trinities 2021 highlights – a grateful review

2021 was a very productive year for the trinities podcast! I managed to produce 27 new episodes, aiming for but not always achieving 3 new episodes per month, excluding August.

I started the year with podcast 314, 10 Fundamental Questions about the Trinity. Here I formulated 10 basic and 10 advanced question about “the doctrine of the Trinity,” which I then used in three further episodes, as I reviewed books which purport to be introductions to the subject, evaluating them how many of these questions they actually give clear answers to. I have a pile of more “Intro to the Trinity” books – because of the inherently dark nature of this subject, there is a perpetual demand for books which promise to lessen the confusion – so I may do a few more such episodes in 2022.

I did fewer interview episodes in 2021. The most interesting ones I did were with Dr. JC Beall, about his book arguing that catholic “two natures” christology should be embraced as a real, and not as a merely apparent, contradiction. Or maybe the best of them was this interview with a new whistleblower about his book, long-time Church of Christ pastor Jeff Deuble, author of Christ Before Creeds.

Speaking of books and whistleblowers, I was proud to present a new, modernized edition of Presbyterian minister Thomas Emyln’s An Humble Inquiry. This was a big project, taken on with my fellow UCA Board Member Kegan Chandler. It makes this lost classic available to present and future generations.

The Unitarian Christian Alliance took up a lot of my energy in 2021, as after being delayed because of Covid-19, we finally were able to put on our first conference, here in Tennessee. It was a smashing success, and everyone is eager to do it again in 2022. The opening-night slot was for my new presentation, the product of many years of studying the fourth gospel, “What John 1 Meant.”

You can hear the audio-only version in podcast 338.

In a unique 2021 episode, I turned to give some criticisms to my fellow unitarian Christians in podcast 328 – 13 bad reasons to switch from trinitarian to unitarian. There will, God willing, be some more constructive criticisms in 2022.

Another big presentation I gave was podcast 334 – “Who do you say I am?”.

These arguments, I think, are important, and show a way past what can become tedious proof-text wars. They’re formulating a sort of reasoning to the best explanation that many engage in instinctively. I wish that I had heard them back when I was starting to re-evaluate my theology and christology. They are applying to christology a sort of reasoning I previously applied to the New Testament and “the Trinity” back in podcast 189 – The unfinished business of the Reformation.

I was in two online debates in 2021, one with fast-talking apologist Anthony Rogers, with him arguing for the hopeless position that the Gospel According to Mark teaches that Jesus is God. The most interesting thing about that debate, I think, were the two follow-up episodes in which I unpacked a whole bunch of exegetical errors he was making.

The second debate was with an actual scholar, who behaved completely differently (and better) than Rogers, Dr. Andrew Loke. I learned a lot from his carefully-argued and erudite book The Origin of Divine Christology. I enjoyed this debate much more; his arguments were clearer and generally more sensible, and he engaged thoughtfully with my material. Here too I produced a follow-up episode, which focused on his claim that in the New Testament the Father “represents” God rather than being one and the same with God. And I turned my opening statement, in which I argue that the New Testament Jesus is NOT fully divine, into this video.

A number of times I engaged with the work of evangelical Christian scholars: apologist and historian Dr. Michael Licona, Baptist theologian Dr. Brandon Smith, and apologist Evan Minton. In each case, I thought my interaction with their material was respectful in addition to being substantial, but none of them chose to respond. Perhaps they will in the future; my hope is that, like philosophers do, they will take it as a complement that someone wants to carefully engage with their work.

Two episodes followed up on an issue which I think is an Achilles’ heel for catholic orthodoxy about Christ, which is how it could be that a divine and so essentially immortal being could die on the cross for our sins. In 2021 I continued this theme with podcast 323 – Did God die on the cross? (responding to an episode by the above-mentioned Dr. Smith) and podcast 333 – The Arguments of “God’s Death,” which analyzes the script of this hilarious puppet show by Mark Cain, host of the UCA Podcast.

I’m very grateful to my Patreon supporters for all their help! If you’d like to chip in on a per-episode basis, you can do it here.

And I’m more grateful to God our heavenly Father, for blessing me with enough health, time, and insight to produce this material. I don’t take my limited time here for granted, and I pray that he and his precious Son, my Lord Jesus, are honored by it.