The Trinity Challenge, from a Sufi Muslim blog. The comments there are wild and wooly. There’s a charge of polytheism, and some non-trinitarian Christians weigh in. The challenge, of course, cannot be met. But it seems to me he’s carelessly overlooking the options that the Trinity doctrine is: (1) implicitly taught in the Bible (i.e. it is deducible from what is there, though not explicitly… Read More »Linkage: a Muslim challenge (Dale)
MMM indeed! Henry of Ghent doesn’t spare the medieval lingo, and as Scott points out, it seems he never met a trinitarian theory he didn’t like – emanation, psychology, relations – it’s all good! Thanks to its being Thanksgiving break – and let me say Happy Thanksgiving to all our American and Canadian readers – I’ve caught up on the recent posts, as well as some very involved comments on my original H.O.G. post. (To those just jumping in – we’re using some letters defined in this post – it actually helps!) Here are some comments and questions relating to the lengthy comments on my original H.O.G. post. Perhaps this’ll give Scott some grist for the mill as he continues his series on Henry’s trinitarian theory. Read More »H.O.G. Questions
“Will the real H.o.G. please stand up?”
Henry of Ghent was an eclectic theologian. He fancied new theories and adored old theories. When it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, Henry was a glutton for old and new doctrines. What was old that he liked? His favourite theologian was Augustine, and his favourite book titled De Trinitate was Augustine’s. Of course, Henry didn’t just read Augustine, he read other De Trinitate texts: Boethius, Ambrose, Hilary, Richard of St. Victor and learned important lessons from these. The primary theological source for psychological doctrines applied to the Trinity comes from Augustine (who contemplated such models as the Father as Memory, Son as Intelligence/Word, and Holy Spirit as Will/Love). Further, Henry takes Richard of St.Victor’s claim about the importance of ‘mutual love’ (of the Father and Son) and applies it as the principiative principle for the production of the Holy Spirit. A ‘principiative principle’ is a fancy phrase for ‘productive power’. Henry seems to use it at times in distinction from a productive power for the production of created essences (e.g. human beings). Still, the the semantic range of this can be applied to ad intra divine productions, and ad extra creaturely productions.
Henry also fancied ‘new’ doctrines of human philosophical psychology, though he was critical of these. What he liked was Aquinas’s developed teaching about what a mental ‘Word’ is, namely, a product that an intellect can produce that is really distinct from the intellect and its operations. This ‘word’ inheres in the intellect as an accident. Further, Henry liked the notion that this product is some sort of ‘final’ act of the intellect. Of course, in the divine case the ‘Word’ won’t ‘inhere’ in the divine essence, but ‘subsist’ in its. This of course is ambiguous (and worthy of another post).Read More »H.o.G.: Philosophical Psychology at Play with the Father and Word/Son (Scott)
“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?
Blame a lot of MMM on this guy – the Hip’ster.
I feel some need to explain and justify what is going on here, as I have divided loyalties.
On the one hand, the stated purpose of the blog is to make recent research on trinitarian theories available to the wider public, in relatively brief, understandable, jargon free form.
On the other hand, this blog’s most faithful readers and commenters are specialists in medieval philosophy & theology, or in recent analytic philosophy of religion, and they can really get into dialogging in the way that PhDs (and to-be-PhDs) in these fields do – which is to say – highly abstract, jargon filled, argument-heavy discourse, that only a scholar can love. Being a scholar, of course, I love it, and have no desire to stem their exploration of historic trinitarian theories. They are all, in various ways, doing cutting edge work, and I learn a lot by listening in, and by joining in. And I know that other philosophy profs appreciate these discussions as well.
My solution? Have it both ways. 🙂 I just want to try to build a bridge for non-academic readers, to help them, maybe, be able to get something out of this recent Medieval Metaphysical Mayhem (MMM). So I’m going to try to give some relevant background information.
Here goes: Read More »MMM unleashed @ trinities
“Stand aside, puny moderns. Or postmoderns. Or whatever you are.”
I thought that Scott and Joseph made some really penetrating comments on the first two posts in this series. Here I want to recap them, so we can discuss how Henry of Ghent (c. 1217-93) a.k.a. The Solemn Doctor would interpret our chart (see the first two posts), specifically, the second, modalistic interpretation I offered.
First, Joseph comes in with some weighty objections to that model (summarized and expanded by me from his comments).Read More »The Latin Trinity Chart 3 – Henry of Ghent to the rescue
Here’s a second application for my Latin Trinity chart (see the first post for what the letters designate). Let’s say that a state of affairs is a thing/substance having a property at a time or timelessly.
The “persons” here are just modes of D, that is, states of affairs involving D. So the Son just is D having Fi. And the Father just is D having P. And the Holy Spirit just is D having Sp. Regarding each of F, S, and H, each of them “just is” D – in the sense that in each of them, there is one and the same D.Read More »The Latin Trinity Chart 2 – a version of FSH modalism
Greetings, campers. We’ll return to Swinburne in a bit… I’ve been drawing again: Now it’s all clear, right? RIGHT?! key: D = the divine essence P = paternity Fi = filiation Sp = spiration F = the Father S = the Son H = the Holy Spirit T = the Trinity In this chart are eight “things” – in the widest sense of “thing”, i.e.… Read More »The Latin Trinity Chart 1 – 8 things, 1 trinity
If there’s at least one, there must be exactly three. Q.E.D.
The installment before the last, we saw that Richard Swinburne’s social trinitarian theory is very carefully built so as to satisfy multiple demands of orthodoxy. There is, he argues, a contradiction-free, reasonable trinitarian theory, which fits well with the classic creeds. But we can do even better than that. In Swinburne’s view, there’s a plausible argument for the Trinity based on reason alone. Don’t believe it? Oh, ye of little faith reason. Have ye not read the earlier Richard on this?Read More »Swinburne’s Social Trinitarian Theory, Part 5 – Yes, we can prove it by reason alone
Dale’s Swinburne Trininty chart, version 2.0. (or 1.1 – whatever) Thanks to reader (and Swinburne student) Joseph Jedwab for the correction. He points out: [Swinburne] wants to avoid the idea that the Spirit’s existence is causally overdetermined [i.e. that it has two complete causes, either of which would alone suffice]. But he also wants to avoid the idea that each actively only partly causes the… Read More »Swinburne’s Social Trinitarian Theory, Part 4 – the cooperation involved in procession or spirating
How the three are tightly functionally unified, in Swinburne’s view.
(See below for the interpretation.)
Last time we looked at Swinbure’s suggested reading of the creeds. They can’t he says, be charitably read as holding that in the same sense there’s only one divinity, and that there’s three. Swinburne comes down on the side of three. Like all social trinitarians, he’s attracted to a vision of the Trinity as being a loving community, three eternal and perfect, spirits, three selves, enjoying one another’s company, living in communion with one another, and working together in all they do. In short, he wants to say there are personal relationships internal to God – and this implies that there are persons – subjects of experience, thought, and action – in God.Read More »Swinburne’s Social Trinitarian Theory, Part 3 – functional monotheism
Swinburne isn’t what you’d call a theological liberal. He’s not a conservative evangelical either, given his rejection of things like biblical inerrancy. He was, I believe, a life-long Anglican, until 1996 when he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. As I understand it, at least part of his motivation was his exasperation with anything-goes style Anglicanism (e.g. priests who are not theists). But my point is that he aims to be a “Catholic” Christian, in the sense of one who holds to mainstream orthodoxy – roughly, that core of doctrines held in common by Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and (at least in theory) most Protestants. (Actually, he’s probably a good bit more “Catholic” than that – in that he believes in apostolic succession, and in the authority of The Church to decree the meaning of scriptural texts – see his book Revelation.) This requires some dexterity on his part, and creates the burden of crafting a theory that one can claim fits with the “Athanasian” and Constantinopolitan Creeds.
Swinburne argues that it is uncharitable to read the ecumenical councils’ claim that “there is only one god” as asserting that there’s only one divine individual, as that would contradict their committment to there being three divine individuals.Read More »Swinburne’s Social Trinitarian Theory, Part 2 – a key move
Swinburne sez: Two thumbs up for the social analogy!
Richard Swinburne is an Emeritus professor at Oriel College, Oxford University, and is widely considered one of the greatest living Christian philosophers. He’s done original work in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and general metaphysics, but is perhaps best known for his work in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. He has a way of squarely facing tough issues, and treating them in original and principled ways. He’s particularly well known by philosophers for his arguments for mind-body dualism, for his cumulative case for the existence of God, and for his bold social trinitarian theory, which I’ll cover in this series. Read More »Swinburne’s Social Trinitarian Theory, Part 1
A simple being containing multiple distinct “persons” – D’oh!
Theologian Lewis Ayres is the author of this worthy book. In it, he hammers the point that the Latin vs. Social trinitarian categories aren’t helpful in understanding post-Constantinople trinitarian theology. I think he’s right about that, though I persist in using the terminology because it is helpful for 20th and 21st century theories. Ayres’s book is a wonderful piece of patristic scholarship, but it is also an extended polemic against social trinitarians. Basically, he thinks that what he aptly calls the pro-Nicene tradition has gotten short shrift in recent theological work on the Trinity, and he very helpfully presents the core of that tradition and bats down a great many mis-readings of it. Obviously, he’s sympathetic to this sort of trinity theory, to put it mildly. This will definitely come up when I discuss social theories.
Here I just wanted to pass on a striking quote, which to me spotlights a central problem that many people have with the mainstream classic Latin or Pro-Nicene tradition.Read More »Quotes: Lewis Ayres on Pro-Nicene 3rd-4th century trinitarianism
Is Ned in trouble? Here’s a quick post to wrap up the series on Brower’s and Rea’s constitution theory of the Trinity. First, it’s striking how original and self-consistent their approach is. It is rare to find something this new, and this well thought through on such an old topic. They’ve carefully carved out a unique position, one which has a motivation outside of theology… Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 6: summing up
I allow, indeed I declare, that the mystery of the Godhead surpasses rational apprehension; and it may be that in the end it will have to be represented by a contradiction. But it is essential that this should happen only when all our rational resources are at an end. It is ludicrous if we represent divine mysteries by avoidable contradictions, by muddles, which more disciplined… Read More »Christopher Stead on mysteries in theology
Like about everything else these days.
In this post I want to explore what to me is the oddest and hardest part to grasp of the constitution trinitarianism. When I first read their paper, I thought they thought God was a stuff – that is, that the term “God” referred to a certain thing, that immaterial stuff they call “the divine essence”. That was wrong on two counts. For as we’ve seen, “the divine essence” isn’t supposed to be a thing (although they think it wouldn’t be a catastrophe if they admitted it was a thing – see their footnote 10). Hence, it can’t be a thing which is identical to God. Second, they don’t think that “God”, say, when used in a Psalm, refers to that stuff. So, what do they think it refers to? It depends. They hold that it’s a systematically ambiguous term. Why is that?Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 5: Ambiguous God-talk
JT Paasch is a graduate student at Oxford, he’s originally from Utah. He earned a M.Div at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (under Kevin Vanhoozer), then went to Oxford to work with Richard Cross on medieval trinitarian theology. His doctoral thesis is titled ‘The Logic and Metaphysics of the Trinity according to William of Ockham’. I’ve appreciated his thoughtful comments on some of my posts here. I thought the following one was post-worthy.
Be sure to check out his blog, the title of which is either (1) contradictory, or (2) an example of English (or Utahn?) dry humor. I say the charitable interpretation is (2). 🙂 – Dale
In the traditional western view of the trinity, e.g., as the likes of Augustine and Aquinas think, the divine essence basically functions as a nature. Read More »Guest post: JT Paasch on constitution trinitarianism
“Come on, you tired little brain – don’t fail me now.” (No, I don’t really blog naked – serious thought requires having at least your underpants on.)
Joseph Jedwab does an excellent job (here, comments 3 & 4) pressing me for details, and taking a shot at defending the Brower and Rea theory. I wanted to chew a bit on some issues that Joseph and Ian raise before moving on, offering some corrections and other reflections. (And JT – I want to post your lengthy comment (the second one) as a guest post, so we can discuss the priority issue – email me if you object to this promotion. 
) Any bold type that appears in quotes here has been added by me.
To non-philosophical readers: I apologize for the over-long load of philosopher-lingo that follows. You may want to skip this one! Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 4: pausing and revisiting some issues
I’ve seen this passage quoted by at least three of my favorite Christian philosophers. Unfortunately, they’ve misattributed it to the famous English antitrinitarian John Biddle (also spelled Bidle) (1615-62). I believe it was Keith Yandell who found it in this old book, where it is misattributed to Biddle. Why did the theologian Leonard Hodgson make this mistake? I’ve seen a copy of the book, the… Read More »“an Error in counting…” Who wrote this?
