podcast 165 – Alvan Lamson’s On the Doctrine of Two Natures in Jesus Christ – Part 1
All Christians have always believed that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, right?
All Christians have always believed that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, right?
Post-debate thoughts and more, in dialogue with an ex-biblical-unitarian who is now a trinitarian.
Closing statements: Finnegan: 1:48:43- 1:52:12 Only one Yahweh. Jesus does things God says he can’t do, e.g. die. Jesus affirms Shema. In John 10, Jesus uses a concept of “representational deity” – i.e. calling a being who isn’t God “God” because of some likeness to God in some respect(s). Trinity is confusing, post-biblical. But it is a solution to a non-existent problem, namely, of their… Read More »Trinitarian-Unitarian Debates – 1 Bosserman vs. Finnegan, 2008 – Part 5
I’ve been reading Gregory of Nazianzus lately, his famous Theological Orations (c. 380 CE), wherein he expounds and defends what scholars call the pro-Nicene consensus about the Trinity – a viewpoint which developed in the latter half of the 4th c. by bishops rallying around the new homoousios term.
In the second oration, he hits this theme hard: God’s essence (the divine nature, the Godhead/deity) is unknowable. What does he mean by this? Only that it isn’t completely knowable (by us, in this life)? He does think that, but he’s saying more than that.Read More »Question about Gregory of Nazianzus on Divinity, the Son and the Spirit
How could God allow the church to err on something so important?
Some reference sources will tell you that Christians have always believed in the Trinity. This claim is misleading at best. Rather than dating trinitarian theology to the start of Christianity, if we carefully examine the history of theology, we can see a relevant series of dates, as elements of belief in a triune god emerge. Yes, Christians have always believed in one God, but in… Read More »10 steps towards getting less confused about the Trinity – #6 get a date – part 1
Kimel lampoons the biblical unitarian historical narrative, and urges that Irenaeus is a big problem for it.
Somehow I missed this when it came out back in July. Our friend the Tentative Apologist Randal Rauser has a podcast (itunes) now, and he’s done a substantial, no-bs interview of leading Reformed analytic theologian Oliver Crisp, of Fuller Seminary. Listen to it at Randal’s blog here. Crisp does a good job presenting and giving a basic defense of the coherence of the traditional catholic… Read More »analytic theologian Oliver Crisp on the coherence of Incarnation
Congratulations to Scott Williams, trinities contributor and newly minted Oxford University PhD in Theology, on his forthcoming paper: ‘Henry of Ghent on Real Relations and the Trinity: The Case for Numerical Sameness Without Identity’, in: Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 79.1 (2012), will be published. Here is his abstract: I argue that there is a hitherto unrecognized connection between Henry of Ghent’s general theory of real relations… Read More »Scott Williams’s new paper: Henry of Ghent on Real Relations and the Trinity
The apostles testify to God the creator and his holy servant Jesus.
Pastor J. Dan Gill was a third-generation Oneness (aka “Jesus only”) Pentecostal, but he started to notice a disconnect between their ways of talking about Jesus and what we read in the Bible.
Does Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 2 teach that Jesus is God himself, and that at certain point in time about 2,000 years ago, Jesus became a man, letting go of his equality with God, and thereby divesting himself of his glory, or the use of his attributes, to become a human like us, but obedient to the point of death? In this episode we… Read More »podcast 48 – 2 interpretations of Philippians 2 – part 1
Dr. Oliver Crisp’s Deviant Calvinism: Broadening Reformed Theology (kindle) has been blessed with excellent publicity. In several places, you can read or hear Dr. Crisp’s thoughts on the book, and get a good sense of what it is about. In the most recent episode of the trinities podcast, I discuss with him just how broad he thinks the Reformed tradition is. Next week we get… Read More »Deviant Calvinism roundup 1 – Crisp on Crisp
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
What, if anything, is wrong with this argument? 1. Only God should be worshiped. 2. Jesus should be worshiped. 3. Therefore, Jesus is God. (1,2) Before you answer, be sure you understand the claims fully. The “only” in 1 makes a claim of quantification, which we all understand in terms of identity. In standard logic, it would be analyzed as: Wg & (x)(Wx… Read More »Worship and Revelation 4-5 – Part 1 – setup
One final example, this time from veteran evangelical apologist Norman Geisler. In chapter 12 of his Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross, Geisler gives a sort of standard exegetical argument for “the” doctrine of the Trinity. But he also addresses some Islamic concerns, and when he does, his modalism jumps to the foreground. Here, he tells us what is wrong with “modalism”.… Read More »Islam-inspired Modalism – Part 4
Peter and John address the Jewish leadership.
“Mary cradled the Creator in her arms. ‘I never imagined God would look like that,’ she says to herself.”
Not “inconceivable” – but rather, “God.” Check out this interesting post, The Dread God Roberts, at our friend Dr. James McGrath’s blog Exploring Our Matrix. (Which amazingly, just had its 10th birthday. He was blogging way before it was cool.) Dr. McGrath describes himself as a Progressive Christian. I commented over there, and he’s replied. The part of his post that got me going was this. Tillich’s… Read More »Atheistic belief in “God”