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Is the Trinity logically coherent?

YouTube is so full of junk about Trinity theories, that when I find something intelligent on the subject, I am pleasantly surprised. Here’s a video which deserves more views:

I would add that the question is not well put. It assumes, falsely, that there is some one claim here about God that can be tested for coherence. There is not; it’s like asking if the idea of human free will is coherent. There isn’t really one such idea, but rather there are at least two broad families of claims that must be evaluated separately. Proponents of “human free will” are not all pushing the same thing! Just so, with proponents of “the Trinity.”

As the video illustrates, Christians analytic theologians have tried to parse traditional, creedal language about the Trinity in a way that seems coherent. And they’ve come up with several competing (not complementary) ways to understand that language. The YouTuber here focuses on how language that each Person of the Trinity “is God.”

Some of the things he or she says about the difficult idea of “relative identity” could be put more clearly and correctly; for this see this podcast episode with Dr. H.E. Baber.

Anyway, bravo to any video that does more than recycling apologetics talking-points on this topic! Concern for the truth of the matter requires more than regurgitated defensive moves and over-simple and unclear arguments.

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1 thought on “Is the Trinity logically coherent?”

  1. Hi Dr. Tuggy, please inform me of what the name of the article is, on Contra Modalism, which lists some of the church fathers mentioning the lay-people only believing in one, single person God. Like when Tertulian says of the simple, in chapter 3 of Against Praxeas: “They are constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods, while they take to themselves pre-eminently the credit of being worshippers of the One God; just as if the Unity itself with irrational deductions did not produce heresy, and the Trinity rationally considered constitute the truth.”

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