Welcome to Dividing Line / James White fans

Listen to this post:

You won’t know much about me if mostly you’ve heard the James White version of me: I “start with Philosophy,” am my own ultimate authority, don’t believe the Bible, impose Philosophy on Scripture, am a sneaking and dishonest “Sophist,” blah blah blah. These are just moldly old stereotypes about non-trinitarians and Philosophers that he’s inherited from his Reformed and apologetics traditions. Frankly, he doesn’t understand my motivations, and he often just uncharitably imagines things about me. Perhaps he will understand in the future; you can too, if you want to; hence this post, which will point you to some central bits of my work (see also here).

I’ve never been a member of any cult. My background, as explained in this series of posts or the short interview below, is mainstream, trinitarian evangelical. I was an apologetics fan-boy in the late 80s and 90s. This is my current denomination; we’re Restorationists, more throughgoing Protestants, like some in the Radical Reformation.

In short, clashing Trinity theories led me to search for which was correct. This eventually drove me back to re-examine the New Testament, and I was shocked to discover that it doesn’t actually teach any Trinity theory or even “the deity of Christ.”

Dr. White thinks that at least if you know Greek, “the doctrine of the Trinity” is easily seen to be logically implied by Scripture. I disagree and explain why the over-simplified, Warfieldian, deductive arguments that apologists make don’t even come close to working.

No sort of deductive argument is going to work; as I explain towards the end, we need to argue in the style of inference to the best explanation. That is what I’m trying to do.

White doesn’t seem to acknowledge that “the doctrine of the Trinity” is really a set of required sentences which can be interpreted variously, with a herd of clashing interpretations about what those sentences mean. I explain the ambiguities in an accessible way in my short book What is the Trinity? I don’t argue for my own theology there; rather, it’s a book to help my trinitarian friends to grapple with the history and complexity of clashing Trinity theories. And I have to chuckle when some keyboard warrior, or even Dr. White, informs me that I ignore the Being/Person distinction; that book has a chapter on rival interpretations of “Being” and another chapter on rival interpretations of “Person.” And many such versions of that distinction are discussed here.

If you want to know why I’m unimpressed with Dr. White’s claims that by calling Jesus “God” or “Lord” the biblical authors are saying that he is Yahweh himself, please see my episodes on the terms “God” and “Lord” etc. in the Bible.

And of course there is also the fact that all the New Testament authors assume Jesus and his and our God to differ (as Dr. White seems to agree).

Like some other recent scholars, White sometimes offers a basic New Testament interpretive error as if it were a special insight: an Old Testament passage says something about Yahweh, and then a New Testament author says that this passage is fulfilled in Jesus. See here, here, and here for why that is an obvious interpretive mistake, what I call “the fulfillment fallacy.” In brief, New Testament authors reasonably assume that since God is the ultimate author of Scripture, passages can have multiple meanings and multiple fulfillments.

What White doesn’t, thus far, seem to understand, is how historical context and some indisputable facts about the New Testament texts strongly support my claim that the authors are unitarians (who think the one God just is the Father) rather than trinitarians (who think the one God just is the Trinity). For that, see this presentation below (there are a few typos in the slides, I think in a few verse references), or the published version.

Here is a similar approach regarding “the deity of Christ” (another catholic tradition of speculations which features a herd of clashing interpretations).

If you’re patient enough to follow either argument, you’ll realize that the form of argument indisputably does not “assume unitarianism.” That’s why I think this style of argument is helpful. It’s too easy to lob the lazy charge that the other side is merely assuming their position and misreading Scripture through that lens. White frequently indulges in that accusation; but so long as he does that, you know that he doesn’t understand either of the two presentations above.

Another frequent White tactic is entering an argument about “the Trinity” and then immediately retreating to “the deity of Christ,” as if these were pretty much the same thing. I’ve got a chapter in What is the Trinity? which explains why that is a mistake. In fact, two-natures speculations about Jesus are there in the mid- maybe even early 2nd century, while triune-God theologies are first seen in the last half of the 300s! So there are two very different historical stories there, and the catholic speculations about Christ being in some sense divine and human much precede triune-God speculations.

About history, you will never learn from White about the early evolution of catholic thinking about God and Jesus. He’s not able to read 2nd and 3rd century writers in their own contexts, but instead he merrily projects his own confusions onto them and concludes that they’re a bunch of trinitarians who affirm the full deity of Christ. Here’s a lecture that is based on a college class I used to teach on the history of Incarnation speculations. It’ll tell you a lot of facts that White will not.

You can also listen to this broad sketch of early catholic doctrinal development.

If you want to know why the New Testament doesn’t teach the full deity of Christ, here’s a summary of some of my reasons below, and you can also see my more thorough recent paper critiquing William Lane Craig’s unique two-natures theory, which discusses many problems common to all such theories.