Parsing the Trinity

Dale Tuggy has responded to two of my posts (“Defining Identity” “What is God?”). For now I’m going to focus on a few key issues:

But the main point is that I think a unitarian view better explains what the Bible says.

 

But if I understand him, Steve thinks Isaiah there speaks of the one perfect Self, who later, we learn, is the Trinity.

 

In plain English, I think this amounts to: The Trinity (“the Godhead”) is a complex whole, a compound Self who has three parts (the three divine selves), and these three parts are exactly alike one another.

 

In sum, the one God is a perfect being, a perfect self, who is the Trinity. He has within himself three parts – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each of these parts fully has the (universal) divine nature, and so, each of the essential divine attributes. Each is a divine self. And these three parts are indistinguishable from one another, or nearly so, though they be numerically distinct.

I. Unitarianism & neotheism

I wonder if Tuggy’s unitarian hermeneutic isn’t related to his neotheist hermeneutic, or vice versa. If so, I think that’s consistent with his hermeneutical naïveté.

Open theists seize on isolated passages of Scripture that seem to indicate divine ignorance, then pat themselves on the back for being more faithful to Scripture than classical Christian theism; but they fail to appreciate the dramatic conventions of narrative theology, where the narrator will sometimes withhold information to generate suspense or even foster an initial misimpression in the mind of the reader–which the narrator will later overturn in subsequent developments. Cultivate a false expectation, then turn the tables on the reader. The Joseph cycle is a good example.

Narrative technique is subversive in that respect. First impressions may be misleading, and deliberately so. God may not seem to know what he’s doing as you move forward, but in retrospect you come to appreciate how all of the apparent setbacks were premeditated means to achieve the goal. The very events which seem to derail the promise are moving the action inexorably towards the promised denouement.

II. “Exactly alike”

To the contrary, I don’t think the Father, Son, and Spirit are “exactly alike.” If they were exactly alike, they wouldn’t be three distinct persons.

I think they share a “numerically identical” nature (where I define “nature” by the divine attributes), but each of them also has property the other two do not–a property which distinguishes one from another.

And that’s analogous to mirror symmetries, which are equipollent, but irreducible.

III. Part/whole

i) Tuggy says I view God as “complex,” which he then defines as a “compound,” “part/whole” relation.

I don’t know why he’d recast my position in mereological terms, since I didn’t explicate selfhood in terms of parthood. Perhaps he did so because I explicate the divine “nature” in terms of the divine attributes, viz. a set of divine attributes.

But as far as that goes, the issue of God’s simplicity and/or complexity isn’t confined to Trinitarian theology. As Tuggy knows, even unitarians must confront the same issue when finessing the status of the divine attributes. Are these reducible or irreducible?

iii) We also need to distinguish between ordinary language and technical language. Ordinary language is pervasively figurative. A cemetery of dead metaphors. It may be convenient to use mereological verbiage when we try to express ourselves in popular discourse, even if our actual position isn’t literally mereological. A graphic time-saver.

iv) We could have an intricate discussion about divine simplicity and/or complexity in general (a la Christopher Hughes, On a Complex Theory of a Simple God), but since Tuggy has defined the issue more narrowly in terms of part/whole relations, let’s stick to that.

v) I don’t view enantiomorphism in mereological terms. A mirror symmetry is a system of internal relations. A given totality, where each abstract constituent entails every other abstract constituent. A necessary, timeless, spaceless, self-contained continuum.

To say the Father, Son, and Spirit “mirror” each other means each person contains the other two–from a subtly different orientation (like handedness). You can reconstruct one from another. The relation is iterative, but incongruous (in the technical sense of the word).

vi) Keep in mind, too, that I’m using this as an illustration. It’s not an exegetical prism through which I view the witness of Scripture to the Trinity (although the Bible is fond of symmetries). That stands on its own.

Rather, it’s a type of equipollence, which is, in turn–a useful way to model the Trinity. But it’s also consonant with a Biblical motif: the Son “images” the Father. That’s a representational principle. And, ultimately, only God can represent himself.

Likewise, symmetries are representational. If A mirrors B, then A represents B, and vice versa.

IV. Selfhood

Tuggy has also recast my position in terms of divine “selfhood.”

i) One problem I have with this framework is that I don’t know how he defines “self.” I haven’t read everything he’s written on the subject, but here are two definitions he’s given:

#1 …is God a self – a subject of consciousness, what Descartes calls a thinking thing, something with will and intellect.

http://trinities.org/blog/archives/2246#comment-93380

#2 For Swinburne, the Trinity is not a self. It is composite substance, composed of three selves, but it isn’t itself a self. It has no first person point of view, performs no intentional actions.

http://trinities.org/blog/archives/2352

On the face of it, these are not synonymous definitions.

#1 defines a self in terms of consciousness whereas #2 defines a self in terms of self-consciousness. But those are not interchangeable concepts.

ii) Not only does the answer vary according to how we define “self,” but it also varies according to our model of the Trinity. Wainwright’s comparative analysis highlights that issue:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monotheism/#ChrTri

iii) There’s also the issue of how far the question moves us into the realm of theological speculation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with theological speculation, and some speculations are more reasonable than others, but it’s not like there’s a right answer we can pull of the shelf.

Basically, all we have to go by in speculating about divine “selfhood” (whatever that means) are the mental states which Scripture ascribes to God–along with extrapolations from human psychology. That’s an argument from analogy. And both source of information have limitations.

We have to make allowance for anthropomorphism in Scriptural ascriptions. And we have to make allowance for the categorical difference between the divine and human modes of subsistence when we extrapolate from human selfhood to divine selfhood.

I’d add that unitarians are in the same methodological boat when they attribute selfhood to God.

iv) There’s also the specter of a false dichotomy. If God is a Trinity, then must he have one first-person viewpoint rather than three first-person viewpoints? Is that an either/or proposition, or a both/and proposition?

On the one hand, if God is a Trinity, then the Father is self-aware of who he is, and the Father is also aware who he is in relation to, and contrast to, the Son and the Spirit. Likewise, the same holds true in reverse for the Son and the Spirit.

So each member of the Trinity would have a first-person viewpoint.

On the other hand, each member is transparent to the others. It’s not like an outside observer with a third-person viewpoint of another other than himself. Within the inner life of the Trinity there’s no privileged access.

Finally, wouldn’t their individual viewpoints include a corporate viewpoint? If God is a Trinity, then I’d expect the Son (to take one example) to have both an individual viewpoint (“I’m the Son”) and a corporate viewpoint (“We’re the Trinity”). The constituent members would also have a Trinitarian viewpoint, for they collectively constitute the Trinity.

This is true even in human social relations, where, by contrast, we’re dealing with truly discrete individuals or separate entities. I have an individual viewpoint as a unique individual with a unique experience, but I also have a corporate viewpoint as a man, a Christian, a baby-boomer, an American, &c.

If both perspectives are sustainable for self-contained beings like me, surely that’s sustainable in the case of God, where the persons of the Godhead are internally related.

Again, though, we’re not dealing with revealed data alone, but possible inferences thereof, or conjectures consistent with revealed data, but going beyond the immediate scope of revelation.