What is the Trinity? A Dialogue with Steve Hays – Part 1

Prolific blogger (at Triablogue) Steve Hays and I have recently been discussing various things.

At the end of a recent exchange, I basically said: Dude, I don’t know what you think “the” doctrine of the Trinity is. What, in your view, does it mean to say that God is a Trinity?

He’s now responded here.

In this post, I try to understand just what he’s claiming, in other words, what he takes trinitarianism (rightly understood) to be.

This is a bit risky, because I think he’s confused about the concept of identity, and I’m trying to hear a self-consistent view here.

The first job in critical thinking is carefully listening to what the source at hand is saying. Here I listen carefully, editing out a lot of his methodological musings and terminological quibbles, trying to get to the meat of his view.

I think the meat starts here:

A conventional list of divine attributes would be something like the following: existence, omnipotence, omniscience, timelessness, spacelessness, aseity, love, wisdom, will, justice, mercy, goodness, speech, truth, unity, unicity, triality.

He then points out that in his view, God shares some attributes with other beings, while others are uniquely his. So,

…if a subject possesses even one uniquely-divine attribute, then, by implication, he must posses every uniquely-divine attribute. Likewise, he will posses the unique set of divine attributes.

The divine attributes include psychological attributes, like love, mercy, will, wisdom, justice, and omniscience. This implies a rational, personal agent.

Right. So, the one God is a perfect self – a being with will and intelligence. I agree.

…what does it mean to believe in three persons who are one God?

1) One elementary formula says God is three in person, but one in nature.

2) What is meant by God’s “nature”?

God’s nature is defined by the divine attributes (see above).

3) What is mean by “person”?

A subject possessing the psychological attributes which the Bible ascribes to God (see above).

4) What is mean by “one” in nature?

On God’s nature – we’re in the dark about whether it is a universal (shared by the Persons) or whether it is an individual thing, a component which could only by had by one thing. As the persons of the Trinity, I assume that he wants to say that they each have all the divine attributes, not merely the psychological or mental ones.  Later he says,

…each member [of the Trinity] possesses the sum-total of the divine attributes.

And I’m going to assume that he holds the divine nature to be a universal which is possessed equally by each of the Three.

After 4) he goes on an excursion about monotheism and the Bible. Eventually, of a text in Deuteronomy:

It says only Yahweh can be the true God, but it doesn’t say who can be Yahweh

and on the famous monotheistic passages in the middle of Isaiah:

They contrast Yahweh’s unique knowledge, power, and control with the idol-gods of paganism–who are false gods precisely because they lack these attributes.

But, of course, the Father, Son, and Spirit in Trinitarian theology possess these attributes. Therefore, the exclusive claims of Yahweh in Isa 40-48 don’t exclude the Trinity. They don’t create any presumption against the Trinity. They don’t speak to that issue one way or the other.

We can ask here, of whom is Isaiah speaking? Who is this YHWH? We might well think it is the Father, since the NT plainly presupposes that the Father of Jesus and the one true God Yahweh are one and the same. Of course then anyone else, would not be the one true God.

But if I understand him, Steve thinks Isaiah there speaks of the one perfect Self, who later, we learn, is the Trinity. Isaiah of course doesn’t say anything about whether or not this perfect Self contains or is somehow composed of other selves.

What is more, the NT applies Isaian monotheistic passages to Christ. That’s something he shares in common with the Father.

So in Steve’s view, both Father and Son are taught to “be” Yahweh, that is, to be parts (members?) of this one great Self which is the Trinity. He’s none too clear about this part-whole relationship. But he says,

Bottom line: Trinitarian Protestants are only required to affirm the unicity of God as Scripture describes the unicity of God. Scripture doesn’t tell us that the Father, Son, and Spirit can’t be the “one” God if some things are true of the Father that are not true of the Son and Spirit, or vice versa.

The “unicity of God” I take it stands for the claim that there is exactly one true God, this being YHWH/The Trinity.

Finally, a flurry of three dollar words:

…if I were attempting to explain how it’s possible for God to be three-in-one, I’d invoke enantiomorphism to model the one-over-many relation. The persons of the Godhead mirror each other, in point-by-point correspondence. The internal structure of the Godhead exhibits self-similarity.

Yet mirror symmetries are not interchangeable, for chirality is irreducible. Their interrelation is equipollent, yet irreducibly distinct.

Is a mirror symmetry one or many? That’s a false dichotomy. Enantiomorphism exhibits both properties.

In plain English, I think this amounts to: The Trinity (“the Godhead”) is a complex whole, a compound Self who has three parts (the three divine selves), and these three parts are exactly alike one another.

In sum, the one God is a perfect being, a perfect self, who is the Trinity. He has within himself three parts – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each of these parts fully has the (universal) divine nature, and so, each of the essential divine attributes. Each is a divine self. And these three parts are indistinguishable from one another, or nearly so, though they be numerically distinct.

Steve, is this right? I await correction here or at your blog, before putting forth any objections.