Category: Christian Doctrine

Can A Necessary Being Depend for its Existence on a Necessary Being?

According to the Athansian Creed, the Persons of the Trinity, though each of them uncreated and eternal and necessary are related as follows. The Father is unbegotten.  The Son is begotten by the Father, but not made by the Father.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  Let us focus on the relation of the Father to the Son.  When I tried to explain this to Peter Lupu, he balked at the idea of one necessary being begetting another, claiming that the idea makes no sense.  One of his arguments was as follows.  If x begets y, then x causes y to begin to exist.  But no necessary being begins to exist.  So, no necessary being is begotten.  A second argument went like this.  Begetting is a causal notion.  But causes are temporally precedent to their effects.  No two necessary beings are related as before to after.  Therefore, no necessary being begets another.

I first pointed out in response to Peter that the begetting in question is not the begetting of one animal by another, but a begetting in a different sense, and that whatever else this idea involves, it involves the idea of one necessary being depending for its existence on another.  Peter balked at this idea as well.  "How can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?"  To soften him up, I looked for a non-Trinitarian case in which a necessary being stands in the asymmetrical relation of existential dependency to a necessary being. Note that I did not dismiss his problem the way a dogmatist might; I admitted that it is a genuine difficulty, one that needs to be solved.

So I said to Peter:  Look, you accept the existence of Fregean propositions, items which Frege viewed as the senses of sentences in the indicative mood from which indexical elements (including the tenses of verbs) have been removed and have been replaced with non-indexical elements.  You also accept that at least some of these Fregean propositions, if not all,  are necessary beings.  For example, you accept that the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is necessarily true, and you see that this requires that the proposition be necessarily existent.  Peter agreed to that.

You also, I said to him, have no objection to the idea of the God of classical theism who exists necessarily if he is so much as possible.  He admitted that despite his being an atheist, he has no problem with the idea of a necessarily existent God.

So I said to Peter:  Think of the necessarily existent Fregean propositions as divine thoughts.  (I note en passant that Frege referred to his propositions as Gedanken, thoughts.)  More precisely, think of them as the accusatives or objects of divine acts of thinking, as the noemata of the divine noesis.  That is, think of the propositions as existing precisely as the  accusatives of divine thinking.  Thus, their esse is their concipi by God.  They don't exist a se the way God does; they exist in a mind-dependent manner without prejudice to their existing in all possible worlds.  To cop a phrase from the doctor angelicus, they have their necessity from another, unlike God, who has his necessity from himself.

So I said to Peter:  Well, is it not now clear that we  have a non-Trinitarian example in which a necessary being, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12,' depends for its existence on a necessary being, namely God, and not vice versa?  Is this not an example of a relation that is neither merely logical (like entailment) nor empirically-causal?  Does this not get you at least part of the way towards an understand of how the Father can be said to beget the Son?

To these three questions, Peter gave a resounding 'No!' looked at his watch and announced that he had to leave right away in order to be able to teach his 5:40 class at the other end of the Valle del Sol.

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen

Here is another of the scholastic manuals I pulled off my shelf: Fernand van Steenberghen, Ontology (Nauwelaerts Publisher, Brussels, 1970, tr. Moonan).  A paragraph from p. 278 supports my thesis that the distinction between primary substance and suppositum is an ad hoc device invented for a theological purpose, a device for which there is no independent philosophical warrant:

4. The problem of subsistence or personality.  This problem was inserted into metaphysics for the benefit of theology, as is quite plain, in order to prepare the way for a satisfactory explanation of the theological  mystery of the incarnation, the question of knowing how and why the human nature of Jesus Christ does not constitute a human person.  But this problem is extraneous to philosophy and must remain so, for from the metaphysical point of view, there is no reason for distinguishing individual nature and individual.  It is therefore contrary to any sane method to ask in ontology on what conditions an individual nature might not be a suppositum (or person, where it is an intelligent nature that is in question.)

Continue reading “Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen”

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Klubertanz

This recent excursion into the philosophy of The School is proving to be quite fascinating, and I thank Dr. Novak et al. for their stimulation.  I should say that I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of scholastic material, from Aquinas to Zubiri,  from Maritain to Marechal, over the past 40 years, so it is not as if I am a complete stranger to it; I do confess, however, to finding some of it mumbo-jumbo and lacking in the sort of analytic rigor that we broadly analytic types prize. To get a better handle on the notion of suppositum ('supposit' in English), this morning I pulled down from the shelf a number of scholastic manuals.

Let us first  turn to George P. Klubertanz, S. J., Introduction to the Philosophy of Being, 2nd ed. (Meredith Publ., 1963).  Back in the day, when Catholic colleges were Catholic as opposed to catholic, this textbook was inflicted upon many a bored undergraduate in required courses. In those days, philosophy was taught systematically; this was before and during Vatican II, before and while  the rot set in (if rot it was) and before chaos descended, the kind of chaos that issued in the Vagina Monologues being presented at the University of Notre Dame.  (To cop a riff from Dennis Prager, there is no coward like an academic coward, and the abdication of authority on the part of university officials from the 60s on is something to marvel at.)

But I digress.  According to Klubertanz, "The first substance is the singular substance which exists.  When we want to designate the being precisely as an existing, substantial, complete individual, we call it a 'supposit.'" (251)  He goes on to say that a supposit is a "complete individual" and therefore not something common to many in the manner of a secondary substance.  Nor is a supposit an integral part, or an essential part, of a substance.  Klubertanz gives the example of the body of a living thing as an example of an essential part of it — presumably because a living thing cannot exist without a body — and the example of a hand as an example of an "integral part."  Klubertanz gives no rigorous definition of the latter phrase, but I surmise that an integral part is a part that is not essential to the whole of which it is a part.  Thus a primary substance such as a particular man can exist without a hand.

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Professor Anderson and the Hyper-Inscrutability of the Trinitarian Doctrine (Peter Lupu)

(This gem is pulled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox to where it may shine in a more fitting setting.  Minor editing, bolding, and comments in blue by BV.)

1). Let us say that a *real* contradiction is a sentence which comes out false according to every possible model (M): i.e., M = language-plus-domain-plus-interpretation, where an ‘interpretation’ is a complete and systematic assignment of extensions to the non-logical terms of the language (L). We assume that L is a well developed natural language such as English and we have a sufficiently rich domain that includes whatever entities are required to implement an interpretation that will suffice for theological purposes.

1.1) Note: We are assuming throughout classical logic in two sense: (a) the logical constants are interpreted classically; (b) there are no *real* true contradictions.

1.2) Sentence S is a *real* contradiction just in case there is no *normal model* M in which it comes out true. A normal model in this context is one which features an interpretation that assigns extensions to the non-logical terms in the usual way prior to resolving any potential ambiguities. On a realist conception of truth, S [if contradictory] has no truth-maker (T-maker) in any normal model or possible world.

2) Let us now define at least one sense of an *apparent contradiction* in model theoretic terms. Let S be a sentence expressible in L and suppose S comes out false in every normal model M. S appears to be a contradiction. Is it really a contradiction? Prof. Anderson maintains that there are sentences which are contradictory in every normal model, but are non-contradictory in some other models of L. How can that be? [Shouldn't Peter have 'false' for contradictory and 'true' for non-contradictory in the preceding sentence?  After all, in (1) we are told in effect that contradictoriness is falsehood in every model, which implies that noncontradictoriness is truth in some model.  'Contradictory in every model' is a pleonastic expression.]

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Was Descartes Poisoned by a Catholic Priest?

Descartes-rene As we have been learning, the conceivability of such theological doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, and Transubstantiation depends on one's background ontology.  Erlangen University's Theodor Ebert, according to this Guardian account, argues that the father of modern philosophy was poisoned with an arsenic-laced communion wafer by a Catholic priest because his metaphysical position is inconsistent with the Transubstantiation doctrine.

This raises an interesting question:  Isn't a Catholic priest's commission of murder by desecration of the host far worse than a philosopher's holding of heretical views? 

More Christology: Freddoso on Supposita

To better understand the doctrine of supposita and the role it plays in the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, we turn to Alfred J. Freddoso, Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation (bolding added):

According to the Christian faith, as defined in this instance by the great Christological Councils and mirrored in centuries of liturgical practice and theological reflection, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. More precisely, he is a single divine person, the eternal Word, in whom are united, whole and unmixed, a divine nature and a human nature–so that he is, to quote Chalcedon, "one with the Father in his divinity and one with us in his humanity."

In expounding this doctrine medieval theologians fashioned the technical metaphysical notion of a suppositum (or hypostasis), i.e. an independently existing ultimate subject of characteristics.4 The philosophically astute will detect at once that, so understood, the concept of a suppositum is remarkably akin to that of an Aristotelian primary substance or individual(ized) nature. Indeed, had it not been for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, medieval Christian thinkers would never have been led to assert that suppositum and substance (or: individual nature) are distinct concepts. To speak now only of the Incarnation, Christ's individual human nature, i.e. the individual composed of a body and an intellective soul and united to the Son of God, is a paradigmatic Aristotelian [primary] substance . . . .Yet, because of its metaphysical union with and dependence upon the eternal Word, this nature is not the ultimate metaphysical subject of Christ's characteristics–not even of his "purely human" characteristics. So in this one instance, known to us only by divine revelation, we have a substance which is not a suppositum, a substance which is metaphysically "sustained" by something distinct from it. To complete the picture, a person is just a suppositum with an intellectual nature, i.e. a suppositum essentially endowed with intellect and free will.

In technical medieval terminology, then, Jesus Christ is a divine suppositum or person, the Son of God, who has freely "assumed" and now "sustains" an individual human nature. What's more, this human nature is united to the divine person "hypostatically," i.e. in such a way that properties had immediately by the human nature have the Son of God as their ultimate metaphysical subject–in a manner analogous to that in which many properties had immediately by a proper part of a whole have the whole itself as their ultimate metaphysical subject.

Continue reading “More Christology: Freddoso on Supposita“

Whether Jesus Exists Necessarily

Lukas Novak comments by e-mail:

You list the following propositions in your post, Christology, Reduplicatives, and Their Truth-Makers:

1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity.
2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily.
3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.

and then say that "each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept." And then you develop a way how the (quite obvious) inconsistency could be explained away.

What I want to point out is that in fact the third proposition most certainly is not something that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept. Quite to the contrary!

There is more to Dr. Novak's e-mail than the above excerpt, but it may help if I give an explicit argument for (3):

4. God is a necessary being: he exists in every possible world.

5. God's creation of a physical universe  is a libertarianly free act:  there are possible worlds in which God creates  a physical universe and there are possible worlds in which he does not.  So, although God exists in every possible world, he does not create in every possible world.

6. The existence of  a physical universe and of each physical thing in it is contingent.  (from 5)

7. Jesus is a man (a rational animal) born in Bethlehem of Mary,  etc.

8.  Animals, rational or not, are physical denizens of the physical universe.

9. Jesus is a contingent being. (from 6, 7, 8)

10.  That which exists contingently (in some but not all worlds) does not exist necessarily (in all worlds).  (Self-evident modal principle)

3.  The man Jesus does not exist necessarily. (from 10)

This appears to be a 'knock-down' argument.  Surely, (4) and (5) are propositions an orthodox Christian must accept. (6) follows from (5).  No orthodox Christian can deny (7). (8) is an analytic truth. (9) is a valid consequence of (6), (7), and (8) taken together.  (1) is a self-evident modal axiom. (3) follows directly from (10).

I suggest that this crystal-clear argument is more worthy of acceptance that the obscure doctrine of supposita with which Novak attempts to rebut (3).

David Stove on the Logos

Commenting on philosophy's alleged "deep affinity with lunacy," Australian positivist David Stove writes,

That the world is, or embodies, or is ruled by, or was created by, a sentence-like entity, a ‘logos’, is an idea almost as old as Western philosophy itself. Where the Bible says ‘The Word was made flesh’, biblical scholars safely conclude at once that some philosopher [Stove’s emphasis] has meddled with the text (and not so as to improve it). Talking-To-Itself is what Hegel thought the universe is doing, or rather, is. In my own hearing, Professor John Anderson maintained, while awake, what with G. E. Moore was no more than a nightmare he once had, that tables and chairs and all the rest are propositions. So it has always gone on. In fact St John’s Gospel, when it says’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, sums up pretty accurately one of the most perennial, as well as most lunatic, strands in philosophy. (The passage is also of interest as proving that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible.) (From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 32.)

A few comments are in order.

Continue reading “David Stove on the Logos”

Christology, Reduplicatives, and Their Truth-Makers

Consider this triad, and whether it is logically consistent:

1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity.
2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily.
3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.

Each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept.   But how can they all be true? In the presence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, the above triad appears inconsistent: The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). Can this apparent inconsistency be shown to be merely apparent?

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Negative and Positive Trinitarian Mysterianism

Dale Tuggy tentatively characterizes Lukas Novak's position on the Trinity as an example of negative mysterianism.  This I believe is a mistake.  But it depends on what we mean by 'negative mysterianism.'  Drawing upon what Tuggy says in his Trinity entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, let us try to understand what mysterianism is in its negative and positive varieties.

A. The Problem. We first remind ourselves what the problem is.  To put it simply in a 'binitarian' form, the problem is to understand how the following propositions can all be true:

1. The Father is not the Son.

2. The Father is God.

3. The Son is God.

4. There is only one God.

It is obvious that if in each sentence the 'is' is the 'is' of absolute numerical identity, then the quartet of propositions is inconsistent.  The conjunction of (2) and (3) by the transitivity of identity entails the negation of (1).  The conjunction of (1), (2), and (3) entails the negation of (4). 

B. Positive Mysterianism.  The response of the positive mysterian to the inconsistency is that, in Tuggy''s words:

. . . the trinitarian doctrine can't be understood because of an abundance of content. [. . .] So while we grasp the meaning of its individual claims, taken together they seem inconsistent, and so the conjunction of them is not understandable . . . . The positive mysterian holds that the human mind is adequate to understand many truths about God, although it breaks down at a certain stage, when the most profound divinely revealed truths are entertained. Sometimes an analogy with recent physics is offered; if we find mysteries (i.e., apparent contradictions) there, such as light appearing to be both a particle and a wave, why should we be shocked to find them in theology?

The position of the positive mysterian seems to be the following.  The Trinity doctrine is true and therefore consistent in reality despite the fact that it appears to us (and presumably must appear to us given our cognitive limitations) as inconsistent and therefore  as necessarily false.  Thus positive mysterianism is not to be confused with dialetheism about the Trinity which is the doctrine that there are some true contradictions and that the Trinity doctrine is one of them.  The positive mysterian is not saying that the doctrine is a true contradiction;  what he maintains is that in itself it is both true and noncontradictory: it only appears to us as contradictory.  It is a mystery in the sense of a merely apparent contradiction.

C.  Critique.  Positive mysterianism seems to entail the view that inconceivability does not entail impossibility.  For it implies that the conjunction of (1)-(4), though inconceivable (i.e., not thinkable without contradiction) is true and therefore possible.  That conceivability does not entail possibility is old hat.  But that inconceivability does not entail impossibility is an innovation that should give us pause.

Why can't I be a positive mysterian about round squares?  I cannot conceive of something that is both round and not round at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense of 'round.'   Normally this inconceivability would be taken as definitive proof of the impossibility of round squares.  But if positive mysterianism is true, then the inference fails.  For what positive mysterianism countenances is the 'possibility' that a proposition which after due reflection and by all normal tests appears contradictory is in reality not contradictory.  So it could be that  — it is epistemically possible that — round squares are possible and actual.  And similarly for an infinity of impossibilia.  This seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of positive mysterianism.

Perhaps I will be told that positive mysterianism applies only to the Trinity and the Incarnation.  But this restriction of the strategy would be ad hoc and unmotivated.  if it works for the Trinity, then it should work across the board.  But if it is rigged solely to save the theological doctrines in question, then one's labor is lost.  One might as well just dogmatically affirm the two doctrines and not trouble one's head over philosophical justification.  Just say:  I accept the doctrines and that's that!

Or perhaps I will be told that God is incomprehensible and that the divine incomprehensibility is what warrants the acceptance as true of apparent contradictions.  But God cannot be all that incomprehensible if we are able to know that the Father is God,the Son is God, the Father is not the Son, the Son is Jesus, etc.  If these propositions are inconsistent when taken together how can unknown and unknowable facts about God remove the contradiction?  The contradiction p & ~p cannot be removed by adducing q, r, s, etc.  Conceivability can be nullified by the addition of further information; inconceivability, however, cannot be nullified by the addition of further information.

D.  Negative Mysterianism.  Among the senses of 'mystery' distinguished by Tuggy are the following:   "[4] an unintelligible doctrine, the meaning of which can't be grasped….[5] a truth which one should believe even though it seems, even after careful reflection, to be impossible and/or contradictory and thus false."  Tuggy then tells us that "We here call those who call the Trinity a mystery in the fourth sense “negative mysterians” and those who call it a mystery in the fifth sense 'positive mysterians'."

E. Critique.  I don't think we need to waste many words on negative mysterianism.  If the Trinity is an unintelligible doctrine, then there is nothing for me to wrap my mind around: there is no proposition to entertain, and so no proposition to accept or reject.  If it is just a mass of verbiage to which no clear sense can be attached, then the question of its truth or falsity cannot even arise.

F. Novak's View. If I understand Novak's view, it is certainly not a form of mysterianism.  For he thinks that if we make the right metaphysical distinctions we will be able to see that the doctrine is noncontradictory.  But I'll leave it to him to explain himself more thoroughly.

From the Mailbag: More on the Lewis Trilemma

 Dear Mr. Vallicella,

I am a theologically-trained youth minister who has studied the Bible 'professionally' for almost 10 years. While I believe that Jesus Christ is in some sense God, I agree with your analysis of Lewis'  ridiculous claim. I'd like to add one more dimension.

Lewis' claim presupposes that the Gospels are literal accounts of history. Very few Biblical historians consider that to be the case. Most historians believe Mark to be the oldest Gospel, and the closest to the original oral material. And Mark is a clearly adoptionist text.  [hyperlink added by BV]Over time, Jesus is identified closer and closer with God. For a great exposition of, say, Paul's "Christology" which differs from what most people nowadays take to be orthodoxy, see Samuel Sandmel's THE GENIUS OF PAUL, one of the best books of New Testament History I've ever read. The Johannine Tradition which you indirectly mentioned, including the Gospel of John, the Epistles of John and especially Revelations, place Jesus' life, death and resurrection in a cosmic context, making them revelatory of the nature of God. (Notice, there is still a difference between Him being a REVELATION of the nature of God, and identical with God). Those later insights are written into the story of Jesus, and you see that evolution within the gospels, from Mark through Luke and Matthew and finally to John. In each Jesus is identified closer and closer with God.

I've brought this up to people who have tried to bring up Lewis' "Trilemma" and they accuse me of making the Gospels 'liars' rather than Jesus or God. But this is just to misunderstand the nature of myth, and to assume from the outset that God's revelation must be solely historical. It never occurs to them that the story itself, the mythos itself, could be revelatory in nature, that through the ideas and stories that surround the original  historical events, God could be revealing Himself. In any event, the very fact that the exact nature of the Gospels themselves is in question shows that Lewis is wrong here. We need not take the Gospels literally to take them seriously. And that opens us up to a whole range of possibilities, including the ones you brought up.

Peace and Blessings
Joshua Orsak

A Different View of the Lewis Trilemma: The Trilemma Vindicated?

Dr. Lukáš Novák e-mails:

I am writing to you personally concerning your last post on your blog, "The Lewis Trilemma." I would like to offer you two things: first, a criticism of your criticism of the "trilemma" (you are right with your terminological quibble, but is there any other word to use instead?), and second, an answer to your question why it isn't possible that Jesus was just "exaggerating" or a "mystic".

I understand that I am quite flooding you with my texts lately, so please feel free not to respond to or even to read this! [Thank you for carefully addressing what I said.  It is good so I am publishing it here. Comments are open.]

1. I think that you are mistaken in claiming that "people like Kreeft inadvertently concede [that there is a fourth horn to the trilemma] when they discuss the further possibilities that Jesus never claimed to be divine and that he might have meant his characteristic sayings mystically."

I think that it is clear that to claim that there are just X horns to a trilemma does not mean that it is impossible to suggest or even defend any additional (or seemingly additional) alternative. It is a platitude that to any x-lemma there can be potentially infinitely many other alternatives one can think of. I can think of several others, in this case: Jesus was an extraterrestrial making some research on humans, Jesus was a collective hallucination, Jesus was an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl who could not speak clearly in the Jewish milieu…

When someone is presenting a x-lemma, he must mean something else then: not that these are the only thinkable alternatives, but these are the only thinkable alternatives consistent both in themselves and with certain given data and reasonable assumptions.

[I see your point, but isn't it an extremely reasonable assumption that no man can be identical to God?  On the face of it, that is an egregious violation of the logic of identity.  I would say that that is a very reasonable assumption despite your attempt, in another thread, to defend a metaphysical framework which renders the Incarnation coherent.  So if one grants that it is reasonable to assume that no man could be God, then it is reasonable to consider whether Jesus' words can be given a mystical interpretation or else interpreted as dramatic ways of making a claim that does not violate standard logic.  Note also that you are not being quite fair in suggesting that my view opens the floodgate to a potentially infinite number of wild alternatives.  It does not, because the mystical interpretation is not unreasonable, has been put forward, and is arguably much more reasonable that that a man is actually God.  Its reasonableness is heightened by the extreme unreasonableness of the God-Man identity theory.  Tertullian, Kierkegaard, and Shestov, you will recall, embrace the identity precisely because it is absurd.  Of course, you will not grant that it is absurd.  But I hope you grant that it is reasonable to believe that it is absurd. (I would argue that it would be unreasonable for you not to grant that it is reasonable to view the identity as absurd.)  So although I agree that we must consider "the given data and reasonable assumptions" there is room for disagreement as to what these are.]

Continue reading “A Different View of the Lewis Trilemma: The Trilemma Vindicated?”

The Lewis ‘Trilemma’

A commenter on my old blog referred me to this famous passage from C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

The commenter offered this as a specimen of good writing, which it undoubtedly is. But content is king and style is arguably mere 'packaging,' or, if "style is the physiognomy of the mind," (Schopenhauer), then content is the mind itself. So let's consider the content of the passage, the famous Lewis Trilemma: Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar.

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From the Mail: Trinity and Incarnation

Dr. Vallicella,

Thank you for some exceptionally helpful posts lately! Regarding your point

(1) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?”

It would seem that a part of that question, or perhaps a prior question to it is:

 (1*) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Incarnation?”

It was because early Christians came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine/God  that the question of how a divine Christ/God-Christ related to the ‘Father God’ to whom he prayed and in whom the Christians also first believed.  As a theologically-trained former minister, who still tries to keep up with contemporary work on the historical Jesus, I must confess that I fail to see that (1*) is the case, therefore I fail to see that (1) is the case.

 Mark Weldon Whitten, PhD   

Continue reading “From the Mail: Trinity and Incarnation”

Some Questions About the Trinity Distinguished

It may help to distinguish the following questions.

1. Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?

2. Is the doctrine, as formulated in the Athanasian creed and related canonical documents, true?

3. Is it possible for human reason, unaided by divine revelation, to know the doctrine to be true?

4. Is the doctrine of the Trinity possibly true?

5. Is the doctrine thinkable (conceivable) without contradiction?

I have little to say about the exegetical (1) since it is beyond my competence as a philosopher. I cannot pronounce upon (2), either for or against, until I have decided (4) and (5). The same goes for the epistemological question, (3). My present interest is in (4) and (5), which are logically prior to the first three, with (5) being logically prior to (4). 

(4) and (5) are distinct questions. An affirmative answer to (5) does not entail an affirmative answer to (4). This is because conceivability is no sure guide to real (extramental) possibility. Of the two questions, (5) comes first in the order of inquiry: if we cannot think the Trinity without contradiction, how could we advance to the further question of whether it is really possible?

(5) is the question at the center of my interest.

It is difficult to get some people to appreciate the force and importance of (5) because they are dogmatists who accept the Trinity doctrine as true simply because they were brought up to believe it, or because it is something their church teaches.  Since they accept it as true, no question of its logical coherence arises for them.  And so they think that anyone who questions the doctrine must not understand it.  To 'set the objector straight' they then repeat the very verbal formulas the logical coherence of which is in question.  "What's the problem? There is one God in three divine Persons!"  They think that if they only repeat the formulas often enough, then the objector will 'get it.'  But it is they who do not get it, since they do not understand the logical problems to which the doctrinal formulations give rise.

Or the adherent may think that the objector is merely 'attacking' or polemicizing against his faith; it doesn't occur to the adherent that there are people whose love of truth is so strong that they will not accept claims without examination.  Now if one examines the creedal formulations, one will see that the gist of the Trinity doctrine is as follows:

1. Monotheism: There is exactly one God.

2. Divinity of Persons:  The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.

3. Distinctness of Persons:  The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.

The problem is to show how these propositions are logically consistent, that is, how they can all be true, but without falling into heresy.  If you cannot see the problem, you are not paying attention, or you lack intelligence, or your thought-processes are being distorted by ideological commitments.  Whatever you think of Brower and Rea's solution to the problem, their exposition of it is very clear and I recommend it to you.  My reason for not accepting their solution is here.