Trinities

For the first time, two accomplished New Testament scholars, one a Jew and the other a Christian, have coauthored a commentary on a book of Bible. Weighing in at 715 pages, The Gospel of Luke by Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington III is a part of the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series. It does all of the things a full commentary should, but it also contains a series of friendly arguments in written form between an evangelical Methodist scholar and an agnostic feminist Jewish scholar who attends an Orthodox synagogue but describes herself as "often quite unorthodox." They disagree on Luke's attitude towards Judaism, his view of women, and sometimes his meaning or sources. But there's also a lot these two distinguished scholars agree on.

In this wide-ranging discussion we focus on this book's origin, their agreements and disagreements, mistaken anti-Jewish readings of Luke, their opposition to replacement theology readings of Luke or Paul, radical views about the gospels such as mythicism, ancient anti-Marcionism and Luke 1-2, Luke's anti-docetism, and the genre, authorship, style, and dating of this famous gospel.

They have produced a model of informed, respectful, and reasonable dialogue between Christians and Jews, and you can hear aspects of their long dialogue here in part 1 of our discussion. (Part 2 is here.)

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"Preexistence" here means that there was a pre-human stage in the man Jesus's life. Such a thing is never clearly and directly asserted anywhere in the New Testament, although following a long-established traditions of interpretation, many readers claim to find this idea in a few famous passages. It is a doctrine of inference. And those inferences can be questioned.

In this presentation, I first distinguish between several related theses about Jesus's alleged pre-human career. I then discuss how various people try to deal with perceived differences between the various NT book on these issues.

I briefly argue that in the NT, it is the Father, not Jesus who is the creator of the heavens and the earth. Thus, one can't show that Jesus had a pre-human career by showing that he is a (or the) creator.

I then discuss several well-known, observable linguistic phenomena in the NT which give rise to preexistence "fool's gold." I briefly engage here with Simon Gathercole's The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

I finish explaining why things we all know about human beings, when combined with clear and explicit NT teaching about Jesus, should push us to look for plausible, contextual readings of the various NT texts which don't involve literal pre-human existence for the man Jesus. I think that there are the needed readings, but I don't go much into those here.

Because of my 50+ slides, I recommend this YouTube version:

https://youtu.be/dWDN_Zp-xZk

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Dr. James R. Gordon's The Holy One in Our Midst defends the doctrine which has been called the extra Calvinisticum.

Modern theologians have objected that the extra implies an incomplete Incarnation, "Nestorian" heresy, and that only the Word but not the "human nature" of Christ should be worshiped.

In this second part of our conversation (Part 1 here), Dr. Gordon rebuts these charges, and argues that this doctrine is in a sense biblical, and that it is theologically useful.

Do you agree? Why or why not?

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In modern times, Lutheran and Reformed theologians have argued about what the Lutherans dubbed the extra Calvinisticum.

As Dr. James R. Gordon explains in this episode, this doctrine might as well be called the extra Patristicum, as it is arguably implied by the sort of "two natures" christology mandated by the council at Chalcedon in 451.

In this first part of our conversation about his book The Holy One in Our Midst: An Essay on the Flesh of Christ he explains a number of distinctions that recent analytic theologians have made, which represent decisions that someone must make in order to interpret the claim that Christ is "one person with two natures."

He also explains what are in his view the right choices to make, as well as some objections to the resulting two-natures christology, what philosopher Tom Flint has called a Model A interpretation of traditional "two natures" language, a version of "compositionalism" about the Incarnation.

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In this episode I interact with a listener comment on podcast 231. Then I present the audio from an orientation video for new members of the Trinity Club.

The video answers all of these questions.

Are you in the club? Are you willing to Say and Sign? Why or why not?

[spp-tweet tweet="Are you in the Trinity Club?"]

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Professor Swinburne is famous for his many books which carefully develop and defend Christian claims. In this talk given to the Evangelical Philosophical Society in March of 2018, he gives his latest thoughts on the Trinity.

Swinburne's is usually called a "social" Trinity theory, what I call a "three self" theory. For him, the "Persons" of the Trinity are so many selves, three conscious, intelligent, intentionally acting beings (individual entities, substances), capable of love and cooperation.

Is this a distinctively eastern or "Greek" theory, as opposed to western or "Latin" Trinity theories? Swinburne denies that it is, sketching his understanding of catholic views on the Trinity from the last 4th c. into the modern era. He also explains why, in his view, it is important for most trinitarians to have a philosophical argument for the Trinity. He defends the coherence of multiple divine beings, and then gives his latest version of his a priori argument that there must be exactly three divine persons, an argument of general sort discussed in our previous episode. Finally, he handles some interesting questions and objections in the Q&A portion of his presentation.

Do you find this to be a compelling account of the Trinity? Why or why not?

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If God were only one Person would he fail to be "perfectly loving," and so fail to be a perfect being, even though he's  supposed to be perfect?

Some have recently wielded arguments like this to try to show that any unitarian theology, Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, collapses into incoherence, or at least is less plausible than a theology on which God "is" more than one Person.

On the popular level, apologist and philosopher Dr. William Lane Craig has made this recent sort of antiunitarian argument in a book and online.

But the main source of such arguments in scholarly literature has been the leading Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, now retired from Oxford University. He finds these arguments as far back as Augustine.

In this episode, you'll hear my presentation at the southwestern meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, in which I summarize and criticize these sort of arguments by Craig and Swinburne.

I claim that Augustine simply doesn't say what Swinburne attributes to him, and I think I show here that Craig's version should not convince anyone, as it rests ultimately on an implausible and unsupported assertion.

But in this talk I don't fully get to the bottom of Swinburne's thinking on this topic. In the Q & A portion of my session, Swinburne himself weighs in with some responses. I'm still working on this topic, hoping to eventually have a publishable paper.

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In this second part of their conversation (Part 1 here), Mr. Buzzard and Dr. Hurtado focus on how New Testament authors apply what were originally texts about Yahweh to Jesus.

What is the significance of this? Is this how they tell us, indirectly, that Jesus is Yahweh himself? Or is something else going on?

They also discuss Dr. Hurtado's ideas that the NT shows a dyadic worship pattern, a triadic structure of God-talk, and that its authors enfranchise Jesus within biblical discourse about Yahweh.

As before, I comment here and there. Towards the end, I wonder what Dr. Hurtado thinks about this argument (discussed here, here, and here).

I believe that Sir Anthony would accept the argument as sound. It seems to me that he and Dr. Hurtado should agree that 1-3 is sound. Does Dr. Hurtado also accept 4, 6, and 8? If so, he would be committed to the truth of 9.

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In this episode, biblical unitarian author Sir Anthony Buzzard dialogues with leading scholar of early Christianity Dr. Larry Hurtado. (This happened in October of 2016 and was posted on the Restoration Fellowship YouTube channel.) I've edited the audio for clarity and length, and I jump in a few times with observations about the views of each, and even with a few objections.

I focus particularly on what they think the correct response is, based on the New Testament, to arguments like these:

Each begins with a summary of their life's work in theology and related fields, so if you're not familiar with either, the first portion of this gives you a good entry into their histories, interests, publications, and views.

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Which of these three arguments is sound?

Argument 1:

Argument 2:

Argument 3:

In this episode I argue that the New Testament, read with common sense, gives us the answer. Christians who agree with the New Testament should discard two of these three arguments as unsound, on the grounds that each has a false premise.

Do you agree? If not, where does my argument go wrong?

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