Comments on The Everpresent Wordsnatcher: Two trinity problems

Great! This is exactly the kind of discussion I wa...

2006-04-19T13:54:00.000-04:00

Great! This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for. Y'all are cool. My response is going to be in a new post, since formatting is easier there.

I've got to agree about the essence bit. I've alw...

2006-04-19T13:23:00.000-04:00

I've got to agree about the essence bit. I've always understood "Jesus is God" to be sort of analogous to saying "Jeff is human." Correct me if I'm wrong, but would we not be seriously mistaken (or simply incoherent) if we inferred from "Jeff is human" that "Human is Jeff?"

Now of course you might ask why the usual formula is not "Jesus is a god" or "Jesus is divine." The latter is a fairly common formula, so never mind that. As to the former, that implies that there are other gods out there, which is something Christians usually don't like to say because it just raises all sorts of useless questions about what we mean by "god." And at any rate, we certainly don't mean that Jesus is a god separate from the Father or the Holy Spirit (we can sort of imagine the Trinty being a Trirumvirate of existentially independent deities, but we don't actually think that's the way it is). So saying "Jesus is a god" would not actually be any clearer than saying "Jesus is God," and arguably more misleading.

The way I always understood it: Jesus is God in te...

2006-04-19T08:01:00.000-04:00

The way I always understood it:

Jesus is God in terms of essence, not in terms of personhood. All three members of the trinity are identical in essence (not sure exactly what that means, but hey, what's one more mystery in this discussion) but not in terms of function. I'd definitely check out Moreland for more on this, mostly because he's the one who explained it little ol' freshman me a few years back.

And using Jesus to try and figure out how the Trinity works may be making things more complicated because of the whole incarnation bit. Jesus sleeps because he's human, not because he's God. Does the divine aspect/side/whatever ever sleep?

Egads, trying to think through this stuff at seven in the morning is not a good idea.

I don't think it's right to interpret the 'is' in ...

2006-04-19T02:05:00.000-04:00

I don't think it's right to interpret the 'is' in 'Jesus is God' as identity. The sentence 'I am human' is true, and presumably 'you are human' is true too, but we cannot infer from the conjunction of these two sentences that 'I am you.'

I'm not sure I agree, but I think identity fails with the sort of problems you raised. Additionally, the identity "relation" is supposed to be symmetrical and transitive. So...

P1: Jesus is (identical to) God.
P1' : God is (identical to) Jesus.

But P1' is wrong. God is a Trinity, but Jesus is not. Moreland claims that rather than thinking of P1 in terms of identity, it ought to be essential predication. I'm not sure I agree yet, but the metaphysics of God tends to be, well, difficult.

There are, of course, puzzles about the Trinity. I don't think this is one of them.

Incidentally, denying (1) isn't so strange. Peter Geach spilled much ink developing an account of "relative identity" according to which identity need not be transitive in all contexts. And the account is not an ad hoc move designed only the save the Trinitarian from embarrassment; it has application to and conceptual motivation from a variety of philosophical topics.

Might I suggest a book? Father, Son, and Holy Spir...

2006-04-17T20:48:00.000-04:00

Might I suggest a book?

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Roles, Relationships, and Relevance by Bruce Ware has been greatly informative. It's a quick read.