“trinitarians,” trinitarians, and me
In the New Testament “God” is nearly always the Father. But what follows from that, exactly?
In the New Testament “God” is nearly always the Father. But what follows from that, exactly?
How can they respond to an argument which shows that they collapse the Father/Son distinction?
Arguing about what is essential to a trinitarian theology, and about a seemingly incoherent Trinity theory.
How does one objectively evaluate a definition of a concept, e.g. trinitarian or unitarian?
Last time we looked at this inconsistent triad of claims, one of which we must deny: The New Testament gospels agree in their core claims about Jesus and God. Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t teach that Jesus is God. John teaches that Jesus is God. We can look at this from two directions. First, we can ask what the evidence for each of 1-3 is.… Read More »Do the Gospels disagree about Jesus and God? Part 2 – Counting the Costs
Last time I tried to analyze Richard’s argument in ch. 22 that his view preserves monotheism. This time, I critically evaluate the argument. Is it sound?
It goes like this:
What shall we make of this argument? Why believe premise 1? Richard says,
…if it is agreed that omnipotence can do everything, it will be able to carry out with ease what any other power would not be able to do. For this reason it is clear that only one omnipotence can exist. (ch. 22, p. 394)
I have a couple of problems with this. Read More »Richard of St. Victor’s De Trinitate, Ch. 22 – part 2 (Dale)
Continuing the conversation, apologist Tom Gilson stands by his claim that the NT doesn’t teach that Jesus had faith during his earthly life, and indeed, tellingly declines to say that. He says, in part, So the NT clearly comments on, and specifically names, many of Jesus’ virtues. If Dr. Tuggy is right, and the reason Jesus’ faith is not named as such is just because… Read More »Did Jesus have faith in God? – Part 5
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… Read More »Islam-Inspired Modalism – Part 3
I woke up this morning, and realized that there is a problem with how I’ve been defining the concept of a unitarian. In this post, I will attempt a definition of the concept of a trinitarian, after reviewing what is required of a good definition. Next time, I’ll try to define the concept of a unitarian.
According to the textbook I have used for years in my critical thinking class, a good definition should:
What is a trinitarian?
Definition 1: someone who believes in a triune god.
Prolific blogger (at Triablogue) Steve Hays and I have recently been discussing various things.
At the end of a recent exchange, I basically said: Dude, I don’t know what you think “the” doctrine of the Trinity is. What, in your view, does it mean to say that God is a Trinity?
He’s now responded here.
In this post, I try to understand just what he’s claiming, in other words, what he takes trinitarianism (rightly understood) to be.
This is a bit risky, because I think he’s confused about the concept of identity, and I’m trying to hear a self-consistent view here.
The first job in critical thinking is carefully listening to what the source at hand is saying. Here I listen carefully, editing out a lot of his methodological musings and terminological quibbles, trying to get to the meat of his view.
I think the meat starts here:Read More »What is the Trinity? A Dialogue with Steve Hays – Part 1
What I call positive mysterianism about the Trinity is the view that the doctrine, as best we can formulate it, is apparently contradictory. Now many Christian philosophers resort to this in the end, but only after one or more elaborate attempts to spell the doctrine out in a coherent way. On the other hand, some jump more quickly for the claim, not really expanding on or interpreting the standard creedal formulas much at all. These are primarily who I have in mind when I use the label “positive mysterian”.
I ran across a striking version of this recently, in a blog post by theologian C. Michael Patton, who blogs at Parchment and Pen: a theology blog. In his interesting post, he says that all the typical analogies for the Trinity (shamrock, egg, water-ice-vapor, etc.) are useful only for showing what the Trinity doctrine is not.
This contrasts interestingly with what I call negative mysterians. Typically, and this holds for many of the Fathers, as well as for people like Brower and Rea nowadays, they hold that all these analogies are useful, at least when you pile together enough of them, for showing what the doctrine is. Individually, they are highly misleading, and only barely appropriate, but they seem to think that multiplying analogies like these results in our achieving a minimal grasp of what is being claimed. Maybe they think the seeming inconsistency of the analogies sort of cancels out the misleading implications of each one considered alone.
In any case, in Patten’s view, the best you can do is to Read More »Mysterians at work in Dallas
The “Great Trinity Debate” has been interesting, exhausting, and a bit hard to follow. It would’ve been better to have somewhat shorter posts and required post-rebuttals. As it is, some of the debate has been tucked away in the comments of the posts, while the blog plugs away on other topics. This sort of substantial, quality content shouldn’t be hidden in comments.
I previously called round 3 a draw. But my call was premature; Burke kept punching, in a long set of comments (#4-15), which substantially strengthened his case. Bowman has left them unanswered for about a week, I believe, as I post this. I re-call this round now for Burke.
Revised score up through round 4:
Bowman: 0
Burke: 3
draw: 1
What he does is address some important texts which as usually read, assert or assume the claims that Jesus created the cosmos, or just that he pre-existed his conception. I can’t summarize Burke’s long exegesis, but I’ll hit a few highlights in this post. What he shows, drawing on some recent scholarship, is that the texts in question can be given non-arbitrary, plausible readings which are consistent with humanitarian christology.
Burke also rebuts some of Bowman’s points re: prayer to Jesus. Bowman argues that Christ can’t be a creature, and must be omniscient (hence divine), if he can hear and answer prayers. This argument is hardly a knockdown one.
Read More »SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 3 Re-evaluated (DALE)
In this guest post, our friend Mario Stratta expounds the prologue of the gospel according to John. – Dale I believe that the Prologue to John’s Gospel speaks about the Incarnation of God’s Word (Logos) in/as the “man called Jesus” (John 9:11). Where I disagree with the Trinitarians, Subordinationists and Arians, is that the Word had a personal subsistence (hypostasis), distinct from that of God,… Read More »The Incarnation of God’s Logos (John 1:1-18)
I’ve been meaning to get back to Ben for a while, to continue our dialogue on biblical monotheism and related matters. (Previous post.) In his reply, Ben says, I gather that Bauckham affirms (in different words) that monotheism involves, (1) A strict partitioning of reality into divine and not-divine portions; and (2) The unity of the divine portion of reality, i.e. the divine reality acts… Read More »more on Ben Nasmith on monotheism
To follow up on Kruger vs. McGrath: in light of what Mark either explicitly says or clearly implies, Dr. McGrath is correct. Not only does Mark not teach that Jesus is God himself, but he plainly implies that Jesus is not God himself. For Mark, God is someone else, the one who sent, empowered, worked through, raised, and exalted Jesus. Jesus is the human Messiah, the unique Son of God,… Read More »Mark: Jesus is God’s Son, the Messiah
In round 1, Burke explains that he’s a biblical unitarian, not a “rationalist” or “universalist” unitarian. Further, he confesses that: Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but not God himself and The Holy Spirit is the power of God, but not God himself. Further, The Bible is the inspired Word of God and the sole authoritative source of Christian doctrine and practice. He neither… Read More »SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Burke 1
Not possible. But why? (image credit)
Here are some rough-draft thoughts on another line of thinking associated with social trinitarian theories.
God is perfect. Arguably, an absolutely perfect being could not fail to be “well off” – in classical terminology, a perfect being must be happy, must be in a “blessed” condition. Part of perfection is independence. One kind of independence is the kind which comes up when discussing ontological or cosmological arguments for God’s existence – the idea of aseity, or existing but not because of anything else. But here’s another kind of independence or self-sufficiency: not requiring any thing (i.e. any fact not entailed by your existence) to be well off, to have a good life. Perhaps we could call it the divine property of security, or independent or self-sufficient happiness.
Is God as well off as he could possibly be? Arguably not,Read More »Reflections on the Impossibility of a truly lonely Christian God (Dale)