SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Bowman 3

In my comments on his first salvo, I wondered exactly what Trinity doctrine Bowman means to defend. (Some kind of modalism?) After round two, I said that Bowman has owned up to affirming a contradiction – trying to pass it off as a “mystery”, i.e. a merely apparent contradiction.

In round 3, Bowman ignores these fundamental conceptual difficulties for his position, and soldiers on with exegesis, multiplying words. His interpretive comments are thoughtful and well-motivated, but not always to the point, as Bowman insists on things Burke would surely agree with.  As he goes, commentary style, through each verse, I’ll try to extract his actual argument.

But first, a story. I have a theory about how the light in my fridge turns on and off. I’ve noticed that when the door is almost shut, it goes off just before it’s all the way closed, and that when I open the door, it seems the light is immediately on. My theory is that a there is a gnome who lives in my fridge. Most of the time he sleeps – maybe, somewhere over by the eggs – not sure. But when he hears the door being opened, he very quickly leaps up and pushes the unfindable light switch. He mills around until one shuts the fridge, then pushes that button again. Then he resumes his slumber. And, by the way, he is a non-existent gnome – he’s kind of unusual that way. Truly, gnomes are mysterious creatures.

Note that my theory does explain what it is supposed to – why the lights are on always and only when the door is open. It also explains why, if look around the fridge, I can’t find this gnome. And it also explains why I can’t find the switch he presses – it is, after all, an unfindable one.

If I harped on the considerable merits of this theory, and you had no better theory to rest your mind in, mine could seem pretty impressive. Still, it is a bad theory – we want not only one which explains what we observe, but also one which is true. And my story can’t be true – it is contradictory. It says the gnome doesn’t exist, and yet that he performs those tasks implies that he does. This is a deal-breaker. And even ignoring it, when we get a competing explanation on the table, it’ll turn out that my theory is not the best explanation of what we observe. The competing explanation by the frig repairman is going to slay mine on grounds of simplicity alone. We might also worry about that odd switch I posited, but I’ll leave that aside.

Now to the Bowman. What are his phenomena to be explained? Something like these:

• Jesus is called “Lord” (Gr. kurios) in the NT, and kurios is the Greek translation (in the widely used ancient Septuagint translation) for YHWH in Hebrew.
• Statements and predictions about about YHWH / God in the OT are repeatedly applied to Jesus in the NT.
• The NT implies that prayer to Jesus is a good thing.
• Paul and the author of Hebrews say that Jesus created “all things”.
• Paul says that Jesus is “equal to” God.
• Paul says that all will confess that Jesus is the kurios.
• Jesus has been “exalted to the same level as” God.
• The Son is described as doing a lot of things God is elsewhere described as doing.
• The NT implies that the Son is properly worshiped.

Bowman’s theory, as I read it last time, is that the Son, Jesus, just is (is numerically identical to) God – they are one being, and indeed one self (any self just is a certain intelligent being). Thus this time,

The Son has God’s names, sits on God’s throne, receives worship from God’s most glorious creatures, performs God’s works, and will rule over God’s kingdom forever and ever. Frankly, if this is not the LORD God himself, it is a second God, and we must conclude that the writer is teaching ditheism. (emphasis added)

This theory indeed explains all of the above phenomena.
But when the theory is more fully spelled out, it’ll turn out that on Bowman’s own views, there are some things true of Jesus that are not true of God, and vice-versa. (e.g. sending his only Son, being obedient to God in all things, wanting – during the period when Jesus prayed in the Garden – Jesus to be crucified, being tri-personal, having been raised to the right hand of God – it doesn’t matter how they differ, but only that they differ in at least one way.) It logically follows that Jesus and God and not numerically one. Hence, Bowman will be committed to their being identical, and to their not being identical. But no one wants a demonstrably false explanation; for all its weaponry, this battleship is sunk – not by the enemy sub, but by the captain.

(Sidenote: the FSH modalism Bowman seemed to gesture at in round 1 would get him out of this – but would land him in equally hard problems.)

In his exegesis, Bowman is sometimes tempted to imply that the passage in question just obviously implies – nay, explicitly says – that Jesus is God. I suspect this may be because he’s not very familiar with unitarians’ exegesis of, e.g. Phil 2 (most people are not – indeed, most theologians, apologists, and Christian philosophers are not). But in his better moments, he realizes that he’s not, in the end, forwarding a sound deductive argument for the deity of Jesus, but rather an inference to the best explanation, the best explanation of what the biblical writers say, assuming them to be inspired. He really agrees with Burke, and with most sensible Christians, that theories about Jesus and God should be based on the totality of evidence. And being a reasonable fellow, Bowman sees the futility of proof-text wars.

Is Bowman’s the only explanation? No – Burke has one. Is Bowman’s the best? If I’m right that it is contradictory, it just can’t be – unless all the available contradictions are contradictory, and Bowman’s is somehow better. “Best” in this case won’t mean worthy of belief, though, for nothing which is on the whole obviously false is reasonable for us to believe!

I do think that Bowman shows that given the way they are normally translated and read, the burden is on the humanitarian unitarian (i.e. a Christian who holds Jesus to be a human, to not be divine, and that Jesus existed no earlier than his miraculous conception) to give plausible, well-motivated, non-arbitrary readings of Philippians 2 and Hebrews 1 (and Colossians 1) which don’t say or imply that:

1. The Son of God created the heavens and the earth.
2. The Son existed long before his conception in Mary.

Can Burke do this? And moreover, how does his theory compare?