In this vein, St. Augustine suggests that the Trinity is analogous to the mind, its knowledge of itself and love of itself, which are distinct but inseparable (Augustine, On the Trinity). 1. Most Relevant is selected, so some comments may have been filtered out. P. 171). The wedge has to be driven somewhere and, if there isnt enough logical space to drive it in between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity, it has to go in between the Second Person, the divine Logos which is from the beginning with God and is God, and whatever it is that is the subject of Jesus predicates. Anselm makes the same point in Cur Deus Homo? If so, then noting that parts need not be spatio-temporal, we might reconstruct (1) (7) as follows: (4) The Father is not the same part of God as the Son, (5) The Father is not the same part of God as the Holy Spirit, (6) The Son is not the same part of God as the Holy Spirit. (Richard Cartwright. Marriage and Fame. In G. K. Chesterton: A BiographyLuther, Martin. God, unlike the gods in other ancient creation stories, did not need to go outside himself to create the universe. So, what is at stake in the doctrine of the Trinity? For we say that gold, even though it be cut into many figures, is one, and is so spoken of, but we speak of many coins or many staters, without finding any multiplication of the nature of gold by the number of staters; and for this reason we speak of gold, when it is contemplated in greater bulk, either in plate or in coin, as much, but we do not speak of it as many golds on account of the multitude of the material,-except when one says there are many gold pieces (Darics, for instance, or staters), in which case it is not the material, but the pieces of money to which the significance of number applies: indeed, properly, we should not call them gold but golden. As, then, the golden staters are many, but the gold is one, so too those who are exhibited to us severally in the nature of man, as Peter, James, and John, are many, yet the man in them is one. He descended to the dead.On the third day he rose again.He ascended into heaven,and is seated at the right hand of the Father.He will come again to judge the living and the dead. When the ancient creeds employ extra-biblical terminology and demand careful theological nuance they do so not to clear up what the Bible leaves cloudy, but to defend, define, and delimit essential biblical propositions. The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity. Biblical and Theological Studies, edited by Samuel G. Craig (1912): 2259.Why Analogies And Illustrations Of The Trinity Fail. The Heidelblog. 4 (January 1, 1980): 488497.Moskala, Jiri. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children. Marmur, Michael. Orthodoxy then requires, in addition, that we hold the Persons of the Trinity to be equal in power, knowledge, goodness and all properties pertaining to divinity other than those that are specific to the Persons individually. Christianity, with its understanding of God as three in one, allows for diversity and unity. In addition, identity is an unrestricted indiscernibilty relation for all properties, which is to say it obeys Leibniz Law, understood as the Indiscernibility of Identicals: LL: If x = y then for all properties, P, x has P if and only if y has P. This is bad news. The central Christian affirmations about God are condensed and focused in the classic doctrine of the Trinity, which has its ultimate foundation in the special religious experience of the Christians in the first communities. Yet, when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, most Christians are poor in their understanding, poorer in their articulation, and poorest of all in seeing any way in which the doctrine matters in real life. Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). Who was praying to whom? Your beliefs about what happens after death or if anything happens might shape how you're dealing with your fears and anxieties. And yet there are not three Gods but one God. In. Intuitively, there are generically divine properties, designated by predicates in the indiscernibility set for for god, which all Trinitarian Persons have in virtue of (1R) (3R) and there are hypostatic properties which each Person has in virtue of being the Person he is. The Son "proceeds" from the Father, and the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son.". distinguishing between Christs divine and human natures or between Christ qua human and Christ qua Godthen there is no particular reason to worry about the space between Trinitarian Persons, and so it may be that Sabellianism is a more attractive proposition than it was initially through to be. We find our purpose in the life Christ has given us. Arguably, we may regard the Trinity doctrine as an explanatory hypothesis, which purports to make sense of divinity claims concerning the Son and Holy Spirit without undermining the Judeo-Christian commitment to monotheism. Much is vague connotation. The historical documents of the Christian Church reveal a unity of commitment to this definition. We may ask however whether, once the Churchs Trinity theologians circumvent the Jesus Predicate Problem by passing the buck to the Christologists, there is any reason to worry about Modalism or other tight-Trinity doctrines that minimize the logical space between Persons. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost So, individual human beings are substances in the first sense, and the human nature they share, the natural kind to which they belong, is a substance in the second sense. So, writing more than a century before Nicea, Hippolytus suggested that Hereclitean contradictions could be avoided by a Trinitarian doctrine that created enough logical space between the Persons to block inferences from the character of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, to claims about the character of the other Persons, the Father in particular. The other way to drive the wedge between the Father and the bearer of Jesus predicates is by adopting an ultra-low Christology, that is, by kicking Christ out of the Godhead altogether. Sortals, as noted, provide rules for counting. We believe King Jesus is the sovereign, sustaining, authoritative head of the church. Credo: Meditations on the Apostles' CreedIttzs, Gbor. God created by speaking (the Word) as the Spirit hovered over the chaos. The Son is God. Those words may sound harsh, but they represent the judgment of the Christian Church across the centuries. He assumes in addition that all properties of Trinitarian Persons are such that they are either generic properties of divinity, and so are shared by all Persons, or hypostatic properties possessed uniquely by the Persons they characterize. Photios and other Eastern theologians worried also that the Western account of the Trinity undermined the personal character of the Holy Spirit. The Logos and Holy Spirit are not merely supernatural beings of an inferior order who do Gods business in the world: according to the Biblical tradition the material world is not an inferior realm to be handled by inferior mediating beings. Aristotle had used the term to designate both individuals, substances that are bearers of essences and properties, and the essential natures of individuals, the natural kinds in virtue of which they are substances in the first sense. It was also noted that the accounts suggested in 3.c and 3.d are not overtly incoherent but ultimately depend respectively on whether a mereology and an account of relative are workable. To avoid the migration of Jesus predicates to other Persons of the Trinity, we need to create enough logical space between the Persons to block inferences from claims about Jesus to claims about the Father so that, in general, Jesus Fs does not entail God the Father Fs where x Fs says either that x has a property, is a certain kind of thing or does a certain kind of action. Christ is the Logos and, insofar we ascribe such Jesus predicates as ___ suffered under Pontius Pilate, ___ was crucified, ___ died and ___ was buried that is merely a faon de parler. Perhaps the Trinity can be fixed by an account along the lines of Gregorys proposal, according to which we may understand the God as a concrete but non-spatio-temporal whole, whose simple, non-spatio-temporal parts are the Trinitarian Persons. Amen., GodWe believe in the triune Godthe Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When Jesus is the center and supreme treasure of our life, we commit ourselves to know Him and make Him known. . For any sortal-relative-identity relation, being-the-same-F-as, there is a set of predicates, SF, the indiscernibility set for F, such that for any predicate P SF, if x is the same F as y then x has P if and only if y has P. For predicates P* SF the inferences from x is the same F as y and x has P* to y has P* and vice versa do not go through. If ascribing these properties to the Father is bad, ascribing them to the Son thus understood is just as bad. Why should one believe that God is a Trinity of Persons? This is the Jesus Predicate Problem: we do not want to ascribe all the predicates that are true of Jesus to God simpliciter or, in particular, to God the Father. The relative identity strategy thus avoids Tri-theism. It follows that, since God has the property of being identical with the Son, the Son also has the property of being identical with the Father, which contradicts (4). What do Christians believe? For Christians, however, the Trinity doctrine is neither gratuitous nor unmotivated. of well-intended analogies that have been used to help us understand the doctrine of the Trinity. (2) The Father is God. For clearly orthodoxy will not permit us to say that the very existence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a theory-dependent matter. Orthodox Trinitarianism rejects Arianism which denies the full deity of Christ. Stephanie is passionate about allowing God to use her honest thoughts and confessions to bring gospel application to life. Love is not the sort of thing that can have psychological properties or count as a person and so Eastern theologians charged that the flat Trinitarian picture that dominated Western Trinitarian theology, in which the Holy Spirit was understood as a relation or mediator between Father and Son undermined the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Christians believe that Jesus will return to the Earth . The doctrine is not developed, as a writer develops a theme, but rather the truth is apparent as Scripture advances from the suggestive (e.g., Genesis 1) to the definitive (e.g., Matthew 28:19). As we believe and put Scripture into practice, in all that it commands, rebukes, teaches, encourages, and promises, we become equipped as disciples of Jesus and witnesses to the watching world. Given a Subordinationist account on the descending model according to which the Second Person is a semi-divine mediating figure there is no problem assigning troublesome Jesus predicates to him. The doctrine of the Trinity is encapsulated in Matthew 28:19, where Jesus instructs the apostles: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.". Without a plurality of persons in the Godhead, we would be forced to think that God created humans so that he might show love and know love, thereby making love a created thing (and God a needy deity). To know wonder is more healing to the human soul than to master logic. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity & I Asked for WonderBalthasar, Hans Urs von. If you believe the Bible reveals that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then you ought to believe that God made this known because he wants us to know it. The Nicene formula declared that the Son was homoousios, of the same substance as the Father, which was elaborated by the Cappadocian Fathers in the dictum that the Persons of the Trinity were one ousia but three hypostases. While Christians have excellent Nor will it permit us to say that the distinctness of the divine Persons is somehow relative to our ways of thinking or theorizing. Warfield wrote, In point of fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is purely a revealed doctrine. The three great ecumenical creedsthe Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creedare all structured around our three in one God, underlying the essential importance of Trinitarian theology. Identity is an equivalence relation: it is reflexive, symmetric and transitive, which is to say, for all x, y and z the following hold: Transitivity: If x = y and y = z then x = y. Abraham Joshua, Heschel. Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (1863), p. 133. The covenant of grace is clearly shown in Scripture, though not written in that exact phrase. A Plurality of Beginnings: Luthers Disputation against Scholastic Theology in Its Historical Context. More than Luther: The Reformation and the Rise of Pluralism in EuropeKer, Ian. The worry about the relative identity account is not that it fails to produce the right results as regards the doctrine of the Trinity, but that relative identity is itself a questionable business and in any case carries metaphysical baggage that may be theologically unacceptable. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 3:16 and 1 Cor. (Gregory of Nyssa, To Ablabius). In addition to founding three churches, and the call as Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Chattanooga, Dr. Milton is a retired Army Chaplain (Colonel). He is the author of more than 20 books and a popular columnist, blogger, and podcaster. It depends on how we read the is in (1) (6). However, (1) (3) just say that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each divine, in the way that (8) just says that Ducati is canine, and this leaves open the possibility that there are two, or three Gods involved. For what else could it possibly mean to say that there is simply no fact about whether Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same thing as one another, the same thing as God, or, indeed, the same thing as Baal. The . Yandell, K. E. The most brutal and inexcusable error in counting? Trinity and consistency. A child is placed in our arms, and we see the sparkle in the eyes of this child. Put another way, given LL, (1) entails that God has all the same properties as the Father, including the property of being identical with the Father insofar as everything has the property of self-identity. 1. A mono-personal god could not be eternally loving and gracious. Milton has also served as chancellor and president of seminaries and is the author of more than thirty books. Finally, Christians hold that God is personalthe subject of psychological states. The fundamental problem for Trinitarian orthodoxy is to develop a doctrine of the Trinity that fits in the space between Sabellianism (or other versions of Monarchianism) and tri-theism. This poses problems when it comes to divine agency. If any doctrine makes Christianity Christian, then surely it is the doctrine of the Trinity. However, this is a minority view, as other contemporary writers reject a prioriarguments for the doctrine of the Trinity. Anti Social Trinitarianism. In, Rea, Michael C. Relative Identity and the Doctrine of the Trinity. In, Van Inwagen, Peter. God gave Adam and Eve dominion to rule over the world as Gods stewards and commanded them to care for, manage, and govern His creation while living in perfect relationship with Him. They lead us towards becoming emotionally, mentally, and physically healthier people. The greatest need of all people is to be reconciled to God. There are lots of reasons, but borrowing from Robert Lethams work, and in Trinitarian fashion, let me mention just three. Christians believe in the Trinity - one God, all-loving and all-powerful, in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Despite this ambiguity, the Gospels do pose puzzles that motivate the development of Trinitarian doctrine. This belief is called the doctrine of the Trinity: God the Father -. Adam and Eve, deceived by the serpent (Satan), distorted Gods creation by sinning against God and His Word. Christianity, major religion stemming from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ, or the Anointed One of God) in the 1st century ce. They are presented here as the core beliefs of Christianity. But what is personal: the Trinity in toto or the Persons individually? Latin Trinitarians, by contrast, begin with the Gods unity as given and seek to explain how the Persons may be distinguished one from another. For starters there are verses that speak of Gods oneness (Deut. (6) The Son is the not the Holy Spirit. Dr. Ray Pritchard, for Christianity.com, relays, "When we say these things we mean that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, but they are not three gods but only one God. To see how this works, consider Apollarianism, an ultra-high Christology rejected at the Council of Constantinople in 381 and again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 at which Christological doctrine was formulated. On the Logical Problem of the Trinity. In. 1:1, Eph. 8:6 which place Jesus Christ as Lord right in the middle of Jewish Shema, and dozens of texts that speak of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the same breath, equating the three in rank, while assuming distinction of personhood (Matt. Warfield who stated that the Trinity is, from a human standpoint, irrational. The point of Warfield's statement is that the Trinity is a divine revelation rather than a human calculation. As heirs to the Hebrew tradition, they recognized a fundamental ontological dividing line between a divine Creator and his creation and faced the problem of which side of the line the mediating being or beings occupiedexacerbated by the monotheistic assumption that there was only room for one Being on the side of the Creator. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost Jesus ascended into heaven and claimed His rightful throne, seated at the right hand of the Father. Then, secondly, becoming a Christian means answering, Yes, from the heart. The Trinity doctrine is also part of a larger theological project. Therefore, we will see it but never see through it, to fully comprehend the mystery. 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