podcast 388 – Yes, “the Trinity” is a Problem – Part 2

1) McDowell and Sanders make no effort whatsoever to establish how they know that God is infinitely unlike any human analogy. If the only way God can be understood involves unclear, mysterious, or fundamentally inaccurate statements that are difficult to parse or that don’t properly map to God, then I question how either of them can claim to know that God is infinite, loving, necessarily existent, unchanging, that he sent a Son, etc. To say this specific doctrine doesn’t analogize properly but deny that other doctrines could be imperfect analogies fundamentally unlike the actual reality of God is to pick and choose whatever happens to be most convenient. The exact same argument could be raised to defend how creation as described in the Genesis accounts are allegorical or metaphorical and don’t describe any actual process God followed, which are unlike any mode of creation we understand; but at that point, it’s unclear how we can even understand that God “created” anything, because we don’t even know what we mean when we say “God created.”

2) Dr. Sanders said something to the effect of: “I believe in the Trinity because God sent his son, God and his Son sent the Spirit, and God does not change.” This is a weird argument to make, because it has a very obvious alternative solution than the Trinity: God, the Son, and the Spirit are different things. If God doesn’t change, but the Son and Spirit do, then in some sense God could hypothetically acausally “send” the Son and Spirit, such as by the Son and Spirit communing with and recognizing the eternal will of God and then acting temporally within creation according to that eternal will. This view just strikes me as a form of Arianism, which appears to be a perfectly valid objection to the Trinity that is at least as old within church tradition, if not significantly older. Basically, I would wonder what about a hierarchy of origin or mission makes the Son and Spirit exactly the same as the Father, and how God being unable to change would lead one to the Trinity over the seemingly simpler and more sensible Arianism (or whatever other view could have a changing Son and Spirit as entities distinct from God; I’m just picking Arianism as a counterexample).

3) I think there may be a hidden “poison pill” in Dr. Sanders’s argument that the Trinity needs to be assembled piecemeal from various parts of the Bible. It may be a rhetorical move to try to trap someone into undermining the very basis for belief in Christianity itself, as the exact same counterargument you’ve raised against specifically searching for the Trinity across scripture can be applied to the validity of searching any of the writings that comprise the Bible for some singular message. I may be giving him too much credit, but the goal may be to try to argue for the foundational importance of the Trinity by arguing that if we can’t go looking for it across scripture, we also can’t do that for other beliefs held to be scriptural in origin, and since that would undermine everything, it must be valid to cobble together the Trinity from disparate parts of scripture. I think the argument fails because it’s disanalogous to other things that are drawn from across the Bible — and because one can still always dispute, granting for the sake of argument that it is valid to search across the scriptures for support of doctrine, whether anything supporting that doctrine is actually found there — but that may be the goal here if Sanders anticipates an objection like yours. Or maybe I’m overthinking his rhetorical goals here and he hasn’t even thought about that.

4) To add to your point about people disagreeing on who is being referred to and yet still having the same concept in mind: A Jesus mythicist could agree with everything Dr. Sanders wants to say defines who Jesus is in scripture, and the only difference they would have with him on the topic would be whether that person existed anywhere outside of scripture. This wouldn’t be a disagreement on “Who is this Jesus character?” but “Does a Jesus like that exist in reality?” For Dr. Sanders to say he and the mythicist aren’t even talking about the same subject would be clearly incorrect, because asking “Did [x] exist?” can only have a single referent for a debate between two parties with different positions on [x] to make sense. If you get up to debate that vanilla is the best ice cream flavor and I stand up and respond with “Human flesh-flavored ice cream shouldn’t exist,” we haven’t debated anything. We might even agree on each other’s points.

5a) If Dr. Sanders thinks you can’t knowingly be wrong about who or what God is in any meaningful sense and still be believing in the correct God, and he can’t clearly explain the Trinity and admits analogies for it are fundamentally unlike God, is he comfortable admitting he isn’t sure if he’s worshipping the right God because he isn’t sure if he’s exactly right about God; or would he say, and reasonably so, that he knows which God he means even if he is sometimes mistaken or inaccurate about exactly what that God is like? But to be allowed to take that “out,” he has to be willing to extend its use to non-Trinitarian Christians as well. If the non-Trinitarian Christian can be knowingly wrong about whether God is triune but still be worshipping the same God — or vice-versa for the Trinitarian if God is not triune — then the possibility exists that this is not an issue that God considers make-or-break for salvation. Since nowhere in the New Testament is the Trinity clearly articulated, let alone mandated as something required to be saved, there should be no question whether this is a salvation issue, because it self-evidently isn’t.

5b) Tangential to that: It’s weird to me that soteriology is not policed as harshly as Trinitarianism. People are not nearly as virulently opposed to competing atonement theories as they are to the idea that maybe God is not an incomprehensible triunity, yet it seems obviously true that what Christ did to bring about atonement and how that atonement works IS a salvation issue, because if one’s understanding of the operation of atonement is incorrect then one may or may not have said, done, or believed whatever interacts with that operation of atonement to have achieved the benefits of atonement. Dr. Sanders seems to believe that this is the case, but he fails to articulate how. Unless specifically believing that God is triune is part of the mechanism of atonement, it’s irrelevant to whether someone has or has not been saved. But any argument for the necessity of the Trinity to the atonement I’ve seen shifts from the Trinity to the Deity of Christ, which is a completely different issue; for example, a modalist could entirely agree that the atonement requires a divine sacrifice and still be a modalist, so the Deity of Christ has nothing to do with the Trinity in such a fashion as to render atonement incoherent without the latter EVEN IF the former is granted.

6) If Dr. Sanders thinks you don’t have to ask the question about the Trinity to be saved, but you do have to address it if it comes up, what OTHER theological issues does he believe Christians are obligated to have the correct answers on once they’ve consciously thought about them? Are Christians OK believing in a temporal God right up until they learn about classical theism, at which point they have to have the correct stance on God’s temporality? Can you lose your salvation for questioning creation ex nihilo, studying theological and philosophical perspectives on the idea, deciding you agree with orthodoxy after all, and then turning out to have been wrong about it because the mainstream was wrong about it? Why would God value holding correct opinions unreflectively but punish reaching incorrect opinions by rational means?

7) Dr. McDowell says you can’t be saved if you deny the Trinity “when it’s accurately presented.” Who decides that it was accurately presented? What if a Unitarian Christian says in response to McDowell’s explanation: “I do deny the Trinity, but I would change my mind if it were accurately presented and clearly explained to be necessary, which I don’t think you’ve done.” Who gets to be the arbiter of whether this person is knowingly rejecting God or whether McDowell just failed to “accurately present” the Trinity? Is it even possible to accurately present, or will there always be some degree of “mystery” to the doctrine that could leave room for a reasonable denial if someone’s concerns fell within that domain handwaved off as incomprehensible?

8) If one can’t understand the Trinity without special revelation, and one is committed to only accepting the Bible as special revelation, and the framework to understand the Trinity was supplied by people outside the bounds of scripture, why would one believe that the Trinity is true? To argue that later people “clarified” something you can’t obviously find in the Bible, as Dr. Sanders is doing, is to imply that special revelation was insufficient to lead one to belief in the Trinity. If someone reading the Bible on their own can’t derive the Trinity without the “clarification” of post-Nicenes, and believing in the Trinity is essential to the faith, that implies the Bible does not contain all things essential to the faith!

9) What is a “triune-style mediation?” A mediator is by definition someone other than the parties mediating. If Jesus is the mediator between God and sinful men, then he’s neither God nor a sinful man. How can the Trinity possibly explain the mediator role in a way that makes sense? If Jesus is God, he’s not suited to be a mediator for God. In what way would invoking the Trinity make explaining the mediator role easier rather than harder?