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Search Results for: Trinity Monotheism

Guest Post: Greg Spendlove on Logos Christology

Below is a guest post by Greg Spendlove, who is an adjunct philosophy instructor at Salt Lake Community College. He received his Master of Arts in Christian Thought with an emphasis in Systematic Theology and a cognate in Philosophy of Religion from Trinity International University in Deerfield, IL in 2005. His Master’s thesis was entitled “A Critical Study of the Life and Thought of Brahmabandhab… Read More »Guest Post: Greg Spendlove on Logos Christology

White vs. Navas – Does the New Testament teach “the deity of Christ”?

Ably reviewed by Sean Finnegan. I would add a few philosophical comments: White, like many evangelicals, understands “the deity of Christ” as meaning that Jesus and God are numerically one, that is, numerically identical. He argues that various things the NT asserts about Jesus imply this. (e.g. He is worshiped, called “Lord.”) Conveniently, he ignores the many passages which assert or presuppose a qualitative difference… Read More »White vs. Navas – Does the New Testament teach “the deity of Christ”?

Flocanrib explained – Irene’s mistake

Irene reflected on how she had got to thinking that her birthday gifts came from one person. She had labelled the source or sources of them “Presenty.” At first she may have been open-minded about whether the gifts came from one or many. But once she’d coined the name, that, in her imagination, solidified the source as being a single person. This seemed to be… Read More »Flocanrib explained – Irene’s mistake

Is God a self? Part 1

Many of you know that I’ve argued in several ways, in print, against “social” Trinity theories, and particularly the sort which holds that Father, Son, and Spirit are a group/community/quasi-family. On such theories, it turns out that the one “God” is a group – a group of equally divine selves (aka gods – though they don’t like that term in the plural). This is surprising… Read More »Is God a self? Part 1

On Dr. James Anderson’s “Brief Response” to the Challenge

Thanks to Dr. Anderson for his carefully-reasoned reply to my Challenge. I have always been a fan of both him and his work, and RTS students are lucky to have such a capable and humble professor teaching them apologetics, philosophy, and analytic theology. I was at first puzzled by his use of an allegedly parallel argument – usually, an objector wields one of those in order… Read More »On Dr. James Anderson’s “Brief Response” to the Challenge

MMM Gone Wild at Paris! Or, the Birth of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology (Scott)

Two Scholars, One Aquinas

“All we need is one substance to cure the ills of our society!” “I have personal experience with substance abuse, and it is wrong.”

Before I start a mini-series on the Trinitarian thought of Henry of Ghent, I thought it would be good to offer a brief survey of the late 13th c. landscape. This is way too brief and fairly focused, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. As the scholastics would say, you cannot will to do something, unless you have some sort of knowledge. No voluntary action without knowledge, however imperfect or confused that knowledge is! (As an aside: Jean-Luc Marion, a contemporary philosophical-theologian and former student of Jacques Derrida contests this medieval Aristotelian claim, and argues that acts of will –i.e. to love- does or can precede any knowledge.)

Of all the issues to discuss about the Trinity the one at hand here is the question: what causes or explains why the divine persons are really distinct from each other? We know there are three persons, and one ‘substance’/’ousia’ from Scripture and our orthodox Creeds, but is there anything that we could say that might account for why there are three, and not say five divine persons? Or even, why not say there is a potential infinity of divine persons (on some contestable account of the deification of believers)? You get my point. Why three divine persons and what makes it that there are three, no more and no less?

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Arius and Athanasius, part 1 — How is the Son produced? (JT)

Even though it should be obvious from our three faces, we like to carry around this large diagram, just to be clear.
Even though it should be obvious from our three faces, we like to carry around this large diagram, just to be clear.

This series is extracted from a paper I delivered at the APA in Chicago last month. I’ve basically just cut up the paper into smaller chunks.

As we all know, the doctrine of the Trinity states that God is three persons: the Father, Son, and Spirit. Further, two of these persons, the Son and the Spirit, are produced. According to both East and West, the Son is produced by the Father, but the East holds that the Spirit is also produced by the Father, while the West holds that the Spirit is produced by the Father and Son together. But that’s by the by. The point is that some of the divine persons are produced.

The question that interests me is this: how, exactly, does one divine person produce another? In this series, I want to look at two 4th century attempts to explain how the Father produces the Son: that of Arius, and that of Athanasius.

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