Further Adventures of the Trinity

By popular demand.

As promised, I want to keep working through some of the trinity questions from a few months ago (has it really been that long?). But first, in response to the comments on my last post on the subject, I want to make a brief note on method.

As I try to work this stuff out, I am making some ludicrously unorthodox statements. This is not because I am inclined to disregard the pronouncements of a hundred generations of thinking Christians. It's because I don't understand what the orthodox formulas are saying. So I'm starting from claims that are probably wrong, but which I (and I hope you) understand. I know how to evaluate claims like that. And by evaluating claims like that, I hope to use them as stepping stones to other claims that I understand, which are closer to the truth. Hopefully the rest of you also find this kind of project worthwhile.

**

That said, I want to try a new angle on things. I started by putting out some trinitarian claims without touching the question of why anybody in their right mind would believe anything like them. I want to reground the discussion: where do these wild claims come from?

For starters, they come from Jewish monotheism. In contrast with other ancient near eastern tribes, who have separate deities for handling the weather and politics and stuff, the Hebrews only worship one god, the LORD (the traditional English rendering of his name). According to Genesis 1, the LORD governs light, darkness, sky, earth, sea, life, sex, food--he's considerably cooler than the average deity.

But is the LORD the only god? The Hebrew scriptures are actually kind of equivocal on that point. On the one hand, the LORD is contrasted with other gods in a way that seems to presuppose their existence. On the other, though, those contrasts are so complete as to lead to claims like "the LORD is God; besides him there is no other" (Deuteronomy 4). What is unequivocal is that the LORD is unique in a lot of important respects. Only the LORD is properly to be worshiped. Only the LORD is the creator. Only the LORD is the all-powerful, all-wise judge of the world.

So as Eric was suggesting, how many gods there are may really be just a verbal matter. If gods are those things that the nations worship, then there are lots of gods. If gods are all-powerful rulers of creation deserving of praise, then there's only one. In light of this, I'm going to drop talk about counting "divine entities"; we can arrive at basically the same place by replacing "divine" with less ambiguous uniquely-held attributes. For the sake of discussion, I'll single one of these attributes out:

(1) Only God (the LORD) is worship-worthy.

Another thing: God is holy. He is utterly different, other, apart: he is not "in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below" (Exodus 20). He is not an idol, not a beast, not a human. We'll fix on this particular bit of otherness:

(2) God is not human.

So far, so good. Now fast forward to the first century. Along comes this guy Jesus, who in most ways is a good Jew--except he keeps claiming to have attributes that a good Jew would know belong only to the LORD. Like being able to forgive sins. Being "lord even of the sabbath". Judging the world. Having power over the wind and waves. People even worship him, and he treats this as if it were appropriate--despite his apparently holding the fully orthodox view that only the LORD is to be worshiped. What's more, he proceeds to back up these absurd claims, in whatever ways they're open to some kind of empirical scrutiny (c.f. Mark 2.1-12, 4.35-41)--the climactic evidence being his resurrection. What in the world do we make of this? Here are the problematic claims:

(3) Jesus is human.
(4) Jesus is worship-worthy.

So you see the problem. To keep with tradition, I'll spell it out. The Christian, on the face of it, has good reasons to believe propositions 1, 2, 3 and 4. Propositions 2 and 3 taken together logically imply that Jesus is not God (this follows from indiscernibility of identicals). But 1 and 4 taken together imply that Jesus is God (this follows from the standard semantics of "only"). This is the dilemma. One side or the other has to give--or else we have to fundamentally rethink the standard logic.

This is a formulation of the problem that I'm finally happy with.

(I should emphasize that there's nothing very special about the choice of "human" or "worship-worthy" here--lots of other attributes could play the same role. I'm hoping that the way we treat these choices will generalize to the others--but I could turn out to be wrong about that.)

**

Now we can start to think about how to resolve this dilemma. In this post I'm going to consider a simple version of Eric's proposal. It goes like this: God is complex. That is to say, God has parts. Among them is a human part, Jesus. So far, this doesn't help to resolve the dilemma. But the important step is to relax claim 1, to this:

(1') Only God or any of his parts is worship-worthy.

There's something intuitive about this move: when Bert says, "I only eat vegetables", that doesn't mean he doesn't eat parts of vegetables (that would be very awkward). A lover isn't unfaithful if he praises his beloved's eyes or smile.

First thing to note about this solution, though, is it's pretty unorthodox. For one thing, on this account it's clear that Jesus is not God, any more than an arm is a person (though it might still be fair to say that Jesus is "divine", since he's part of God).

It also seems to make God dependent on Jesus, instead of the other way around. In medieval terms, "the part is prior to the whole": a lego spaceship is dependent on the legos that make it up in a way that the legos are not dependent on the spaceship. If Jesus is part of God, then God would seem to depend on Jesus the same way. This is one basis for the traditional doctrine that God has no parts. It's a very clean argument: if a thing depends on its parts, and God doesn't depend on anything, then God has no parts (Geoff Anders introduced me to this argument, from Thomas Aquinas, I think).

One further observation: if we allow a composite God like this, which can have a whole human being as a part, then it becomes even hazier what the difference is between this and good old-fashioned polytheism. The polytheist could say, "I also believe in 'one God', one worship-worthy entity: the pantheon. Each of its parts--that is, each god--is also worship-worthy. And nothing other than the pantheon and its parts is worship-worthy." This isn't exactly a knock-down argument against the theory of divine parts, but I think it does make it look less appealing.

While we're on the subject, here's a complementary solution: Jesus has parts. Among those parts is a divine part, God. Then, to resolve the dilemma, we can take a couple of different routes. One route is to relax proposition 1 a different way:

(1'') Only God or anything which includes God as a part is worship-worthy.

This seem wrong, though, because God is a part of lots of things: for instance, God is a part of God-and-this-sofa, but worshiping this weird hybrid object seems pretty clearly against the first commandment.

The other route is to relax proposition 4:

(4') Part of Jesus (the divine part) is worship-worthy.

So far I can't find anything illogical about this move, but it does give a rather different picture from the orthodox one--the formula in the Chalcedonian creed is that Jesus is "truly God and truly man", sometimes glossed "fully God and fully man". Besides that, though, this move just seems unsatisfying, though I can't put my finger on the problem yet.

Thoughts?

"Science and Religion"

i have a real post coming, with lots of philosophical theology goodness to satisfy the masses. in the meantime, though, enjoy this tidbit from g.k. chesterton's biography of st. thomas aquinas:

For instance, in the matter of the interpretation of Scripture, [Aquinas] fixed first on the obvious fact, which was forgotten by four furious centuries of sectarian battle, that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self-evident; and that we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And unfortunately, nineteenth-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were seventeenth-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation. Thus, private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, and premature theories about what the world ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.