Trinities

Analytic theologian Dr. Randal Rauser wrote an excellent review of my first short book What is the Trinity? Recently, he's reviewed my debate book co-authored with Chris Date. In this episode, I present and respond to his review, answering some of his questions, explaining a few of my own missteps, and ultimately hitting the tennis ball back to Dr. Rauser's side of the court. Topics include:

If you read both the book and Dr. Rauser's review, what did you agree with? Disagree with? Let us know in a comment below. And what does Dr. Rauser say - or what should he say - to support the traditional claim that the New Testament teaches that Jesus is divine in the way the one God is divine?

Links for this episode:

Rauser’s review of What is the Trinity?

Is Jesus Human and not Divine?

Tuggy vs. Date: the book is better

podcast 195 – Dr. Randal Rauser on What’s So Confusing About Grace

podcast 104 – Dr. Randal Rauser: Is the Atheist my Neighbor? Part 2

podcast 103 – Dr. Randal Rauser: Is the Atheist my Neighbor? Part 1

podcast 124 – a challenge to “Jesus is God” apologists

Origen on the Challenge to Jesus is God Apologists

a reading of Philippians 2:5-11

podcast 259 – Who is the one Creator? – Part 2

podcast 258 – Who is the one Creator? – Part 1

odcast 11 – Tertullian the unitarian

podcast 248 – How Trinity theories conflict with the Bible

podcast 189 – The unfinished business of the Reformation

podcast 218 – Dr. Jerry Walls on Roman Catholic and Christian Foundational Claims

podcast 85 – Heretic! Four Approaches to Dropping H-Bombs

podcast 286 – Is the Trinity Essential? – Three Views

podcast 257 – A letter from the Lord Jesus: About God and Me

John 8:40; Romans 5:6-8; Philippians 2:5-7; Hebrews 1:2-3; Matthew 23:37-38; Luke 13:34-35;hl

This week's thinking music is "Isolation Swing" by Admiral Bob.

In this talk, originally presented to Restoration Fellowship's online 2020 Theological Conference, I describe six "stages" I've gone through, and that many go through, with respect to "the Trinity."

Because of my many slides, I recommend the YouTube version of this episode, embedded below.

As I explain, most Christians spend their lives at the first stage. But some believe what they are told, that "the doctrine of the Trinity" is an all-important truth, one worth looking into, finding evidence for, and defending - and then one has taken a step down a path. But it is one step of many.

The stages are these; each is briefly explained in this episode. I give examples of such people, relate a few of my own experiences, and explain why people move on to the next stage, or in some cases "regress."

I have gone through all six, in order. Which stage are you at, and what is keeping you from moving to the next?

Links for this episode:

Unitarian Christian Alliance

podcast 281 – Introducing the Unitarian Christian Alliance

Rauser, Faith Lacking Understanding (review)

White, The Forgotten Trinity

The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318-381

What is the Trinity?

podcast 31 – Dr. William Hasker on the “Arian” Controversy

podcast 30 – The Council of Nicea

podcast 29 – Arius

Evolution of the Trinity – with Bill Schlegel

The Standard Opening Move

podcast 265 – What apologists don’t understand about the terms “being” and “Person”

Baber, "The Trinity," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Howard-Snyder, "Trinity," Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Tuggy, "Trinity," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

podcast 189 – The unfinished business of the Reformation

podcast 260 – How to Argue that the Bible is Trinitarian

podcast 248 – How Trinity theories conflict with the Bible

How Trinity theories conflict with the New Testament

podcast 232 – Trinity Club Orientation

John 1:29; Acts 2:22; Acts 17:31; Philippians 2:9-11; Acts 2:33

This week's thinking music is "Iyanetha" by John Bartmann.

Dr. Daniel Boyarin is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of more than a dozen scholarly books and more than 150 scholarly articles in English and in Hebrew. He has been called one of the greatest living Talmudic scholars. Many Christians interested in historical theology or apologetics have read his work on ancient Jewish and Christian theologies, including his book The Jewish Gospels and his weightier Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity.

In this episode I present and explain some of his thoughts on interpreting the famous Prologue to the Gospel According to John. This is in his appendix called "Logos, a Jewish Word: John's Prologue as Midrash," in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and in his book Border Lines. For Dr. Boyarin,

Until v. 14, John's Prologue is a piece of perfectly unexceptional Jewish thought. . .

I start by explaining some of his interesting ideas about how one variegated religious scene split into two wholly separate religions in the 100s and 200s, and how the rabbinic movement changed the mix of Jewish theologies in late ancient and early medieval times.

The way Dr. Boyarin reads the opening of the fourth gospel, it is a unified whole; it is pointless to speculate about a pre-existing "Logos hymn" which the author has allegedly pasted in, and then he or another redactor modified it - some alleyways (arguably, dead-ends) much-explored in 20th c. scholarship. Boyarin argues that verses 1-5 are a "midrash" on the opening of Genesis 1, a sort of exposition of it using a later text in the Hebrew Bible, in this case, Proverbs 8. The rest of the prologue, he argues, explains how God's wisdom eventually finds its fullest expression in Jesus. Like me, he understands that Jesus enters the scene at v. 14: "and the Word became flesh and dwelled among us."

Do you find his interpretation of John 1 plausible? Why or why not?

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In this second part of my conversation with apologist Dale Glover, I object to the argument he presented in part 1 (see below).

Topics discussed include how to understand "the Holy Spirit" in the Bible, why we can't (I argue) treat the New Testament like those authors treat the Old Testament, the significance of personal pronouns when it comes to interpretation, the fact that there is no biblical passage which clearly teaches that God is tripersonal, Yahweh identifying features, Yahweh distinguishing features, divine immortality and how a divine Jesus could possibly die, and what it is to die.

Dale Glover's argument that something like Craig's "Trinity Monotheism" is implied by the New Testament is:

What's your reaction to the whole discussion? Which side made the stronger case, and why?

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In this episode, the first half of my conversation/debate with Canadian evangelical apologist Dale Glover, about whether or not the New Testament teaches "Trinity Monotheism." (This is a three-self Trinity theory on which the Persons are proper parts of the triune God.)

First, Dale asks me which Trinity theory I would accept if I were convinced that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three personal, divine beings. Then, he argues that belief in "multiplicity in the Godhead" is essential to being saved, and I reply with what I understand to be the required beliefs according to the New Testament. I then present a summary case of why I think the New Testament writers think that the one God just is the Father, and not the Trinity. My case focuses on four indisuputable facts about the New Testament

I argue that these confirm the thesis that these authors think the one God is the Father over the thesis that they think the one God is the Trinity. (A longer and more technical version of this sort of argument is in podcast 189 – The unfinished business of the Reformation.)

Dale Glover formulates his case that Trinity Monotheism is supported by the Bible as follows:

Do you find Mr. Glover's argument convincing? Why, or why not?

What about the evidence that I offer in favor of the New Testament authors being unitarian? Do you find that evidence compelling? Why or why not?

Next week, our discussion of our clashing cases.

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Harvard professor Andrews Norton (1786-1853) was the leading American unitarian intellectual in the first half of the 19th century. He was an original thinker, a careful and deep scholar, and a lucid writer.

In this episode I present in full his discussion of the prologue of the fourth gospel from his important book A Statement of Reasons for not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians, Concerning the Nature of God and the Person of Christ.

Norton discusses the key word logos ("Word") here, and how it functions in the theological thinking of this time. Key sources include Jewish wisdom literature and the writings of the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who was roughly contemporary with Jesus.

He explains why trinitarian interpretations don't fit the passage at all. Then he asks whether John's logos is a personification (treating something that's not a person as if it were a person) or a hypostasization (something which one might suppose is a non-person but which is understood by the author as a person). After this he gives a complete interpretive translation or paraphrase of the whole passage.

Finally, he argues that the beginning of the letter 1 John does not do anything to shed light on the prologue to the Gospel of John.

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In this second part of my conversation with Canadian apologist Dale Glover, we continue to discuss Dr. Craig's views on the Trinity. Mr. Glover is sympathetic to "Trinity monotheism," but I am against it for biblical and philosophical reasons. Our topics include:

Thanks to Dale Glover for a good conversation!

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Notoriously, Dr. William Lane Craig compares the Trinity to the mythical three-headed dog Cerberus from Greek mythology - shown here as Hercules is about to club him. (Or: club them?)

But that analogy is not really the heart of his model of the Trinity, which he calls "Trinity monotheism."

On this theory, God is one "soul" which somehow supports three "centers of consciousness" by having three sets of mental and volitional faculties. This is called "Trinity monotheism" because on this theology, only the Trinity is divine in the way the one God is divine - none of the "Persons" is. Each person is "divine" in being a part of something which is literally and fully divine - God.

Canadian apologist Dale Glover, who is sympathetic to Craig's Trinity theory, invited me on to his podcast to discuss the merits of Dr. Craig's "Trinity monotheism." In this first part of our conversation, I first describe some positive features of Craig's work on the Trinity, and then I give a few biblical, historical, and philosophical objections to this unique theory.

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In this episode I present and offer a few comments on a discussion of the prologue to the fourth gospel by a very learned English unitarian Christian who died in 1900, the pastor and philosopher James Martineau.

This is a portion of his chapter "The Proposition 'That Christ is God,' Proved to be False from the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures".

Martineau writes in a dense, learned, 19th century style, but I think his discussion abounds with important insights about rightly interpreting this text. About personification, he observes:

Indeed the distinction between a mere personification and a positive mythological personage is very faint. When a writer personifies an abstraction, for the moment he conceives of this object of thought as a person; and were this state of mind perpetuated, he would believe it to be a person. But his mental attitude changes; and in a less excited hour, that which bad constructed and painted itself almost into a being, fades away again into an attribute. Hence the fluctuation of writers, at once imaginative and speculative, like Philo and some of the early Christian Fathers, between the logical and the mythical method of speaking of the properties of the Divine nature. And it may be remarked, that the Apostle John partook, though in a very slight degree, of the same tendency.

Martineau's topics in this portion of his lecture include:

As usual when I present historical works, I substitute a word here and there so as to make the material understandable (more or less!) by an educated person in our day. If you want to read this whole chapter, there is a pdf of it linked below.

German-speaking listeners; please forgive my pronunciation of German words in this episode!

Do you find Martineau's reading of the prologue persuasive? Why or why not?

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In this second conversation with Dr. Jo-Ann Brant, author of a unique commentary on the Gospel According to John, we discuss a number of topics, including:

Thanks to Dr. Brant for these stimulating conversations.

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