There’s a standard answer to the question posed at the end of the last post: the doctrine of the Trinity is the claim that the Christian God is three “persons” (Greek: hypostases, Latin: personae) in one “essence” or “being” (Greek: ousia, Latin: substantia). Case closed, right? How I wish! Again, ambiguities abound. Take “persons”. Ordinarily, a “person” is a kind of thing (individual entity). You’re… Read More »“the” Trinity doctrine – Part 2
Dr. Winfried Corduan is emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Taylor University, and has been a blogger since before it was cool. His scholarship is thorough, multi-disciplinary, insightful, and informed by his own travel and conversations. He’s well known among students of apologetics for his informed engagement with members of other religions.
Check it out: a whole site and blog devoted to art featuring impossible objects! I can’t help but think that the picture above had a trinitarian inspiration: according to the babelfish, it means “You must in such a way live”. (German speaking readers – feel free to correct the translation.) I read this as addressed to the Trinity. If so, this pic would be an… Read More »Linkage: Impossible World Site and Blog (Dale)
Following an ancient tradition of mocking modalists as “patripassians”, she seems to think the biggest or the main problem with modalism is that it identifies the Father and the Son. (pp. 1, 3) On her modalist theory, they are temporal parts (person-stages) of one being, but they are not numerically identical – they are different temporal parts of God. As she observes, on this theory, “There is… no time at while f=s.” (p. 3) Thus, her theory doesn’t identify any of the persons with one another, or with God for that matter.
Many metaphysicians, she knows, reject the theory of temporal parts, and the perdurance theory of how a thing can “last” through time.
But moving on, is this theory monotheistic? She urges,
All we need to capture the spirit of monotheism is the doctrine that at any time there is exactly one God. (3)
Huh? She draws an analogy with US Presidents; at any given time, there’s one one.
But imagine this:Read More »“Sabellianism Reconsidered” Considered – Part 2
In the last post, I explained that something is ‘created from nothing’ when it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. I also explained that by ‘ingredient’ I mean any sort of constituent which satisfies the following two conditions: first, it exists in the product; and second, it bears its own properties, i.e., it has features that other ingredients in the product do not have, and which the product itself does not have. In this post, I will explain what I mean by ‘pre-existing’.
Read More »Arius and Athanasius, part 3 — Producing something with ‘pre-existing’ ingredients (JT)
Just got this in the mail; a very thorough symposium on Dr. Keith Ward’s Christ and the Cosmos,
Earlier catholic theologians like Tertullian and Origen show us how.
They tend to carve things like this or this Get it? One self/personal substance/entity (represented by the one head) with three faces, i.e. ways of presenting himself or interacting with us. Or alternately, three ways of living (with or without us in the picture). To be fair, though, one might think that the artists’ inspiration was something like the constitution theory of presented by Mike… Read More »Another way to spot FSH modalists
An interesting and much more recent statement from John Hick, along the lines of my last post. …Since then [around 1993] the focus of much theological discussion has moved from christology to the doctrine of the Trinity. This is partly because theology always does go the rounds of the traditional topics – creation, sin, incarnation, atonement, Trinity, church, heaven and hell – and after a… Read More »Is the doctrine of the Incarnation prior to & the source of trinitarian doctrine? – Part 2
“Father, Son, Holy Spirit”? Or “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier”? The editors of the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism weigh in here: Blessed Be the Name of the Lord | Christianity Today While I share the editors’ irritation with politically correct revision of liturgical and theological language, I think their reasoning in this opinion piece is poor. (Read their editorial, then see if you agree.) For one… Read More »Baptism in the NAME
“But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”
A question from the Facebook group a few weeks ago: …One model of the Trinity that I’ve heard articulated–call it “paterderivationism”–says that the way in which the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are homoousios is the same way in which Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus may be called “homoousios”: they share the same kind of nature, though… not the same instance of that nature. According to… Read More »“paterderivationism,” monotheism, and “mono-theos-ism”
To fully understand a philosophical theory, one needs to understand not only the content of it, but the reasons for which it is held. This is why I’m patiently going through how Moreland and Craig reject what they see as the competing Trinity theories, before giving their own.
As we’ve seen, they consider themselves to be “social trinitarians” (last time we looked at their rather vague definition of that term). They then adopt Brian Leftow’s taxonomy of social trinitarian theories, and decide that the first of these is the most promising. Read More »Trinity Monotheism Part 3: Their Set-Up, Part 2
Does Christianity trump Philosophy?
I see trends in this analytic theology literature somewhat towards relative identity theories, and towards “metaphysical madness.”
Now for another historical interlude – I’ll get back to current philosophy shortly. Regular readers will note that I’ve been insinuating for a while now that the way many people understand the mainstream, so-called “Latin” trinitarian position amounts to a certain variety of modalism (which entails S-modalism, to which I’ve objected). Some of you know that I also work on what philosophers call “early modern”… Read More »Nothing New Under the Sun – Part 1
“For the New Testament, as for the Hebrew Bible, the principle of unity is clearly the one God…”
Should we defend what we think are biblical, yet unintelligible or seemingly incoherent claims as “mysteries”?
Review of Thomas McCall’s Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism?
