{"id":1486,"date":"2010-02-15T09:13:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T14:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=1486"},"modified":"2015-02-23T16:29:04","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T21:29:04","slug":"more-on-mysteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/more-on-mysteries\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Mysteries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1523\" style=\"border: 11px solid white;\" title=\"Mystery Machine\" src=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mystery-Machine3.jpg\" alt=\"Mystery Machine\" width=\"448\" height=\"299\" srcset=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mystery-Machine3.jpg 448w, https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mystery-Machine3-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mystery-Machine3-420x280.jpg 420w, https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mystery-Machine3-90x60.jpg 90w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 448px) 100vw, 448px\" \/>Thanks to Ed Feser for some interesting dialogue on the topic of mysteries in Christian theology. <strong>This post is just a bunch of miscellaneous responses<\/strong> to his thoughts posted last week, <a title=\"first mystery post\" href=\"http:\/\/edwardfeser.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/trinity-and-mystery.html\">here<\/a> and <a title=\"second post\" href=\"http:\/\/edwardfeser.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/trinity-and-mystery-part-ii.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As he mentioned, Ed and I knew each other briefly as students at what is now called <a title=\"CGU website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cgu.edu\/pages\/1.asp\" target=\"_blank\">Claremont Graduate University<\/a>. I remember having a conversation in his car once, maybe around 1994. He was pressing me with tough questions about the Trinity, and I was coming back with some <strong>lame replies<\/strong> cribbed from the Bible Answer Man radio show. Ed, rightly, wasn&#8217;t buying it. I hadn&#8217;t thought much about the Trinity then, but I flagged the issue in my mind as needing more looking into. Though I haven&#8217;t seen him since then, reading his blog now confirms my memory of him as virtuously pugnacious &#8211; a good, Socratic sparring partner, pleasant but also a straight-shooter.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On<strong> Catholic books<\/strong>: my version is probably better than the one Ed links: <a title=\"The Divine Trinity\" href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/product\/paperback\/the-divine-trinity-a-dogmatic-treatise\/4509747?productTrackingContext=center_search_results\">Joseph Pohle and Arthur Preuss, <\/a><em><a title=\"The Divine Trinity\" href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/product\/paperback\/the-divine-trinity-a-dogmatic-treatise\/4509747?productTrackingContext=center_search_results\">The Divine Trinity: A Dogmatic Treatise<\/a>. <\/em>An old-school Catholic source that says a lot more about mysteries is Scheeben&#8217;s <a title=\"Scheeben book at Amazon\" href=\"http:\/\/astore.amazon.com\/trinities-20\/detail\/0824524306\">The Mysteries of Christianity<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Suppose a Trinity doctrine is a &#8220;mystery&#8221; &#8211; either negative (as Ed and the Catholic tradition hold) or positive (as various Protestant theologians hold). <strong>Is this, by itself, a sufficient reason for someone to reject it?<\/strong> Ed says no, and I agree. But, it is reason to worry, on at least two counts: (1) reject WHAT again? What in the end is this claim which I&#8217;m supposed to consider for belief, and is there any <em>believable<\/em> claim there? (2) Some mysteries, either kind, are surely generated from our own mistaken theorizing. Ever heard of Brahman? The Buddha nature? The <a title=\"Schminger story\" href=\"Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 16 - Mysterious Interpretations\" target=\"_blank\">schminger of God<\/a>? Is this one of those, or not?<\/li>\n<li>About <a title=\"first mystery post\" href=\"http:\/\/edwardfeser.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/trinity-and-mystery.html\">Ed&#8217;s 1-7<\/a>: if you say these claims are implied by the Bible, we need to provide an interpretation of &#8220;is&#8221;. As Ed knows, if we mean &#8220;is numerically identical to&#8221; throughout, the set 1-7 is demonstrably inconsistent with itself. They would then provide only an uncharitable reading of the Bible. For this same reason, until we say what &#8220;is&#8221; means, we can&#8217;t infer the creedal formulas from 1-7. (Of course, there&#8217;s a pretty hard problem of interpretation with those too!)<\/li>\n<li>Ed is right when he asserts that <strong>Catholic and patristic theologians<\/strong> affirm that the Trinity doctrine is a <em>negative<\/em> mystery. But it is not true to say without qualification that trinitarian theologians don&#8217;t say that the doctrine is apparently contradictory (that is, a positive mystery). Some do say just that, such as my friend James Anderson. While his is a minority view in the broad catholic tradition, it is important to consider.<\/li>\n<li>I agree that we should expect that we should not be able to fully understand God. But this is a trivial point. Fully understanding God would require understanding all he knows, which is infinite. No theist ever denied that God is &#8220;mysterious&#8221; in this sense.<strong> What is the prior epistemic probability<\/strong> of God&#8217;s revelation about himself being either positively or negatively mysterious? As far as we know, God can reveal as much as he wants, and he knows what revelation will and won&#8217;t turn out to be mysterious (in either sense) to us. Also, as far as we know, he could have made us with a great range of mental capabilities. But whether a truth is mysterious to us is partly a function of those two factors &#8211; not just of God&#8217;s nature, as Ed seems to hold. So it&#8217;s far from obvious that we should expect true, revealed theology to be mysterious in either sense. I waver between thinking that this prior probability is inscrutable, and thinking that it is low. In brief, it seems that God would not want to confuse us.<\/li>\n<li>With Aquinas, Ed asserts<strong> that God is &#8220;Pure Actuality&#8221; and &#8220;Subsistent Being Itself&#8221;<\/strong>. He also says, without qualification, that true talk about God is always analogical, and that God is &#8220;outside any possible world&#8221; (I <em>think<\/em> he means, cosmos, i.e. physical universe.) I guess I agree that if you load up on medieval speculations about God, the obscurity of Trinity doctrines can seem like no big deal. I&#8217;ll just register my semi-informed opinion that all the claims just mentioned are incompatible with the idea of God contained in the Bible. Like many philosophers, I&#8217;m not comfortable with the amount of neo-Platonism that became grafted into medieval Catholic theology.<\/li>\n<li>Ed says that <strong>my characterization of negative mysterianism needs some nuance<\/strong>. I agree &#8211; when I revise the entry, I want to make clearer that it comes in degrees. There are, however, extremists around nowadays &#8211; I&#8217;ll say more about extreme negative trinitarianism in a future post.<\/li>\n<li>He says I should clarify that the mysterian needn&#8217;t be committed to the dubious idea of <em>intrinsically<\/em> unintelligible truths. I don&#8217;t think I suggested that, but in any case, there is an extreme end of Catholic theorizing that seems committed to just that, or to intrinsically unintelligible facts or realities. For instance, there&#8217;s John Scotus Eriugena&#8217;s argument that God can&#8217;t understand himself &#8211; &#8217;cause then he&#8217;d have an essence, and be a being, while in fact he is more-than-being. (?!) Or there&#8217;s this part of the &#8220;Mystery&#8221; entry, from <a title=\"Encyclopedia\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/HarperCollins-Encyclopedia-Catholicism-Richard-McBrien\/dp\/0060653388\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1266239668&amp;sr=8-1\">this book<\/a>: &#8220;<strong>mystery,<\/strong> a term that refers to the infinite incomprehensibility of God. God is not provisionally mystery, <strong>God is essentially mystery<\/strong>; not just unknown, but unknowable, literally incomprehensible. &#8230;Even in the Beatific Vision, God will remain mystery. &#8230; &#8221; (p. 900, second emphasis added) She&#8217;s unclear here, about whether God is intrinsically unknowable, or just whether he is necessarily unknowable <em>by us<\/em>. The &#8220;essentially&#8221; part pushes towards the first reading, the last part of the quote towards the second &#8211; it is just a cloudy paragraph.<\/li>\n<li>I agree that the part Ed quotes from the &#8220;Dogmatic constitution on the catholic faith&#8221; ch. 4 &#8220;Faith and reason&#8221; from the first Vatican Council (1869-70) <strong>rules out positive mysterianism for Catholics<\/strong>. I&#8217;ve quoted this elsewhere\u00a0 &#8211; it is on p. 809 in the <a title=\"Tanner at Amazon\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Decrees-Ecumenical-Councils-2-Set\/dp\/0878404902\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1266241778&amp;sr=8-1\">newer Tanner translation<\/a> &#8211; and I think it is a significant Catholic-non-Catholic difference.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m not sure what to make of Ed&#8217;s discussion of &#8220;grades of theological certainty&#8221;. Are those really <em>epistemic<\/em> distinctions, or just a taxonomy of the centrality to or importance of various claim to Catholic theology? He holds that the Trinity formulas are &#8220;directly&#8221; revealed &#8211; I assume he means, via the councils &#8211; and are so at the top level of &#8220;theological certainty&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li><strong>My main worry about negative mysterianism<\/strong> is something which hasn&#8217;t come up in our discussion yet. It is that such moves are dialectical conveniences, handy talk to fend off objectors, that folks really don&#8217;t believe, or don&#8217;t consistently believe. To bring out this worry, <strong>let me ask Ed what precisely<\/strong> about the Trinity formulas he finds to be a negative mystery. Take any statement which is regarded as expressing &#8220;the&#8221; doctrine, such as: &#8220;God is three persons in one being&#8221; &#8211; and say which terms are the ones which we can barely grasp the meaning of. Typically, following Augustine, people will focus on &#8220;persons&#8221;. But then in other contexts, it is pretty clear that they think of each of the Three as a self &#8211; something with knowledge and will. If that&#8217;s so, then the earlier appeal to mystery looks like an insincere smokescreen.<\/li>\n<li><em>Update:<a title=\"Ed Feser on mysteries @ his blog\" href=\"http:\/\/edwardfeser.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/tuggy-contra-mysterianism.html\" target=\"_blank\"> Ed responds<\/a>.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Ed Feser for some interesting dialogue on the topic of mysteries in Christian theology. This post is just a bunch of miscellaneous responses to his thoughts posted last week, here and here. As he mentioned, Ed and I knew each other briefly as students at what is now called Claremont Graduate University. I&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/more-on-mysteries\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">More on Mysteries<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,4,14,8,20,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-heresy-orthodoxy","category-history","category-linkage","category-mystery","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34856,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions\/34856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}