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 mainstream trinitarianism and pluralism: (p. 65) —->
Regarding the “safeguarding”, on the previous page (for some reason, google books no longer has it available), he says:
The doctrine of the Trinity was developed as an interpretive framework to secure the prior doctrine of the deity of Christ. That is to say, if Jesus Christ was God incarnate, but if throughout the period of his earthly life God was also at work sustaining the universe, receiving prayer and otherwise acting outside the person of the historical Jesus, it follows that the Godhead is at least two-fold, namely Father and Son. This was the essential expansion or complication of monotheism required by belief in divine incarnation. And when the Spirit of God… is added, we have a Trinity. Given the doctrine of the Incarnation, which it was formed to protect, a binitarian or trinitarian conception of God was thus inevitable. (p. 64, my emphasis)
He then goes on to endorse a revisionary doctrine of the Incarnation, or rather two of them (from 20th c. theologians Lampe and Baillie), for if we accept the Incarnation doctrine that way, “it no longer necessarily involves the claim to the unique superiority of Christianity which the more traditional [i.e. Chalcedonian] understanding of the Incarnation involved.” (67) Ho hum. I think several writers have refuted his pluralism as well as any philosophical theory has been refuted, and his suggested “up to date” versions of the Incarnation just amount to God’s working through Jesus to a higher extent than he works through the rest of us – it’s basically akin to later Unitarian views of Christ – what sometimes used to be call a “humanitarian” view, which make him a man who is uncommonly godly but not worthy of worship.
What I’m interested in, is this. In what senses, if any, is Incarnation theory “prior to” any trinitarian doctrine? My first reaction, is that it is prior both historically (theories of Jesus’ divinity came first) and in terms of centrality. I mean, in an evangelistic context, or in a scholarly context when trying to explain the essence of Christian doctrine, most Christians lead with the doctrine of the Incarnation, and only later (if ever) get around to saying something about the Trinity. Faithful readers, what say you?
Dale,
I’ve followed this for awhile, and work now subsiding for the briefest of moments (!), I wanted to say “yes” to your question: incarnation first, trinity second. But, I sense the question is worth revisiting from time-to-time, and I’m not finished with the question right now by any sense.
I’m reading Dogmatics In Outline by Barth, which are his lectures on the Apostles Creed; no surprises where he ends up as he begins his chapter titled “Jesus Christâ€:
I quote Barth here, as he creates lots of tension in his writings…duh…but, he’s really transparent here about his logic: Incarnation first, Trinity second. I can’t find the references right now, but Pannenberg alleges that Barth’s Trinity “falls from the sky†in Church Dogmatics. That allegation has some proximity to Barth, as CD I has some descriptions of a Trinitarian doctrine of God that appear to come out of nowhere…and yet, Barth gets it from (or reattaches it to?) his rendering of the Incarnation. I wish I had CD I nearby to verify this, so I’m going from memory here.
So, even someone like Barth, with a great and grand Christology, has some quasi-start with the Trinity going “firstâ€. Sort of…your take on Barth?
Right – I take it that those passages are battling the odd notion that Jesus wasn’t a human being – that the Son of God didn’t come “in the flesh”. They assert that Christ was human. Many people reason, “Well, whatever’s human is essentially human. So this is saying that Christ is essentially human, or in the lingo of Chalcedon, that he has the nature of humanity.” Maybe. What if something can be a human, without essentially being a human? I don’t know how to decide the issue of whether everything that’s human is essentially human (i.e. it would be contradictory to suppose that thing existed while not being human). There are a lot of interesting and thorny issues here regarding the idea of Incarnation. But my present point is that if it’s non-contradictory to think that something could be human without being essentially human, than a possible reading of the passages that assert Christ’s humanity is just that he is human (the author being neutral about whether this is an essential feature or not). And I don’t know how we rule out that reading, in favor of the one that has it (one might thing anachronistically) making a point about Christ’s essence.
1 Jn 4:2; 2 Jn 7…that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.
…That deity, or the fullness of the Father’s deity, couldn’t fully dwell in flesh until Christ, or it could fully dwell “only in Christ,” must say something about the essential nature of Christ.
Michael,
Regarding some of your other points. I agree that the NT patently represents Jesus as divine in some sense, at least in the sense of being worthy of worship, and outclassing all other men, and all angels. How much easier it would be, if it was clear just what notion of “divinity” was in play. But as many have noted, the Bible isn’t a metaphysical textbook.
You’re also right, I think, that the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t part of the content of the NT, but is rather a theory constructed to explain various parts of that content. This is a point of widespread confusion, I think. Evangelicals, for their part, sometimes admit what I’m saying, but on the other hand, especially in apologetics contexts, want to present the doctrine as logically deducible from Scripture, as though it is in fact implicitly asserted therein. Well, both can’t be right. It either is or isn’t part of the Bible’s content (including both explicit and implicit assertions, and even claims that are simply assumed by any assertion therein). An interesting case in point: this poll.
Regarding your third posting, if I understand you, you’re asserting what some theologians do when in a skeptical mood – that all we can know is how God appears to humanity, and not how God really is in himself, and that the scriptures only deal with the former.
I’m not sure what to say to this. As far as I can tell, the doctrine has nearly always been assumed to deal with how God is “in himself”, i.e. how is, and would have been even if he never created anything. But there is a strain of traditional theology, not obviously consistent with what I just said, that holds that we can’t to any degree understand how God is, but we can only understand how he ain’t. The traditional doctrines which say that all God-talk is analogical, are supposed to reconcile that claim with our desire, as Christians, to go around asserting a whole lot of positive claims about God – about how God is, not about how he isn’t. Here I can only say that I’m dubious about the success of those analogy theories, and so I default to what seems to be the Bible’s assumption, that we do grasp some aspects of God, to some degree, e.g. when we say that God is wise, powerful, or loving. The issue is a knotty one, but the first step, I think, is asking if and why we should hold that God so transcends us that not a single concept we can form literally applies to him.
Hi Michael!
Thanks for the helpful and thoughtful comments. You raise a ton of points – feel free to press any further, if I don’t respond enough here.
Regarding “numerical identity”, this concept is as clear and precise as any we have. See here.
Whatever things there are, each one much be self-identical. When we read a text, we try to figure out which terms the author is using are co-referring (names for the same thing) and which are not. We must do this for the Bible, as we do for any book. e.g. “Abraham” and “Abram”, “Paul” and “Saul” And relevantly here, “Yahweh”, “God” (in most instances), and “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”. If terms co-refer, it is to one, self-identical thing. So whatever is true of “Yahweh” must also be true of “the Father” (when those terms refer to the same thing).
As an illustration of how this concept is helpful, consider your claim that the NT identifies Jesus with the God who created the world. Several passages seem to say the Jesus, or the pre-existent Son, created the world. And of course, the Bible says that God created the world. So, Jesus must just be God, right? But then, some passages (Eph 3:6, 1 Cor 8:6, Heb 1:2) which can be read as asserting that God created the world through or by means of or “in” Christ. *If* that is right, and “God” and “Christ” are co-referring, then it would follow that Christ created the world through (etc.) Christ. But that is dubiously coherent, and doesn’t seem to be what the texts are saying. So a consistent reading would be that “Christ” and “God” don’t corefer, but both can truly be called the creator of the world, though God is the creator in a more ultimate sense. So the way the concept of numerical identity helps, is this. If X and Y are identical, then whatever’s true of one must also be true of the other. If something is true of one but not the other, then we know that X and Y are not identical.
Perhaps it’s also important to say that the concept of numerical identity so defined is just a part of common sense; it’s bound up with the concept of an individual entity, with the concept of a single thing. Thus, using this tool on the text is just part of exercising due diligence in reading and interpreting it; no philosophical baggage is thereby loaded into it, in my view.
Hick’s pushing something even less consonant with Christianity than modalism. He thinks that “Yahweh” is a real thing, but is mind-dependent, and is no more or less real than “Krishna”, “Vishnu”, “Allah”, and any other deity that has seemingly been experienced by religious people. That is, he’s pushing that a completely ineffable Ultimate is experienced in all the main religions of the world, just in different ways (i.e. as different apparent deities). This (to many people initially attractive) theory, in my view, faces devastating problems. But I digress.
Hi Joel,
Thanks for the comment. I’m not sure what parts of 1 & 2 John you’re referring to. But as to Colossians, what you cite is a popular proof-text for the idea that Christ is “fully divine”. It is far from clear that this is a point actually contained in that book. Back back in their day, the challenge seems to have been from those challenging Christ’s true humanity, not his divinity. Note that Col 1:3 seems to identify God and the Father of Jesus. 1:15 calls Jesus the “image of” God. Now 2:9 (cf. 1:19) is a remarkable sentence – that in Christ the “fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form”. This is often read as saying something about the metaphysical essence of Christ, that he is essentially divine, in fact completely divine. That’s one way to take it. However, it could be that God’s, that is, the Father’s deity is in view, the idea being that God’s nature “lives in” Christ insofar as God is working to accomplish his purposes through Christ’s life. His deity dwells there “fully” in that only in Christ, does a human life “fully” represent how God is. If this were the idea, then the passage would be compatible with Christ being divine, or not, as it would be making a point about God’s action through Christ, not about Christ’s essential nature. (compare: 2 Cor 5:19).
When I speak of the Incarnation as being temporally and logically prior to the doctrine of the trinity, I am at least there agreeing with Hicks that here we are speaking of human awareness and reflection.
If one were to wish to instead speak of the actual ontological being of God, and whether God is necessarily triune always, before the incarnation, and before time, and after time – then I think we are speaking of a God whom we cannot know. We tend then to collapse upon ourselves and must speak instead of what we are required, or perhaps destined, to imagine.
Cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin, and all that.
Not that it isn’t a worthy topic of conversation and consideration and of course, study – certainly it is – but it really can’t be, in the economy of God’s revelation, all that important. By which I mean, important for us to really know.
Else, I, from within this creaturely skin, can only imagine that God would have told us more about it, so we would have to guess … er, I mean philosophize … so much about it.
With regard to the question of whether the notion of the Incarnation is both temporally and logically prior to the doctrine of the Trinity, one would think the answer is yes.
Such a doctrine as the trinity is not adopted unless by necessity. In and of itself, it does not seem to be something that would draw people to the Christian faith; on the contrary, it is a difficult pill to swallow if presented as a part of the evangelistic effort.
It is instead a product of believing Christians who are reflecting on what might/must be the case based on the affirmations of their confession and faith.
No doubt it did not take long to begin to wrestle with this, but still it is something of an “after market” addition – even if necessary and unavoidable, growing “organically” from accepted faith and confession.
One may end with a Trinity, but one does not easily start there. I tend to agree that the Incarnation plants the seeds of necessity which eventually drive to the doctrine of the trinity.
It only confuses things, I think, to introduce a concept like “numerically identical to” Yahweh when trying to understand what it means to speak of Jesus being divine. In fact, “numerically identical” doesn’t even seem to mean something. Though some of the language of faith in the NT approaches formal philosophical categories, most does not, and trying to impose strict philosophical grids upon such language violates it easily.
What is clearly confessed in the NT, I think, is that Jesus is divine. Putting aside Paul’s comments about “many gods” for the moment, I think it is also a confession of NT faith and worship that there is but one God. Jesus cannot be divine without being that God, and not another.
This does not imply absolute identification in the sense of sharing every boundary – what I suppose was intended by the phrase “numerically identical.” Nor does it imply otherwise, necessarily. It doesn’t really imply much of anything in terms of HOW Jesus is divine – it is a confession of faith that He is, and that this means that he is in some fashion identified with Yahweh. Identified in his identity, not just that he is aligned with Yahweh and represents Yahweh. Jesus “is” Yahweh.
I return to the first verses of John’s gospel, where the language clearly intends the reader to understand that the allusion is to Genesis 1 in the Septuagint. “In the beginning …” “All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created.” This Logos was with God, and was in fact God – the very God Who created all things (Elohim).
That’s the kind of “divine” Jesus is, according to the confessional language of the New Testament – the kind of divine who is the Divinity who created our world.
The question is begged, by such confessions, as to how this could be, or how it is. The logical issues which boggle the mind are not addressed. Jesus is certainly identified with the creator God but the philosophical notion of “identity” is not addressed.
I don’t think anyone can proof-text a full-blown trinitarian doctrine out of the language of the New Testament – at least, certainly not in a systematic sense of the doctrine. Language of confession and worship is not ignorant of the elements of reason, but does not stop at the dry formalism of philosophy.
But I do think a required starting point if we are reading John, is that we understand that he intends us to understand that Jesus is, somehow, the God who created the heavens and the earth.
I know that John’s not the earliest of the writings but is earlier than previously thought, and he has the benefit of reflecting a bit on earlier confessions.
Hick is joining ranks with the Oneness Pentecostals, the original snake-handlers, with a rather blatant modalism. He might be right, in the end, who knows? But it seems the easy way out. If one does arrive there, it would have to be by a longer and more tortuous path to satisfy that the dues have been paid.
Well I took divine in what I thought was the most typical meaning i.e. being a deity. I take “being a deity” to mean that the being in question is supposed to be a god, which implies more than being worthy of worship.
I tend to think the people who think they can proof text 3 and 4 from the scripture are either poor scholars or intellectually dishonest. Hmm maybe I shouldn’t make that so strong. At this point in life I’ve become accustom to addressing such people with what I take to be the clear testimony of the text. However, I’ll admit that it gets dull answering the same questions about the same verses time and again. These days I tend to shift the burden to them. For example, they have answer why many of their best scholars think 3 and 4 are at best inchoate in the scripture.
Early on, as we see in 1 and 2 John and Colossians 2, the church was concerned about the humanity of and the fullness of deity in Christ. The separation of docetists and Ebionites from the early Church is evidence of the importance of Christ’s humanity and divinity early on.
Controversy surrounded Christ’s humanity and divinity, making it a priority.
As for which theories came first, what say the Jews? What would Isaiah say? or Moses?
As for Hick, he sounds like a conspiracy hunter.
…Why “add the Spirit” to the formula? Is it humanity’s “inherent bias”?
Ah – I see what you’re thinking. This is where it gets sticky! The thing is, the word “divine” doesn’t come with a ready-made definition. People tend to just load it with whatever meaning suits their current purpose. If divine means, “is numerically identical to YHWH”, then your 1 comes out true. But if (on the lower end) “divine” means something like “worthy of worship”, then your 1 is false, and even analytically false. What if “divine” means “has all the essential attributes of YHWH”. Then, 2 might be analytically false. I think NT readers should agree that 4 is unacceptable. But the choice between 1-3 is much less obvious. And 3 has the unclear notion of “ontological equality” – is this inconsistent with the idea of “eternal generation” or not? As to whether only 4 entails the Incarnation – that depends! Does the divine essence itself become incarnate, or is it only the Person of the Son? There certainly have been people who’ve wanted to affirm a doctrine of Incarnation, and held to one of 1-3, denying 4. I guess I’m feeling Socratic today – just raising a bunch of questions without answering any! Here’s a slightly less wishy-washy comment – I think one can make a case for some sort of progression like the one you give, though you have to answer the legions who think they can proof-text 3 and/or 4 from the NT or from the whole Bible.
I pooched my previous post. I had meant to say that some early binitarian views entail incarnational ones. If that’s true then theories of the incarnation precede theories of the trinity in virtue of the fact that binitarian views precede trinitarian theories. I was thrown by your consideration of Jesus’ divinity, because I take it that Jesus could be divine without being god incarnate. I take it that at least something like the following views are in play:
1. Christ is worthy of worship but not divine
2. Christ is worthy of worship, and divine, but subordinate to the father.
3. Christ is worthy of worship, divine, ontologically equal to the father.
4. Christ is worthy of worship, divine, and identical to the father.
I think one is clearly in the NT, but two is what I had in mind when speaking of binitarianism. I’m inclined to think there is a historical procession in thinking from one to four, with four entailing the incarnation. All four though precede trinitarian formulas.
Hi Matthew,
By “binitarian developments”, do you mean just the worship of Christ? I’m not sure that’s a development at all – it’s right in the NT. But if you mean the idea that Christ is in some way completely ontologically equal with the Father, that seems much later.
Dale
I certainly think theories of Jesus’ divinity came prior to any Trinitarian doctrine. Early texts that display binitarian positions seem to provide good evidence for this. I’m inclined to think though that the idea of the Incarnation does come after binitarian developments.
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