{"id":249,"date":"2008-02-07T09:32:57","date_gmt":"2008-02-07T09:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/249"},"modified":"2016-03-28T12:10:05","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T16:10:05","slug":"are-persons-essentially-relational","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/are-persons-essentially-relational\/","title":{"rendered":"Are persons essentially relational?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/robinson-crusoe1.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dwillard.org\/\"><strong>Dallas Willard<\/strong><\/a> is one of my favorite authors, and I don&#8217;t normally go in for criticizing what he writes. But I found a great example in <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=9_V3AAAACAAJ&amp;dq=renovation+of+the+heart&amp;ei=lSsvR9OiAoPM6ALVh93sCQ&amp;hl=en\">this (good) book<\/a> (p. 122) of an idea that is fairly widespread, and which underlies a lot of social trinitarian speculation. This brief passage got me to thinking. He says,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;God is love and sustains love for us from his basic reality as love, which dictates his Trinitarian nature. <strong>God is in himself a sweet society of love<\/strong> where three persons complete a social matrix. Not only does each one love and receive love, but each has a shared love for another, the third person. <strong>The nature of personality is inherently communal<\/strong>, and only the Trinity does justice to what personality is. (emphasis in bold added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t really know what his last phrase (re: doing justice) means. But <strong>consider this claim: &#8220;The nature of personality is inherently communal.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>On one interpretation, this is true, but trivial<\/strong>. It is part of what is meant by calling something a &#8220;person&#8221; that it is capable of personal relationships with other persons. So personhood includes a capacity to love and be loved, or at least, a capacity for interpersonal friendship.<\/li>\n<li>But <strong>a stronger interpretation seems to meant, according to which it is essential to persons that they are in relationship<\/strong>. This is contentious, and not at all obviously true.\n<ul>\n<li><strong>You might think it is easily refutable<\/strong>, as it declares impossible what is plainly possible: just imagine a baby, fresh from its mother, dropped on an uninhabited desert island, and this tot is raised by the wolves or chimps or orangutans (or if you think these <em>are<\/em> capable of personal relationships, suppose he&#8217;s raised by robots). Thus, it reaches adulthood, and may live out its natural life, without ever having been in a personal relationship. But this lone human would still be a person, right? This <em>doesn&#8217;t<\/em> seem to be impossible, as the stated principle implies. So the stated principle, the stronger interpretation of what Willard says, is false.<\/li>\n<li><strong>But things are not so easy<\/strong>. For the social trinitarian may say this: the lone human <em>is<\/em> in a personal relationship, perhaps whether he knows it or not &#8211; to his God. God can&#8217;t not exist, and so there really is no possibility to consider, in which a person exists without relationship. If only God exists, he&#8217;s a community of three, and so is in relationship. And even if only one human existed, and never had human friends, he&#8217;d still have a relationship to God.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>This reply, in my view, doesn&#8217;t work<\/strong> &#8211; couldn&#8217;t our lonely Robinson Crusoe reject God, and push God (almost?) entirely from his mind, so that he <em>doesn&#8217;t <\/em>have any personal relationship to (i.e. friendship with) God? Sure, he&#8217;d still bear some relations to God, but he wouldn&#8217;t be in any kind of relation<em>ship<\/em> with God. If so, and if he&#8217;d still be a person, then it is false that being in relationship (to <em>someone<\/em> else) is essential to being a person. Of course, if God exists and can&#8217;t possibly not exist, then there is no possibility of any person whatever not being related to him somehow (as creature to creator, for example). But the claim, I take it, is about <em>friendships<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Suppose that God exists, and that he is (identical to) one perfect person.<\/strong> This is what Jews, Muslims, and unitarians (not be confused with Unitarian-Universalists) think. Further, suppose that this one God was <strong>free to never create<\/strong> &#8211; so it is a logical possibily, it is consistent to suppose a scenario where only this God exists. Call this the <strong>Solitary God Scenario<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>What the social trinitarian is saying, on this second, stronger interpretation of Willard&#8217;s statement, is that the Solitary God Scenario is <em>not<\/em> a possibility after all, but rather, an impossibility, for it is an essential feature of an person, including a perfect, divine person, to be in at least one personal relationship with another. <strong>They are saying there is something contradictory about the Solitary God Scenario<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Presumably, the contradiction would be this: that it is essential to divinity that it be tri-personal, or that it should contain three persons capable of personal relationships. So the Solitary God Scenario is contradictory in that it posits a divine being which <em>doesn&#8217;t<\/em> contain three persons. How do we know this is essential to divinity? Presumably, we learn from divine revelation that divinity must be tri-personal. Unless Swinburne is right, it doesn&#8217;t seem to be knowable on the basis of reason alone. If you think of the concept: unipersonal divinity &#8211; there just isn&#8217;t any (obvious) contradiction there.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there are problems with this sort of social trinitarianism. It would follow from the above, that the Father is not divine (he&#8217;s not tripersonal). None of the Three would be, except in the sense that they are members or parts of a thing which is divine. Or is the Trinity a thing it all? Perhaps it is a mere group, not a thing but just a set of things &#8211; a divine group. But can a group &#8211; a mere collection of things &#8211; be divine, that is, a divinity, a god? A god is an entity, not, we&#8217;d think, a mere construction out of three entities. Willard calls God a &#8220;he&#8221;, but also a society. Go figure.<\/p>\n<p>But lay these problems aside. <strong>The lessons I draw from this are as follows:<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>One can&#8217;t argue for or support social trinitarianism on the basis of the claim that human persons are essentially relational, for they are not<\/strong>. A human which is truly solitary, in that he has no friends at all, is nonetheless a person, a personal being, a being <em>capable of<\/em> friendship. If one is going to know that a social trinitarian theory is true, it&#8217;ll have to be known on the basis of divine revelation. Then, maybe, something relevant to human relations will follow from this theory.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Solitary God Scenario isn&#8217;t something we know, simply by reflection, to be contradictory<\/strong>. On the face of it, why couldn&#8217;t this be, and why couldn&#8217;t the solitary God be truly and fully happy? You might say &#8211; but he&#8217;d be lonely, incomplete. Well, maybe not. Maybe he would have a desire, out of his overflowing goodness, to create angelic and human companions, but maybe nonetheless, he&#8217;s <em>not<\/em> (prior or &#8220;prior&#8221; to creation) aching for company &#8211; his desire may stem from a fullness and not from a deficiency. The point is, it&#8217;s hard to <em>see<\/em> this as impossible.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dallas Willard is one of my favorite authors, and I don&#8217;t normally go in for criticizing what he writes. But I found a great example in this (good) book (p. 122) of an idea that is fairly widespread, and which underlies a lot of social trinitarian speculation. This brief passage got me to thinking. He&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/are-persons-essentially-relational\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Are persons essentially relational?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":205,"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":[9,13,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","category-theologians","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","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=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37436,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/37436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}