Doing trinitarian apologetics is easy. There are a ton of arguments out there – good, bad, and ugly (OK – mostly the latter two) – for your cutting and pasting pleasure, and the evangelical Christian public knows very little about this topic, other than that it is desperately hard to understand and yet is somehow very important, although we talk about it mostly in combating “cults.” Just keep shoveling out those old arguments, and few will question you. You can rest easy atop a giant heap of prestige, stay firmly within the received folk wisdom, and thunder down ready-made objections against non-trinitarians of various sorts. Since so many will assume that you’re doing God’s work in this, you can speculate irresponsibly without fear of the consequences, which is a real kick. You can even get mean; you can get your Athanasius on. Some things are just so important, after all! You can do this, importantly, while merely gesturing at “the Trinity,” as if everyone knows what this doctrine is. Or you can get away with quick and crude sketches like “One God in three Persons” or “The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, and there’s only one God.” But alas, the standard formulas are read by serious people in clashing ways, and Trinity theories are not one but many. My What is the Trinity? explores many of the options.
Being a thoughtful trinitarian, one who is not only verbally loyal to that broad swathe of catholic traditions, but who actually can tell you what they mean by a “Person” of the Trinity and what they mean by the “Persons” being “one in essence” – that is hard! Whatever you say will be objected to not only by non-trinitarians, but also by trinitarians! You’ll get it from both sides, and some of the objections are going to really sting. And if you’re a Bible-centered Protestant, the more you say, the more you’ll make clear that you are going firmly beyond anything the Bible clearly asserts (whether explicitly or implicitly). You have to get the “right,” creedal answers, whilst pretending to care nothing for the old catholic creeds. Your educated Catholic friends will not be impressed.
A long time critic, or really, heckler, of my work has been the rough-edged polemicist and would-be apologist Steve Hays. I have often pointed out how, in his heresy hunting adventures, he nearly always skates by without actually taking a stand for any Trinity theory. Happily, he has decided to pony up, saying just what the thinks “the doctrine of the Trinity” is.
1. There is one God. I’m using “God” in a categorical sense. In a class by itself. “One” is a relative term. “One” implies a contrast with more than one of something. What’s the point of contrast? In biblical theism, pagan polytheism is the point of contrast. There is “one God” compared to that. The concept of a heathen deity was the concept of a physical, humanoid being who comes into existence and may pass out of existence. Finite in knowledge and power. Often territorial gods (e.g. Hades, Poseidon).
So for there to be one God is for there to be exactly one infinite deity, i.e. a deity not limited in power or knowledge or goodness, or by being confined to a body.
The “Being Itself” crowd which opposes “theistic personalism” would object here, but any New Testament based theology is going to agree.
2. The one God consists of three persons. By “person” I mean an individual with a mind or consciousness, and first-person viewpoint. Each member of the Godhead has a first-person viewpoint. An indexical property.
Here Mr. Hays goes against probably a majority of recent theologians, those who intone that the classical trinitarian formulas don’t employ “the modern (or Cartesian) concept of a person,” i.e. thinking being. These would include recent bigshots like Barth and Rahner, and their legions of theology nerd fans, who would rather dispense with the term “Persons” precisely because people are likely to interpret it as Hays does. Here Hays aligns himself with three-self trinitarians, for whom the “Persons” of the Trinity are so many selves, roughly: conscious, acting, concrete beings, or beings for whom it is most appropriate to use personal pronouns and adjectives. His choice of the term “individual” fits with their being selves, and with their being so many concrete entities/beings. This puts him in a camp with philosophers like Swinburne and Hasker.
He here goes against catholic traditions which affirm both Trinity and divine simplicity, because like W.L. Craig he commits to (“consists of”) the “Persons” of the Trinity in some sense being parts or components of the Trinity. This will not bother us Bible oriented Protestants. But what should bother us is the utter lack of reference to any such tripersonal God in scripture. (This is not to point out that “Trinity” doesn’t occur in scripture, but rather the point that no scriptural term or phrase was then understood to refer to a multi-personal god.)
He is assuming here, that there must be some good argument from the Bible to the reality of this tripersonal God – a key part of apologetics culture. (Beware of unexamined assumptions!)
3. Each person of the Godhead is fully and equally divine. By “divine” I mean having all the divine attributes.He here uses “Godhead” in the modern way, to refer collectively to the Persons of the Trinity, not in its proper meaning, which is “divine nature” or “divine essence.” In any case, he has three beings (see his claims 2, 5), each of which is “fully… divine.” So, three gods/deities. Ruh roh Raggy!
Thus, like Hasker and Swinburne, his view so far straightforwardly implies that there are three gods, three beings each of which has all the divine attributes, even while explicitly insisting that there is only one god, one who consists of three persons! But these “persons of the Godhead” – none of them consists of three persons. So, none of them is the one god, according to claims 1 and 2 above. And yet 2 and 3 imply that each of the three is a god. And presumably, the three differ from one another, so they are not the same god.
Now, Swinburne and (especially) Hasker make a lot of moves to try to get around such problems. Oddly enough, they would take issue with the way he cashes out 1 above. But Hays just presses on.
4. Each person of the Godhead is inderivative.
Trinitarians are split on this one. The more traditional, typically Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed, think it is really, really terrible error, and probably even heresy, to deny traditional claims about “eternal generation” and “eternal spiration.” Even Hasker defends them as central to the tradition. But Bible oriented Protestants, going back at least to mid 19th c., have in my view quite rightly pointed out that such claims are no part whatever of biblical teaching; they are only projected onto the traditional proof-texts. And many of the same people point out that if the Son and Spirit exist because of the Father, this is to say that neither Son nor Spirit exist a se. And if being fully divine requires aseity, as arguably it does, it would follow that only the Father is fully divine. It would seem that Mr. Hays agrees with these recent adjustments to trinitarian speculations.
5. Father, Son, and Spirit are eternally distinct from each other. That’s why the Son can become Incarnate without Incarnating the Father or the Spirit.
If each of those is a being/entity, they will have to be three entities (that is, no pair of them are numerically identical), as they differ. Nothing can at one time or in eternity differ from itself.
A student of scripture will note that there the Father (aka God) and the Son of God are assumed to be numerically two different beings, ones which have actually different from one another. (E.g. God sent his only Son, but Jesus didn’t. Jesus died, but God didn’t.) He will see, though, things are far less clear in the case of God’s spirit/Spirit.
We should note that 5 combined with 3 will require understanding the divine essence/nature to be a universal, a property that can be shared by more than one thing. Again, some Trinity theorists will deny that; “Latin” or one-self theorists like Oxford’s Brian Leftow will urge that the divine nature should be understood as an individual property, in principle unshareable. Others, like Mike Rea, will say that it should be understood as analogous to a shared portion of matter, which simultaneously constitutes non-identical beings. However, Hays might argue that what is common to the three is that they satisfy a certain concept, not that they literally share some property. A nominalist position could make sense here. Although it would cut off the traditional line of argument that somehow the three are one god, or compose one god, because they share this property of divinity, this divine nature or essence.
At this point, Hays has himself in quite a theological mess. There’s only one god, a tripersonal god (1,2). Yet, there are three gods, none of which is tripersonal. (3-5) The theory staggers under its own incoherence. It explicitly asserts monotheism, yet very clearly implies the falsity of monotheism.Moreover, he’s made clear enough that the one God is great and mighty and unique self. (1) But the “Godhead” (Trinity) “consists” of three great and mighty selves. Is this Trinity a mere group of selves, or is it a being, a concrete entity? For “God” to be a mere group of beings seems an abuse of language – a god can’t be a mere group of beings, but is by definition a being in his own right. But if this “God” is a being, is it a fourth divine self? That is, if this “God” which is the Trinity is a self, is it divine or not? If we say yes, we now have a fourth divine person/self, one which is composed of three others! But if we so no, we’re burdened with a “God” who is something less than a god, something which fails to be omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and so on.
Sensing these serious difficulties, our apologist tries to have it both ways.
6. Does God have one mind or three minds? In a sense, both.
So he wants to say that the Trinity has exactly one mind, but also that it (or he?) has exactly three minds. How’s he going to pull that off? And why are we talking about having minds now? Isn’t the problem whether or not the triune God is a divine self?
To take a weaker comparison, suppose you had three individuals with complete telepathic access to each other’s minds. There’d be three minds, but in another respect there’d be a “hive mind” or group consciousness.
In that scenario, there would be one “group consciousness” in the sense, of: what all three of them are thinking, i.e. the contents of their thoughts or experience. But it is not clear that any fourth mind (thinking being, self, person – OR capacity for thinking/being conscious) would be involved. As the case has been described, there are three persons, but no more. With good reason, Hays quickly abandons this analogy, switching to another.
However, Trinitarian psychology is deeper than that. It’s not one mind over and above three minds. Rather, each mind is contained in the other two. To take another comparison, suppose you have two mirrors facing each other and reflecting each other. The righthand mirror contains an image of the left-hand mirror while the lefthand mirror contains an image of the righthand mirror. You could reconstruct each mirror image from the opposing mirror image.
In one respect that’s two images, while in another respect that’s the same image. Due to chirality, the mutual reflections are isometric, yet irreducibly distinct.
So, three minds, each of which “contains” the other two. How does this help with the obvious theological worries above? It is, unfortunately, opaque how his mirror analogy is supposed to help.
Again, the student of scripture will recall that nothing remotely like this is taught in scripture. Hays is off in speculation land, and honestly, seems lost there.
Hays senses that he’s not getting anywhere, so he parachutes out:7. Although the Trinity is inevitably and ineluctably mysterious to some degree, that’s not unique to the Trinity, but has common parallels. As one philosopher observes:
The Trinity…poses a number of intriguing logical difficulties akin to those suggested by the identity of spatio-temporal objects through time and across worlds, puzzle cases of personal identity, and problems of identity and constitution. Philosophical discussions of the Trinity have suggested solutions to the Trinity puzzle comparable to solutions proposed to these classic identity puzzles. http://www.iep.utm.edu/trinity/
The view given so far is self-refuting, being patently incoherent. To dub it “mysterious” is rather indulgent – what we call special pleading. And to suggest that any Trinity theory is going to run into problems like this – well, no, they’re not all so straightforwardly incoherent.
He evidently quotes philosopher Harriet Baber because he thinks it says that ideas about the Trinity are no more problematic than ideas about numerical identity. This is not at all true – but note that his strategy here is just innocence by association. Sure, my views have problems – but so do these others. It ain’t much of a defense!
Again, the student of scripture will recall there are no such learned disclaimers in scriptural teaching about the one God.
In sum, what Hays touts as “the Trinity” is a poorly developed “social” or three self Trinity theory which is apparently incoherent, entailing both the truth and the falsity of monotheism.
Does he think that contradictions can be true? I’m going to charitably assume not. Or does he think that his Trinity theory is a merely apparent contradiction? If the latter, why shouldn’t we take the evident incoherence of his theory as strong evidence for its falsity? It looks like a Christian truth-seeker should just move on, whether or not his main concern is fit with scripture.
Related posts:
Trinity Monotheism Part 8: Bill Fires Back, Part 2
Dan Wallace: 5 Myths About Bible Translation
flailing against the New Testament - part 1
Defining the concept of a trinitarian
podcast 12 - the Apostles' Creed
podcast 270 - Origen's "one God"
Keith Ward on laughing in church, and a comprehensible incomprehensible
more on despising analytic theologians
explaining why God has the ability to love another
Interview with Ray Faircloth, translator of the Kingdom of God Version of the New Testament
Wouldn’t the theories that the Unitarians suggest to explain the Logos also lead to the Logos becoming a part or component of God, or worse still an abstract entity which has no real existence? Has God outsourced his wisdom?
If their Logos was real, continually active and existent wouldn’t that very fact ironically destroy the unity that they espouse and which leads them to reject the trinity?
This seems to me to explain why Unitarians have difficulty coming up with a plausible explanation for the Logos. If they did they would destroy God’s simplicity. Thus they are doomed to failure like the trinitarians who they mock and look down on for being unable to concoct an extra-biblical definition of the trinity.
Paul, I don’t get the jist of what you’re saying here, unless it is just that you’re not convinced by any unitarian reading of John 1.
How many beings created the world, according to the Unitarian?
Paul – it depends on the unitarian. Biblical unitarians answer: one, the Father, which is the what NT plainly and repeatedly teaches. But going back to mid-2nd c, some unitarians have accepted versions of “Logos theory,” and these must say two, God and the Logos, or even three, God, the Logos, and the Spirit. But these still have the Father/God being the ultimate source of creation, so there is a sense in which only one is the creator. Any Logos theorist will distinguish creating directly from creating indirectly.
So Hays is not a polytheist, i.e. he does not believe that there are a multitude of gods. But he is not strictly a monotheist, in spite of his insistence that he is. He is, it seems to me a tritheist, he believes there are exactly three separate individuals who are God. The unity or oneness that he imagines of these three seems nothing more than a conglomeration, a corporation, a family unit, or to use his analogy a ‘hive’. The one God of the Scripture is, in contrast, a single personal individual, which is easily seen by the many statements made about him in Scripture. If Jesus had never come into this world, no one reading the OT would get Hays’ idea of the one God. God has to reinterpreted to fit Jesus into the one God, because everybody knows we can’t have a savior who isn’t fully God.
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