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Long ago Arius said that there could be only one God because the distinctive attribute of God is to be ungenerated. In turn, Arius devised a neat syllogism. (i) God is ungenerated. (ii) The Son is generated. (iii) Therefore the Son is not God.<\/p>\n
The way that the catholic Athanasius addressed this syllogism was to ask what might we mean by saying ‘ungenerated’. Perhaps we mean ‘does not come into existence’. If that is what we mean by ‘ungenerated’, then (says Athanasius) we can say that the Son is ‘ungenerated’ in just this sense. Hence, the syllogism doesn’t go through.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Now, Dale has (for awhile) raised the question, ‘is God a self?’ And, if we answer in the affirmative, then it looks like there is just one God-self, and that’s the Father. It seems to me that this question that Dale has been asking (again and again) is analogous, for the catholic Christian at least, to Arius’s apparently straightforward syllogism (i)-(iii). Athanasius’s response is to deny (ii) if by (ii) we mean “the Son comes into existence.”<\/p>\n
Athanasius had to work out some possible definitions or meanings of the term ‘ungenerated’ in order to figure out which premise of Arius’s syllogism to reject. Along these lines I’ve wondered, ‘what does Dale, or anyone, mean by the term “self’?”‘ I hope in the future to write something about this. It seems to me that in addition to exegetical concerns of the NT, Dale is transfixed by this question, at least from my catholic point of view, much like Arius was transfixed by his syllogism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Long ago Arius said that there could be only one God because the distinctive attribute of God is to be ungenerated. In turn, Arius devised a neat syllogism. (i) God is ungenerated. (ii) The Son is generated. (iii) Therefore the Son is not God. The way that the catholic Athanasius addressed this syllogism was to… Read More »That Difficult Question: “Is God a self?” (Scott)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2816,"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":[37,4,3,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-heresy-orthodoxy","category-theories","category-unitarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2826,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2814\/revisions\/2826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}