Recently I've been reading Roland Bainton's Hunted Heretic and I was struck by an interesting passage on Trinitarian thought. Given the doctrine as formulated at Nicaea and later Chalcedon the doctrine becomes the going assumption. The question that remains is how such a doctrine can be known, proved, or explained. Bainton asserts that there are three broad schools of thought that emerge.
The first was associated with the name of St. Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries and claimed that the doctrine cannot be proved, but may be illustrated; the second, stemming from Richard of St. Victor in the twelfth century, averred that the doctrine can be demonstrated; and the third, originating with William of Occam in fourteenth century, claimed that it can neither be demonstrated nor illustrated, but can only be believed.So the three schools of thought on the Trinity are Illustrative, Demonstrative and Fideist.
This is the first time I've seen someone carve up the options available to the Trinitarian in such a way. It seems like an accurate dividing of the logical space. At least it seems to cover most accounts of how one can know or explain the Trinity. I'm wondering if anyone would object to such a characterization of the options open to the Trinitarian? Further, what is the dominate school today?
Matt... While I am unsure about the theological specifics, I thought I would add that, in his apologetic opus “Mere Christianity� C.S. Lewis seems to take the Augustinian-Illustrative track in his exposition of the doctrine of the trinity. While he makes no effort to prove that the Trinitarian doctrine is true, he does use analogies to show that it is, at the very least, coherent.
I think you need to subdivide the "demonstrated" category. Some have thought that it could be demonstrated by reason. I believe Wolfhart Pannenberg says this, but I'm not sure. Aquinas, on the other hand, makes it clear that he thinks it's revealed in scripture but not demonstrable via reason.
Once that distinction is clear, I wonder if Augustine meant that it can't be demonstrated or just that it can't be demonstrated via reason apart from scripture. I'd be more likely to guess the latter.
I think most evangelicals think it can be demonstrated by scripture. My guess is that Catholics will be divided between that and the view that it is demonstrated through scripture together with tradition, which for them amounts to calling it revealed doctrine.
I'd be surprised if anyone nowadays who has seriously thought about the logical views will think that it can be illustrated in any way that really represents how the three persons are related to the one God. All such attempts that I've seen recently, including C.S. Lewis', make it plain that they don't really think these illustrations illustrate the logical relationships of the Trinity but might merely help people see one element of the relationship, with other analogies helping to see other elements. I don't think that counts as illustrating that it's logically consistent, and Lewis didn't either as far as I can tell.
I think that the current trends within philosophical theology are probably a mixture of illustrative and demonstrative. In Moreland and Craig's Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview they compare the Trinity to Cerebus the three headed dog of Greek mythology (prima facie this just seems wrong). Now, this is clearly illustrative, but they also offer a social trinitarian formulation of the doctrine - which is clearly demonstrative. Considering the significant literature generated recently comparing the relative-identity strategy and the social trinitarian model, I would say that any dichotomy between the demonstrative and illustrative is currently waning. Michael Rea (Notre Dame) and Brian Leftow (Oxford) have both done some work in the area, with Rea questioning the logic of the Athanasian Creed.
Patrick and Jeremy,
Thanks for the replies. I think it is correct to take C.S. Lewis as taking the illustrative route. It seems to me that this is the school that most apologists are likely to take. I also think this is what Rea and Brower are up to in their recent paper Understanding the Trinity. The problem with the Illustrative route, as acknowledged by Augustine, is that none of the analogies completely succeeds. So, for example Augustine points out objections to his memory/intellect/will model in Book 15 of De trinitate. What is interesting about the way these analogies go wrong is that they tend to turn out to be directly analogous to a heresy. Rae and Brower also offer that:
I find this line of reasoning a little troubling. I don’t follow how it is that each individual illustration can fail, yet cumulatively they can be successful. This strikes me as something like four wrongs make a right, or three weak arguments make a strong one.Jeremy,
I’m not sure that what is revealed in the text can be taken as a demonstration of how we are to know or understand the Trinity. I can see where one might think that is serves as a demonstration that the Trinity is a revealed fact, but not how we are to understand it. So, I think it is correct to say that evangelicals think it can be demonstrated as being in the scripture, but I think that is distinct from demonstrating how a 3-in-1 god can be understood.
That said I think most evangelicals and non-evangelicals lean towards fideism. However, I take this on the testimony of my friend who works for Campus Crusade.
I was rethinking what I said about scripture and demonstration, when it occurred to me that Aquinas doesn't think we can know the Trinity. That is in fact the example he uses of something that falls under the category of faith, which (in my view) is not the wishful thinking of fideism but something more like what a reliabilist would call knowledge. For knowledge, you need to satisfy an internalist criterion of being able to establish to yourself why it's true. He says that's not true of faith. Faith is epistemically strong not because of what we have access to but because of the source of revelation. This externalist kind of thing is what grounds the belief in the Trinity. If indeed it is revealed in scripture, then that grounds someone's belief in the Trinity on that basis. He would see it as not like a demonstration in the way the cosmological argument is, but he wouldn't see it as illustrative or fideistic. That's why I was thinking of it as a fourth category.
What I was thinking of with most evangelicals is the view that I've seen best presented by D.A. Carson's defense of the Trinity (which is popularixed in a chapter on the Trinity in Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. Carson takes us to be able to have knowledge that the doctrine of the Trinity is true based on scripture. He doesn't take us to have knowledge of how any aspect of that relationship works unless it is clearly taught in scripture. This is a basically the same thing he says about his compatibilism about human responsibility and divine sovereignty. He considers philosophical work modeling these sorts of things, e.g. Paul Helm on the latter issue, as speculation that we should never endorse but something on the order of what van Inwagen calls a just-so story (which comes up in his paper on resurrection and materialism). It's not fideism because he considers it knowledge that it is true. It's not what someone like Aquinas would call knowledge, because we have no access to what makes it true or how the tensions among various true statements will work out to be logically consistent. If it's the last issue that you're concerned with when you speak of demonstration, then it's not a demonstration, but Carson would certainly see his argument that the doctrine of the Trinity is true as a demonstration (given that scripture is a reliable source of doctrine via being truly from God, which he thinks is true).
This is Matt's friend he speaks of in the earlier thread. In this comment, not only do I attempt to further the discussion and clarify a few things, but I satisfy Matt's urgings for me to comment on some of the discussions going on here. Here you go, Matt...
A couple housekeeping notes...not a big deal, but I work with Campus Crusade as a volunteer, not for them. Also, when I characterized evangelicals as generally being fideists, the scope that I was considering was loosely all Prodestants. So, that would be a large population. To be more clear, I think that most evangelicals in this large scope accept the doctrine essentially by faith with the assumption that if they were to look into the matter more they would think it is demonstratable. This is a broad stroke based on my experience. Given that, most of them do not think very deeply about such issues.
Along the lines of this topic, I have thrown out the thought with Matt that even before we get to questions of whether the trinity can be known illustratively, demonstrably or fideistically, I wandered how much the doctrine was necessitated by readers/scholars just trying to make sense of the text itself. In other words, does the the personal language used for the trinity actually demarcate 3 persons and do passages that include all 3 interacting simultaneously require not only that a trinitarian theory makes the text understandable in the sense of consistent and coherent, but also serves as the best explanation of the facts, events and states of affairs contained in it.
In our discussions, I have just wandered if this type of consideration serves as a type of hermeneutical demonstration that motivates further illustrations or, more likely, further demonstrations. Whatever this shows, I think it is easy to classify this move as a species of demonstration in that it may presuppose that the text is an artifact of natural theology that can investigated and understood in light of developing the best theory to capture all the facts regarding what it contains.
What I'm getting from this is that you think most evangelicals accept it on the basis of the testimony of those who have studied it more deeply. That's not fideism. It's trusting testimony. It's nothing like Kierkegaard's irrational trust in something that all the evidence goes against. I don't see most evangelicals doing that, particularly not the Campus Crusade type, which tends to be heavier on theology and apologetics than most other evangelical groups. One problem with the word 'demonstration' is that it's not clear what counts as one. There's some sort of vagueness there.
On the text, I think Jesus's statements in John 13-17 are the strongest place for difference of roles. The Holy Spirit is another comforter (and thus not to be identified with Jesus). Jesus submits to the Father. I'm not sure if there's anything in those chapters distinguishing the Father and the Spirit, but it seems to be intended in the baptism formula in Matthew 28 as well as many places in Paul that gives three elements, each tied to one of the three persons. The strongest point I know of for some sort of identity is the Mt 28 baptism formula, which treats the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as one name, which presumably would be the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. That's not an airtight argument, but I think it's pretty strong.
_So the three schools of thought on the Trinity are Illustrative, Demonstrative and Fideist. . . It seems like an accurate dividing of the logical space_.
This doesn't exhaust logical space. A demonstration is a proof from necessary premises to a necessary conclusion. That's just what a demonstration is; they're not often found, though there are lots in Spinoza, hence all of the QED's. Can't complete any old proof with QED--even any old sound proof. You need premises that are necessarily true as well. But then clearly there is room for all sorts of proofs short of demonstrations: to mention a few, inductive proofs, abductive proofs (for instance, to the best explanation), run-of-the-mill deductive proofs.
But then Jeremy notes,
_He would see it as not like a demonstration in the way the cosmological argument is_
The cosmological argument is not a demonstration. It is rather an a posteriori argument some of whose premises are contingent truths.
And elsewhere,
_I'd be surprised if anyone nowadays who has seriously thought about the logical views will think that it can be illustrated in any way that really represents how the three persons are related to the one God_.
But obviously illustrations are designed to be clarificatory, and insofar as an illustration clarifies, it is successful. Illustrations are not designed to be representational. So their failure to represent the world as it actually is constitutes no objection to them. What constitutes an objection is their failure heuristically: their failure, that is, to give us a useful and clearer picture of the Trinitarian idea.
On the last issue, I'm with Matthew. How can it clarify if it's a terrible analogy, one that's disanalogous in all the important ways (ones relating to heresy and orthodoxy)?
You're using 'demonstration' as a technical term, Mike. I'd never use it so restrictedly, but if that's what you insist on then we clearly need more than three classificatory categories, because there are people who will place it in what you're calling a proof and some who will simply see it as based on a good argument that isn't a proof or a demonstration.
So much to respond to so little time...
Just to be clear I wasn't really concerned in my post with proofs for the truth of the Trinity, but with knowing such a truth. i.e. a metaphysical/epistemological distinction. I think there are two issues on the epistemic side of this question. 1. What grounds one's belief in the doctrine? 2. How does one, or can one, understand the content of this belief? I think Bainton's categorization is an attempt to characterize approaches to the second question. Unfortunately I was a little hazy about this in my initial post.
Jeremy's reliabilist case brings up one category that I thought difficult to fit into Bainton's three broad schools. Bainton was writing well before philosophers were talking about reliabilism in a formal sense. However, it seems to me that while reliabilism does a good job of answering question one, I'm not sure what it has to say about question two. If we take Bainton as I suggest above then I don't think reliabilism gives us a fourth category. One thing that caused me to lean this way is that I kept thinking of the fact that Plantinga makes an illustrative case for Social Trinitarianism.
Several folks have brought up the vagueness of what it means for something to serve as a demonstration. In conversation this afternoon it occurred to me that there is some lack of specification in what is meant by a demonstration. I was thinking of what we might think of a demonstration, and overlooking that Bainton might be using it in the way Mike Almeida suggests. Given the context of Bainton's remarks being in regard to Richard of St. Victor, Mike may well be right in part. Richard's De Trinitate has a nice touch of Aristotle from whom the notion of a demonstration comes. For Aristotle the demonstration (apodeixis) is a proof from necessary premises to a necessary conclusion, with the additional criteria that the middle term must be explanatory. I don't think we'd think that the argument would need to be in the form of a syllogism, but in order to count towards the second question is would need to be explanatory. So, perhaps Jeremy and Mike's arguments derived from scripture would serve as a fourth category of non-demonstrative explanatory proofs, but it seems that they yield a limited understanding of the doctrine.
_On the last issue, I'm with Matthew. How can it clarify if it's a terrible analogy, one that's disanalogous in all the important ways (ones relating to heresy and orthodoxy)?_
I didn't express any opinion on how good the proposed analogies were. I'm just not in a position to do so, since I don't antecedently know what a good illustration would look like. I don't even have a good sense of what a good illustration would look like.
I rather expressed an opinion on the way to assess illustrations. They needn't be representational--I recall that is the term you used--in order to be valuable. They need only clarify and this can be done by displaying, say, analogous relations (holding in the Trinity) or suggesting the relevant relations or suggesting relations that we hadn't considered. When considering something as mysterious as the Trinity, I don't expect much illumination from even the best analogies.
Just to add another small wrinkle to the discussion on the classification of schools of thought re: the trinity...
Abelard has some very interesting things to say about the Trinity. (Of course, he was convicted of heresy on this subject, but who wasn't?) At any rate, there are implications in Abelard that the pagan philosopehrs had knowledge of the Trinity, but whether this knowledge was obtained through rational reflection or revelation is controversial. Ont he one hand, Abelard seems to imply that God reveals his nature through his effects (though it seems as though he is then still somehow rationally accessible). On the other hand, Abelard claims that the ancients had no access to the divine positive (written) laws, and therefore operated purely under the natural law, which is accessible to human beings through the exercise of their rational faculties.
Additionally, Abelard has a nice linguistic analysis of the distinction/unity of the persons of God that seems comprehensible. Whether this is meant as a demonstration or illustration, however, is a difficult question.
Finally, it seems that Abelard elsewhere stresses the MYSTERY (and indemonstrability) of the Trinity. I have been taught that Abelard's line basically amounts to the idea that reason can get us the existence of A trinity, but the exact nature of that Trinity is going to have to be a matter of faith in revelation.
Are there other interpretations?
Where does Abelard fit in the above-discussed classification of Trinitarian schools of thought?
Just curious!
Abelard is an interesting case because he tries to split the difference between the anti-dialecticians and the pseudo-dialecticians by offering a restricted appeal to reason in understanding the Trinity. If I recall correctly Abelard's linguistic analysis of the distinction/unity found in the Trinity is an attempt to illustrate how the Trinitarian claim is rational. That is we understand numerical identity, identity of kind, etc, and when we apply these concepts to the Trinity we can understand what the doctrine is claiming is the nature of God. I think this is just using analogy to elucidate the claim and not the actual relationship between the persons. So, when it comes to understanding the nature of those relationships - how they hold, come to be, work, etc – Abelard falls back to fideism. So, your analysis that:
seems correct to me. I think it is worth noting that Abelard's illustration led to his being accused of tritheism. If one doesn't mind giving up on monotheism Social Trinitarianism has access to plenty of illustrations to explicate the view.Jeremy,
Thanks for the clarifying comments.
You say-
What I'm getting from this is that you think most evangelicals accept it on the basis of the testimony of those who have studied it more deeply. That's not fideism. It's trusting testimony. It's nothing like Kierkegaard's irrational trust in something that all the evidence goes against.
I guess we not only have to get clear on demonstration, but also fideism. If I take it that fideism is as you capture with Kerkegaard, then I am wrong. I obviously have taken it in a weaker sense, like trusting the testimony of authorities without personal reflection or thought by one's self. This may non-exhaustively just be the result of laziness or fear or plain anti-intellectualism. On this weaker sense of fideism, do you think your response would be question begging to just say that they accept it on the testimony of others? Is the trusting you mention fideistic? On the other hand, it seems my sense may be too weak, though, since my conditions of self-reflection and thought would make us fideists about many things that we don't reflect or think about. Overall, do we want to commit to your sense of fideism? Seems a little strong, but does introduce the possibility of why we look to demonstrations to move away from fideism.
If I am closer to being right in the weaker sense of fideism and your response is somewhat question begging, then I think my general account of evangelicals stands on a stronger footing. All I am trying to capture in this bit of a side note to the full discussion is that this doctrine is not really thought about or taught about pretty much across the board, including Campus Crusade. I agree they may be more theologically and apologetically minded, but they are just above the fray. I have only encountered discussions such as this briefly in my master's theology classes and in my philosophical theology classes in masters and Ph. D. programs. In 15 years of being in the Church, campus ministry as a student and campus ministry as a staff member and volunteer, I have only one time heard a sermon somewhat pertaining to the trinity, and it was pretty weak. I have never seen a Sunday school class or church seminar on the subject. I think this is very sad.
I was thinking of the case of accepting something on the basis of others whom one knows to be knowledgeable and careful at reasoning. It wouldn't have to be unfounded trust. It may even be a trust of people whom one has good reason to believe has understood it based on a demonstration. The sense I get from many people in this position is that they do believe those who have investigated more fully have that sort of level of understanding. Trusting in such a situation doesn't seem to count as fideism even on the weaker reading. Aquinas seems to have thought most people should believe in the existence of God in a similar way, and it seems wrong to call him a fideist.
I have to say that I have completely different experiences with Campus Crusade and with evangelical churches. I believe I was taught about the Trinity in Sunday School at a very young age. A number of sermons, weekly meeting talks, conference talks, and Bible studies I've been present at have considered the issue closely enough to count as engaging with philosophical issues. I'd heard Lewis' analogies many times before reading them in Mere Christianity. My current congregation teaches on the Trinity every time the passage we get to raises issues related to it. I imagine the topic will be central when we look at John 13-17 this coming spring. It came up a few times in the previous sections of John in the last three springs. It was important for discussion of gender roles in passages such as I Corinthians 11 and Ephesians 5 when they covered those books. It came up in the role relation of Father and Son in Philippians 2 in a Bible study on that book. When we studied Revelation, there were plenty of places where issues related to the Trinity came to the fore.
Just a quick word on the fideism (certainly of Kierkegaard's). I think it is a mistake to characterize it either as wishful thinking or as anti-intellectual. According to K it is not possible to have a genuine religious commitment(that is, a genuine faith) that is based on historical (i.e., empirical) evidence. Inductive reasoning will make your theistic conclusion something less than probablity 1. A person who bases his credence on such evidence will (inevitably, thinks K) have a partial belief (a belief to probability 1-n, for some n). This is obviously something less than total commitment and so less that genuine religious commitment. You're basically hedging your bets when you believe on the basis of historical evidence.
So the basis for fideism is pretty interesting. And the a priori arguments--I think I'd agree--are not certainly sound. So (says K) getting to genuine reigious commitment takes that personal decision.