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The so-called Athanasian Creed (also known by the Latin words it begins with, Quicunque vult) is considered by many to be the very definition of “the” orthodox doctrine. It is of uncertain origin, although many readers think it has a strongly Augustinian flavor (which if true shows it is not from Athanasius himself, who died before Augustine was converted). It has long been considered authoritative in the West, but less so in the East, and honestly I’m not clear about how this document came to be so popular, other than the fact that it memorably and concisely sets out something like the same doctrine as the Council of Constantinople.
Many recent Christian philosophers, in setting out to defend trinitarianism, have used this (and not the Bible or some council document) as the reference point. I’d probably chalk this up to convenience, and to the fact the philosophers are more likely to be from “high church” and confessional Christian groups.
The creed reads in part,
Whoever wants to be saved should above all cling to the catholic faith. Whoever does not guard it whole and inviolable will doubtless perish eternally. Now this is the catholic faith: We worship one God in trinity and the Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the divine being. For the Father is one person, the Son is another, and the Spirit is still another. But the deity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, coeternal in majesty. What the Father is, the Son is, and so is the Holy Spirit. Uncreated… infinite… eternal… And yet there are not three eternal beings, but one who is eternal… Almighty is the Father… And yet there are not three almighty beings, but one who is almighty. Thus the Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spirit is God: And yet there are not three gods, but one God. …not three lords, but one Lord. As Christian truth compels us to acknowledge each distinct person as God and Lord, so catholic religion forbids us to say that there are three gods or lords. The Father was neither made nor created nor begotten; the Son was neither made nor created, but was alone begotten of the Father; the Spirit was neither made nor created, but is proceeding from the Father and the Son. Thus there is one Father, not three fathers; one Son, not three sons; one Holy Spirit, not three spirits. And in this Trinity, no one is before or after, greater or less than the other; but all three persons are in themselves, coeternal and coequal; and so we must worship the Trinity in unity and the one God in three persons. Whoever wants to be saved should think thus about the Trinity. It is necessary for eternal salvation that one also faithfully believe that our Lord Jesus Christ became flesh… That our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is both God and man. He is God, begotten before all worlds from the being of the Father, and he is man, born in the world from the being of his mother — existing fully as God, and fully as man with a rational soul and a human body; equal to the Father in divinity, subordinate to the Father in humanity. Although he is God and man, he is not divided, but is one Christ. He is united because God has taken humanity into himself; he does not transform deity into humanity. He is completely one in the unity of his person, without confusing his natures. For as the rational soul and body are one person, so the one Christ is God and man. He suffered death for our salvation. …
I’ve been critical of this much-beloved standard of orthodoxy. In a published article I said,
. . . it is worth asking whether it is a mistake to consider [the so-called Athanasian Creed] document authoritative. To be sure, it is and has been endorsed by many western Christian churches for a long time. Thus many western Christians who see God’s hand in the historical development of the Christian tradition want to affirm it. The problem is that we can find some powerful reasons not to. The main problem is that it seems to put forth contradictory claims. The creed says that each of the three divine persons has at least one property the other two lack (e.g. being “from none,” being “begotten from” the Father, and “proceeding from” the Father and Son). It follows by the indiscernibility of identicals that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identical, not numerically the same. It also says that each of the three is God, and yet there is only one God. Further, it lacks the kind of pedigree one wants in an authoritative document. It is neither a council document, nor a digest of scriptural teaching, nor from the hand of a church father (we don’t know who wrote it, but it wasn’t Athanasius). Finally, this document makes morally dubious claims, when it asserts that anyone who doesn’t accept its (contradictory?) doctrines is damned to Hell. But doesn’t the merciful God accept many Christians with vague or incoherent trinitarian beliefs (often modalist in essence), Christians before the trinitarian developments of the fourth century, social trinitarians, and those with unique, speculative beliefs about the Trinity?
Some would argue that the above reasons are outweighed by reasons we have to trust in whatever documents a certain religious body (e.g. the Catholic Church) has affirmed. That looks like a tough row to hoe, but I suggest that the matter deserves more discussion by Christian philosophers, and that it is better to face than to avoid what looks like genuine conflicts between reason and tradition. . . (“Tradition and Believability: Edward Wierenga’s Social Trinitarianism”, Philosophia Christi, 5:2, 447-56, 2003.)
Now there are apparently consistent ways to interpret this document, for instance, using the doctrine of relative identity, or the concepts of material constitution and “numerical identity” which isn’t the relation which occurs in Leibniz’s Law. How, then, can I assert that the Athanasian Creed seems contradictory? Simply, I’m not convinced that the authors had any of these highly rarefied metaphysical notions in mind, nor am I convinced that God inspired the anonymous author of this creed to write truths the meaning of which he didn’t understand, and that indeed no one would really understand until the 1960s (relative identity) or the 1990s (material constitution and “numerical identity” which ain’t identity). Charity does require us to seek for a consistent interpretation of any document, but doesn’t prevent us from ultimately concluding that an author is confused, when no plausible consistent interpretation presents itself.
Still, having said that, I must admit that I’ve seen traces of materialistic and quasi-materialistic thinking about God in the era of the church Fathers. Tertullian, I believe, thought (like Hobbes much later) that God is a material object. And others sometimes seem to think of the divine nature (Godhead, deity) as a matter (or something like matter) which might eternally compose three divine persons – a sort of God-stuff. This sort of talk tends to disappear later in the Latin tradition, I’d guess because of the increasing emphasis on the doctrine of divine simplicity, and the Thomistic claim that God is pure act. So I’ll leave the door open to the idea that this creed’s author may have had something like Brower’s and Rea’s constitution trinitarianism in mind, though he’s less than clear about this.
I don’t think the same kind of historical considerations can help out the relative identity reading of this creed, but in any case, this version of trinitarianism, like any other, deserves to be considered on its own merits. Another day.
Update: you can hear, and hear about this creed in episode 2 of the trinities podcast!
Wait…
I’m confused. Why is Leibniz’s Law an appropriate tool for demonstrating inconsistency in the creed when L’s L would have been just as far from the author’s mind as relative identity, etc?
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Hi Alex,
Thanks for the comment! Yeah, what you suggest is possible. It commits us to what I think is an odd and hard to accept historical story, which goes as follows:
My problem with this, is that it seems to remove the Quicunque from the realm of human speculation, and place it in the category of a divinely inspired writing. I can’t bring myself to believe that.
Another problem with your suggestion is that we can confess words we don’t understand, but we can’t really believe what they express. But the doctrine of the Trinity it supposed to be an important, action-guiding belief. If I confess “XYZ”, i.e. that those words express some truth or other, it is hard to see how this can guide my actions and choices. Maybe one could assert that we understand part of the content of “XYZ”, and that’s good enough…
I wonder if it’s necessary to assume that the author(s) of the creed had a particular interpretation in mind. Here’s one analysis of what one is doing when one makes a creedal statement: One is uttering a sentence and committing oneself to the claim that the sentence has a reasonable, etc. (I don’t know exactly what conditions to put in the place of the “etc.”) interpretation that makes it be the assertion of a truth.
This account nicely explains how even small children can sincerely recite a creed, even one that contains words that they do not understand. Augustine talks about the simple believers not understanding what they believe, and this may be a case like that. This also explains why people can sincerely pray in a sacred language (e.g., Hebrew or ecclesiastical Latin) that they do not actually understand.
If this is correct, then the authors of a creed do not need to have a semantics for the terms in the creedal claims. All they need to have is the belief that a good semantics is possible.
In other words, even if the author(s) of the pseudo-athanasian creed did not believe in relative identity, if the hypothesis relative identity provides a reasonable semantics for the creed that renders the creed non-contradictory, then this is all that is needed for defending the creed.
I am not endorsing relative identity as the only way to make sense of this creed. I just want to point out that the fact that the authors didn’t know about relative identity does not rule out the possibility that relative identity is the right rendering of their claims.
Dale,
To worship Jesus as God is idolatry, because he is not God.
As the King of the coming Kingdom of God (whom God has given all authority) he is worthy of praise and admiration. He can be ‘worshipped’ (in biblical language, but not in our language today) like Joseph, David, Solomon, and such were worshipped.
Well, in part I suspect I don’t think it to be as crude as you do. As I see it, it’s not part of a research project, except in a very indirect way, and I agree that it’s odd that some people treat it as if it were. Since I regard it as a summary and not as a rigorous development of a doctrine, I hold it to the standards of a popular summary, not a rigorous theological account. And I think it does very well by those standards; I think its history speaks very well for its success according to those standards. Further, because I view it as a summary, I read it with a view to what it is trying to summarize, which, with all its diversity, can be rather sophisticated at times. (I also am less convinced by criticisms of it than you are. For instance, I don’t think the apparent contradiction argument works; at least, I see no plausible way of reading the Latin that would make it viable. But I don’t think this is a major issue here, since I agree that there’s something wrong with how considerable a role the document has in a lot of modern discussion of the Trinity.)
In other words, I think reading it as a ‘speculation’ is entirely the wrong way to read it. There is nothing in the text nor in the way it is usually used that suggests it should be treated this way. The text itself presents itself simply as a brief account of tradition on certain key points. The strongest ecclesiastical affirmation of it, that of the Council of Florence, treats it simply as a summary of much more important things. And the most common usage of it is not as a theological text but as part of public prayer. These do make the question of its consistency under various interpretations an interesting one; but if it’s only in the ballpark, or if it has an infelicitous expression or two, that isn’t much of a criticism against it. It would be absurd, for instance, to take a basic primer on government from government class, and complain that it lacks a rigorous analysis of constitutional law, or that if taken too literally it leads to an inconsistent view. It’s a primer; if you’re taking it as a sophisticated account, you’re misreading it, even if it turns out, in fact, more sophisticated than some of the criticisms let on. Likewise here: if it’s best taken as a summary, it’s a mistake to read it as a speculation, because summaries aren’t venues for speculation. I do think, as I said, that the Quicunque Vult is more sophisticated than most of its critics will admit. I also think that this is something of a moot point. The value of a summary is not that it is a sophisticated account, but that it puts in small space what a sophisticated account would have to put in much larger space. This is not a principle of charity but one of common sense; and when we use it, I don’t think there’s much of a basis for coming down hard on the Creed Called Athanasian.
So, in other words, my point is that, while I agree that it occupies much too large a place in contemporary discussions about the Trinity, I don’t think it can be simply dismissed without carefully reflecting on the question of whether it is being misread in the arguments for its dismissal. And I think defenders of it have plenty of room to argue that there is a better way to read its claims, and a great deal of freedom as regards which direction they can take this argument.
Brandon,
The reason I asked if you considered the Creed to be divinely revealed (or something like it) is that I was trying to understand why many people are so infinitely patient with it, tolerating its problems unresolved for so long, and expending massive amounts of intellectual energy to come up with a genuinely new interpretation of it. One doesn’t treat failed speculations like that.
If I understand you, you see the document as a well-motivated and highly sophisticated theory, which ain’t necessarily true or even possibly true, but is nonetheless… helpful as a route into a certain line of thinking – an admittedly inaccurate “summary” of much Patristic intellectual labor.
To be honest, I just can’t bring myself to take such a hyper-sophisticated stance on something which doesn’t seem true. If the research project it’s a part of is fruitful, then isn’t it best to ditch it, and in its place substitute something which seems true?
To put it differently, even the principle of charity has its limits. After we’ve done our best, some documents are just internally inconsistent, inconsistent with something else we know, or graspable but implausible, or just dark and ungraspable.
JohnO,
Do you hold that it is idolatry to worship Jesus? Or a permissible polytheism? Or is it OK to worship him, but not to worship him as God? Or not as a god?
Just curious.
Dale and Jeff,
To worship more than one person as God is polytheism. The definition of monotheism means that you worship one person as God.
Luke,
I happen to highly admire NT Wright and Ben Witherington (though I haven’t read a complete work of either) – the tidbits I do get show that they are not afraid to challenge convention (not the least of which is going to to heaven when you die). I know NT Wright is sympathetic to my position regarding Christology. Though I’m not sure about Witherington. In any case an even more sympathetic person – Dr Colin Brown of Fuller Seminary, where he teaches christology and systematic theology – that I know of. Bart Ehrman (as wacky as he is sometimes) would fully be in my corner (from an NT textual perspective). JAT Robinson (another Brit) would also be sympathetic. But ultimately it isn’t in any of their hands – it is in my hands and your hands.
So when Jesus says to the Pharisees that they are called God, what does that mean?
Yeah, a straw man. Something like modalism presented (oddly) together with the assertion that it is tantamount to polytheism.
Sad thing is Vynette’s blog entry, does not hit the Trinity even though she thinks it does (i.e. staw man). This is what is very sad and indicates she has not done her homework.
Hello Dale,
“And we can try to ignore the long post-biblical theological tradition, but that seems impossible to me to do. In any case, no one really does it, that I’ve ever seen.”
You asked me to let you know when I started my Trinity on Trial series. Well, the first post is up.
JohnO,
I have nothing against the traditional historical-critical method. But I don’t think agreeing that we need to do good critical history and sociology and form study and whatever else is going to be much help. These methods yield very different results, depending on whose hands they’re in; NT scholars like N.T. Wright and Ben Witherington are light years apart in their reconstructions from the likes of Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan.
So I’m all for historical criticism in the right hands. How do we decide which hands are the right ones, which reconstruction is closest to reality? I tend to think that my own inclination to find someone like Wright or Witherington more plausible than, say, Mack is (more than anything else) a product of my prior acceptance of a more-or-less traditional view of Xianity. If I’m being honest, it’s my previous faith commitments that drive my assessment of different historical-critical proposals.
This doesn’t mean I can’t have those commitments challenged; I do have them challenged, and sometimes I give up certain beliefs I previously held dear. But it’s usually a confluence of factors that prompts this change. I see that maybe the text isn’t as clear as I thought, or under-determines a certain conclusion; then I’m influenced by philosophical or theological factors in such a way that I find myself holding a different belief than I previously did.
Anyways, what do you propose?
luke
Yes tradition carries some weight. But we don’t want our tradition to become what Jesus said of the Pharisees (theirs nullified the word of God).
So then, choosing the hermenutic should be discussed. What do you have against the current historical-critical modern exegesis methods? What would you propose instead?
Hi JohnO,
It would be nice if we could just hold up the products of the tradition against Scripture and get an unambiguous declaration on their accuracy (or veridicality, or whatever). In principle I’m all for it; in practice, I don’t think it’s possible.
I don’t think we’re going to be able to get a verdict on these matters out of Scripture without employing some hermeneutic or other. So far as I can tell, hermeneutics always presuppose substantive philosophical or theological commitments, and thus different hermeneutics are going to yield different results. Our conclusions about which aspects of the tradition align w/ Scripture are thus going to be strongly influenced by our prior, extra-biblical commitments; if we can’t agree on them, we won’t agree on what parts of the tradition to keep.
No doubt we’ll want to say that our extra-biblical commitments, despite the fact that they can’t be extracted verbatim from Scripture, nevertheless are supported by and plausible on Scripture itself–that they find inferential support therein. Then we can argue (if we want) about which hermeneutic is *better* supported by Scripture itself. But I also don’t think it’s illegitimate to bring philosophical commitments to bear on this endeavour. If we think the existence of an omnipotent, morally perfect God requires the denial of, say, theological determinism, then that might legitimately influence the way we read certain passages of Scripture.
I tend to agree that tradition isn’t as important as good biblical exegesis–informed by a sensible hermenutic–or theological or philosophical plausibility. But I do think tradition carries some weight. After all, Scripture itself always comes to us as part of a tradition, as redaction criticism shows; the canon wasn’t formed in a vacuum. Anyways, cheers!
luke
Brandon, if your line of reasoning holds weight – that what are inconsistencies currently can be explained to be consistent through philosophical rigor – the question remains is the doctrine defensible?
Like I previously stated, defensible according to what? I would have to think Biblical exegesis. And Biblical exegesis demands us to stay within the confines of the environment in which it was written. We must interpret Jesus as his hearers would have interpreted him.
Hi, Dale,
I’m not sure I understand your comment, so I’m not sure this answer will be helpful for clarifying my point. I don’t think the Athanasian Creed is divinely revealed. In its summary of the Trinity it does seem to me to be a reasonable first-approximation rough-and-ready summary of a doctrine. But holding this doesn’t require one to hold that it is flawless or even strictly consistent in its characterization, nor that there is no better way to express the points that it attempts to make, nor that it can be accepted on its own without balance from other sources. (Because I regard it as a summary rather than a definition, I do think the thought behind it is rather more sophisticated than what most people get out of it on reading it and only it; that is, I think it is misread if read alone without taking into account common Patristic arguments and claims it may possibly presuppose without explicitly stating. But this doesn’t require much commitment to precise details in it.) All it requires is that it be sufficiently in the ballpark for certain practical purposes (e.g., giving people a rough first notion).
But, as I said, if we are talking about consistency, and assuming just for the sake of argument that it turns out to be completely consistent on some well-argued notion that the author could not possibly have had in mind, there is no need to appeal to divine revelation in order to explain this. Such things are very common. For instance, people developed arithmetic millenia, and assumed that it was consistent, before Gentzen proved it consistent using transfinite induction. I very much doubt that many of those developers and users had much of a notion of transfinite induction.
Finding statements that are consistent under some interpretation is often very easy. Showing that they are consistent — even if we relax the standards of proof quite a bit from the mathematical level — is not always easy, and sometimes requires appeal to notions we didn’t have in mind when making the statements in the first place. If the Quicunque Vult turned out to be consistent on some interesting and defensible but wholly unexpected notion, it might suggest nothing more than that the author had a good sense of Church liturgy, and that liturgical meditation and rational reflection on the relevant texts had gradually eliminated all the ineliminable inconsistencies over the centuries. Or it might suggest any number of other things — e.g., that the statements might not be sufficiently precise not to admit of some defensible consistent interpretation, however unanticipated. Or it could be that people were much cleverer then than we are assuming. After all, with regard to relative identity, Geach thought that he was developing and making more precise an idea found in nuce in Aquinas. (I don’t think it really is; but Geach certainly thinks he was at least in the vicinity, and Thomas does occasionally say things that might be considered suggestive of it.) It might conceivably be that the author of the Athanasian Creed did have some vague, intuitive notion of something like relative identity when he wrote it, and just didn’t have the means to refine his sense of it (that had to wait until the means came along). Such things have certainly happened before; it’s one way philosophical theories become more sophisticated over time. I don’t think that’s what happened here; I just raise it to point out that there are lots of things that could explain its being clearly consistent only on apparently new-fangled assumptions (assuming that it is) besides divine revelation.
And, given that, and given that the Quicunque Vult doesn’t make any attempt to account for its own consistency, I don’t think there’s anything suspicious or unreasonable about looking into whether some notion the author couldn’t have in mind can make his statements consistent. And if it does, the only real question is not one of consistency, but whether the statements interpreted under that notion are defensible.
Luke, I would think the highest priority in determining truth would be what we hold to be most authoritative, correct? That would be the scriptures. Hence biblical exegesis would be of the highest regard. I think we’re on pretty steady ground to disregard tradition because of the mass number of flip flops contained therein. Moreover, if you read accounts of the period “When Jesus Became God by Dr. Richard Rubenstein (he is neutral, he is an athiest of Jewish descent)” these ‘christians’ acted like power hungry mobsters.
I think maybe the Chalcedon/physicalism example made things unnecessarily complex. Let me try again.
I tend to see documents like the Chalcedonian and Athanasian statements as under-determined, in the following sense. They seem to state pretty clearly *what* is the case, without giving us the means to say *how* it could be the case; they don’t tell us how we can understand or render the claims they make logically coherent. In this sense they’re under-determined.
Chalcedon asserts that, in the Incarnation, there was one person with two natures–one fully human, one fully divine–that the two natures were distinct and unmixed, no tertium quid, etc. But Chalcedon says nothing about how we’re supposed to make sense of this state of affairs; it doesn’t tell us what the concepts necessarily mean, or what sort of philosophical machinery we need to render its claims coherent. There might be a number of ways to do so (here Dale’s disjunctive proposal seems right), and which one we go w/ will be determined by which one we find most philosophically and/or theologically satisfying. My view is that it’s one of the jobs of Xian philosophers and theologians to try and work all this out.
Similarly w/ the Athanasian formula; it states pretty clearly *what* is going on w/ the Trinity w/o telling us *how* it makes sense. As I see it, when people like Rea and Brower introduce something like material constitution to answer the *how* question, they’re doing one of the things Xian philosophers should be doing: unpacking the means by which we can render the creeds consistent (supposing, of course, we think the creed in question reliable or veridical or whatever).
I guess I don’t tend to think of these formulas in terms of revelation, and I’m not sure I grasp the import of that for the discussion. I see them as part of a tradition that arose from the need to make sense of certain claims in the NT–more of a human process than a divine one, though of course God might have been guiding the process at certain times in certain ways. My own view is that the tradition is fallible, and that every generation needs to consider the products of the tradition and judge them on their merits–though it’s difficult to say what criteria they should be measured against, and how the criteria should be weighted (e.g., biblical exegesis vs. philosophical plausibility vs. commitment to tradition vs. experiential data, etc.). This is something that seems to be going on quite a bit these days, though not w/o a lion’s share of resistance in some circles.
Luke
Dale, the problem with philosophy is that the writers of the Bible had presuppositions. Our western, greek presuppositions are FAR different. Therefore we will misunderstand and mis-apply what they attempted to say. We can use newer philosophical constructs and processes, but we never transplant their words into a new environment. It loses all meaning. We have to address their words in the original enviornment to find the meaning. Then we can bring the meaning to our environment with new words.
Therefore the discussion should be what did the words of the writers of the Bible mean to them – which is what modern exegesis is all about.
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John and Luke: Chalcedon – wow, the issues it raises! Maybe I’ll post on it in this series, or maybe I’ll save it for a later one on Incarnation theories.
Hey Luke,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I’m not sure what to make of your Chal Creed and physicalism analogy, though I think I understand the import of it.
Your suggestion about how to regard the Ath Creed: is it almost like God issuing a disjunctive truth (P v Q v R) and it is up to us, perhaps with the aid of later revelation, to find the one or more true disjuncts? I guess that makes sense… If the doctrine of material constitution is a later revelation! Your strategy makes plent of sense, I think, but only on the assumption that the document is divinely inspired. I suggest that we don’t have good grounds for that belief, so we should go back to the default for medieval theological speculations, which is judging it on its theoretical merits and our best undersanding of the Bible.
Brandon,
Thanks for the very interesting comments. When we mull over the Ath Creed, what do we think we’re doing? We’d like to think that the thing expresses an insight, held by the author, in a pithy way no less. That sort of reading seems unattainable. But what you suggest strikes me as a reasonable reading only if the document is taken to be the product of divine revelation – so it is indirectly God’s words. He would no doubt grasp their meaning as he “spoke” them, even though the human author didn’t.
Do you take the document to be divine revelation? I don’t – to me it has the marks of merely human speculation (mind you, I don’t thereby denigrate it – I’m a philosopher!) and sectarian ecclesiastical controversy – it is meant to sort of bully people into not diverting from the teaching of the proto-Catholic church. Some are wedded to seeing all or most of the early doctrinal development in Christian theology as divinely guided, and so it would just fall out from that that this was to, insofar as it fits in with other early Latin trinitarian documents. I don’t agree with that either, but the reasons why are kind of involved…
JohnO:
One reason is that for better or worse, we don’t live, so to speak, in the conceptual world of the ancient Jews. While we could try to make everything consistent with the core of divine revelation there, as philosophy has come a long way and become more precise, we’re going to at least express things somewhat differently. And we can try to ignore the long post-biblical theological tradition, but that seems impossible to me to do. In any case, no one really does it, that I’ve ever seen. Some say they do, such as the biblical unitarians, but they in fact rely on post-biblical philosophical claims about human nature, God’s nature, and so on. So engagement it must be. Having said that, there is plenty in the church fathers to not like!
I wonder what other possibilities are available regarding the Athanasian Creed, although so far, I find Dale’s assessment attractive!
I mention this, as one who comes from a tradition that-for better or worse-often tacitly assumes that if you believe or assent to specific theological formulations, you are saved. Hence, “the Quicunque Vult,†offers that kind of capsule of formulations with which one can readily “pull off the shelf†and invite someone to assent to.
I must admit that Brandon’s allegation is not too far off the mark! None of us would want to revise or attempt to write something like the Athanasian Creed, or for that matter any of the other creeds. So, it does offer an accessible reading of the Trinity…or at least, I thought it did until I read Dale’s critique! I’d add that there appears to be a confident belief of the Triune God’s goodness toward humanity in the gift of salvation.
Another matter has come to mind, and forgive the diversion, but if one looks squarely at the beginning of statement, you’d have to revisit why you’d want to trust anything that follows: Does anyone’s salvation depend upon a common set (or collection) of knowledge or does it depend upon what God has done in Jesus Christ? Of course, this calls into question the assumptions of the tradition I am part of! The Athanasian Creed does go into some details that I hadn’t observed before until reading Dale’s blog; as he put it regarding damnation, “there are some morally dubious claims†when its authors insist upon assent to a particular collection of beliefs found with in the statement.
To its credit, there is a strong expectation of meeting up with the Triune God in worship that is declared in the statement, and I cannot recall other creeds that attempt that affirmation.
I’m finding, though, that the different properties cited within, as observed by Dale, create confusion rather than clarity regarding the Trinity.
One is either human, or God. I do not understand how a being, can be 200% of two mutually exclusive entities, seperated, yet undifferentiated – which is what Chalcedon states.
When I was an undergrad I recall my Theology 101 professor trotting out the Athanasian creed, breaking the class up into groups, and asking each group to come up with a coherent interpretation of the text. His point was more-or-less that it couldn’t be done, and that the rhetoric about eternal punishment was just that–rhetoric.
I share Dale’s puzzlement as to why this particular document should be held in such high esteem, particularly since we really don’t have much of a clue where it came from.
But Dale, I’m wondering about one of the reasons you give for being skeptical about attempts to give a coherent interpretation of the document via relative identity or material constitution. Your skepticism about these attempts seems to stem from your belief (quite right, no doubt) that the author didn’t have such high-falutin philosophical concepts in mind, or think such machinery was necessary to make sense of the formula; that God wouldn’t have inspired the author to unkowingly write a document which couldn’t be understood apart from this machinery; and that therfore we should be skeptical about the relative identity and constitution strategies.
Now I haven’t thought much about the Athanasian creed, but I have thought a bit more about the Chalcedonian formula, so let’s suppose we consider that for a moment. Suppose you’re a Christian who wants to stay within the bounds of the Chalcedonian definition; but suppose that, like many thinking Christians nowadays, you’re also a physicalist about human persons. Should you conclude that, because the authors of the Chalcedonian formula were mind-body dualists (or at least they weren’t physicalists in our sens of the word), and because the definition assumes that what it means to be a human person is to be composed of a body and a soul (however they thought of that), you need to articulate your account of the Incarnation in non-physicalist terms in order to be faithful to Chalcedon?
I’m strongly inclined to say no. It’s clear to me that what matters most, on Chalcedon, is the fact that Jesus was fully human and fully divine (and that the natures are seperate, not confused, etc.). What it means to be fully human–that’s another question, one that is more-or-less left to us to decide. If we decide physicalism about human persons is the way to go, we should have no qualms about developling a model of the Incarnation along physicalist lines–this despite the fact that the authors of the Chalcedonian formula weren’t themselves physicalists in our sense of the word (and probably would have been downright opposed to the notion).
All this just to say that often times these creeds and confessions are extremely under-determined, and it’s up to us to put some meat on their bones. I’m not sure if the Chalcedon/physicalist issue is exactly analogous to the Athanasius/relative ID/material constitution one, but I think they’re at least in the same ballpark. Thanks for the post.
Luke
I’m glad you said something about this. I’ve always been puzzled by the reliance on the Quicunque Vult; and I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s partly due to laziness — at least, it sometimes seems that a lot of people who rely heavily on it in discussing the Trinity don’t seem to put much effort into looking at the Ecumenical Councils and Church Fathers, which is where the doctrine is really found. But I also wonder if instead it may be due in great measure to Anglicans; they seem to use it more than anyone else, both liturgically and doctrinally. And if that’s true, it may all just be because it’s quite catchy in English.
In defense of some of those who use it, though, I don’t see how it would matter if the claims made by the author were only consistent on the basis of ideas developed much better. Since the author doesn’t claim to be giving an account of how the claims he is making are consistent, the only question is whether in fact they are; and as far as I can see, the only important historical constraint on any such defense of consistency is that it not appeal to anything that implies something ruled out by the claims themselves. After all, we don’t need to look to divine inspiration to find cases of people making consistent claims whose consistency they didn’t have an account for; philosophy and science are full of such cases. Given our patchwork way of doing just about everything, it’s probably the norm rather than the exception.
A small bit of trivia: It’s sometimes said that the Quicunque Vult has never been recognized by an Ecumenical Council; but this is not strictly true. It’s found in the bull of ‘Union’ with the Armenians from the Council of Florence, which is considered an E.C. by Catholics. But the bull explicitly calls it a compendium — i.e., it’s put forward as a summary, one not intended to be understood outside the context of what it is summarizing — and, while the bull is a little vague, it seems to be offered for supplementing catechesis and nothing more. And it’s only found in the bull of union with the Armenians, nowhere else in the bulls of union put forward by the Council; one of the things I’ve always wondered about is why the bishops at the Council thought that the Armenians, and (it seems) only the Armenians, needed it so much.
Why not ditch the church fathers, who were Greek Pagan philosophers before they knew of Christ – and listen to the first century Jewish understanding of God and Messiah (which Jesus subscribed to! Mark 12).
The Jewish understanding of God and Messiah was enough for Jesus – why isn’t it enough for us?
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