Tuggy's shellgame

DALE SAID:

All unitarians identify the one God with the Father, on the basis of numerous NT passages.

 

Steve, this is a textbook case of question begging. Humanitarian unitarians don't think that the NT actually does ascribe creation to Jesus, and subordinationists think those texts make him the instrument of God's (the Father's) creation - God being the creator in an ultimate sense, and the pre-human Jesus in an instrumental sense.

i) But the unitarian hermeneutic cuts both ways. If unitarians can either deny that the NT “actually” ascribes creation to Jesus (pace Jn 1:3; Col 1:16; Heb 1:10) or gloss those passages in a purely “instrumental” sense, while the “ultimate” Creator lies in the background, then, by parity of logic, we can either deny that Scripture “actually” ascribes creation to the Father (or Yahweh), or we can gloss those ascriptions to the Father (or Yahweh) in purely instrumental terms–where the Father or Yahweh is the agent of some ulterior Deity. So it’s hermeneutically arbitrary for unitarians to single out the Father or Yahweh as the real God.

ii) Moreover, Tuggy’s Isaian prooftexts don’t distinguish between instrumental and ultimate creatorship. Indeed, his Isaiah prooftexts disallow that distinction, for once we interpolate that distinction into the text, creatorship no longer demarcates the true God from false gods. So Tuggy’s expedient scuttles the Isaian argument by blurring the categorical distinction between the Creator and his creation.

iii) Furthermore, this exposes the circularity of Tuggy’s appeal. On the one hand he anachronistically identifies Yahweh as the Father in Isaiah, although he can’t extract that identification from Isaiah alone. Rather, he restrictively identifies the Father as Yahweh in NT usage. He then uses that as a reference point to identify Yahweh as the Father in Isaiah. Having read his (alleged) NT identification back into his OT prooftexts, in a classic case of salting the mine, he then brings his OT prooftexts forward to restrictively identify the real God of the NT as the Father–or Yahweh.

iv) The entire procedure is circular and question-begging. Tuggy’s shellgame. On the one hand, Isaiah doesn’t even identify the Father as Yahweh in 40-48. On the other hand, the NT doesn’t restrictively identify the Father as Yahweh. 

I'm not reticent to exegete; in fact, in a forthcoming paper, I devote considerable, detailed attention to the contents of Is. 40-55. Not a line-by-line exegesis, of course. What I'm hesitant to do is to engage in useless proof texts wars, where we just dump our favorite verses in front of one another and yell "SEE!", accomplishing nothing.

i) I don’t simply quote my favorite verses. I’ve been exegeting my prooftexts. Moreover, I’ve also been exegeting Tuggy’s prooftexts.

Again, you seem to take the point to be about deity - that whoever, however many selves have the features you mention, those would be truly divine. The point, though, is that Yahweh himself is the only one with the features you mention. He being the only true God in that sense (i.e. having those features), then no one else can be. I'm not sure where you see the "leaning on logic" in this rather pedestrian point.

For some reason, Tuggy suffers from a persistent mental block on this issue. To say that Yahweh is the only one in Isaiah with these features doesn’t single out the Father as the only one with these features.

Taking the following sentence: “Fred is a twenty-something Caucasian male with blue eyes, blond hair–average height.”

Does that description pick out “Fred”? Does it tell me who “Fred” is? No.

It doesn’t tell me in advance who matches the description. It only tells me that “Fred” will match that description. But it doesn’t pick out the referent by connecting the description with the corresponding individual

If I happen to see Fred or meet Fred, I can compare him to the description. Likewise, I could go through a list of “Freds” an,d by process of elimination, see which one matches the description.

Or I could go through a list of vital statistics and see which man matching that description also goes by the name of “Fred.”

Your own view has desperate problems with these very texts. In your view, three distinct selves are, each one "Yahweh" that is, you understand, truly God. There are three with those features you highlight here, in your view.

You’re simply recasting the issue according to your pet category (“self,” “selves”).

But I'm afraid you, like me, and just a Christian with a theory you want to put out there as the best.

Unitarians aren’t Christians. Unitarians are Christ-haters and Christ-deniers. They evince the same hostility to Christ that Satan does.

That's fine, but I'm getting tired of your not engaging, diverting attention by constantly trying to catch me out in some stupid, obvious error or other. I could be wrong, terribly and tragically wrong about all this, but as a minimally competent philosopher, I'm probably not making some silly beginner's mistake, right?

Actually, I think Dale’s a flunky of the Devil.

Technical aside: In the "alone" part, you're quantifying, which supposes the relation of =. Call one of these properties F. You're making a bunch of statements like this: Only Yahweh has F. In standard logic, this is rendered: (x) (Fx -> x=y) This read: for any x whatever, that x is F only if it just is YHWH. (x is a variable here, y a name for YHWH.) The quantifying is "the only x part".

Yahweh “is” whatever Scripture says Yahweh “is.” If Scripture says the Father is Yahweh, the Son is Yahweh, and the Spirit is Yahweh,” then I’ll go with that.

Second, and more importantly, who or what does "YHWH" refer to, in these passages of Isaiah?

i) The question is ambiguous. Are you asking a question about authorial intent, viz. what did the prophet Isaiah have in mind? If so, he’s referring to the God of the Pentateuch, as well as the God who appeared to him–to commission him (Isa 6). That’s the literary and psychological referent.

ii) If, however, you’re not confining the referent to Isaiah’s experience, conscious intent, or literary allusions, then–objectively speaking–Isaiah’s God is the Trinity, whether or not he’s fully cognizant of that fact.

It seems to me that you only have 2 options; there's a dilemma here for you. First, it could be the Trinity. But as we've seen, you don't think the Trinity is a self. Well, then it can't literally know anything, much less know all. Nor can it literally perform an intentional action like creating; it's not the kind of being which can do things for a reason, if it is not a self. This would make what Isaiah says false.

Let’s take some concrete examples of how God describes himself in Scripture:

27 All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

(Mt 11:27; par. Lk 10:22)

As R. T. France observes:

Such passages [Mt 24:31ff.] assume, rather than state, some sort of “equivalence” between Jesus and God…More explicit is 11:27, where Jesus’ statement (in a context of revelation) that “all things have been delivered to me by my Father,” leads to the declaration of the exclusive mutual knowledge between “the Father” and “the Son” (followed, as we have just seen, by his speaking in 11:28-30 with the voice of divine Wisdom). Here the special status of Jesus already embodied in the Son of God title is more fully spelled out, and “the Son” is seen to be in a unique relationship with God which is his by virtue of who he is, in contrast with the knowledge of the Father which others may indeed come to share, but only as a result of mediation…in 11:27 we see the Son as distinct indeed from the Father, but yet related to him in a way which is different from other men’s relationship with God not only in degree but also in kind.

Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher (Zondervan 1989), 309-10.

Let’s compare that with a similar passage:

10these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

(1 Cor 2:10-11).

As Gordon Fee observes,

The basis of the argument will be the Greek philosophic principle of “like is known only by like”…Only “like is known by like”; only God can know God.

 

The analogy itself is a simple one, and insists that just as the only person who knows what goes on inside one’s own mind is oneself, so only God knows the things of God. Paul makes that point by use of the language of pneuma, because first of all he is talking about the Holy Spirit, and secondly because it is for him a common word for the interior expression of the human person.

 

At a human level, I alone know what I am thinking, and no one else, unless I choose to reveal it in the form of words. So also only God knows what God is about. His Sprit, therefore, who knows his mind, becomes the link to our knowing him also…

 

Here is the certain evidence that the Spirit is at once both fully God…and distinct from the Father. On the one hand, the closest kind of intimate, interior relationship exists between the Father and the Spirit, so close that the only proper analogy for it is that of the human spirit, as the interior expression of personality…But at the same time the Spirit is not identical with the Father. The Spirit, as a distinct personality, alone knows–and reveals to us–God’s thoughts, God’s ways.

 

God’s Empowering Presence (Hendrickson 1994), 99-101.

Incidentally, this passage has its literary antecedents in passages like Isa 40:13-14, regarding Yahweh’s incomparable wisdom.

So here we have two passages (Mt 11:27; 1 Cor 2:10-11) which, taken in combination, explicate a correlative, self-enclosed dynamic between the Father, Son, and Spirit in terms of privileged symmetrical knowledge. Only like knows like. Only like reveals like.

Tuggy can stamp his feet and scream scary words like “Tritheism!” He can repeat his stand-up routine about the “self” or “selves,” or the = sign. But God is his own interpreter. We must defer to God.

Second, it could be the Father. This is who the NT identifies with the OT God. (Acts 3:13)

That’s a deceptive statement. The NT identifies the Father with the OT God, but it also identifies the Son with the OT God, as well as the Spirit with the OT God. You selectively and arbitrarily prooftext the NT.

But then, in your view, what Is. says is false. He isn't the only God, the only one with those properties. He's but one of three.

What you’ve done, once again, is to artificially isolate God’s unicity from its constituent properties, as if you can discuss God’s unicity in abstraction from its constituent properties. But Isaiah doesn’t treat the unicity of God as something other than, or above and beyond, his creatorship, providential foreknowledge, incomparable glory, &c.

Solution? Be a unitarian. You can pick which kind. Go with option two, and ditch your tritheistic speculations. Or, you can show how you avoid both horns of the above dilemma.

Even if your specious dilemma were apparently sound, that’s irrelevant to exegetical theology. If the Bible describes God in both “monotheistic” and “tritheistic terms,” then we have to play the hand we’re dealt.

It’s not incumbent on me to massage the revealed data to make them measure up to some extrabiblical yardstick. That’s not my responsibility. My duty is to believe God’s self-revelation.

This is far too quick. Some properties of the Father are such that it's a contradiction to suppose them shared. E.g. existing a se. But some seem to be shareable in principle, e.g. omniscience, the right to forgive sins. Sharing terms and title is one thing, sharing properties is another. But unitarians have said a good bit on both.

i) That’s just your ad hoc, post hoc explanation. It doesn’t comport with your Isaian prooftexts. Isaiah doesn’t say these properties and prerogatives are shareable with creatures, in varying degrees. Rather, as Isaiah repeatedly says, that’s what demarcates the true God from false gods.

ii) If attributes like omniscience are transferable, then what you have isn’t monotheism, but pantheism. Degrees of divinity. A chain-of being which extends from God through an intermediate series of creatures who participate in the godhead. Very Plotinian.

In a previous comment on another post I've already explained how unitarians have no problem distinguishing God from others, and no problem with reading the scriptures that way. So this sort of criticism doesn't even go skin deep. Someone who has actually read unitarians will see that there's no actual problem here, about their confusing God with some creature.

When you transfer Yahwistic prerogatives and attributes to creatures, Yahwistic prerogatives and attributes which are expressly said to demarcate the true God from the created order (e.g. pagan solar, lunar, planetary deities), then you are, indeed, confusing God with his creatures.