the dud of “corporate personality” or group persons

In his latest bombing run, Chad occasionally talks in ways that suggest that I’ll actually alleging divine deception in my “Divine Deception” paper. Again, I must remind the reader that I don’t think the Father et. al. deceived anyone in this regard. I’m knocking “social” Trinity theories for implying such past deception.

Once you realize that if the Father, Son, and Spirit did have morally sufficient reasons for deceiving the ancients, such reasons would not be obvious or transparent to us, it should no longer seem to you that there are no such reasons.

It is being conceded that, given that (as Chad thinks) ST is true, it follows that the members of the trinity intentionally deceived the ancient Jews, by given them solid reasons to think that God is a non-group person/self. This will be too much for some, who think that intentional deception is intrinsically wrong. But I don’t think that, so I move on.

Others, like me, find this undesirable, that this would seem to be a morally wrong deception. If you find this wholly relieved by general considerations about God’s ways being beyond us, then I’ll have to leave you there. I find that this only reduces the level of how strongly it seems wrong, but it still does seem that way, not only because it’s intentional deception, but also because of the subject-matter.

Moving on, I think it is important to see how radically Chad and his source think the ancients differed from us. Granted, it’s more than the careless stab (at a reason justifying the deception) than one is accustomed to, but I just don’t buy it, and I don’t think that most people will. Chad summarizes that for these ancients,

It is the individual person that is an abstraction, for his identity depends on the group of which he is a part. People of this culture will find it convenient for practical reasons to speak as if there were individual, private selves, but whether there really are or really could be private selves would be a largely foreign consideration to them.

I think you’re slipping, unnecessarily, into saying that they denied the existence of individual persons, or that they thought they were reducible to aspects of a group person. But this is just unbelievable. No sane adult, even in ancient times, thinks of himself as an abstraction, as a mere aspect, mode, or property of a group-sized entity. (Notice that I didn’t say member of a group, which is a thing in its own right, and not a mere abstraction.) You talk of “individual” and “private” selves as what they don’t believe in, but both adjectives are redundant. A self has a point of view which is not literally shared by others. And a self is an individual entity, a being.

The idea of a self is universal in human cultures, because it’s part of the furniture built into the human mind. Ancient Buddhists c. 400-100 BCE denied that there were selves, meaning lasting, substantial things which can be the owners or components of first-person-implying states or events like perceptions, beliefs, and desires. This shows that they had the concept of a self. But so does anyone who uses personal pronouns about himself or others. Surely, an ancient Jew could anticipate the future. This assumes that he himself is real, and will potentially still exist in a week, month, etc. Surely he doesn’t think he’s an abstraction of “the Jews” or “the Hebrews” or “the children of Abraham.” But yes, his membership in this group may have been considered more important that we moderns consider our various memberships. The difference between them, we can say, is ethical, not metaphysical. It’s on the importance we put on individuals as such, and which they put instead of group membership. One’s place in the group, they though, just dictated what one should do. One sees this in many ancient and early medieval cultures, e.g. Confucianism, Hinduism.

I deny that there is any “modern concept of personhood.” The concept of a self is basic to the human mind, and there is no reason to think this has changed in the last 5000 years or so. What there are are modern values and practices and ways of relating to human selves, which yes, differ, and can be characterized as more “individualistic” in various ways. (e.g. thinking that they are or should be considered “autonomous”) Back to Chad,

The safest conclusion is that, at most, the ancients spoke of God at times as if He were an individual, private self, for practical reasons, not because they really believed he was such a self. As collectivists, the question of whether they believed there were or could be such selves was likely foreign to them.

That question was foreign to them because as humans, of course they believed in individual selves. I’m sorry, it is obvious that they thought Yahweh (etc.) to be a god, and a god, they thought, is a certain sort of powerful (individual) self. There is just no reason I can see to think they left it as an open question whether a god was an individual self or a group self. I don’t say they never imagined that there might be a group self, of course. (This falls short of believing in such.) Chad is not positing an “epistemic gap” between the ancients and us, but rather a radical difference in how they thought about selves, human and divine. It’s a big difference in their metaphysics of human persons. Again, he says that

Our concept of a person as a private self—an autonomous, individual center of consciousness—began to appear in nascent form in Augustine and Boethius, developed in the reflective womb of Western theology and philosophy, came to full term in Descartes

This is bizarre in the extreme. Did not Abraham think of himself as a real being, with his with own first person point of view, and in some sense autonomous (free, in control)? Of course he did. What developed was the terminology of hypostasis and persona, based on theological agonies respecting the trinity, then the Trinity.

All that matters is that their concept of personhood did not exclude the possibility that God be a group person. And to insist that it did—on the grounds that ours does, or that the concept of personhood is analytic—is sound hermeneutics only to an analytic philosopher!

No, that is not all that matters. I don’t think I want to claim that it is (now or then) an analytic truth that there are no group-persons. I do think it is a necessary falsehood, though. What matters is that they thought the one god was a self, and that they didn’t think this self was composed of or somehow supervening on other selves. And were led directly to this view by OT-era revelation.

As I see it, and I haven’t fully looked into the Robinson book/papers, no one has ever made a strong case for thinking that the ancient Jews thought that God was a group person, or that they believed anything was a group person. If this last is so, then I don’t see how they could be expected to be open-minded about whether or not God is a group person. The family, the nation, the army, etc. – I don’t see any evidence that they thought these were literally group persons.

In Chad’s paper (pp. 11f), he suggests that phenomena like punishing descendants, Levirate marriage, collective responsibility, and Paul’s talk of the church as “the body of Christ” can only or best be understood by supposing they believed in group persons, but as best I can tell, this hasn’t been shown. Apparently (p. 242) Robinson largely just hand-waved here, never really spelling out most of this, and his work has been severely criticized by other Old Testament scholars. (pp. 243-5) And see some more plausible explanations of some of his OT texts in that same paper, by Andrew Perriman.

Anyway, one reading Robinson’s hypothesis is that the Hebrews were “unable to distinguish clearly between the identity of the individual and the identity of the group.” (p. 246) But you only need the claim that they believed in group persons, in addition to persons. (You don’t need to say that they denied non-group persons, or reduced them to aspects of a group-person, or that they couldn’t clearly distinguish the two.) If they did believe in both sorts of persons, then perhaps, presented with evidence that Yahweh is a person, they would have to wonder whether or not he was a group person. Note though, that in these circumstances, there need be no intentional deception by members of the trinity. They may, in these circumstances, have just intended that people conclude that they were a person (of some sort), not that they were a single, non-group person – even if a few would have foolishly made that leap.

But again, I just don’t see any reason to think they believed in any literal group persons at all. I would settle for one single passage which could only be, or best be understood as assuming the existence of a literal self composed of other selves, human, angelic, or divine. But I don’t see any such passage. And I don’t see any reason why they would have thought God to be anything other than a single self, the referent of “he,” “him,” but not (also) “they,” “them.” And again, in visions etc. Yahweh is depicted as a humanoid figure, bearing personal names and titles, which given common human experience with human selves, would make them think that Yahweh was a single self. e.g. the vision of Isaiah 6, in which there is not a single clue that the figure on the throne might in some sense break down into three persons.

Let me suggest this: Chad, what is in your view the clearest such text? Post on it, and then show us how it implies or assumes some group self/person.