What is essential to the gospel, according to Luke? Part 5
“Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”
“Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”
The apostles testify to God the creator and his holy servant Jesus.
Peter and John address the Jewish leadership.
An apostolic account of what is truly essential to the gospel.
What must you sign off on, to make the deal?
Is “the doctrine of the Trinity” essential to salvation? To Christianity?
James Goetz and Corby Amos on the inconsistent triad about Jesus dying.
A pound of misunderstanding and irrelevance together with a little pinch of relevant but inadequate response.
Thanks to Dr. Anderson for his carefully-reasoned reply to my Challenge. I have always been a fan of both him and his work, and RTS students are lucky to have such a capable and humble professor teaching them apologetics, philosophy, and analytic theology. I was at first puzzled by his use of an allegedly parallel argument – usually, an objector wields one of those in order… Read More »On Dr. James Anderson’s “Brief Response” to the Challenge
Do biblical theophanies show that the Challenge argument is unsound?
“Stand aside, puny moderns. Or postmoderns. Or whatever you are.”
I thought that Scott and Joseph made some really penetrating comments on the first two posts in this series. Here I want to recap them, so we can discuss how Henry of Ghent (c. 1217-93) a.k.a. The Solemn Doctor would interpret our chart (see the first two posts), specifically, the second, modalistic interpretation I offered.
First, Joseph comes in with some weighty objections to that model (summarized and expanded by me from his comments).Read More »The Latin Trinity Chart 3 – Henry of Ghent to the rescue
In three of the last four posts (Rick St. Vick 6, 7, 9, 10) I surveyed some of Richard of St. Victor’s arguments for why there must be at least three divine persons. (We’ve yet to see an argument for there aren’t more than three persons.) Here I’d like to respond to these, and to one JT’s responses too.Read More »Richard of St. Victor 11 – Response to the Argument From Love Thus Far (Scott)
An interesting and much more recent statement from John Hick, along the lines of my last post. …Since then [around 1993] the focus of much theological discussion has moved from christology to the doctrine of the Trinity. This is partly because theology always does go the rounds of the traditional topics – creation, sin, incarnation, atonement, Trinity, church, heaven and hell – and after a… Read More »Is the doctrine of the Incarnation prior to & the source of trinitarian doctrine? – Part 2
I was reading famous philosopher of religion John Hick‘s contribution to the 1982 book The Concept of Monotheism in Islam & Christianity, and ran across an interesting idea. Let me put it in context. If you know anything about Hick, you can guess that in his chapter he’s is ultimately trying to promote his unique theory of religious pluralism. Here’s the connection he sees between… Read More »Is the doctrine of the Incarnation prior to & the source of Trinitarian doctrine? – Part 1
Evaluating three proposed reasons why God would be motivated to incarnate.
Who needs the Bible when you can gesture at some philosophical speculations?
“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials liberty; in all things, love.” So far, so good. But, what does Scripture say is essential teaching about Christ and about God?
I Can’t Stop Loving You – actually, it’s worse than that – I can’t not love you!
Alexander Pruss is an excellent philosophy of religion dude at Baylor. His second PhD dissertation was on possible worlds. Don’t ask me to explain what his first one was on! 🙂 He’s got about a million original ideas on almost as many topics, a lot of which get posted at his creatively-titled blog, Alexander Pruss’s Blog 🙂 as well as at The Prosblogion.
He recently weighed in (comments #8-9) on my attempted argument against social trinitarian arguments. Here are the most relevant bits:Read More »Pruss on essentially loving beings
“This clears it all up, right?”
Anselm: “Um, no. I must bestow upon it the analytic frown of uncomprehension.”
(image credit)
I used to think I had a great objection to Anselm’s famous ontological argument. (Bear with me – this has something to do with social trinitarianism.) The argument, at least many forms of it, basically goes like this. If it is logically possible that there’s a Greatest Possible Being (i.e. a being such that there’s no logical possibility of there being a greater one), then it is necessary that there’s a Greatest Possible Being. More simply: if it’s possible (non-contradictory) that God exists, then it’s also necessary that God exists (i.e. it is inconsistent to suppose God not existing). (For more, see here and here. For more than you’d ever want to know, here.)
Many critics have replied like this:
I’d be a sucker to grant your premise. Why should I think that the notion of a Greatest Possible Being is the notion of a possible thing at all? Read More »perfection, the Trinity, and impossible beings (Dale)
Was 381 the dawn of imperially enforced confession of a triune God?