Dr. Timothy George is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School and a very active evangelical author and editor. I was curious to see if his Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? also exhibited Islam-Inspired modalism.
This is a lucidly written, brief, popular book, which would be a good place for many Christians to pick up a lot of basic information about Islam and how it differs from Christianity (or at least, Reformed Christianity). Here, I’m only going to look at it with a view towards the version of trinitarianism it presents.
Does it exhibit Islam-Inspired modalism? Not clearly. But his chapters on Christology and the Trinity provide an accurate snapshot of mainstream American evangelical thinking on these matters. I’ll list some of these typical features, which I’ve seen in dozens of other places. (This is no shot against George – he isn’t trying to be original here, but only to communicate mainstream Reformed evangelical thought to a wide audience.)
- Rhetorical exaggeration.”The Trinity is the basis for the entire Christian life – the basis of everything we believe and teach.” (55) “…the Bible itself is thoroughly Trinitarian from first to last.” (59)
- the only objectionable kind of modalism is what I call serial, phenomenal modalism. (77)
- No evidence of thoughful interaction with sophisticated non-trinitarian Christian arguments. Also, no discernible awareness of the debate about the best way to understand the doctrine by philosophers and some theologians in the last 30 years or so.
- An unexplained allegiance to the formulations of the early church councils, the thought apparently being that they were either (1) only drawing out what was implicitly in the Bible concerning the Incarnation and the Trinity, or (2) inventing the only extra-biblical theoretical framework that allows one to really make sense of what is in the Bible. (59, 132)
- A strong appeal to mystery. We can neither explain nor understand the Trinity. (56) Not even in the afterlife will we understand it, but nonetheless, we’re obligated to believe it, and base our lives on it. (66-7) This lack of understanding, I suppose, is supposed to render #6 and #7 neither surprising nor objectionable. To those who object: “…this is how God has revealed himself to be.” (85, original emphasis) What are the three “persons” (etc.) precisely? We don’t know. (85)
- Some statements which seem to imply something like eternally concurrent noumenal S- or FSH modalism. “To say ‘Jesus is Lord’ is the New Testament way of declaring the deity of Jesus Christ – of affirming his essential oneness with the Father.” (62) “…Jesus our Redeemer – is of the same essence as the Father. We are not talking about two different gods. We are talking about only one God, but this one God has forever known himself as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” (65, italics are original emphasis)
- Some statements which seem to imply the falsity of S-modalism (and anything that implies S-modalism). God and Christ “belong inseparably together”. (77) “The Father of Jesus is the God of Israel – the God of the Old Testament…” (65) The Son is eternally begotten from the Father. (79)
- Closely related to #7 and #5: murky social trinitarian ideas. “The mystery of God’s unity is thus a unity of love. When we peer into the heart of God, we find not solitary absoluteness – the Alone with the Alone – but the mystery of eternal love and relationship, a begetting without a beginning and an indwelling without an ending.” (80, original emphasis) God lives “in the fulsome fellowship of three divine persons eternally united in being, relationship, and love. …In the biblical view, relationship is constitutive for God himself: The Father gives, the Son obediently receives, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from both of them.” (82, original emphasis in italics) The Christian God is not “three individuals ‘selves,’ each impervious to the needs and reality of the others. The Christian God is an unbroken unity of infinite intimacy and holy love. (86) “What makes God God is the relationship of total and mutual self-giving” between the three. (132)
- While all elements of the Constantinopolitan creed are affirmed, the main interest is really the ontological status of Jesus (fully divine, and fully human), the main motive being that Christians must believe in a Jesus who is worthy of worship. (62-4, 77-9, 103-4) The doctrine of the Incarnation is also a mystery to be adored. (103-4).
With the exception of 9, I’ve offered some critical thoughts on all of this in my published work, and for some, here on the blog as well. My main point now is that the version of the doctrine of the Trinity offered here is unclear – too unclear, really, to criticize. I can’t attribute either a form of modalism or a kind of trinitarianism incompatible with modalism to him.
What does it mean to say that the Three are all “the same essence”? There are many mutually exclusive options, and I couldn’t really say which one Dr. George has primarily in mind. I’m not really singling out him, though. The complacency and unclarity in 1-8 above are very common in (1) professional theological literature, (2) apologetics literature, and (3) popular evangelical literature. Christians philosophers have, with some success, started to sort out the options, and evaluate them on theological, philosophical, and biblical criteria. To my dismay, though, this work is little known outside the realm of Christian philosophers, graduate students in philosophy, and a younger generation of trained theologians.
Note: I wrote this post in 2006. Evidently, I never published it. It is part of this series. I now prefer to call this sort of modalism “one-self trinitarianism,” reserving “modalism” for the sort of modalism which catholic theologians find objectionable.
