SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 5 – BOWMAN – PART 3

As I explained in the previous installment, in round 5 Bowman is trying to show that not only does the Bible imply that all three Persons are divine, but also that they in some sense are the one God. In other words, he wants to show how the NT brings the three, as it were, within the being of the one God.

To do this, he considers a dozen triadic passages, in which the Three are all mentioned together in quick succession. Last time, I mulled over his treatment of the “Great Commission”  passage. This time, a few others, and I take a crack at another explanation of this triadic language.

First, as I look at Bowman’s interpretations, some of them strongly suggest that he thinks that asserting the divinity of each just is asserting each to be numerically identical to God. I looked into this more last time, but briefly, this won’t fly, as it’ll make the persons identical to one another. So it is not clear, even if his expositions are right, that really support an orthodox Trinity theory.

Second, I reiterate that Bowman does a good job here, assembling a dozen important passages, in which it is impossible to ignore the triadic language. Suppose the doctrine of the Trinity is just this vague claim: “there are three co-equal persons in God”. If that is true, that would explain why these three are often mentioned together, in a way which can suggest they are on an equal footing. I said last time that any unitarian is obligated to explain these triadic statements in a way which is both compatible with unitarianism, and which is independently motivated (in can’t be that the only appeal of the reading is that it saves one’s theology).

Here’s Bowman’s treatment of one such text:

1 Corinthians 12:4-6

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.
And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord.
There are varieties of activities, but the same God who works all things in all.”

The deliberate parallelism of these three lines practically speaks for itself. If a Jew unfamiliar with Christianity read these lines alone, he would certainly understand “the same Spirit,” “the same Lord,” and “the same God” to be three synonymous expressions for the same Creator. We know from the immediate context that the one whom Paul identifies here as “the same Lord” is Jesus (v. 3). Paul clearly attributes personhood to the Spirit, whose work of gifting believers Paul details in verses 7-10, concluding in verse 11, “But one and the same Spirit works all these things [panta tauta energei], distributing to each one individually just as he wills.” Paul here in verse 11 uses the same language for the Spirit’s working that he used in verse 6 for God’s working (“who works all things in all,” ho energ?n ta panta en pasin). Thus, Paul can speak interchangeably about what the Spirit, the Lord, and God do in relation to spiritual gifts, while still distinguishing the three from one another. We have here at the very least an implicit Trinitarianism.

Bowman is too confident here, in my view. He’s saying that a first century Jew would certainly read those three terms as co-referring. But if a first century Jew would assume some things true of one which are not true of the others, this isn’t so. “The Lord” here is Jesus – a man. And a Jew of that (or any) era would assume that neither God nor the Spirit of God are men. About the personhood of the Spirit – looking at v. 6 along with v. 11 suggests that the “Spirit” which distributes gifts at will just is God. But as I explained before, a unitarian can concede this (which is consistent with holding the Spirit-talk is sometimes about an aspect of God or action of God), and moreover, identifying the Spirit with God isn’t going to help the trinitarian get his three persons within God.

Still, what might a unitarian say about passages like these?

We can get a clue by looking at another passage: Ephesians 4:1-16 (read the whole thing). What is going on here? Paul is forcefully arguing for Christian unity. We know from the whole NT that there were considerable factionalizing forces the apostles fought against. Misguided loyalty to one apostle over others, Judaizers, teachers with “secret knowledge” foisting a holier-than-thou attitude towards those without knowledge, renegade prophets, big personalities. Here’s the crucial bit: “…There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—  one Lord, one faith, one baptism,  one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” As Bowman notes, here is a seven-fold formula, in opposition to the more common threefold one.

So, here’s an alternate explanation which unitarians can offer – actually, any Bible reader can accept it, irrespective of their views on the Trinity: the threefold formulas are a shorthand, something like a slogan – one God, one Lord, one Spirit – asserting the unified nature of all Christian assemblies, or all Christians – they all worship one God, have been saved by one Savior, and sealed, empowered, etc. by one Spirit. They’ve got one hope, one baptism, and so on – they all stand on one footing as a new people, with Christ as their head. One could say it is a standard, short (but expandable) list of fundamental church-unifying factors. It doesn’t imply that the named factors are literally divine, or that the are the same in some metaphysical sense (i.e. equally divine). These statements are compatible with those claims, but don’t imply them. And if my reading is on track, one should not infer the “full divinity” of the listed factors, or their being in some sense “within” God or the divine nature.

But why focus on those three? “One God” unites Christians in excluding polytheists, or even monotheists who don’t worship the God of the Jews. “One Lord” unities Christians as standing behind one man, having one immediate boss (“Lord”) – Jesus – and so not divided among this or that teacher, prophet, apostle, etc. “One Spirit” – unites Christians as against those influenced by the spirits which in the apostolic view inspire, control, and oppress the non-Christian world. And it also prevents the elevation of one gift  over another – it’s all from one Spirit (or one spirit) – God (or God’s).

Mentioning these three, in that order, sort of re-iterates the story of the gospels and Acts. It is one God at work, first by sending his Son, then (after his Son’s resurrection and ascension) by sending his Spirit. So this triadic language is a way of encapsulating, as it were, this whole story of God’ work in these last days.

Will this explanation fly? Is this compatible with unitarianism? Yes. (And really, with any views on the Trinity.) Is it arbitrary? No – it seems well-motivated. Not every such passage is one where Christian unity is at the forefront, but Paul is much-concerned with Christian unity, and he needn’t be read as dropping hints that only a good bit later would be taken as implicit creedal trinitarianism. This unity doctrine, expressed by a triple slogan, seems to a common thread in all known apostolic teaching. Moreover, this explanation keeps us within a mid-1st c. thought world, in which (arguably) theories of divine triunity are as yet unknown, and in which the one God of Israel just is the Father of Jesus – not a complex of the Father and two others. This is an important virtue – letting the texts speak on their own terms, and not anachronistically reading our concerns back into them. Moreover, the explanation is charitable to the NT authors, and is simple.

It bears repeating that one can accept this explanation and be a trinitarian. One must just concede that these triadic formulas don’t imply your version of the Trinity doctrine. They might still be part of a broader set of data which you think your Trinity theory best explains.

Back to scoring: Bowman needs to show that his explanation of these triadic passages is the best. He hasn’t tackled one like that sketched above. And his own explanation at best seems to require a troublingly vague formulation of “the” Trinity doctrine. And at worst, his explanation implies that anything like a mainstream current Trinity doctrine is false, as it simply identifies all the persons and God, and doesn’t show how the former in some sense compose the latter. Still, he gains some points simply by facing an important sort of objection, and for forcefully presenting important phenomena which demand explanation, and for which he arguably has one. How will Burke’s round 5 compare?