dialogue on God, Jesus, and identity with Alvin Kimel

Thanks to our friend Alvin Kimel for linking my post Jesus, God, and an inconsistent triad.

Check out his post and the ensuing discussion here.

Unfortunately, the fact that I’m a unitarian seems to distract him from the actual purpose of the post. He says,

In this article he hopes to persuade us that the classical trinitarian doctrine is logically absurd.

No. That is not the point. I don’t claim that “the classical trinitarian doctrine” is committed to all three of those claims. In truth, I don’t think there is any one doctrine, any one set of determinate claims which mainstream Christians have always believed, or always believed since 381.

What there are, are standard formulas, sentences, which people interpret in various ways. Some of those ways do seem self-consistent to me, and others not. And others are simply not intelligible enough to seem either self-consistent or self-contradictory.

What my blog post was, was not an objection, but rather an invitation to trinitarians to sharpen their views by running them up against the blade of an obviously inconsistent triad of claims. The point is only this question: why do you deny, and why? The invitation is to consider how much reason one has to believe each claim. The weakest link, it would seem, should go. Analytic theologians, be they Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, usually deny N or I. Interestingly, never D, that I can think of.

As I write this, not one of the commenters on Fr. Kimel’s blog post really replies. One quotes a passage by Richard Bauckham, while another rants against the “kind of cold “pragmatism”” that he imagines he sees in my post. Others gas their offense at the very idea of a Christian being a unitarian. “We don’t need no stinkin’ blade” seems to be the feeling.

Happily, Aiden himself does reply – although he first seems to insinuate that there’s something idiosyncratic about my idea that these three can’t all be true. (“One cannot affirm all three statements, insists Tuggy, without contradiction.”) But this is just standard logic, as taught in colleges; I won’t bore everyone with the proofs.

About the inconsistent triad,

D: Jesus and God have differed.
N: Jesus and God are numerically one.
I: If any X and Y have ever differed, then they are not numerically one.

He’s not sure he wants to affirm D, because he thinks God is timeless, in the strictest sense. Now, I think a Christian ought to affirm D, on the basis of NT information like this: at a certain time, as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, he didn’t want to die on the cross, but God did want Jesus to die on the cross. There’s a qualitative difference: at one time, one wants something which the other doesn’t want. D is true. But if we want to insist on traditional divine timelessness, I think we can just work with a different triad:

D*: Jesus and God differ.
N*: Jesus and God are numerically one.
I*: If any X and Y differ, then they are not numerically one.

All the verbs underlined here I mean to be in the timeless tense. Should a Christian who believes in divine timelessness affirm D*? I think so. Eternally, God does something which in the temporal realm results in people hearing “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” Jesus, if you like, in his eternal, divine nature, does not do this. Ergo, D*.  I don’t think the difference in verb tense is going to matter for N* or I*. I* will, like I, be self-evident – something one knows to be true as soon as one has a good understanding of it.

Alvin asks,

…why should I prescind from the dogmatic faith of the Church when interpreting your first two statements?  Or to phrase it differently, why should I adopt your hermeneutical rules for reading the Bible?

These are red herrings, distractions, irrelevant to this discussion. No one is asking you to be disloyal to catholic tradition. You are most welcome to consult that tradition in deciding which to deny.

The question is: do you see the need to deny one of this second triad? If so, which do you deny? But he moves on to consider N:

On to statement #2: “Jesus and God are numerically one.” If this means that Jesus and God are one hypostasis, then the statement is clearly false—but who believes otherwise? The developed trinitarian faith is clear: Jesus (the Son) and God (the Father) are two distinct hypostases. It also goes on to assert that Jesus and God are numerically one in one precise sense: they both equally possess the divine nature.

Now, I was expecting him to say at the end that “they are one God.” This would suggest a commitment to relative identity theory, the idea that things can be one F but different Gs, where F and G are sortal concepts or predicates. But saying that “they both equally possess the divine nature” – sorry, but until you say more about a “nature” here is, this does clearly imply that they are numerically one. “Numerically one” here means identity, the relation logicians represent with =. So it’s not clear that you really do affirm N. Unless you want to claim (see 2.1.2 here) that there can be numerical identity which is not =. (This, for entirely non-theological reasons, most philosophers consider to be a wacky move…)

Happily, he agrees to affirm I. (And so, I assume, I* too.) But then he concludes,

So there you have it, Dale. A trinitarian Christian can easily affirm each of the above statements. The triad is not inconsistent.

No – big mistake. By reading I as involving =, but not reading N as involving = (identity), you’re just not “seeing” the inconsistency. But it is blatantly clear. Just ready any two of the three out loud, and look at the remaining one – it has to be false, right, assuming the two you just read? Do this three times, for all the combinations, and you’ve done a sort of informal proof of the inconsistency of the set. We should not waste time disagreeing about that, when we could be talking theology. Seriously – do it now, out loud.

He now veers off into what he imagines I would object re: the Bible or biblical interpretation. But those issues are not relevant what we’re talking about here.

Once you “see” the obvious inconsistency of our set, you will realize that it will not be reasonable to accept all three, even if a majority Christian tradition has done so. (Mind you, I don’t say that it has!)

Alvin, given that you so readily grant I (thus I*) and that you should accept D*, I humbly suggest that you should deny N (and N*).

If you do that, then about this matter, you and I agree! On the matter of denying N (and N*), we would be on the same side against many American evangelicals, who seem to think that affirming N is the main point of Christianity.

Friend, I think you should not say,

“Unless one presupposes that the doctrine of the Trinity is false, the above three statements can certainly be affirmed as true.”

Again, this is a mistake, and demonstrably so. You think you’re affirming N, but in fact you have only affirmed that Father and Son are divine-nature-sharers. That appears to be consistent with denying N – unless you mean a divine nature to be a particular property… But I leave it to you to say more about what you mean a “nature” to be.