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?
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?
Posted by Jeff on Sunday, July 23, 2006
7 Comments:
Well I think one thing that's unsatisfying about it is that it's starting to feel like we're denying the basic evidence that got us into this problem in the first place. One of the reasons we're even talking about this is because Jesus acts like he's God. But I never get the impression that Jesus thinks of himself as part human and part God.
or to put it in the terms of the post, the point is that Jesus talks and acts like he has these controversial attributes like worship-worthiness--not like part of him does. the question people ask is "who is this?", not "what is he composed of?"
(assimilating that to your statement--"Jesus acts like he's God"--sounds question-begging to me. it presupposes a particular solution to what i see as the difficulty. do you see what i mean?)
but see, it's not immediately obvious to me what the difference is between acting like you're worship-worthy, and acting like part of you is worship-worthy. how would those look different? maybe it's easier with a different attribute: if i have a proper part which rules the wind and waves, how does that look different from me ruling the wind and waves?
Well, honestly it depends on the attribute. If your brain controls the wind and waves but your right hand does not, that doesn't look very different from you ruling the wind and waves. On the other hand, if your right hand controls the wind and waves, it would get a lot easier to see that only a proper part of you controls the wind and waves. For one thing, we could (in principle) cut off your right hand, which we would have a harder time of in the case of your brain.
But now perhaps we have hit upon a way in which being worship-worthy is different from some of the LORD's (or Jesus') other attributes. My intuition is that if I attribute worship-worthiness to the whole then I attribute it to all the parts - which is not really my intuition about being master of the wind and waves. If Jesus shared this intuition, and if Jesus was concerned about blasphemy (which, since he was in most respects a good Jew, seems reasonable to me), then I would expect him to make the distinction if he thought only part of him was worship-worthy. This would be a particularly important distinction to make since, as you observe, it's not immediately apparent how you can tell the person who is entirely worship-worthy from the person who is only worship-worthy in one or more of his parts.
Hey jefe -
Nice discussion! Have you seen what is going on here? I'm the blog's author, and I'd love to have your comments there. I may post a link to your discussion here.
I like your setup of 1-4. I've been puzzling about this for some time, and I believe that the best way out is just to deny 1. Worship only the LORD - right, among the available deities in the pantheon of the ancient near-east. That commant needn't imply, as so many seem to assume, that there's exactly one thing (period, one thing in existence) which is worship-worthy. To support this, take a look at Revelation 4 & 5. How many objects of worship? On the face of it, two. Only one, of course, can be numerically identical to Yahweh, and that is clearly the one who sits on the throne.
You're comment about monotheism being a verbal issue is, I think, a deep one. If a "god" is a worship-worthy thing, there are two. If it means various other things, or just being identical to Yahweh, there's one.
Isn't that a neat solution? No fancy metaphysics need (yet). What do you think?
Dale
PS - who are you?
Your appeal to "ex cathedra" is confusing to me. That's a concept that didn't get any ink until the ninth century or so, so you're going to have to do a lot of exegesis to convince me that Jesus sometimes spoke ex cathedra and sometimes not.
As for the early church fathers failing to understand Hebrew modes of thought, I find that difficult to swallow. Paul, Matthew, John, and Peter at least had grown up Jewish, which puts them in as good a position to understand "Hebrew" modes of thought as anybody in the first century. Matthew and John had three years of rabbinical instruction under their belts; Paul seems to have had significantly more than that in addition to being a voracious intellectual. Yes, it would be nice if we had a Christian rabbi among our first century authors, but we've got a good cross-section of native intellectual ability, personal background, and education. And just restricting ourselves to our first-century Jewish sources you can get an awful lot of trinitarian language.
Now, it may be that our first-century Jewish church fathers deliberately broke with what you call "Hebrew" modes of thought regarding the trinity, and what it means for God to be "echad." But you're making a claim that strains my credulity beyond the breaking point when you say that Jews who grew up in first-century Palestine simply didn't understand the traditional way of thinking about that issue.
Vynette:
Thanks for your comments. Glad to have you drop by.
Your first question--"whether the doctrine is actually based on the Bible"--is just what I was trying to address in the central section of this post. The New Testament includes some trinitarian theorizing, but, as you say, most of that happened in the later ecumenical councils. As I understand it, though, that theorizing is grounded in the kind of NT data I described here--not just in terms like "Son of God" and the epigrammatic statements in John. Take a look at Mark 2.1-12, or compare Matthew 4.10 and 28.17-18. Something unusual is going on.
Apropos of those last passages, the word "worship" does indeed denote an act of reverence that can be paid to all sorts of things. But that doesn't mean it's proper to worship just anything. Consider the verse you cited, when John worships the angel:
"At this I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, 'Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!'" (Revelation 19.10).
But also, you're quite right that the NT makes distinctions between Jesus and God. Reconciling that distinctness with the other things we know about Jesus is the big trinitarian problem. So far, I don't know how to solve it.
But one thing is clear: Jesus isn't a "normal man". As you say, he is "annointed" (Messiah), and he has "plenipotentiary powers" beyond any prophet. And he seems to have a whole slough of attributes that no normal man would claim to have.
More broadly, I think the basic point on which we disagree is this: "They negate the values for which he lived and died by concentrating on the man instead of the message." As I read the gospels, Jesus' message is primarily about himself and the kingdom he inaugurates. His central question is, "Who do you say I am?", his central command, "Follow me." Christianity, as I understand it, is not primarily about abstract "values"--it is about the Christ. Do you disagree?
Vynette,
Sorry for my delay in responding.
We agree on quite a bit. I agree that Jesus enjoins us to much more than "passive belief", and that there are issues of timeless principle involved in the Christian faith ("now these three remain..."). I also believe that Christianity is fundamentally about particular events in history, "the mystery of the faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." But I don't suppose we'll settle a lot by exchanging generalities.
Anyway, this is all outside the task at hand, which is simply trying to make sense of the Jesus-accounts. I'll leave the implications for faith and practice for another time.
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