SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Burke 1

In round 1, Burke explains that he’s a biblical unitarian, not a “rationalist” or “universalist” unitarian. Further, he confesses that:

Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but not God himself

and

The Holy Spirit is the power of God, but not God himself.

Further,

The Bible is the inspired Word of God and the sole authoritative source of Christian doctrine and practice.

He neither affirms or denies inerrancy, though I doubt that will matter to this debate. That he really holds the Bible to be the sole source of Christian doctrine is doubtful, even though he reiterates this old Protestant slogan. I predict we’ll see him using principles justifiable only by reason, for example in interpreting the Bible. But he is asserting that councils, bishops, etc. have no underived authority, no authority that is independent of the Bible.

I will be using the words “God” and “Father” interchangeably.

This is familiar from John, Paul, and Peter. And Jesus in all the Gospels. (Yes – there are a very few passages where arguably Jesus is addressed as or called “God” – these are infrequent exceptions, but any theory will have to account for them as well.)

Here’s my first flag:

Arguments from silence are inadmissible
An argument from silence (“argumentum ex silentio”) is a logical fallacy defined as a conclusion based upon a lack of evidence. For example:

The apostle Paul does not refer to the virgin birth in his epistles
Therefore, Paul was ignorant of the teaching that Jesus’ mother was a virgin when she conceived him
This argument is flawed because the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

Arguments from silence can be good arguments. Argument from silence is an informal fallacy, and for any informal fallacy, there can be circumstances where the inference in question is reasonable. If someone doesn’t say P, we oftentimes can’t conclude with any probability that not-P – it depends, though.

• But when I got home tonight, my wife didn’t mention anything about being mugged today. I conclude that she was not mugged today. This is a perfectly fine argument, although the premises don’t entail the conclusion. (The missing premise: Probably, if my wife had been mugged today, she would have told me that she had been some time between my arriving home and now.)
• Again, I don’t see a pink elephant in here, so there is no pink elephant it here. No problem with that argument at all.
• Still, Burke is right that the example argument he gives is a weak one, or at least not obviously very strong.

Flag 2:

Any proposed definitions of a word must be supported from several examples of identical usage
This principle is self explanatory.

No, there are cases where you can reason to the meaning of a word when there are no parallels. I’m going to itch my frack right now; it is itchy, because I used Crusty Brand Shampoo too many days in a row. I’ll itch my frack right after I push my hair out of the way, and remove my hat. Probably, some loose dandruff will be released.

Now, I’ll bet you’re pretty sure what I meant by “frack”. I take it Dave’s point, though, is that he doesn’t want to allow arbitrary, special-pleading, theory-saving definitions for words. Fair enough.

Flag 3:

the Christian God is the Jewish God and everything that we know about Him through the Christian message was already known to the Jews through Judaism.

I don’t think he really wants to say this. But it can be argued that the NT concept of God pretty much is the same as the OT one, though the NT writers may have presented a better or more complete representation of his character. I mean, where does any NT author assert some essential attribute of God that that can’t be found somewhere in the OT?

Flag 4:

Since it is now widely accepted that the first-century church was not Trinitarian, it has become necessary for Trinitarians to explain (a) why this was and (b) how Trinitarianism successfully emerged from an ideological climate which was wholly unfavourable to it.

This is, in my view, true and important. Further, there’s a unsettling disconnect here between biblical specialists and theologians on this score. But I throw a minor flag, because the point does need arguing in this context. Bowman appears to hold that the NT writers implicitly held trinitarian views. If this is so, then in a sense some early Christians were trinitarian. This is probably out of bounds for this debate, but if anyone is curious, read what we have from Justin Martyr, and ask yourself whether or not he’s a trinitarian in anything like the sense on which Bowman would insist.

Burke points out that on the face of it, the God of the Bible is a self. There are the personal pronouns. And there is the way he’s clearly assumed to be someone other than, and hence some other being than (any person / self just is a certain being) Jesus – someone Jesus obeys, prays to, loves.

• I think Dave goes too far when he asserts that Deut 6:4 features “explicit Unitarian language”, but I’ve posted on that passage before. (Again, here.)
• He doesn’t need to say that, though. Yahweh is supposed to be what? A god. What is a god? A certain sort of self. That puts the burden on one who accepts the accuracy of the Bible, but denies that he’s a person / self. We’ll look next time at how Bowman responds.

He anticipates that Bowman won’t be impressed, so he asks:

(a) What would you consider valid evidence of a Unitarian God?
(b) If God is one person how would you expect Scripture to say so?

Good questions.

Finally, Burke points out, like Samuel Clarke, that only the Father / God is called pantokrator (all – powerful), and according to two gospels, only he is all-knowing, and Jesus is not all-knowing. (Mt 24:36) God is omnipresent, self-existent, essentially immortal, morally perfect, invisible, and incorporeal. Jesus doesn’t share these last two attributes.

But according to Burke, Jesus is morally perfect, and this entails that he can neither sin nor be tempted. But was he not tempted, according to Burke?

Next up: Bowman’s opening salvo.