Dr. Randal Rauser interviews Dr. Michael C. Rea on the Trinity

Here. It’s an excellent, substantial discussion, posted in December 2014. If you don’t know who Dr. Rea is, he’s a leading Christian philosopher, specializing in metaphysics, and co-coiner of the useful term “analytic theology.”

Here’s a rough guide to the interview, in case you want to skip around, or review after the fact, with a few sparse comments in italics.

• 1-12:20 Randal reads quotes about how difficult a subject the Trinity is. Dr. Rea admits that it is apparently contradictory, and makes the point that if you have good reasons to believe something, you don’t reasonably abandon it upon first discovering an apparent contradiction.
  • Quite true. But can a Christian get to a point where it’s no longer reasonable? Anomalies eventually force one to either suspend judgement, find a way around, or re-evaluate the evidence.
• 12:15 – 15:43 Augustinian psychological analogies. Bad.
• 15:43 – 19:29 split brain experiment analogies as discussed by Trenton Merricks, and “consubstantial.”
• 19:30 – 27:06  Cerberus (the mythical three-headed dog) and other part-whole analogies.
  • Dr. Rea says some surprising and interesting things here.
  • And he lodges some strong objections to the Trinity theory of William Lane Craig.
• 27:07 – 32:57 Dr. Rea expounds his own view. This is where our friend Gumby comes into it. 🙂 Gumby and his clay are not the same thing, but are the same material object. (He’s applying his views on the metaphysics of constitution and material objects here.) Similarly, we count hand and fist as one material object (but two things) – the hand constitutes the fist. Though God is not a material object, he contains something like matter (his divine nature) and form (the defining properties of the Persons) – so we’ll count one God, and three Persons – one divine nature formed in three different ways. Each Person is constituted by the one nature.
  • It’s not clear to me, still, whether he means it to be a rational reinterpretation, or merely one of many half-decent analogies.
• 32:58:Dr. Rauser asks: but is this monotheism? If the whole Greek pantheon is divine, that’s not monotheism, right? Dr. Rea – no, it wouldn’t be. But that nature would be divided – in the Trinity, the divine nature (the “Godhead”) is undivided in space and time (or space-time).
• 34:25 Dr. Rauser: But isn’t there a division in the Incarnation? Dr. Rea: no. What if there were multiple incarnations? Hard to say… is that even possible? What about the “Trinitophany” in Genesis 18? No incarnation there, much less three of them. Maybe it’ be analogous to human time travel.

If you want to think through Dr. Rea’s Trinity theory, here are some materials to work with:

• here’s his original co-authored paper, “Material Constitution and the Trinity” (under Research, 2005). See also “Understanding the Trinity” there.
• here’s a summary by me.
• And here’s my own critical evaluation.
• On belief in apparent contradictions, see this introduction and this critical evaluation of Dr. James Anderson’s developed mysterianism.