{"id":36199,"date":"2015-09-04T14:00:18","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T18:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=36199"},"modified":"2017-03-15T15:37:33","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T19:37:33","slug":"the-dud-of-corporate-personality-or-group-persons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/the-dud-of-corporate-personality-or-group-persons\/","title":{"rendered":"the dud of “corporate personality” or group persons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dudIn his latest bombing run<\/a>, Chad occasionally talks in ways that suggest that I\u2019ll actually alleging divine deception in my “Divine Deception<\/a>” paper. Again, I must remind the reader that I don\u2019t think the Father et. al. deceived anyone in this regard. I\u2019m knocking \u201csocial\u201d Trinity theories for implying such past deception. <\/span><\/p>\n

Once you realize that if the Father, Son, and Spirit did have morally sufficient reasons for deceiving the ancients, such reasons would not be obvious or transparent to us, it should no longer seem to you that there are no such reasons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is being conceded that, given that (as Chad thinks) ST is true, it follows that the members of the trinity intentionally deceived<\/strong> the ancient Jews, by given them solid reasons to think that God is a non-group person\/self. This will be too much for some, who think that intentional deception is intrinsically wrong. But I don\u2019t think that, so I move on. <\/span><\/p>\n

Others, like me, find this undesirable, that this would seem to be a morally wrong deception. If you find this wholly relieved by general considerations<\/strong> about God\u2019s ways being beyond us, then I\u2019ll have to leave you there. I find that this only reduces the level of how strongly it seems wrong, but it still does seem that way, not only because it\u2019s intentional deception, but also because of the subject-matter.<\/p>\n

Moving on, I think it is important to see how radically Chad and his source think the ancients differed<\/strong>\u00a0from us. Granted, it\u2019s more than the careless stab (at a reason justifying the deception) than one is accustomed to, but I just don\u2019t buy it, and I don\u2019t think that most people will. Chad\u00a0summarizes that for these ancients,<\/p>\n

It is the individual person that is an abstraction, for his identity depends on the group of which he is a part. People of this culture will find it convenient for practical reasons to speak <\/span>as if<\/span><\/i> there were individual, private selves, but whether there really are or really could be private selves would be a largely foreign consideration to them.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think you\u2019re slipping, unnecessarily, into saying that they denied the existence<\/strong> of individual persons, or that they thought they were reducible to<\/strong> aspects of a group person. But this is just unbelievable. No sane adult, even in ancient times<\/strong>, thinks of himself as an abstraction, as a mere aspect, mode, or property of a group-sized entity. (Notice that I didn\u2019t say member of a group, which is a thing in its own right, and not a mere abstraction.) You talk of \u201cindividual\u201d and \u201cprivate\u201d selves as what they don\u2019t believe in, but both adjectives are redundant. A self has a point of view which is not literally shared by others. And a self is an individual entity, a being. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"woodenThe idea of a self is universal in human cultures, because<\/strong> it\u2019s part of the furniture built into the human mind. Ancient Buddhists c. 400-100 BCE denied that there were selves, meaning lasting, substantial things which can be the owners or components of first-person-implying states or events like perceptions, beliefs, and desires. This shows that they had the concept of a self. But so does anyone who uses personal pronouns<\/strong> about himself or others. Surely, an ancient Jew could anticipate the future. This assumes that he himself is real, and will potentially still exist in a week, month, etc. Surely he doesn\u2019t think he\u2019s an abstraction of \u201cthe Jews\u201d or \u201cthe Hebrews\u201d or \u201cthe children of Abraham.\u201d But yes, his membership in this group may have been considered more important<\/strong> that we moderns consider our various memberships. The difference between them, we can say, is ethical, not metaphysical. It\u2019s on the importance we put on individuals as such, and which they put instead of group membership. One\u2019s place in the group, they though, just dictated what one should do. One sees this in many ancient and early medieval cultures, e.g. Confucianism, Hinduism.<\/p>\n

I deny that there is any \u201cmodern concept of personhood.\u201d The concept of a self is basic to the human mind, and there is no reason to think this has changed in the last 5000 years or so. What there are are modern values<\/strong> and practices and ways of relating to human selves, which yes, differ, and can be characterized as more \u201cindividualistic\u201d in various ways. (e.g. thinking that they are or should be considered \u201cautonomous\u201d) Back to Chad,<\/p>\n

The safest conclusion is that, at most, the ancients spoke of God at times <\/span>as if<\/span><\/i> He were an individual, private self, for practical reasons, not because they really believed he was such a self. As collectivists, the question of whether they believed there were or could be such selves was likely foreign to them.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That question was foreign to them because as humans, of course they believed in individual selves. I\u2019m sorry, it is obvious that they thought Yahweh (etc.) to be a god<\/strong>, and a god, they thought, is a certain sort of powerful (individual) self. There is just no reason I can see to think they left it as an open question whether a god was an individual self or a group self. I don\u2019t say they never imagined<\/em> that there might be a group self, of course. (This falls short of believing in such.) Chad is not positing an \u201cepistemic gap\u201d between the ancients and us, but rather a radical difference in how they thought about selves, human and divine. It\u2019s a big difference in their metaphysics of human persons. Again, he says that<\/p>\n

Our concept of a person as a private self\u2014an autonomous, individual center of consciousness\u2014began to appear in nascent form in Augustine and Boethius, developed in the reflective womb of Western theology and philosophy, came to full term in Descartes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is bizarre in the extreme. Did not Abraham think of himself as a real being, with his with own first person point of view, and in some sense autonomous (free, in control)? Of course he did. What developed was the terminology of hypostasis<\/em> and persona<\/em>, based on theological agonies respecting the trinity, then the Trinity.\"dud<\/p>\n

All that matters is<\/strong> that their concept of personhood did not exclude the possibility that God be a group person. And to insist that it did\u2014on the grounds that <\/span>ours<\/span><\/i> does, or that the concept of personhood is analytic\u2014is sound hermeneutics only to an analytic philosopher!<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No, that is not all that matters. I don\u2019t think I want to claim that it is (now or then) an analytic truth that there are no group-persons. I do think it is a necessary falsehood<\/strong>, though. What matters is that they thought the one god was a self, and that they didn\u2019t think this self was composed of or somehow supervening on other selves. And were led directly to this view by OT-era revelation.<\/p>\n

As I see it, and I haven\u2019t fully looked into the Robinson book\/papers,\u00a0no one has ever made a strong case for thinking that the ancient Jews thought that God was a group person, or that they believed\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>anything<\/i><\/strong> was a group person<\/strong>. If this last is so, then I don\u2019t see how they could be expected to be open-minded about whether or not God is a group person. The family, the nation, the army, etc. – I don\u2019t see any evidence that they thought these were literally group persons.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"dudIn Chad’s\u00a0paper (pp. 11f), he suggests that phenomena like punishing descendants, Levirate marriage, collective responsibility, and Paul\u2019s talk of the church as \u201cthe body of Christ\u201d can only or best be understood by supposing they believed in group persons<\/strong>, but as best I can tell, this hasn\u2019t been shown. Apparently <\/strong><\/span>(p. 242)<\/a><\/strong> Robinson largely just hand-waved here<\/strong>, never really spelling out most of this, and his work has been severely criticized by other Old Testament scholars. (pp. 243-5) And see some more plausible explanations<\/strong> of some of his OT texts in that <\/span>same paper, by Andrew Perriman<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, one reading Robinson\u2019s hypothesis is that the Hebrews were \u201cunable to distinguish clearly<\/strong> between the identity of the individual and the identity of the group.\u201d (p. 246) But you only need the claim that they believed in group persons, in addition<\/em> to persons.<\/strong>\u00a0(You don’t need to say that they denied non-group persons, or reduced them to aspects of a group-person, or that they couldn’t clearly distinguish the two.) If they did<\/em> believe in both sorts<\/strong> of persons, then perhaps, presented with evidence that Yahweh is a person, they would have to wonder whether or not he was a group person. Note though, that in these circumstances, there need be no intentional deception<\/strong> by members of the trinity. They may, in these circumstances, have just intended that people conclude that they were a person (of some sort), not that they were a single, non-group person – even if a few would have foolishly made that leap.<\/p>\n

But again, I just don\u2019t see any reason<\/strong> to think they believed in any literal group persons at all. I would settle for one single passage<\/strong> which\"vision could only be, or best be understood as assuming the existence of a literal self composed of other selves, human, angelic, or divine. But I don’t see any such passage. And I don\u2019t see any reason why they would have thought God to be anything other than a single self, the referent of \u201che,\u201d \u201chim,\u201d but not (also) \u201cthey,\u201d \u201cthem.\u201d And again, in visions etc. Yahweh is depicted as a humanoid figure, bearing personal names and titles, which given common human experience with human selves, would make them think that Yahweh was a single self. e.g. the vision of Isaiah 6<\/strong>, in which there is not a single clue that the figure on the throne might in some sense break down into three persons.<\/p>\n

Let me suggest this: Chad, what is in your view the clearest such text?<\/strong> Post on it, and then show us how it implies or assumes some group self\/person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chad occasionally talks in ways that suggest that I\u2019ll actually alleging divine deception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36200,"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":[37,21,46,14,8,47,9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-bible","category-buddhism","category-history","category-linkage","category-papers","category-philosophy","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36199","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=36199"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38702,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36199\/revisions\/38702"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}