podcast 327 – Dr. Licona’s historical case that Jesus considered himself to be God – Part 2
Can we establish on historical grounds that the historical Jesus thought that he was God?
Can we establish on historical grounds that the historical Jesus thought that he was God?
There’s a lot of meat in Burke’s second round, and both his and Bowman’s second rounds were cleaner, more free of stray punches than round 1. Here I offer some summaries and brief comments on Burke.
In the last three posts, I explained Richard’s argument for why there must be two distinct persons who charitably love each other. Here I want to raise some objections to three of Richard’s claims.
Read More »Richard of St. Victor 5 – Evaluation of the argument thus far (JT)
Hippolytus (c. 170-236) is an interesting, if obscure character. He was a presbyter in Rome, and on some reports, was a bishop of Rome – either a pope on an anti-pope, depending on how you look at it (he would have been a rival bishop, if this is true, to either Zephyrinus or Callistus). (See the entry on him in this book, pp. 164-5)
He was especially concerned to combat “monarchian” theology. In my view, it is a huge undertaking to get clear what on just what “monarchian” theology was all about. In any case, it is clear that the Hippolytus re-asserts the two-stage logos theory against it, the same sort of theory we saw in Ireneaus. He may have been a disciple of Irenaeus.
God, subsisting alone, and having nothing contemporaneous with Himself, determined to create the world.Read More »trinitarian or unitarian? 9 – Hippolytus’s two-stage logos theory
Is it “Lord” or “Jesus” here? What’s a layperson to do?
Richard Swinburne was a visiting fellow at Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought in the Fall of 2012. Here are the videos they’ve posted from that visit. Interestingly, they seem to have avoided the topic of Swinburne’s Trinity theory – at least, judging by the videos they posted. One has to wonder why. Maybe they just wanted to leave room to discuss the soul, about which… Read More »Swinburne @ Biola
What I would expect to see, if Yahweh himself were to be a man, would be…
V.V. Raman is an emeritus professor of Physics at the Rochester Institute of technology, and has written a number of works on science and religion, his Indian heritage, and other subjects relating to the history of science, and the relation of the sciences to the humanities. Also, he’s a poet. Watch his interview by Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn here (click the blue button) and read… Read More »Is God a Self? Part 5 – Varadaraja V. Raman
I Can’t Stop Loving You – actually, it’s worse than that – I can’t not love you!
Alexander Pruss is an excellent philosophy of religion dude at Baylor. His second PhD dissertation was on possible worlds. Don’t ask me to explain what his first one was on! 🙂 He’s got about a million original ideas on almost as many topics, a lot of which get posted at his creatively-titled blog, Alexander Pruss’s Blog 🙂 as well as at The Prosblogion.
He recently weighed in (comments #8-9) on my attempted argument against social trinitarian arguments. Here are the most relevant bits:Read More »Pruss on essentially loving beings
Against Celsus is not the only important surviving book by Origen. Origen’s On First Principles is often called the first systematic Christian theology. It was written some time before 231. It is a bold and wide-ranging work, and in Origen’s day Christian theologians could speculate a fair amount.
But the curtain was brought down on this era of freedom by ecclesial-political events of the fourth century. While many still considered Origen a great scholar, the atmosphere was such that one might lose one’s church career if people thought you were too sympathetic to his views.
Among his admirers was the great scholar Jerome (translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible), but Jerome had do distance himself from Origen lest the heresy hunters get him. But still, people wanted to read Origen. Answering this need, Rufinus (d. 410) translated Origen’s On First Principles into Latin. Problem is, Rufinus systematically cut out and/or changed numerous passages that would not fit the new Pro-Nicene hegemony.
How do we know this? Because Rufinus tells us! He argues that heretics must have corrupted Origen’s works, since there just could not be a difference between those and the new catholic orthodoxy. Also, we have from other sources, e.g. letters of his contemporaries, the Greek texts of some of the cut and altered passages. In the excellent modern edition of the book, the editor-translator restores these to the text. Sadly, Rufinus’s Latin version is the only complete version we have of Origen’s book, so as it stands, the book is riddled with suspicious passages that don’t fit what we otherwise know about Origen, but which we have no textual grounds to correct. (On the whole crazy affair, see the above edition, pp. xxxi-lii.)
Here are some of the cut and restored passages; if you’re familiar with the “Arian” controversy and the trinitarian orthodoxy that coalesced and acquired the power of the Roman emperor at the end of the fourth century, you will not need an explanation why Rufinus cut them.
…the Saviour… is an image of God’s goodness, but Read More »trinitarian or unitarian? 7 – Origen uncensored
I was reading Murray’s and Rea’s new An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion – the Trinity section, of course – and I was struck by this sentence: “… we cannot say that Jesus is the Father, nor can we say that they are two Gods (Deuteronomy 6:4).” (p. 74) I realized some time ago that there are problems in using that famous text as a… Read More »Jesus and “God” – Part 7 – What did the Shema originally mean?
Given my scholarly interests in Hinduism, I had to post a link to this story about the conversion of a Reformed Christian philosopher to a form of Hinduism.
Pictured here are Krishna and his lover Radha. I take it that in Sudduth’s form of Hinduism Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu. Other Hindus consider Krishna to be the high god himself.
There is much art celebrating the love of these two.
The story for me was a bit spoiled when I watched a documentary in which a Hindu, Indian man explained that (at least on some versions) Radha is married to another, and is Krishna’s aunt. Perhaps some would object that I’m not looking at it metaphysically enough. (Update – to be fair, some Hindu sources assert them to be unrelated and married – see comment #11 below.)
In another famous episode, Krishna charms a bunch of cow-herding ladies.
I’m curious to read more about Sudduth’s conversion. How does one get from Calvin’s all-determining triune deity to Vishnu? I wonder if it is by way of fairly mainstream trinitarian modalism…
Myself, as I read Sudduth’s interesting narrative of his conversion I’m not sure where, i.e. with what sort of Christianity, he was starting from. I too have taught the Gita in an academic setting, but I have not had experiences like this:
Around 4:20am (Friday morning) September 16th, I woke suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of the name of “Krishna” being uttered in some wayRead More »Reformed Christian Philosopher Converts to Hinduism
In my comments on his first salvo, I wondered exactly what Trinity doctrine Bowman means to defend. (Some kind of modalism?) After round two, I said that Bowman has owned up to affirming a contradiction – trying to pass it off as a “mystery”, i.e. a merely apparent contradiction. In round 3, Bowman ignores these fundamental conceptual difficulties for his position, and soldiers on with… Read More »SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Bowman 3
“My god Spock! Is this the apex of human intellectual production?” “No Captain, look within, do you smell that?”
I apologize for the delay in posting. I have been busy with, among other things, my own work.
In the previous post, I enumerated 40 lines of premises and conclusions that generally summarizes Henry’s philosophical psychology of the Trinity. There are one or two things that ought to be clarified.
I have posted some responses to Dale’s post in the Comments section of his post.
I would like to elaborate on two issues in this post.
1. Why must the divine intellect be perfectly actual? (pace Dale’s 2nd objection)
2. Why must the divine intellect have two powers, an operative power and a productive power?
In regards to 1, Henry generally follows Anselm’s perfect being theology program. In this program, when we attribute some property to God we should follow the rule: ‘whatever it is simply better to have than not have we should attribute to God’. This property that it is simply better to have than not to have in medieval speak is called a ‘pure perfection’. A pure perfection is some property that it is simply better to have than not to have it. A pure perfection is some property x that is not considered as a pure perfection with regard to some species-nature. It is not a question of whether ‘it is better for my fish Nigel to be a Ninja or not’, but whether it is simply better to be a Ninja or not. A comparison to some species is not at issue here. For example, if it is better to be wise than not be wise, we should say that God is wise. If it is better to be loving than not to be loving, we should say that God is loving. If it is better to be stupid than not stupid, we should attribute ‘being stupid’ to God. But, our intuitions lead us to think that being wise and being just are simply better to have than not to have; yet being stupid is something we wouldn’t attribute to God because it is actually better to not be stupid, than to be stupid.
Read More »HoG: Intellectual Production of the Word (Scott)
How does one objectively evaluate a definition of a concept, e.g. trinitarian or unitarian?
“The Lord created me at the beginning of His ways in His work: He set me up from everlasting, in the beginning, before He made the earth… he brought me forth.”
Here’s an overview, with a few comments, of an interesting little public disagreement about Romans 1 and atheism. The discussion was kicked off by evangelical apologist Greg Koukl’s “No Duh” video, where he says that according to Romans 1, all atheists are intentionally suppressing their knowledge of God. Randal Rauser then pointed out a hard to accept implication of Koukl’s claim, which seems to require us to re-think just how… Read More »Are atheists denying the obvious? Koukl vs. Rauser and Feser
“And the best thing is, we can take these blocks apart!”
In the last post, I introduced the ‘generic view’ of the trinity, namely the claim that Divinity (that which makes the divine persons God/divine) is shared equally by all three persons and so does not belong to any one divine person more than another. In this post, I would like to highlight some of the issues faced by a generic view.
My point of departure is modern day criticism of the generic view such as that of Colin Gunton and John Zizioulas (to name just a few). These authors are not, in my opinion, the most philosophically astute critics, but nevertheless, they do highlight some of the issues relevant for the generic view.
Read More »Derivation vs. Generic Theories – part 6: Issues for the Generic View (JT)
Mike, reloaded – before the smoke has even cleared.
More from Mike Almeida about a premise in an anti-social-trinitarian-argument argument I’ve been exploring. Also, (sorry Mike – actually, sorry everyone) I continue my cheesy cowboy theme. (But as a native Texan, it’s my sacred right, Pardn’r. 🙂 )
Here’s a summary in (attempted) ordinary English of his thoughtful post on infinitely increasing properties @ his PhilRel Blog, followed by my response, which I posted to his comments section.