorated derivative of theirs.
Now that I’ve mentioned it, this actually is a good example of why I think more history would often be illuminating here: different exegetical choices in reading Augustine’s exegesis of Scripture can potentially give very different accounts of Augustine’s account of the Trinity, and equally of the doctrine of the Trinity itself.
Dale, I too want to congratulate you. Well done!
(And contrary to some of the ideas expressed above, I find this blog to be rather historically insightful. An idea doesn’t have to be presented in a ‘sermon’, ‘hymn’, or ‘biblical exegesis’ to be ‘relevant’. Abstract discussions (say, like we find in much scholastic or contemporary analytic writing) can be relevant or irrelevant, and many hymns, sermons, and passages of biblical exegesis can be relevant or irrelevant too.)
Hi John,
Yes, I plan to do at least one more post in that series. Thanks for your encouraging words!
Dale
I think you have gone a long way towards achieving your stated objective of being widely helpful!
We all tend to suffer from ‘information overload’ so there is a fine balance between ‘essential’ information and ‘the avalanche’!
Are we going to get another post on the evolution of your thinking on the Trinity?
I’d appreciate hearing howyour thoughts have become refined/fine-tuned since your last post on the subject.
Every Blessing
John
1. More posts on the history of early church and imperial church Christology
2. More analysis of identity
3. A list of comment code that may be used on this blog
🙂
I’ve certainly enjoyed your posts and those of your contributors and fellow commenters. I’ve learned much. I’ve started reading through the Blog from it’s commencement, making it all the way up to June 2009 so far. Some great stuff on the metaphysics of the Trinity but not too much on the mechanics of the Incarnation from what I’ve read so far. Perhaps you could develop a Blog post or 5 about how Trinitarian thought could, from the Cappodocians onward, accept a hypostasis as First substance and the ousia/physis as Second substance, according to an Aristotlian theme – then perhaps you could touch on the development of theory of Jesus human physis, how it appears (at least to me) to have been accepted as a generic universal (Second substance?) by Ephesus and Chalcedon (homoousios hemin) and yet it has developed to what today appears to border on Nestorianism, Nature as a second personal subject amongst popular treatments of the Incarnation. This common problem made Buswell (in his Systematic Theology) pretty adament in describing Jesus human nature in terms describing it as a bundle of attributes. Thanks for all the in depth UNBIASED information.
Happy Birthday Trinities! Thank you for all of the online academic resources. 🙂
Dale, I echo Brandon’s comments in #2. It would be great to have some more history here; solid patristic material, talking about councils, creeds, heresies, movers and shakers, etc.
I’d be happy to write a few contributions.
Hi Brandon,
Interesting suggestion. Like you, I’m a history of philosophy guy, and plow through the darndest things.
Every Christian in a sense needs to have a coherent way to think about Father, Son, and Spirit, but not every Christian needs to be a historian.
So in my aim to be widely helpful, much of the abstraction you speak of is deliberate. And a lot of theologians have a perverse way of putzing around with historical ideas and labels as a substitute for thinking through the claims, their bases, and how they are related.
But I agree that you don’t really understand a theory until you understand the reasons behind each of its component claims. And yes, sometimes you need to read the historical sources themselves for this.
I’ve been plowing through a lot of patristic stuff in recent years, but haven’t posted much. Joseph knows a lot of patristic material, but hasn’t posted often. Same with JT. Same with Scott, for the later medievals. We need new or existing contributor with a wide knowledge of patristic sources, who wants to present it to the masses bit by bit. I might pony up some myself, but will probably remain more focuses on the systematic and textual issues.
@Brandon. Re: Augustine’s De Trinitate. I have found that Augustine’s discursive discussion of the trinity in Book 15 provides for different accounts. I talk about this in my article ‘Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus: On the Theology of the Father’s Intellectual Generation of the Word’ (Recherches de Theologie et Philosophie Medievales, 2010). I show that Aquinas, Henry, and Scotus all claim that Augustine supports their view–and in a certain way they are all right. Augustine says things that support each of their views. From what I can tell, each was interested in getting Augustine right. You might say that this is analogous to three literary critics that get three different interpretations of the very same poem, and that each uses textual evidence for his or her interpretation.
It’s clear that there were philosophical differences, and it seems that there were theological differences too (as I argue in my article). Whether these theological differences arise out of different interpretations of Scripture or perhaps out of diverse theological visions that arise from diverse lines in the Catholic tradition(s), is another question. Generally, one theological difference between Aquinas and Henry, on the one hand, and Scotus on the other hand, is that the former believe that the Son/Word has some special role in God’s intellectual life and the Holy Spirit/Love has some special role in God’s love life. Aquinas and Henry differ as to what the role is precisely but they agree that there is some special role. Scotus disagrees. His theological vision is such that each divine person is entirely psychologically perfect without the other divine persons (although the divine essence itself is psychologically perfected/’adequated’ in the Son/Word and Holy Spirit/Love). You might say that the old Logos theology is faintly alive in Aquinas and Henry, but not at all in Scotus.
True; although sometimes they explicitly tell you their reasons, and at times there are heated disputes that provide plenty of evidence for finding out. It’s no different, I think, than any other sort of historical analysis: understanding solutions and answers requires looking into the problems and questions to which they are directed.
I am inclined to be skeptical of your assessment of scholastic authors, which is directly contrary to my own impression; I think much of the tendency to think this way comes from selective reading — we have a tendency to read the more abstract works, and thus miss what they do in biblical commentaries, sermons, and hymns (where those are available) or even, in the abstract works themselves, adaptation of received ideas to new disputes and the concomitant extensive re-thinking and development that brings. And, too, they tend to be innovators (and, more, innovators to whom we are beholden) in understanding what the Fathers were doing in their own exegesis; we tend to read Augustine’s De Trinitate through the filter of issues raised by scholastic thinkers, and thus, I think, miss out on how extensively they rethought Augustine’s Trinitarian theology in light of their own philosophical and biblical concerns. Perhaps you have a particular group of scholastics in mind, though?
@Brandon: Sometimes it is difficult to ‘know’ what the motivations of a past (or even present) philosophical theologian are that explains the theory put forward. After all, theologian A and theologian B might have the same motivations to get certain results, but get there in different ways (different theories consistent with the same conclusion).
There is a lot of interesting stuff from the 12-14th centuries (I’ve tended to find much afterward, though not all, a conscious or unconscious rehashing of medieval discussions.) For example, what I’ve read of Alexander of Hales (early 13th c. Franciscan) is interesting. For me, one of the interesting 13th c. ‘inventions’, so to speak, is to posit that the distinguish personal properties are mind-independent. It seems (I could be wrong) that many patristic theologians (who aim to be consistent with Nicea) think that the divine essence is the lone truthmaker (the only being) for all Trinitarian claims–not so for people like Richard of St. Victor, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus, and others (I have my doubts that Aquinas fits in this group).
So, if you love love love a strong doctrine of divine simplicity, you might think that the infinite divine essence is sufficient to make true all Trinitarian claims. But, if you are less captured by a strong form of this doctrine, then you might go with some sort of constituent ontology for the Trinity.
So, one might explain some theories by the combination of creedal statements and a commitment to a strong account of divine simplicity (which might be arrived at by some cosmological argument for God’s existence, or something akin to it). And, well, other motivations are typically respect for the authority of Augustine (usually his _On the Trinity_, those sometimes other works like _Answer to Maximus the Arian_), sometimes for John of Damascus’s _On the Orthodox Faith_ , and some lesser western authorities (compared to Augustine) like Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose.
A final observation: oftentimes (I won’t ever say always) I find that scholastic authors don’t spend much time doing biblical exegesis to support everything they say about the Trinity, but instead they depend on earlier patristic authors for biblical exegesis.
And on Trinity Sunday, no less!
I’d say: more frequent posts would be nice, but more historical stuff is probably the biggest room for improvement. Much of the discussion on the blog is abstracted from the real history, only occasionally dipping down to give an indication of why anyone would have come to believe these things (Arianism, Cappadocian Trinitarianism, early modern Unitarianism, etc.) at all. It does occasionally happen, but I think the blog often gives the impression that there are just all these different views that people simply made up at random for no apparent reason.
Congratulations Dale! 5 years is a milestone for blogs these days, and you’ve done a lot of hard work in that time.
😀
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