At the suggestion of a poster on another thread that, like so many on this site, quickly began to fray as Trinitarians and non-Trinitarians debated (I’m being kind in using that word) the meaning of each side’s proffered biblical verses, I’ve decided to explain my position that Trinitarians actually need to support – and can support –their thesis logically rather than Scripturally.
This notion will draw fire from both camps, but particularly from the sola scriptura crowd. You won’t find me underscoring supposed proof-texts, because I’m convinced that none truly qualify as “proof.” From the standpoint of word meaning, Scripture is maddeningly equivocal. Arguments over Hebrew words ending in “-im” as establishing plurality; over how kurios or adonai are to be interpreted as a referent; over proper rendering of phrases like theos en ho logos from a language with no indefinite article and which uses case rather than word order to convey meaning – all of these arguments are, in my view, ultimately unpersuasive, and while each of these have their standard bearers (who will now come gunning for me!), it’s obvious that nothing will ever be decided in this way.
Even where word meaning is clear, intention of the author often is not; we sometimes need to pay mind to the historical context, the intended audience and the purpose of writing in order to distill that intention.
Then there is the matter of separating the pre-incarnate Son from the incarnate Jesus, which injects additional ambiguity when, for example, construing gospel passages indicating Jesus’ subservience to the Father – all of which were uttered during the 30-odd years that Jesus had “emptied himself” of whatever “equality” he may have had with the Father (Philippians 2:7). How much are we to discount those subservience quotes as a result?
And enough ink has been spilt over John’s Prologue – obviously a key piece of Scripture on our issue. I can add little, other than to point out an exegetical question: given that John was the last to write a (canonical) gospel, are we to understand his Prologue, to quote James J. G. Dunn, “as a variation on an already well formed conception of incarnation or as itself a decisive step forward in the organic growth or evolution of the Christian doctrine.” If the former, it will inevitably cast the incarnation as a refinement of first-century Jewish messianic expectations (which, by the way, come in several flavors), and inform our interpretation of the Prologue.
I’ve waxed on here not just to set the stage, but to give the Inerrantists and Fundamentalists among you an off-ramp. To you, I’m obviously a nut, maybe even a heretic. You can stop reading now.
To those who are still reading, here is my thesis: Trinitarianism is the outgrowth of the early Church’s effort to understand and explain its own experience of the risen Christ in philosophical terms. The march of Christianity outward from Palestine into the Greek world inevitably resulted in a cultural and philosophical disconnect, as tales told and texts written from a Jewish/messianic perspective were being interpreted by men imbued in a Greek philosophical tradition. Those few scattered passages in the emerging New Testament canon that could arguably be deemed binitarian or (far less frequently) trinitarian yielded no coherent picture of the Son’s participation in the Godhead, and two centuries of patristic thinking were occupied by the effort to weave that idea into a doctrine that was consistent with Scripture. It was thus natural that Greek philosophy, which had long sought to locate an ontological bridge between the One and the Many, between the realm of soul/spirit and the material world, would provide the looms for this tapestry. Particularly in Alexandria, Christianity was discovering its affinity with middle Platonism and using it as a lens through which to view Christian concepts, furnishing the early church fathers with a template for reworking Jewish monotheism into a trinitarianism that could successfully resist devolving into tritheism.
But have they been successful? Now it is time to talk logic. We can express the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (three “persons” in one God) as a set of propositions in this way:
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
5. The Holy Spirit is God.
6. The Holy Spirit is not the Father.
7. The Holy Spirit is not the Son.
For simplicity’s sake we need consider only 1 through 4 (for 5 through 7 will stand or fall on the same logical analysis we apply to 1 through 4):
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
The difficulty in defending the Trinity has always been that these four propositions are, as a group, logically inconsistent when analyzed from the standpoint of the three basic rules of logical equivalence: self-identity (everything is identical to itself, i.e., x = x); symmetry (if two things are equivalent, they are equivalent in any order, i.e., if x = y, then y = x); and transitivity (if one thing is the same as another and that other is the same as a third, then the first is the same as the third, i.e., if x = y and y = z then x = z). The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity fares ill in this analysis.
To make them logically consistent, it is tempting to sacrifice one of the four tenets – and most early heresies took this tack. Thus, Arius sacrificed the third one:
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
3′. Therefore the Son is not God.
and Sabellius (building on earlier Modalist thought) sacrificed the fourth one:
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4′. Therefore the Father is the Son.
Both Arius’ argument and Sabellius’ argument are logically consistent because, unlike the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, they satisfy all three of the aforementioned principles of logical consistency. Arius and Sabellius, although approaching the inconsistency from different perspectives, each preferred rationality to irrationality―even if it meant preferring heresy to orthodoxy.
Now, we Trinitarians have two choices. We can simply throw up our hands and declare that God does not have to play by the rules of logical consistency, thereby forever assigning the Trinity to the status of unfathomable mystery. Or, we can allow for identity and equivalence to be relative to their contexts. Thus, “Robert is good” can be consistent with “Robert is not good” as long as a different sense of “good” holds for each proposition (e.g., he is a good theologian; he is not a good golfer.)
To say that “The Father is not the Son” is likewise context-dependent and predicate-specific. One can maintain without contradiction both that “The Father is not the same person as the Son” and “The Father is the same God as the Son” by separating out personhood from Godhood. How to tease them apart is the ultimate challenge of orthodox Trinitarian theology.
I’ll explain how I do it shortly – and why “persons” is a poor word to use in expressing the hypostasis concept – but I wanted to throw this much up to draw a bit of fire first. That is, if anyone is still following . . .
This notion will draw fire from both camps, but particularly from the sola scriptura crowd. You won’t find me underscoring supposed proof-texts, because I’m convinced that none truly qualify as “proof.” From the standpoint of word meaning, Scripture is maddeningly equivocal. Arguments over Hebrew words ending in “-im” as establishing plurality; over how kurios or adonai are to be interpreted as a referent; over proper rendering of phrases like theos en ho logos from a language with no indefinite article and which uses case rather than word order to convey meaning – all of these arguments are, in my view, ultimately unpersuasive, and while each of these have their standard bearers (who will now come gunning for me!), it’s obvious that nothing will ever be decided in this way.
Even where word meaning is clear, intention of the author often is not; we sometimes need to pay mind to the historical context, the intended audience and the purpose of writing in order to distill that intention.
Then there is the matter of separating the pre-incarnate Son from the incarnate Jesus, which injects additional ambiguity when, for example, construing gospel passages indicating Jesus’ subservience to the Father – all of which were uttered during the 30-odd years that Jesus had “emptied himself” of whatever “equality” he may have had with the Father (Philippians 2:7). How much are we to discount those subservience quotes as a result?
And enough ink has been spilt over John’s Prologue – obviously a key piece of Scripture on our issue. I can add little, other than to point out an exegetical question: given that John was the last to write a (canonical) gospel, are we to understand his Prologue, to quote James J. G. Dunn, “as a variation on an already well formed conception of incarnation or as itself a decisive step forward in the organic growth or evolution of the Christian doctrine.” If the former, it will inevitably cast the incarnation as a refinement of first-century Jewish messianic expectations (which, by the way, come in several flavors), and inform our interpretation of the Prologue.
I’ve waxed on here not just to set the stage, but to give the Inerrantists and Fundamentalists among you an off-ramp. To you, I’m obviously a nut, maybe even a heretic. You can stop reading now.
To those who are still reading, here is my thesis: Trinitarianism is the outgrowth of the early Church’s effort to understand and explain its own experience of the risen Christ in philosophical terms. The march of Christianity outward from Palestine into the Greek world inevitably resulted in a cultural and philosophical disconnect, as tales told and texts written from a Jewish/messianic perspective were being interpreted by men imbued in a Greek philosophical tradition. Those few scattered passages in the emerging New Testament canon that could arguably be deemed binitarian or (far less frequently) trinitarian yielded no coherent picture of the Son’s participation in the Godhead, and two centuries of patristic thinking were occupied by the effort to weave that idea into a doctrine that was consistent with Scripture. It was thus natural that Greek philosophy, which had long sought to locate an ontological bridge between the One and the Many, between the realm of soul/spirit and the material world, would provide the looms for this tapestry. Particularly in Alexandria, Christianity was discovering its affinity with middle Platonism and using it as a lens through which to view Christian concepts, furnishing the early church fathers with a template for reworking Jewish monotheism into a trinitarianism that could successfully resist devolving into tritheism.
But have they been successful? Now it is time to talk logic. We can express the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (three “persons” in one God) as a set of propositions in this way:
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
5. The Holy Spirit is God.
6. The Holy Spirit is not the Father.
7. The Holy Spirit is not the Son.
For simplicity’s sake we need consider only 1 through 4 (for 5 through 7 will stand or fall on the same logical analysis we apply to 1 through 4):
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
The difficulty in defending the Trinity has always been that these four propositions are, as a group, logically inconsistent when analyzed from the standpoint of the three basic rules of logical equivalence: self-identity (everything is identical to itself, i.e., x = x); symmetry (if two things are equivalent, they are equivalent in any order, i.e., if x = y, then y = x); and transitivity (if one thing is the same as another and that other is the same as a third, then the first is the same as the third, i.e., if x = y and y = z then x = z). The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity fares ill in this analysis.
To make them logically consistent, it is tempting to sacrifice one of the four tenets – and most early heresies took this tack. Thus, Arius sacrificed the third one:
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
3′. Therefore the Son is not God.
and Sabellius (building on earlier Modalist thought) sacrificed the fourth one:
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4′. Therefore the Father is the Son.
Both Arius’ argument and Sabellius’ argument are logically consistent because, unlike the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, they satisfy all three of the aforementioned principles of logical consistency. Arius and Sabellius, although approaching the inconsistency from different perspectives, each preferred rationality to irrationality―even if it meant preferring heresy to orthodoxy.
Now, we Trinitarians have two choices. We can simply throw up our hands and declare that God does not have to play by the rules of logical consistency, thereby forever assigning the Trinity to the status of unfathomable mystery. Or, we can allow for identity and equivalence to be relative to their contexts. Thus, “Robert is good” can be consistent with “Robert is not good” as long as a different sense of “good” holds for each proposition (e.g., he is a good theologian; he is not a good golfer.)
To say that “The Father is not the Son” is likewise context-dependent and predicate-specific. One can maintain without contradiction both that “The Father is not the same person as the Son” and “The Father is the same God as the Son” by separating out personhood from Godhood. How to tease them apart is the ultimate challenge of orthodox Trinitarian theology.
I’ll explain how I do it shortly – and why “persons” is a poor word to use in expressing the hypostasis concept – but I wanted to throw this much up to draw a bit of fire first. That is, if anyone is still following . . .