Little known fact: overwork causes one’s neck to become invisible!
After an embarrassing amount of time, I’ve finally finished my encyclopedia entry on the Trinity for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (as well as lengthy supplementary documents on the history of Trinity doctrines, Judaic and Islamic objections, and unitarianism).
Since I can’t thank them in the entry, I’d like to thank editors Ed Zalta and Uri Nodelman for their help, and their patience in working through many issues that arose. Also, thanks to SEP philosophy of religion editor Ed Wierenga, for his comments on a draft, and help in figuring up how to divide up the enormous thing.
My thanks to those who offered helpful comments on various drafts, including James Anderson, and trinities bloggers Joseph Jedwab, JT Paasch, and Scott Williams. I also benefited from correspondence with Richard Cross, and with historian Dean Grodzins.
Many parts of the entries are related to my previous posts here at trinities, so I have to also thank everyone who commented on those as well.
It took so long, a couple of sections are already a little out of date!
Finally: become a friend of the SEP. I’m going to I did. Friends get to download really awesome pdfs of the entries, which look & print like book pages.
Update: discussion over at Prosblogion.
Hey Ben,
I think everything you say here is right. The biggest difference is that Clarke is a unitarian, Swinburne a trinitarian (or at least – that’s what he intends. Arguably, his divine persons are not at all equally divine.) From another angle, how the secure monotheism is different. Follow the pre-Nicene catholics, Clarke emphasizes the uniqueness of the Father; given his status, there is no other God (in that same sense). He’s very close to Origen for example, in his core theology. Swinburne instead identifies the Trinity with the substance composed of the Three. But that substance isn’t a god! Implausibly, he urges that the ancient catholics, in their emphasis on monotheism, only meant to emphasize that there were no – independent gods running amok – that all the gods there were, were of necessity united in will and action. The hardest, and to me most annoying, thing about Swinburne is that he uses God ambiguously. In natural theology contexts, he usually means the Father. But then he walks to talk of “God incarnate”, and there, it’s the Son. And “the Christian God” for him is the Trinity. It’s just straight up ambiguity, which clouds his views. Those views are pretty fully worked out. But in my view, the don’t fit either NT or early Christianity.
Hello trinities bloggers,
I read the SEP main Trinity section and the Unitarianism supplement yesterday and today. They were both really helpful to me, clarifying the logical structure of Trinity discussions. I recently discovered this blog and was happily surprised to find that Dale wrote the SEP Trinity entry. Thanks!
I’m still trying to discern the difference between Swinburne’s view and Clark’s view (I have a superficial understanding of both, Swinburne from ‘Was Jesus God’ and Clark from the Trinity SEP entry). Clark is described as holding that “the Son of God has all the divine attributes but one, that of existing a se that is, existing and not being in any sense derivative of or dependent on anything else.” Sounds to me like Swinburne on metaphysical vs. ontological necessity. What’s the difference? Is it that Swinburne calls the triad ‘God’ and Clark calls the Father ‘God’? Both models seem to describe the same sort of divine persons, with the Father alone being a se. Any help?
Dale, I happened to be reading that entry just the other day. I’m very interested to know you’re the author, it’s always good to be able to talk with someone who makes an entry in such a scholarly work. I found your article extremely informative. I’m still only part way through it, but I’m learning a great deal. Thank you.
Great! I’ve been looking forward to this. Keep the good work up on the website, there’s not enough philosophical treatments of the Trinity out there!
Thanks again for entertaining my question on Prosblogion. I’m glad I found trinities, and I’ll add it to my reader.
Oye, che bueno! What a labor of love, baby.
Wicked cool.
Congratulations Dale! Super cool.
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