They tend to carve things like this or this Get it? One self/personal substance/entity (represented by the one head) with three faces, i.e. ways of presenting himself or interacting with us. Or alternately, three ways of living (with or without us in the picture). To be fair, though, one might think that the artists’ inspiration was something like the constitution theory of presented by Mike… Read More »Another way to spot FSH modalists
My paper critiquing the Brower-Rea “constitution” approach to the Trinity has now been published in Philosophy and Theology. I just received the issue this week. Pre-print is on the home page. I worked very hard on this, off and on, for more than two years, and tried (with limited success, I think) to make the discussion intelligible to non-philosophers. It’s a metaphysics-heavy discussion though. My… Read More »publications update
The conversation continues, as we get into to the specifics of Dr. Hasker’s “social” Trinity theory. Dr. Hasker answers many questions, including: How is it that these three divine selves are one God, and not three? What is “perichoresis”? What does it mean to say that their actions respecting the cosmos are “undivided”? What role does the contemporary metaphysical concept of “constitution” play in the… Read More »podcast 28 – Interview with Dr. William Hasker about his Metaphysics and the Tripersonal God – Part 2
In the same issue of Faith and Philosophy (22:1, Jan 2005, 77-86) Bill Craig has a critical response piece. (Available online here.) First, he gives a nice and clear summary of their article, more complete than the one I gave last time. Then he proceeds to object. As with most philosophical theories, when you start objecting, things start getting complicated, and you start to understand the theory in question better.
For starters, what do they mean by “the divine essence”? What sort of thing is this which constitutes the persons? Rea answers in an email which Craig quotes:
All we mean to commit ourselves to is the idea that maybe the Persons are like a hylomorphic [form plus matter] structure: there’s something…we call it the “divine essence”… that plays the role of commonly shared matter, and, for each Person, something else that plays the role of form. (80)
Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 2: Craig’s objections
The next theory up to bat is by philosophers Mike Rea of Notre Dame and Jeff Brower of Purdue University. In some ways Mike reminds me of his mentor Al Plantinga – a tall guy you don’t want to argue against unless you absolutely have to. He’s published many articles in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, and is perhaps best known for this book. He’s presently editing several books, including one of recent essays on the Trinity, which I’m really looking forward to seeing. Jeff is one of the best medieval philosophy specialists around, focusing on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and ethics. I think he has excellent tastes in medieval philosophers. Both of these guys are top-notch, and you’ll always learn a lot from anything they publish. Both of them, by the way, have many papers available to download from their websites, and their other Trinity work will surely be discussed here at some future date. The one I’ll be discussing in this series is here. Theirs is a bold and controversial theory, and one which is quite out of step with the Social Trinitarian views that have been so popular of late.
“Material Constitution and the Trinity” (Faith and Philosophy 22:1, Jan 2005, 57-76) is a difficult and technical article, dense with argument. Philosophers will appreciate how well it’s crafted; I not sure many others can get through it! Here I’ll just lay out the broad lines of it, getting slightly more precise in future installments. Consider Ned the gnome:
How many things are pictured here? Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 1: Ned and Lumpy
Exploring a new argument against any sort of catholic Trinity theory.
“Come on, you tired little brain – don’t fail me now.” (No, I don’t really blog naked – serious thought requires having at least your underpants on.)
Joseph Jedwab does an excellent job (here, comments 3 & 4) pressing me for details, and taking a shot at defending the Brower and Rea theory. I wanted to chew a bit on some issues that Joseph and Ian raise before moving on, offering some corrections and other reflections. (And JT – I want to post your lengthy comment (the second one) as a guest post, so we can discuss the priority issue – email me if you object to this promotion. 
) Any bold type that appears in quotes here has been added by me.
To non-philosophical readers: I apologize for the over-long load of philosopher-lingo that follows. You may want to skip this one! Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 4: pausing and revisiting some issues
This brings the total of R’s to 6. Wish I could say there weren’t more coming! We’ve looked so far at two ways Christians may respond to apparently contradictory doctrines: Redirection and Restraint. We now move on to a third strategy: Resolution. In brief, the Resolver holds that the apparent contradiction can be banished, made to disappear. She doesn’t change the subject (as the Redirector),… Read More »Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 7 – Resolution by Rational Reinterpretation
Congratulations to Scott Williams, trinities contributor and newly minted Oxford University PhD in Theology, on his forthcoming paper: ‘Henry of Ghent on Real Relations and the Trinity: The Case for Numerical Sameness Without Identity’, in: Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 79.1 (2012), will be published. Here is his abstract: I argue that there is a hitherto unrecognized connection between Henry of Ghent’s general theory of real relations… Read More »Scott Williams’s new paper: Henry of Ghent on Real Relations and the Trinity
Like about everything else these days.
In this post I want to explore what to me is the oddest and hardest part to grasp of the constitution trinitarianism. When I first read their paper, I thought they thought God was a stuff – that is, that the term “God” referred to a certain thing, that immaterial stuff they call “the divine essence”. That was wrong on two counts. For as we’ve seen, “the divine essence” isn’t supposed to be a thing (although they think it wouldn’t be a catastrophe if they admitted it was a thing – see their footnote 10). Hence, it can’t be a thing which is identical to God. Second, they don’t think that “God”, say, when used in a Psalm, refers to that stuff. So, what do they think it refers to? It depends. They hold that it’s a systematically ambiguous term. Why is that?Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 5: Ambiguous God-talk
Is the Son God? In the immortal words of Bill Clinton, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Brower and Rea suggest the following classification of meanings of “is” (in logic, “is” is called “the copula” – that which connects the subject and what’s being said of that subject).
Um, no the Clintons aren’t in the original chart in their paper (71).
And yes, Bill is intrigued by the word “copula”. Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 3: The Meaning of “Is”
Swinburne sez: Two thumbs up for the social analogy!
Richard Swinburne is an Emeritus professor at Oriel College, Oxford University, and is widely considered one of the greatest living Christian philosophers. He’s done original work in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and general metaphysics, but is perhaps best known for his work in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. He has a way of squarely facing tough issues, and treating them in original and principled ways. He’s particularly well known by philosophers for his arguments for mind-body dualism, for his cumulative case for the existence of God, and for his bold social trinitarian theory, which I’ll cover in this series. Read More »Swinburne’s Social Trinitarian Theory, Part 1
What I call positive mysterianism about the Trinity is the view that the doctrine, as best we can formulate it, is apparently contradictory. Now many Christian philosophers resort to this in the end, but only after one or more elaborate attempts to spell the doctrine out in a coherent way. On the other hand, some jump more quickly for the claim, not really expanding on or interpreting the standard creedal formulas much at all. These are primarily who I have in mind when I use the label “positive mysterian”.
I ran across a striking version of this recently, in a blog post by theologian C. Michael Patton, who blogs at Parchment and Pen: a theology blog. In his interesting post, he says that all the typical analogies for the Trinity (shamrock, egg, water-ice-vapor, etc.) are useful only for showing what the Trinity doctrine is not.
This contrasts interestingly with what I call negative mysterians. Typically, and this holds for many of the Fathers, as well as for people like Brower and Rea nowadays, they hold that all these analogies are useful, at least when you pile together enough of them, for showing what the doctrine is. Individually, they are highly misleading, and only barely appropriate, but they seem to think that multiplying analogies like these results in our achieving a minimal grasp of what is being claimed. Maybe they think the seeming inconsistency of the analogies sort of cancels out the misleading implications of each one considered alone.
In any case, in Patten’s view, the best you can do is to Read More »Mysterians at work in Dallas
Up to this point in Book 3 Richard has told us several things about love (caritas). We have wondered at his saying there isn’t a perfectly good person if he doesn’t love. We have sorted through some necessary conditions for love such that we wonder whether a perfectly good person p must love another person q if p is to be perfectly good. You might say we’ve been contemplating some divine ethics, or aesthetics, or whatever.
In the previous post I suggested how we might interpret what Richard means by saying (two) divine persons are equal and similar to one another, namely the divine persons have the same disposition of love and the same acts of love (see [T4’] and [T5’]). In the next part of Richard’s argument he returns to his metaphysics of the divine substance which he discussed in Books 1 and 2.Read More »Richard of St. Victor 7 – The Same Divine Substance (Scott)
JT Paasch is a graduate student at Oxford, he’s originally from Utah. He earned a M.Div at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (under Kevin Vanhoozer), then went to Oxford to work with Richard Cross on medieval trinitarian theology. His doctoral thesis is titled ‘The Logic and Metaphysics of the Trinity according to William of Ockham’. I’ve appreciated his thoughtful comments on some of my posts here. I thought the following one was post-worthy.
Be sure to check out his blog, the title of which is either (1) contradictory, or (2) an example of English (or Utahn?) dry humor. I say the charitable interpretation is (2). 🙂 – Dale
In the traditional western view of the trinity, e.g., as the likes of Augustine and Aquinas think, the divine essence basically functions as a nature. Read More »Guest post: JT Paasch on constitution trinitarianism
As I said last time, Arius maintains that the Son is created from nothing (ex nihilo), but Athanasius denies this. Much of the discussion depends on what these authors mean by ‘creation’. Before we go any further then, it will be helpful to establish a working definition for ‘creating something from nothing’. This requires some care, because we’re after a definition that both Arius and Athanasius would agree to. But so long as we make the right qualifications, I think that Arius and Athanasius do agree on what it means to create something from nothing.
Just so we have a rough idea of what we’re talking about, let me begin by describing creation in the following way: something is created from nothing if it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. Now, that’s a very loose way of putting it, but it makes the basic idea clear enough. We know that things get produced with pre-existing ingredients all the time. Masons build walls with bricks and mortar, cavemen make charcoal with fire and wood, humans procreate with sperm and eggs, and so on. But none of that counts as a creation. Something is created from nothing only when it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients.
Read More »Arius and Athanasius, part 2 – Producing something with ‘ingredients’ (JT)
In chapter 24, Richard says that
Certainly one and the same substance is not something greater or lesser, better or worse than itself. Therefore, [there are no inequalities among members of the Trinity] since one and the same substance is certainly in each. …for this reason any two persons [in the Trinity] will not be something greater or better than any one person alone; nor will all three taken together be more [great?] than any two or any one alone by himself… (p. 396)
I take it that in the first sentence here that by “substance” he’s referring to the divine nature, saying that it can’t be greater than itself. That’s hard to argue with. He then argues that no person can be greater than any other. There’s an assumption here that greatness is solely a function of a thing’s nature. I’m not sure why we should accept that. Why not other intrinsic properties as well? One might think, e.g. it is greater to be the Father than it is to be the Son, hence even though they share the divine nature, one might think that the Father is greater than the Son. The inference from X and Y have the same substance to X and Y are the same in greatness, seems invalid. But if we make a valid argument, by adding the premise that greatness is a function solely of essence, we have valid argument, but then, Read More »Richard of St. Victor’s De Trinitate, Ch. 24 (Dale)
Richard of St. Victor is well known for talking about love, and how awesome it is. It might surprise a few people who have only read the popular English translation of Book 3 (the love/ethics? book) that On the Trinity contains six books. The English translation has brought attention to what some contemporary (continental-esque) philosophers would call Richard’s ‘erotics’. What remains to be seen is whatever he says in Books 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6. In this post I’d like to focus on one theme in these other books, which I’ll call Richard’s Constitutional Latin Trinitarianism (= CLT). At the start I must say that I am claiming that Richard suggests a constitutional model of the Trinity and not that he straightforwardly proposes one. At least, Richard can be read to propose such a model–after all, certain later scholastics like Henry of Ghent seem to have read Richard in that way.
Read More »Richard of St. Victor 8 – A Proposed Constitutional Trinitarian Taxonomy (Scott)
How many times have you seen one of these offered as an explanation or illustration of the doctrine of the Trinity? There’s a good article about these here, complete with some links to real medieval examples. Basically, this sort of Shield of Faith (Latin: scutum fidei) diagram seems to have originated in the high middle ages, with the intention of illustrating the doctrine. In general,… Read More »Ye Olde Trinity Diagram: The Shield of Faith
A book review I’ve written of philosophical theologian James Anderson’s Paradox in Christian Theology.