Christianity, like the other two Abrahamic religions, is monotheistic. But unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity holds to a trinitarian conception of God. The idea, spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. How is this possible? How can Christians convince Jews and Muslims that their position is logically tenable and does not collapse into tritheism, and thus into polytheism to the detriment of the divine unity and transcendence?
Many will wonder how anyone in the 21st century could still take seriously this old nonsense. Well, Muslims take it seriously, some of them so seriously that they want to cut our heads off over it. They see us as Christians, even those of us who have long abandoned Christianity, and thus they see us as polytheists and infidels worthy of being put to the sword for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful. My tone may be breezy, but let us not forget New York, Madrid, London and the nuclear events that are likely to come.
So it may be useful if we Christians, lapsed or otherwise, reflect a bit on what our doctrine is and what the objections to it are. Know thyself and know thy enemy. Apart from the Islamist threat, the logical and ontological problems to which the Trinity doctrine gives us graphic access are intrinsically fascinating and important — even if we end up deciding that the Trinity is an absurdity.
There is also this surmise. The vitality of the West, the vitality and prosperity that elicits the envy of the Islamic world, is due in part to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem, between philosophy and religion. There is nothing quite like this fruitful tension in the Islamic world, or at least in the Islamic world of the last four hundred or so years. And this is because there is no philosophy to speak of in the Islamic world. (Don't confuse philosophy with historical scholarship.) Tiny beleaguered Israel in the scant fifty seven years of its existence has cranked out more real philosophy than the huge Islamic world in four hundred years.
So much for backdrop.
Now let's get to work.
Here is one problem. God is said to be tripersonal: the one God somehow includes three numerically distinct Persons. But none of these Persons is tripersonal. The Father is not tripersonal. The Son is not tripersonal. The Holy Ghost is not tripersonal. Now if two things differ in a property, then they cannot be identical. (This is the irreproachable principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals expressed in its contrapositive form.) Since God is tripersonal, but none of the Persons is tripersonal, it follows that God is not identical to the Father, nor to the Son, nor to the Holy Ghost. Therefore, God is not identical to any of the three Persons, whence it follows that God is distinct from each of the three Persons.
Is God a divine person? If you say yes, then we are on our way to the Quaternity, the doctrine that there is one God in four divine persons. For if God is not identical to the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost, each of which is a person, and God is a person, then there are four persons.
The impression one gets from the Scriptures, of course, is that God = God the Father. But if God is tripersonal, and God = God the Father, then God the Father is tripersonal, which is false, or at least counter to the Athansian creed. So it appears that God cannot be identified with God the Father.
Some doctrines in philosophy threaten to collapse into others. Thus mind-brain identity theory threatens to collapse into eliminativism about the mind. Other doctrines seem to want to expand. How do we keep the Trinity from expanding into the Quaternity? The attentive reader will have noticed that the argument can be iterated. If the Three-in-One becomes a Four-in-One, how avoid a Five-in-One, ad infinitum? My purpose in raising this question is not polemical, but aporetic in the good old Platonic style. And I don't assume that the aporia has no solution.
I am playing Athens off against Jerusalem, but with great respect for both, as readers of my weblog already know. I suspect that it is within their fruitful tension, if anywhere, that we shall find whatever enlightenment we are likely to find on the ultimate questions.
(First off, glad to have you aboard Bill.) The timing of this post is interesting because just this morning I was allerted to the fact that Mike Rea has an article in the new issue of Journal of Theological Studies entitled "Polytheism and Christian Belief." In the article, Rea argues that social-trinitarian models collapse into polytheism, and thus should be rejected by Christians. Here is the article's abstract:
Christian philosophers and theologians have long been concerned with the question of how to reconcile their belief in three fully divine Persons with their commitment to monotheism. The most popular strategy for doing this—the Social Trinitarian strategy—argues that, though the divine Persons are in no sense the same God, monotheism is secured by certain relations (e.g. familial relations, dependence relations, or compositional relations) that obtain among them. It is argued that if the Social Trinitarian understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity is correct, then Christianity is not interestingly different from the polytheistic Amun-Re theology of Egypt's New Kingdom period. Thus, Social Trinitarianism should be classified as a version of polytheism rather than monotheism.
I can't remember off the top of my head what Rea thinks about the reduplication strategy. And maybe it won't ultimately work. But it does seem to provide a helpful way of keeping us clear whether or not we're talking about God qua Godhead (or Trinitarian unity or divine beig) or God qua one person of that Godhead. So I don't share the sentiment that "The impression one gets from the Scriptures, of course, is that God = God the Father" if 'God' refers to the divien being, 'God the Father' refers to the first person of the Trintiy, and the '=' is numeric identity. The reason that I think that the 3-in-1 doesn't become a 4-in-1 is that the 3 and the 1 aren't of the same sort (and I reject unrestricted composition!). Of course, this depends on whether or not the 3-in-1 claim can be made coherent. But I don't see the real worry of the ad infinitum.
(By the way, have I avoided heresy here?)
Michael Rea's paper is available online in PDF format:
http://www.nd.edu/~mrea/Online%20Papers/Polytheism%20and%20Christian%20Belief%20_revisedfinal_.pdf
I recently did a post on my blog entitled "Perfect Love and the Trinity" in which I explore the idea the God is love to help articulate the Trinity. I think I can plausibly argue that God as Perfect Love would contain at least two persons. What's not so clear to me is how to demonstrate the necessity of a third person.
Perhaps if we could provide an intuitively plausible rationale for there being three persons, then we could answer Bill's question by (a) showing that no comparable rationale exists for extending the number of divine persons to four and beyond and (b) invoking a principle of parsimony like Ockham's Razor.
Bill: How do we keep the Trinity from expanding into the Quaternity?
Tom: Deny that God (Father, Son, Spirit) is a person. God is tripersonal, yese, since the three persons who are the one God are (as persons) personal. But the three persons cannot constitute a fourth person, God.
As a missionary to Muslims of 20+ years, I'm very interested in such a discussion!
Tom
"The Son is not tripersonal. The Holy Ghost is not tripersonal. Now if two things differ in a property, then they cannot be identical. (This is the irreproachable principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals expressed in its contrapositive form.)"
I'm always a little suspicious of the application of LL in abstract metaphysical contexts. For instance, does a proper application of LL really show that a statue *could not* be identical to the bronze that composes it, since there are properties the bronze has that the statue does not? That kind of thing is often said, but why doesn't it just beg the question? Why isn't the reply, "no, the metal does not have the different properties you allege, however much it might seem to". Similarly, why isn't one perfectly good response in this metaphysical situation, "no, there is no distinct being, God, in addition to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. There's just one being"? In this case the alleged difference in properties is what is mistaken. Since they are one in being, each being (F,S, & HG) must be tripersonal.
Tom,
Thanks for the comment. It is true that God cannot be a fourth person. But to avoid this by saying that God is not a person does not strike me as a solution. The Christian God is both personal and one. If the personality is divided among the Persons, then the one God is subpersonal. But a subpersonal God is not that than which no greater can be conceived. God to be God must be both a person and one. Otherwise you have three gods unified by something subpersonal and hence something less than fully divine.
Alan,
I think you are on the right track in your post since an adequate model of the Trinity cannot be physical but must be mental. The problem of the Trinity might be approached by first trying to solve the problem of the binity, the two-in-one. Is there a two-in-one in our experience? I am conscious of an object but simultaneously (though secondarily) conscious of myself as conscious of the object. As conscious of myself I am distinct from myself as object is distinct from subject and so am two; but as conscious of myself, I am one. So I am a two-in-one. Compare Sartre: "The For-itself (pour-soi) is what it is not, and is not what it is."
Gibberish? Imagine hitching Jean-Paul to the cart of the Trinity. I am aware that he denies the existence of God by maintaining the impossibility of a For-itself-in-itself.
Michael,
Good comment. By the way, I avoid the expression 'Leibniz's Law' since I have seen it used in three different ways, as referring to the Identity of Indiscernibles, the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and the conjunction of the two. But that is a minor quibble.
BV: God is tripersonal; the Father is not tripersonal; ergo, God is not identical to the Father. (Similarly for the other two persons.)
MA: God = the Father; God is tripersonal; ergo, the Father is tripersonal. (Similalry for the other two persons.)
Somehow, I prefer BV's argument: it sounds distinctly unorthodox to say that there is one God in three divine tripersonal Persons.
Kevin,
Thanks for the comment and the welcome. You are right: the reduplicative strategy must be given careful consideration.
Brandon,
Thanks for the Rea link.
Three quiddities, One haecceity
"Somehow, I prefer BV's argument: it sounds distinctly unorthodox to say that there is one God in three divine tripersonal Persons"
Oh my, unorthodoxy is not good. Agreed. On the other hand, we all have unorthodoxy to appeal to. It's at least as unorthodox to suggest that God is not one in very being with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that must be denied if it is asserted that one has properties that the other lacks. So, we all have a place in the unorthodoxy boat.
I don't know if it matters much ultimately, but one thing that often strikes me when this sort of problem is formulated is that it abstracts from the whole thesis of Trinitarian processions, which was so key to the actual formulation fo the doctrine.
An example from Basil of Caesarea comes to mind (from his treatise on the Holy Spirit, if I remember correctly). Basil denies that the persons of the Trinity are, in themselves, countably three. His idea in saying this is that, strictly speaking, to count something you must first identify it as a unit discrete from other units. But, says Basil, we never can really do this with the persons of the Trinity because of the procesions. We say 'the Father', but, if we are thinking correctly about the Trinity, we will always be thinking of the other two persons as well. Thus, 'the Father' is really shorthand for something along the lines of 'the Father-from-whom-the-Son-is-generated-and-the-Spirit-proceeds' and 'the Son is really shorthand for something along the lines of 'the Son-who-is-from-the-Father-with-the-Spirit-that-is-through-Him', and 'the Holy Spirit' is really shorthand for something like 'the Spirit-who-is-from-the-Father-through-the-Son'. Each person is the person He is by relation to the other persons, so if we are talking about the Trinity properly, we can never separate the persons (consider them apart from each other); although we can distinguish them by changing our emphasis. I don't know if this makes a massive difference; but if we accept Basil's claim, it means that statements like 'The Father is not the Son' have to be disambiguated in a way we might not see on first glance: both sides of the inequality actually involve the whole Trinity, and only differ in the way the Trinity is being considered. (I wonder, by the way, if a Basilian view would make the reduplicative approach more attractive?)
Oh, I meant to gesture vaguely at a way Basil's poin might be relevant to the Quaternity discussion. If 'the Father' is really just shorthand for (Father-Son-Spirit), and 'the Son' is really just shorthand for (Father-Son-Spirit), and 'the Spirit' is really just shorthand for (Father-Son-Spirit), could 'God' in a Trinitarian view be analyzed as (Father-Son-Spirit), i.e., without any emphasis on one of the three?
(I also intended to make a caveat about Basil on counting: obviously, Basil allows that in a looser sense of 'count' we can count the persons as Three; his point is merely that in one strict sense of 'count' we cannot.)
OK, I've been lurking for some time, but Bill has finally drawn me out. I've written about this Quaternity problem (Rel Stud 2003), and it's a tough one.
I could circle around this problem from a lot of philosophical angles, but for me the bottom line is that the scriptures assume and imply that God is numerically identical to the Father of Christ. (Bill understates the case when he says that one gets this impression from the New Testament.) How can I say this? By applying a few common sense rules of thumb, that we all apply when trying to figure out what an author thinks is identical to what. (Rel Stud 2005 - sorry for doing that, but I can say more if people are interested.) The language of Paul, and of the author of John is particularly revealing, and consistent. Only what theoretical concerns swamp attention to the text does this become unclear.
I find it bizarre that people on many sides of this issue either (1) simply think that the NT writers, and even Jesus himself (or only his human mind) are very confused about this, or (2) they anachronistically read back in their own version of trinitarianism to what is in the NT. Both approaches disrespect the texts and the men who wrote them.
About (1) - they take John (etc) to hold that f=g, and s=g, and yet not-f=s. That's simply uncharitable, and should thus be a last resort interpretation.
About (2), there are many manifestly bad arguments for trinitarianism (of some sort or other) based on mindless proof-texting. E.g. Jesus forgave sins, only God can forgive sins, ergo s=g. (problem: Jesus himself says the 2nd premise is false) Or: s is called Alpha and Omega, f/g is called Alpha and Omega, ergo s=f/g. (invalid, or valid but unsound if you add the premise that anything that can truly be called A & O is =g.)
Regarding the qua-move: Tom Senor and Richard Cross have shown it to be a dead-end. Cross does it in his The Metaphysics of the Incarnation ch 8, and Senor does it in his chapter in God and Time, eds. Ganssle and Woodruff.
I have thought about this issue before, but in respect to New Testament Studies. As Dale pointed out the New Testament is most likely not confused on this subject, I think the problem is that we may not, at this point in historical study, understand fully the complexity of Jewish though concerning the person of God. In some of the Rabbi's and in the Intertestemental literature , not to mention the OT, we find God's wisdom as a personified reality, N.T. Wright has written about this in his series "Christian Origins and the Question of God". I think there is the possibility that our formulation is wrong although I am a Trinitarian because I do not see anyother explanation at this moment that explains the NT writers comments on God and Jesus adequately and I realize that there have been thinkers throughout church history much smarter than I, who have defended it.
Blake
Mike,
Seems to me the problem is how to make logical sense of the orthodox position. Both of our arguments point up the difficulty. In other words, your response to me doesn't show how the orthodox position is coherent.
Brandon,
You wrote: "Each person is the person He is by relation to the other persons, so if we are talking about the Trinity properly, we can never separate the persons (consider them apart from each other)..." Perhaps we should distinguish:
1. The Persons are in essential relation to one another, i.e., cannot exist apart from these relations, incl. relations of procession
and
2. The Persons are what they are only in relation.
If what you mean is (1) then I think my problem would still arise.
Dale,
Thanks for the references. So we agree that God = God the Father. God is tripersonal. How do you block the inference to 'God the Father is tripersonal'?
Jesus said to her "do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father". (John 20)
So He could have said "Do not hold my Father, for He as not yet ascended to me"?
(Assuming Fa & a=b implies Fb).
Ocham,
Although the Incarnation doctrine seems logically to require that of the Trinity (though not vice versa), it might be best to keep the issues separate. One question is how the Son (the 2nd Person) can be the same God as the Father; a second problem belongs to Christology: How can the Son be identical to Jesus of Nazareth?
Bill,
There's far more biblical reason to hold that g=f than that "God is tripersonal" - whatever that means - it can be read in many ways.
The common apologetic strategy, is to start with the fact that the Father "is God", insist on the strictest monotheism, and then, so to speak, try to move s and h "into" the divine nature. This sort of strategy depends on fudging in what sense any of the three are "in" God (parts? does God consistute them, or vice-versa? are they aspects of God? etc.) This is why I've found apologists and theologians pretty useless when it comes to these issues. They're so busy trying to prove their case, that they never get clear on precisely what they're supposed to be proving.
But note the reason for this strategy - one can't find any concept of a tri-personal God in the Bible. (Note: the appearance of f, s, and h in some manner, or the sequential mention of their names doesn't suffice.) The common view seems to be that the apostles and biblical authors, strangely, overlook the clear implications of their own committments. Well, that's one take on it; you can then say that luckily, the later guys figured it out. Whether you believe that depends on whether you think there's a coherent form of "Latin" Trinitarianism to be found in the later guys (church fathers, ecumenical councils). I tend to take a dim view of that...
Dale
Terry Parsons (in his book *Indeterminate Identity*) defends the view that there can be ontological (or "worldly") indeterminacy of identity by defining identity in terms of what he calls "worldly" (as opposed to "conceptual") properties. In this way he restricts the distinctness of discernibles (which features in Bill's argument) to "worldly" properties. You might try adapting this strategy to the present case by claiming that the property of being tripersonal is a "conceptual" property. Of course one would like to know more about how to understand this distinction between "worldly" and "conceptual" properties. Parsons does not tell us much, but the labels "worldly" and "conceptual" are at least suggestive, I guess.
I don't think that the strategy works for Parsons. The reason is that it seems like a mistake for someone who believes in "worldly" indeterminacy of identity to deny that being indeterminately identical with something is a "worldly" relation. But this isn't a problem in the case of the puzzle about the trinity, because it does not seem to me that the orthodox view takes a position on the question of whether being tripersonal is "conceptual".
For a similar speculation with regard to the concept of Persons as subsistent relations, see "Augustine's Trinitology and the Theory of Groups" by Thomas Ryba in _Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum_.
Readers of this thread will likely also want to see the following discussion as well.
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2006/05/of_course_trini.html#more
The unique and acceptable solution to this enigma that was raised in this blog is that God is one and everything else is under him. I have gone thru a long research on this subject for years because I have never believed in the Trinity and I would like you to google the Osiris Dionysus old mythologies because I am quiet sure that that is the direction you should all take to understand where the Trinity concept came from. Islam might be right.