CRAIG SAID:
“It doesn't follow that the Son and Spirit are creatures if their origin is in the Father. ‘Origin’ is different than ‘created’. The terms are not equivocal.”
i) They needn't be synonymous. Implication will suffice.
ii) By definition, a creature has its source of origin in something or someone else.
iii) Take the operative category of “generation.” To beget is to cause something to exist. That’s equivalent to creating something. Indeed, children are creatures.
“Is that parity of logic? Dr. Waldron started with the relation of the divine Father and divine Son and moved to creaturely relations of fathers and sons...which is what Paul does in Ephesians 3:14 ‘For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family (or all fatherhood) in heaven and on earth derives its name...’”
You seem to construe Eph 3:14-15 as an archetype/ectype relation. But in context, Paul is using a play on words to indicate that God (the Father) is the Creator of all human and angelic social units. For exegesis, see the commentaries by Hoehner and Thielman.
“On the other hand, you're starting with human relations and moving to God. Biblically, Dr. Waldron would point to the relationship of Christ to His Church when it comes to the economy of marriage and the authority of husbands/fathers for wives/daughters.”
i) You’re confusing the order of knowing with the order of being. I’m merely paralleling Waldron’s methodology.
ii) Is the economy of marriage grounded in the Godhead? A family pantheon?
“We can refer to any of the Persons as God, and even the Trinity as simply ‘God.’”
Which is equivocal given Nicene subordination.
“The Father is referred to as ‘God’ in a distinguishing sense from the Son and Spirit because He is the origin, the fount of divinity.”
Which assumes what you need to prove.
“As Athanasius argued against the Arians, because He *is* Father, He has always been Father to the Son. So when we refer to the Father as "the" God, we are saying that precisely for the reason that Father presupposes the eternality of the Son and Spirit because He is generative.”
That’s a non sequitur. Eternal Fatherhood/Sonship is distinct from what the theological metaphor means. The intended analogy.
“What/who is the source for the Son and Spirit if not the Father?”
Wrong question. Your question takes for granted the sourcehood of the Son and Spirit, then asks the source. But why assume God must have a source of origin in the first place? God is the originator. Must the Father have a source?
“In what sense is the Son begotten?”
i) Are you posing a question about the interpretation of Scripture or the Nicene creed?
ii) If the former, you’re apparently assuming that monogenes means “only-begotten.” But, of course, that’s disputable.
iii) I’ve already indicated that I think it’s equivalent to the theological metaphor of primogeniture.
“Is the ‘unity’ of the Trinity a ‘social’ convention between three divine persons? I doubt this is what you believe, but I am scratching my head as to what you actually believe.”
i) You seem to be grounding the unity of the Trinity in the monarchy of the Father. That amounts to generic identity rather than numerical identity. And that’s a hallmark of Social Trinitarianism.
ii) I’ve presented my own views in tremendous detail in response to Dale Tuggy and Perry Robinson.
“Sure, for a creature. But I wasn't talking about a creature.”
What demarcates a creature from a non-creature? Contingency. Causal dependency. To be the effect of something or someone else. Just consider the same question in reverse: is an entity that’s uncaused and unsourced still a creature?
“The generation of a child is not the same as the Son. What we experience is not the archetype.”
i) You're beginning with a category, the meaning of which we only know from human experience, then stripping away a fundamental feature of what makes generation generative. So what’s left?
You don’t have the archetype. In the order of knowing, you can’t begin with the archetype. You can only begin with the ectype. So what is the archetypal concept of generation? How to you know that your noncausal redefinition of generation corresponds to archetypal generation? Your biblical prooftexts don’t draw that distinction.
ii) Moreover, your position doesn’t even make sense in terms of Nicene monarchy. If the Son or Spirit derive their essence (or person, a la Calvin) from the Father, then that’s a causal relationship. Son and Spirit are the effect of the Father’s eternal sourcehood.
“I'd say that's a fairly limiting interpretation. Chapter 1 and 2 argue for the notion of sonship through Christ and culminate with chapter 3. The context includes much more than the notion that God created these things (which He did, obviously).”
When Paul applies the sonship category to Christians, is that an ontological category, or a forensic category (i.e. sons as heirs)?
“Of course not. The economy of marriage is a shadow of the reality: Christ and His Bride, the Church.”
So that’s a contingent comparison. It doesn’t have an analogue in the immanent Trinity. Which illustrates the weakness of Waldron’s inference.
“What makes you think it's a metaphor? I don't think the relationship of Father and Son is metaphorical. I think the relationship of fathers to sons is ectypal, as you say, while the former is archetypal.”
i) Scripture doesn’t give us the archetype in itself. Scripture gives us the ectype. Scripture takes a category we only know from human experience, and applies that to the Godhead. So in the order of knowing, that’s a metaphor.
You keep confusing the order of being with the order of knowing, as if you can begin with the order of being (the archetype), and then define the order of knowing (the ectype) by reference to the order of being. But we don’t have that frame of reference.
ii) What we can do is consider the scope of the intended analogy. What does the sonship of Christ mean in NT usage? You have to study the usage of different NT writers. It has more than one connotation.
“’Source" points to unity.”
It points to unity of origin, but that’s generic unity, not numeric unity. I originate with my parents, but I’m not numerically identical with my parents.
“If the Son is His own source, for example, in what way is He of one essence with the Father?”
i) I didn’t say he was his own source. To say the Father is not the source of the Son is not to say the Son is his own source. It’s not to say the Son has a source. That’s the point. Sourcehood doesn’t apply to God. That’s bedrock. There’s nothing above and beyond God. Deity is inderivative. Sourcehood applies to creatures.
ii) Having a common source of origin doesn’t yield numerical identity. Two tributaries may have their source in the same headwaters. That doesn’t make the two tributaries numerically identical.
If you want to avoid Social Trinitarianism, then you need a more rigorous and robust unifying principle than a common essence or common source of origin.
BTW, who is Craig and where can we find his response?
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing Craig is Craig French, a member of the Bayly bros church. His response is from this thread:
ReplyDeletehttp://triablogue.blogspot.com/2011/10/whos-tampering-with-trinity.html
Assuming the I.D. is right, this is his old blog:
http://www.antipelagian.com/
That's me. I'm not really into blogging...posting is too sporadic b/c of time constraints.
ReplyDeleteThe title of this blog post ("Who made God") may confuse some, so let me clarify at the outset:
My comments have zero to do with who "created" God...whether Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. I am a Trinitarian. God was not created. Not the Father, nor the Son, nor the Spirit.
As I'm able, I'll try to provide comments on this entry rather than the old.
STEVE SAID:
ReplyDelete“What demarcates a creature from a non-creature? Contingency. Causal dependency. To be the effect of something or someone else. Just consider the same question in reverse: is an entity that’s uncaused and unsourced still a creature?”
I’d like to point out s weakness to your question. If there are three uncreated entities, each without a source, in what sense can these be one? This is the heart of the mystery of the Trinity. I think if I should explain it, I have certainly entered heresy.
STEVE SAID:
"i) Your beginning with a category, the meaning of which we only know from human experience, then strip away a fundamental feature of what makes generation generative. So what’s left?"
Surely you don’t believe that our apprehension of the Transcendent depends on our experience? That seems to be the implication. If that is the case, a) God is either just like us, or b) can’t be known at all. How the Father and Son experience their relationship is beyond me…but I accept that their relationship is the archetype. He built it into the created world as Eph 3 points out. If I don’t accept this, then the Son is not “son”. Perhaps someone could argue that He became “Son” through incarnation, but even then, the Father could not beget Him as He is not a man to beget in a way that we experience begetting…so the Son still is no son, and the Father is no father…only by metaphor…in which case you have your own problem to explain: Why do you call them Father and Son when the Son (in His deity) cannot be generated in the sense creatures are?
Cont...
ReplyDeleteSTEVE SAID:
“Your biblical prooftexts don’t draw that distinction (between the generation of the Son and generation of sons from their earthly fathers).”
Shorthand: I can’t pretend systematic theology hasn’t occurred, but suffice to say that John 1 (especially v18) provides a solid "prooftext".
STEVE SAID:
“ii) Moreover, your position doesn’t even make sense in terms of Nicene monarchy. If the Son or Spirit derive their essence (or person, a la Calvin) from the Father, then that’s a causal relationship. Son and Spirit are the effect of the Father’s eternal sourcehood."
Please explain how my position doesn’t make sense in terms of Nicene Monarchy.
STEVE ASKED:
“When Paul applies the sonship category to Christians, is that an ontological category, or a forensic category (i.e. sons as heirs)?”
Forensic.
STEVE SAID:
“You keep confusing the order of being with the order of knowing, as if you can begin with the order of being (the archetype), and then define the order of knowing (the ectype) by reference to the order of being. But we don’t have that frame of reference.”
I’m beginning with revelation. Scripture speaks of the Father and the Son in archetypal language. In fact, the un-raveling of the glory of this is unpacked in startling ways throughout the NT where we are sons by virtue of the Sonship of Christ. Of course, it is here someone might point out (like you did later) that sonship is used in different ways. The Sonship of Christ as God, and his sonship as a man...add to that the fact He is said to be "begotten" in reference to His resurrection as well.
Our sonship relies on certain truths: That Jesus is God, that to bring us into sonship it must be that the Son take on flesh (as opposed to the Father). Am I confusing the order of knowing and ontology? I don’t think that is even pertinent. Marriage is in Scripture from cover to cover. Marriage was instituted at Creation. Yet it wasn’t until fairly late in redemptive history that we are informed of the archetypal reality (Christ and the Church)…yet Paul does not hesitate to point to the archetype to order the way we do marriage life. In fact, Paul doesn’t hesitate to also go to the order of Creation to order marriage life either. The order of knowing depends on the order God reveals it. When He reveals it, even in the “ectypal” way, it always speaks of the archetypal. How else does He hold all of us responsible for our knowledge of Himself ala Romans 1?
STEVE SAID:
“It points to unity of origin, but that’s generic unity, not numeric unity. I originate with my parents, but I’m not numerically identical with my parents.”
Yes, but once born, you are no longer necessarily connected to your parents. Christ is generated from the Father, but never separated. He is “in the bosom” of His Father, as John tells us. Given this notion, of generating without separating, I don’t see how social trinitarianism could be implied from my view.
“ii) By definition, a creature has its source of origin in something or someone else.”
ReplyDeleteOrigin in time. The generation and spiration of the spirit are not in time but in eternity.
Craig said,
“Dr. Waldron started with the relation of the divine Father and divine Son and moved to creaturely relations of fathers and sons”
Where does he call it a relation?
Steve said,
“Wrong question. Your question takes for granted the sourcehood of the Son and Spirit, then asks the source. But why assume God must have a source of origin in the first place? God is the originator. Must the Father have a source?”
Steve does not understand the historical context of the question. The question is, what is the principle of unity? Why One God when the Godhead is three persons?
Steve said,
“i) You seem to be grounding the unity of the Trinity in the monarchy of the Father. That amounts to generic identity rather than numerical identity. And that’s a hallmark of Social Trinitarianism.”
That’s right.
“When Paul applies the sonship category to Christians, is that an ontological category, or a forensic category (i.e. sons as heirs)?”
If in the ontological category you understand species of spiritual distinct from physical then ontological.
“Scripture doesn’t give us the archetype in itself. Scripture gives us the ectype.”
This is the Eastern essence and Energies distinction. If it does not give us the archetype then you have no basis for nature influencing action and you find yourself right back in Pelagian pure nature.
“It points to unity of origin, but that’s generic unity, not numeric unity. I originate with my parents, but I’m not numerically identical with my parents.”
And neither are the other divine person numerically one with the Father you Sabellian modalist.
“It’s not to say the Son has a source. That’s the point. Sourcehood doesn’t apply to God.”
What Steve’s readers must understand is that Sourcehood is just one thing that does not apply to God on his view. On his view no predicate applies to God in this sense: the ontological sense. On his view the ontological aspect to God is beyond being and predication. He falls right into Eastern Theology proper. Here's Steve’s problem: this view of God is taken for a reason: to deny deliberation before action to defend Pelagianism’s pure nature. No deliberation to God’s action: why? Because God is not in being to deliberate. He falls right into Perry Robinson's hands.
“If you want to avoid Social Trinitarianism, then you need a more rigorous and robust unifying principle than a common essence or common source of origin.”
Unifying principle? But Steve I thought Sourcehood/Unifying doesn’t apply to God?
Drake asked:
ReplyDelete"Where does he call it a relation?"
Steve quoted Dr. Waldron...and it's at the blog entry Dr. Waldron wrote as well:
"The Lord Jesus Christ is “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father.” This affirms that there is an organic relationship between God the Father and God the Son similar to that of an earthly father-son relationship. Of course, it is not that Scripture and the Nicene Creed borrow the human father-son relationship after the fact to illustrate this Trinitarian relationship. It is rather that the human father-son relationship was created to illustrate this divine relationship in the Trinity."
I won't get into the other points you raise...some are valid, some sounded like crazy-town.
Craig,
ReplyDeleteI still did not see personhood defined as relation. I mean relation the way Aristotle and the medieval scholastics use it.
What did I say that you thought was crazytown?
Drake Shelton said...
ReplyDelete“Origin in time. The generation and spiration of the spirit are not in time but in eternity.”
i) I never attributed temporal generation/spiriation to Nicene subordination. So Drake is tilting at windmills. Try to keep up with the actual argument.
ii) Moreover, shifting from temporal to atemporal causation doesn’t change the contingency of the relation. Son and Spirit would still be the effect of the Father’s origination.
“Steve does not understand the historical context of the question. The question is, what is the principle of unity? Why One God when the Godhead is three persons?”
i) Drake doesn’t understand the difference between historical theology and truth. It’s pointless to ask questions we can’t answer. Where the immanent Trinity is concerned, we can only answer questions if we have revealed answers.
ii) There’s no antecedent reason to imagine we could even grasp what constitutes the unity of the Godhead. Just as we can understand some things that are incomprehensible to a dog, there are many things which are incomprehensible to a man. Human intelligence is quite limited.
“If in the ontological category you understand species of spiritual distinct from physical then ontological.”
The point of reference was Craig’s appeal to Eph 3:14. Provide exegesis.
“This is the Eastern essence and Energies distinction. If it does not give us the archetype then you have no basis for nature influencing action and you find yourself right back in Pelagian pure nature.”
Drake is confusing the order of being with the order of knowing. I wasn’t discussing God in himself, but how God reveals himself in human language. Epistemology, not ontology. Try to keep that straight.
Human language belongs to the created order. Likewise, the tiems which human language denotes typically belong to the created order. And when human language denotes something that doesn’t belong to the created order (i.e. God), it uses analogies drawn from the created order. So it’s ectypal from start to finish.
That’s not distinctive to God-talk. We also use analogies (e.g. metaphors) for mundane states and relations.
“And neither are the other divine person numerically one with the Father you Sabellian modalist.”
I didn’t indicate that the persons of the godhead are numerically identical with one another. I’m responding to Craig’s framework. Try to keep up with the argument, rather than importing your extraneous agenda into the debate.
“On his view no predicate applies to God in this sense: the ontological sense. On his view the ontological aspect to God is beyond being and predication. He falls right into Eastern Theology proper.”
Notice that Drake doesn’t show how he derives that conclusion from what I actually said.
“Here's Steve’s problem: this view of God is taken for a reason: to deny deliberation before action to defend Pelagianism’s pure nature.”
i) If Drake is using “before” in a temporal sense, then, yes, I deny temporal succession between God’s deliberation and God’s action.
ii) Drake is also confusing a divine mode of subsistence with a human mode of subsistence. Men are timebound creatures. So our existence and mental life do involve temporal succession.
“No deliberation to God’s action: why? Because God is not in being to deliberate. He falls right into Perry Robinson's hands.”
I haven’t said anything to indicate that God is beyond being (a la pseudo-Dionysius). This is another case of Drake going off on a tangent.
“Unifying principle? But Steve I thought Sourcehood/Unifying doesn’t apply to God?”
A dumb comment since I was clearly responding to Craig on his own grounds. Try to keep up with the actual argument.
CRAIG SAID:
ReplyDelete“I’d like to point out s weakness to your question.”
To the contrary, the point of the question is whether you can define your terms. What do you mean when you say the Son is begotten? Is that just a cipher, or can you spell out what you mean by that? Otherwise, you’re not really affirming or denying anything.
“If there are three uncreated entities, each without a source, in what sense can these be one?”
That’s a different question than defining your terms. That involves the interrelation between various concepts. But you can’t even pose that question until you’re reasonably clear about the underlying concepts which form the conjunction.
“This is the heart of the mystery of the Trinity. I think if I should explain it, I have certainly entered heresy.”
If you can play the mystery card, so can I.
“Surely you don’t believe that our apprehension of the Transcendent depends on our experience?”
God reveals himself in human language. Categories drawn from human experience. Now, God providentially gave us that empirical/linguistic experience in the first place. But that still constitutes our frame of reference.
“That seems to be the implication. If that is the case, a) God is either just like us, or b) can’t be known at all.”
You need a principled method for distinguishing the analogies from the disanalogies.
“How the Father and Son experience their relationship is beyond me…but I accept that their relationship is the archetype.”
That general statement doesn’t specify the range of the intended analogy.
“He built it into the created world as Eph 3 points out.”
You’re not exegeting your prooftext.
“If I don’t accept this, then the Son is not “son”. Perhaps someone could argue that He became “Son” through incarnation, but even then, the Father could not beget Him as He is not a man to beget in a way that we experience begetting…so the Son still is no son, and the Father is no father…only by metaphor…in which case you have your own problem to explain: Why do you call them Father and Son when the Son (in His deity) cannot be generated in the sense creatures are?”
i) Paul uses “sonship” language, but he doesn’t use “begetting” language. That’s a traditional rendering (e.g. KJV) of Johannine language. You need to construe each writer on his own terms.
ii) You’re trying to take shortcuts rather than exegeting the relevant passages. In what sense is the Father/Son “archetype” analogous to the father/son ectype? That’s something you can’t just stipulate. That’s something you have to delineate based on how those categories function in the theology of this or that NT author.
“Shorthand: I can’t pretend systematic theology hasn’t occurred, but suffice to say that John 1 (especially v18) provides a solid ‘prooftext.’”
i) You’re assuming that monogenes means “only-begotten.” That’s disputed.
ii) Even if we went along with the traditional rendering, there’s nothing about eternal generation in v18.
iii) Moreover, generative imagery doesn’t tell you the extent of the intended analogy. What aspect of the potential analogy is John deploying? Derivation? Primogeniture? Like father/like son?
Cont. “Please explain how my position doesn’t make sense in terms of Nicene Monarchy.”
ReplyDeleteI did.
“Forensic.”
In which case derivation is not the analogue. After all, even adopted sons can inherit the estate.
“I’m beginning with revelation. Scripture speaks of the Father and the Son in archetypal language.”
i) You’re confusing language with concepts. Scripture speaks of the Father and the Son as archetypes, but it doesn’t use archetypal “language.” Rather, it uses mundane human language, which reflects human observation.
ii) To keep repeating the word “archetype” is just a cipher unless and until you can explicate the intended analogy. And that’s also something you need to determine exegetically, not merely posit where you think the parallel lies.
“Am I confusing the order of knowing and ontology?”
Yes, you don’t seem to grasp the terminology. The “order” of knowing/being doesn’t mean a sequence, but a domain.
“Christ is generated from the Father, but never separated. He is ‘in the bosom’ of His Father, as John tells us. Given this notion, of generating without separating, I don’t see how social trinitarianism could be implied from my view.”
Because your position reduces to generic identity rather than numerical identity.
“Son and Spirit would still be the effect of the Father’s origination. ”
ReplyDelete>>>You have yet to show how that makes them creatures which is why I made the point that this causation happens in eternity not time.
“It’s pointless to ask questions we can’t answer. Where the immanent Trinity is concerned, we can only answer questions if we have revealed answers.”
>>>We do have revealed answers: 1 Cor 8:6 But to us there is but one God, the Father
“ii) There’s no antecedent reason to imagine we could even grasp what constitutes the unity of the Godhead. Just as we can understand some things that are incomprehensible to a dog, there are many things which are incomprehensible to a man. Human intelligence is quite limited. ”
You have left the door wide open for every other religion in the world to do the same thing. There is now no way to determine the correct religion.
“The point of reference was Craig’s appeal to Eph 3:14. Provide exegesis.”
>>>Actually I was replying to your statement: “When Paul applies the sonship category to Christians”
The issue of sonship being applied to Christians and full exegesis can be found in John L. Girardeau’s Discussions of Theological Questions Chapter on Adoption.
“Drake is confusing the order of being with the order of knowing. ”
>>>I am a Clarkian Steve. We see no difference. All things are sets of propositions.
“ I wasn’t discussing God in himself, but how God reveals himself in human language. ”
>>>But if you understood Clark’s position which I hold to I can still criticize you in that respect. Why? Because on our view Language is not created. God is a mind with propositional thoughts. You like Plotinus deny thoughts to God, or at least that’s the logical implication if not the outright assertion, that God is a monad which tolerates no distinction between subject and predicate and can therefore have no mind with thoughts. Plotinus was consistent enough to posit the nous-divine mind as the first production of his One. Maybe you should just be consistent and leave Christianity like Jay Dyer did for this exact reason. Your system falls right into plotinus’ hands. On our view God is rational AD INTRA and he made us in that image. The logos of our nature then is to participate univocally in God. It is a divine predestination of sorts.
“ So it’s ectypal from start to finish. ”
>>>Which is why your system can never get a real hypostatic union in Christ. AS I HAVE RECENTLY GOT BOB LETHAM TO ADMIT!
“Notice that Drake doesn’t show how he derives that conclusion from what I actually said.”
>>>LOl! You just admitted it . You said language was created. Wow.
“i) If Drake is using “before” in a temporal sense, then, yes, I deny temporal succession between God’s deliberation and God’s action.”
>>Of course not Steve. Let’s try to assume we aren’t complete imbeciles when we speak to each other.
“I haven’t said anything to indicate that God is beyond being”
>>>If you say God is outside of human language then you have eliminated the categories of being, categories of predication. If you then make God all substance/subject, uh you seriously need to look for another religion than Christianity because you’re never gone to be able to get three persons and attributes from that. You are going to have to create some other non created category just like the East does and you’re right back into Essence and energies which makes THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD ECONOMICAL. LOL!
If I understand you, Drake, you believe that one can be originated and yet fully divine so long as the originating happens ‘in eternity’ and not in time. Correct?
ReplyDeleteIf so, do you consider numbers to be divine? They too find their origination in God and are eternal and necessary.
And while we’re on the subject of ontology… you said that ‘all things are sets of propositions’ so I was wondering what you make of the following argument(s).
(1) People are sets of propositions
(2) Sets are abstract objects
(3) Therefore people are abstract objects
The argument is valid so in order to avoid the conclusion you will have to show that at least one of the premises is false. I suggest that you want to avoid the conclusion for a number of reasons. Consider the following argument:
(4) Abstract objects have no causal powers
(5) People are abstract objects
(6) Therefore people have no causal powers
But (6) seems intuitively false. The only way that you could avoid the conclusion of (4)-(6) is if you were an occassionalist which is a position that is rejected by the WCF since it speaks of secondary causes. However, showing that a position is rejected by the confession is not a refutation so this may not seem like that big a deal so perhaps we should go further.
If you’re like me, when you think of occassionalism you immediately think of Jonathan Edwards and thinking about Edwards got me thinking about the fact that he was also an idealist and inspired the following argument:
(7) Abstracts objects are divine ideas
(5) People are abstract objects
(8) Therefore people are divine ideas
Now (8) should most certainly be rejected. Why? Well, for starters it entails that all creatures are eternal. Unless God changes his mind from time to time, which he doesn’t, he has always been thinking of the set of propositions that is Steve or the set of propositions that is Drake. But if that’s the case then Steve and you have always existed and are co-eternal with God. You may be dependent upon his thinking but you are still eternal and that can’t be right.
But most troublesome is the fact that if God is the set of all propositions that applies to him then he is identical to his thoughts but we are included in the set of divine ideas that he thinks so we are part of God which seems to make this view a species of panentheism.
Undoubtedly you’ll be coming back to point all the places that I’ve gone wrong and I welcome the clarification. :)
David,
ReplyDeleteYou raise good questions and I must confess that I am not familiar enough with all the philosophical issues you bring up to give a full answer. I am a theologian and the context of this blog is about God, eternal generation and the Trinity, not set theory. I know some people who understand these issues more than I do. However, I cannot say that all your arguments follow logically or definitionally.
“If so, do you consider numbers to be divine? They too find their origination in God and are eternal and necessary.”
>>>Numbers are uncreated, that does not mean that they are divine persons. Numbers do not have consciousness.
“They too find their origination in God and are eternal and necessary.”
>>>That does not mean that numbers are divine persons.
“ Sets are abstract objects”
>>>The divine ideas in God’s mind are not concepts but propositions. Clark spoke on this issue a number of times. I am currently not convinced that sets are abstract concepts. I may agree that the idea of a set is abstract but as a set takes a concreted definition in defining a particular thing it moves from abstraction to something concrete.
“(6) Therefore people have no causal powers”
>>>Actually in Lord God of Truth Clark proves that only divine persons are causal, but that is a result of strict definition. Persons have principles of action and have activity no doubt. But you aren’t going to get me to admit that the “true essences” in the divine mind are abstract concepts.
“The only way that you could avoid the conclusion of (4)-(6) is if you were an occassionalist which is a position that is rejected by the WCF since it speaks of secondary causes. ”
I am an occasionalist and I agree that the theory is contradictory to the WCF. I have stated multiple times that Scripturalism is not compatible with the WCF. I don’t think it contradicts all of it but there are a number of important differences.
“If you’re like me, when you think of occassionalism you immediately think of Jonathan Edwards and thinking about Edwards got me thinking about the fact that he was also an idealist and inspired the following argument:”
Agreed. Clark used Edwards to defend immediate revelation in Lord God of Truth. I picked up on this and extended his work into my scripturalism in the metaphysics of grace.
David,
ReplyDelete“(7) Abstracts objects are divine ideas”
Not on our theory. Gordon Clark says in Three Types of Religious Philosophy (Jefferson Maryland, The Trinity Foundation, 1989) by Gordon Clark pg. 123 –Dogmatism-Realism
“To be sure, Christian dogmatism does not accept the unaltered World of Platonic Ideas. The Philonic Interpretation is better. [By the way Philo's construction posited the Ideas in the mind of God. DS] *****Still better is the replacement of Ideas (minus predicates) by propositions or truths******…Christian dogmatism therefore must be realistic. The real object of knowledge is itself present to the mind…There are of course other thoughts, objects, or realities. Every Biblical Proposition is one. These never change nor go out of existence, FOR THEY ARE THE CONSTITUENTS OF GOD’S MIND…We know God directly for in him we live and move and have our being.”
“Therefore people are divine ideas
Now (8) should most certainly be rejected. Why? Well, for starters it entails that all creatures are eternal.”
>>>>Nope. Dr. Clark said in his The Biblical Doctrine of Man,
“Realism of course asserts the real existence of the human genus. This is an idea in God’s mind and it is a real object of knowledge. But it is hard to imagine any Realist identifying the perfect eternal idea with a temporal and imperfect individual. The relationship of Adam to the Idea is precisely the same as the relationship of any other individual man to the Idea. The individuals ‘participate’ in or are all ‘patterned after’ the Idea; but the notion that one individual is ‘physically and numerically one’ with the Idea, or that any other individual is ‘physically and numerically one’ with Adam is enough to send poor Plato to his grave in despair. This misunderstanding of Realism vitiates much of Hodge’s argumentation.” (pg. 49)
“he has always been thinking of the set of propositions that is Steve or the set of propositions that is Drake.”
Explain ‘always’?
“ Well, for starters it entails that all creatures are eternal”
>>>Our definition of eternal may be different from yours. Your use of “always” sounds like the view of eternity that Clark refuted. Eternity is not some infinite series of ages in the direction of eternity past. Time is differentiated from eternity in that time is a function of a created mind. The idea that God has of me in eternity is given a form in time. The propositions of me are eternal, but my particular consciousness that thinks those propositions is created.
I do believe in panentheism but I was under the impression that this view is fundamentally distinct from the idea that creation and God are consubstantial. That’s the whole reason it isn’t pantheism. Creation is contained in God but not consubstantial with God.
David, here is some cataloging of Clark's statements on this issue:
ReplyDeleteDr. Clark says,
“Holmes may say that I am an idealist and he is a realist. I reply that I am both and that he is neither…While I do not particularly object to the term idealism, for my emphases rest on spirit, will, intellect, and mind, the term realism if taken in its ancient sense, is more appropriate. Realism is the view that the mind can actually possess the truth, the real truth.” (The Philosophy of Gordon Clark, pg. 440)
In The Works of Gordon Haddon Clark, Vol 1, ed. John Robbins, A Christian View of Men and Things, (Unicoi, TN: The Trinity Foundation, 2005), pg. 224-225 – VII Philosophy of Knowledge- A Theistic World Gordon Clark said,
“Is all this any more than the assertion that there is an eternal, immutable Mind, a Supreme Reason, a personal, living, God? The truth or propositions that may be known are the thoughts of God, the eternal thought of God. And insofar as man knows anything he is in contact with God’s mind. Since, further, God’s mind is God we may legitimately borrow the figurative language, of not the precise meaning, of the mystics and say, we have a vision of God…The world of physics drops into the secondary position of stage scenery, and instead of picturing little hard pellets, the Christian view emphasizes a world of spirits or persons, or minds. The Apostle Paul said that in God we all live and move and have our being…God is the ‘place’ of Spirits…The Divine Mind …encloses or surrounds all others penetrates them completely…There is some affinity between this view of the world and contemporary Personalism in that the basic categories are mental and that personality and history are emphasized above the corporeal and mechanical but the differences transcend the superficial similarity. The Christian view differs from the various forms of Personalism in refusing to equate the physical world with the eternal consciousness of God. But more especially it differs in its concept of the Person who ‘includes’ all others and of his relation to them…The other persons are brought into being by fiat; they are completely and in every respect dependent on God but God is completely and in every respect independent of them.”
The physical world is not God but it is in God. All we know how to define the physical world is through operationalism which is not infallible knowledge. “That which is measurable” is my definition for the physical world but again this is only operational. In light of this, I affirm a form of Christian Panentheism. The questions that this philosophy of Scripturalism is trying to answer do not concern, what is real, and what is not real. Or, what has being and what does not have being (?). The question we are trying to answer is: what is it? Dr Clark says,
“My realism is so pronounced that everyone but the most enthusiastic disciple would call it extreme. A few lines further on I shall repeat, what I have often said, that even dreams and hallucinations are real; and although this statement is a criticism of the category of Being…In my view, at any rate, Being and Reality are so universal as to be meaningless. A word that is applicable to everything is applicable to nothing…Everything is real.” ((The Philosophy of Gordon Clark, pg. 409-410)
DRAKE SHELTON SAID:
ReplyDelete“You have yet to show how that makes them creatures which is why I made the point that this causation happens in eternity not time.”
I explained the implication to Craig. Your denial is not a counterargument.
“We do have revealed answers: 1 Cor 8:6 But to us there is but one God, the Father.”
i) So you’re a unitarian.
ii) I’ve exegeted that text in response to Dale Tuggy. Try again.
“You have left the door wide open for every other religion in the world to do the same thing. There is now no way to determine the correct religion. ”
That’s an assertion, not an argument.
“The issue of sonship being applied to Christians and full exegesis can be found in John L. Girardeau’s Discussions of Theological Questions Chapter on Adoption.”
i) The question at issue was the exegesis of Eph 3:14. Not a general disquisition on adoption.
ii) Why should I need to read Girardeau to know his position? Given Clarkian ontologism, why don’t I enjoy a direct apprehension of the propositions contained in that book?
“I am a Clarkian Steve. We see no difference. All things are sets of propositions.”
Yes. Pantheistic idealism.
In that case, you deny the Incarnation and Resurrection. Reality is a set of timeless divine ideas. No time, no space, no matter, no energy, no birth, no death; hence, no Incarnation or Resurrection.
“Because on our view Language is not created. God is a mind with propositional thoughts.”
Back to your pantheistic idealism. You deny the creation of language because you deny the creation of anything. For you, there is nothing objective to God. All that exists is God thinking thoughts. Timeless thoughts.
Incidentally, it’s ironic that you defend six-day creation when your pantheistic idealism renders time illusory. If your position is true, then there’s no such thing as real time or real space.
“You like Plotinus deny thoughts to God, or at least that’s the logical implication if not the outright assertion, that God is a monad which tolerates no distinction between subject and predicate and can therefore have no mind with thoughts.”
Feel free to document your imputation with supporting material from my writings. I await the quotes.
Cont. “On our view God is rational AD INTRA and he made us in that image.”
ReplyDeleteOn your view, God didn’t make us–he thinks us.
“Which is why your system can never get a real hypostatic union in Christ. AS I HAVE RECENTLY GOT BOB LETHAM TO ADMIT!”
Your ontology doesn’t have the raw materials for a hypostatic union. Your ontology is monistic rather than dualistic. There is no room for time and space in your ontology. Just sets and subsets of timeless divine ideas.
“You said language was created. Wow.”
“Wow”? Yes, language is created. God created human language-users. God also created the secondary-causes that providentially generate human languages.
“Let’s try to assume we aren’t complete imbeciles when we speak to each other.”
I assume that I’m not an imbecile. But I can’t vouch for my interlocutor.
“If you say God is outside of human language then you have eliminated the categories of being, categories of predication.”
i) That’s yet another bare assertion bereft of argument. Do you even know how to reason for your position, or is it multilayered assertions all the way down?
ii) God is ontologically “outside” of his creation.
iii) What makes you think that eliminates the category of “being”? It makes God a different kind of being. A being with a difference mode of subsistence.
iv) How does that eliminate predication? Do you think a description must ontologically resemble what it describes? Must a verbal description ontologically resemble what it describes? Must a visual description ontologically resemble what it describes? It’s easy to cite counterexamples.
“If you then make God all substance/subject, uh you seriously need to look for another religion than Christianity because you’re never gone to be able to get three persons and attributes from that.”
You keep mouthing these formulaic statements which you impute to me without ever bothering to quote me to that effect.
Wow...not sure I can keep up with this.
ReplyDeleteDRAKE SAID: “I still did not see personhood defined as relation.”
I see, you thought I was defining personhood a "relation". I wasn't.
BTW, crazy-town items were things you brought up that weren't directly related to the discussion.
STEVE SAID:
“To the contrary, the point of the question is whether you can define your terms. What do you mean when you say the Son is begotten? Is that just a cipher, or can you spell out what you mean by that? Otherwise, you’re not really affirming or denying anything.”
Begotten means that Christ is generated from the Father…that the Son is because of Who the Father is, and for the Father to be Who He is, He must have the Son. The Son is “caused”, but necessary, begotten, but not in time, logically second to the Father…not ontologically “second”…He’s not inferior. Apart from the Son, the Father cannot be Father. So the Father *depends* on the Son, but He is the origin of the Son. So within the Trinity there is: Unity, distinction, interdependence, and hierarchy. To go further than this in explanation would require me to be God, which I am not. This isn’t a get-me-out-of-jail mystery card. I don’t think you can meet your own standard for defining the Persons of the Trinity. How is calling the Father “Father” any less a cipher for you? In fact, I think it’s more of a cipher for you. You can’t make sense of the Father being Father and the Son being Son because you keep going back to the order of knowing…the significance of which I still fail to see, btw. You affirm God's Fatherhood is archetypal, but I have yet to see what you actually know about that and how that informs your view of the creature's fatherhood.
STEVE SAID: “God reveals himself in human language. Categories drawn from human experience. Now, God providentially gave us that empirical/linguistic experience in the first place. But that still constitutes our frame of reference.”
Obviously God reveals himself in human language. He also created us in His image. Fortunately, the meaning of language doesn’t depend upon individual experience…otherwise we’d each simply be talking about our experience and nothing else. In fact, our discussion would just be Steve talking about his experience and Craig talking about his…we might be using the same words, but each word is informed differently…since you can’t experience my life, you can’t understand me, & vice versa. In the end, you haven’t pointed out a weakness in my view, you’ve simply introduced a faux problem.
Cont...
ReplyDeleteSTEVE SAID:
“You need a principled method for distinguishing the analogies from the disanalogies.”
I don’t disagree…but all analogies become disanalogies. This is especially true of God. If there are analogies that don’t become disanalogies they’d simply be identical.
STEVE SAID: “You’re not exegeting your prooftext.”
You’ve merely asserted that the Fatherhood by which all families in heaven and earth get their name refers to the fact God created everything. Not much of an argument, and certainly not exegesis. But there’s no need to “exegete” that passage. It’s part of a larger argument…it is the culmination of it: That God is Father, He is Father to us in an adoptive way through the Son’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, and that all things…whether in heaven or on earth, are being “summed up” in Christ His Son (the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world). While God is the Creator, and Father to all in that sense, He is also Father in the sense that we bear His image...finally, because of the entrance of sin and Christ's victory over it and death, all things are being summed up in Christ. As Christ has been resurrected and is exalted over all things, therefore fatherhood is eternally and cosmically established. The fact that Christ, in His flesh, glorifies fatherhood among men testifies to the reality that it is founded in God. Christ not only restores fatherhood, but glorifies it to the nth degree. That is a bulk of the message of Eph 1-3. Paul establishes grace in Paternity.
Drake,
ReplyDeleteIt’s understandable that you aren’t an expert in the philosophical issues. Few are! However, you’ve been making some rather bold accusations about Steve’s philosophical theology for someone who admits their limitations in this area. Generally speaking, unless we’re dealing with someone one who’s a bit uppity and needs to come down a few notches, we’re not to impute to our opponent all of the implications that we believe follow from their statements. People are generally better people than they are logicians. With this in mind we may certainly bring the implications to their attention but let’s do so with some respect.
And on that happy note I turn to your critique!
I can certainly agree that numbers are not persons. However, in my ontology, you are either God or not God. There is no third option. The main difference between God and creation is that creation finds it source in God whereas God simply is. So numbers are eternal creatures but creatures nonetheless.
I said that sets are abstract objects not abstract concepts. Abstract objects, such as propositions and numbers, are necessarily abstract and therefore cannot become more concrete by degrees. It’s like picturing the number 7 descending from Platonic Heaven to make an appearance on Sesame Street as the number of the day. As I’m sure you find that as ridiculous as I do, I’m sure you’ll explain what you actually meant.
So far you seem to believe that abstract objects are not divine ideas but then you believe that propositions exist in the divine mind and that people are sets of propositions. Furthermore, you believe that the human genus exists as a universal but not in any kind of Thomistic sense but in Philo’s sense – not Plato’s? At least one of us is confused ‘cause that just doesn’t make sense!
I’m down with God being timelessly eternal rather than everlasting. My understanding of God actually entails this conclusion. However, I’m not understanding how God can create you when you are a set of propositions that he eternally thinks. You have to make some kind of separation between propositions and the objects that propositions are about since, as it stands, you’ve a priori ruled out the possibility of creation.
If I understand you correctly then your position does not imply pantheism. However, on panentheism, at least on the version you seem to hold, although there is a distinction between the creator and the creature it’s pretty thin. God is the one thinking the thoughts that are his creation but since, on your view, his entire creation is made up of abstract objects his creation is spiritual, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. Necessarily, God thinks all of his creation as it is thereby initiating a modal collapse. Contingency is destroyed and all theologians and philosophers scream out in terror.
But other than that it’s a great system! :P
You punt to Clark a fair bit (which, again, I understand since you’re not a philosopher) but it might be more helpful for those reading our discussion (all three of them! >.<) if you could reproduce his arguments in your own words since I agree with Steve that so far you’ve done little more than assert your conclusions and appeal to authority. I think you’ll need to bone up on metaphysics before we can have a meaningful discussion.
God bless.
CRAIG SAID:
ReplyDelete“Begotten means that Christ is generated from the Father…”
Of course, that’s circular. You’re using one synonym to define another. That’s not the issue.
The question at issue is not a dictionary definition of “begotten” or “generated,” but what aspect of the father/son analogy Bible writers intend to convey or assert.
“…that the Son is because of Who the Father is, and for the Father to be Who He is, He must have the Son.”
Once again, you miss the point. The correlativity of fatherhood/sonship is not the issue. The point at issue is what aspect of the father/son analogy Bible writers intent to convey or assert.
Thus far you’re doing nothing to advance understanding. You just stay on the surface grammar.
“The Son is ‘caused’, but necessary, begotten, but not in time, logically second to the Father…not ontologically ‘second’…He’s not inferior.”
Several problems:
i) You need to show, exegetically, that Bible writers were singling out the causal aspect of a father/son analogy, rather than some other aspect(s). Thus far you’re assuming what you need to prove.
ii) You say it’s “necessary,” but you haven’t established that on either exegetical or philosophical grounds.
a) Given fatherhood, it’s necessary that a father have a son, and vice versa. But you haven’t established the necessity of the given.
If the Father didn’t “beget” the Son, he’d cease to be a father, but that doesn’t mean he’d cease to be.
b) You also need to show why a causal relation is necessary rather than contingent. If the Son were a necessary being, why would he need to be caused?
A necessary being is a being which (or who) cannot not exist. His nonexistence is impossible. But if his existence is caused by another, then in what respect is his nonexistence impossible?
iii) You say “not in time” as if that’s relevant. My argument wasn’t never predicated on a denial of the (allegedly) timeless nature of the cause/effect relation. So why do you bring that up?
iv) You say he’s not “inferior,” but if he’s the effect of another, then isn’t there an obvious sense in which he’s ontologically inferior to the agent on whom his existence depends? An agent can exist apart from an effect he causes, while the effect can’t exist apart from the action of the agent. So that metaphysical asymmetry implies the ontological superiority of the originating agent, does it not?
“Apart from the Son, the Father cannot be Father. So the Father *depends* on the Son, but He is the origin of the Son.”
That’s equivocal. The Father doesn’t depend on the Son’s existence for his own existence. Rather, he can’t assume a paternal role without a son.
But that’s no different than God’s status as the Creator. God can’t be the Creator without a creation. But that doesn’t mean God depends on the creation. Creator and creation are correlative, but that’s a contingent, asymmetrical relation. God can exist apart from the creation, but not vice versa.
Same thing with redemption, or judgment. God can’t be a redeemer or judge without something to redeem or judge. But that doesn’t mean God can’t exist unless he’s a redeemer or judge.
“So within the Trinity there is: Unity, distinction, interdependence, and hierarchy.”
You’ve failed to establish interdependence. A cause/effect relation isn’t interdependent.
Cont. “How is calling the Father ‘Father’ any less a cipher for you? In fact, I think it’s more of a cipher for you. You can’t make sense of the Father being Father and the Son being Son because you keep going back to the order of knowing…the significance of which I still fail to see, btw. You affirm God's Fatherhood is archetypal, but I have yet to see what you actually know about that and how that informs your view of the creature's fatherhood.”
ReplyDeleteI already explicated what I think the analogy signifies in response to Dale Tuggy.
“Fortunately, the meaning of language doesn’t depend upon individual experience…”
A red herring. The meaning of language depends on collective experience. A linguistic community which assigns meaning to words in relation to objects.
“I don’t disagree…but all analogies become disanalogies. This is especially true of God. If there are analogies that don’t become disanalogies they’d simply be identical.”
Which is just a dodge, because you fail to draw the line. You leave it purely abstract.
“You’ve merely asserted that the Fatherhood by which all families in heaven and earth get their name refers to the fact God created everything. Not much of an argument, and certainly not exegesis.”
I said more than that. I also said Paul was punning. And I referred you to two standard commentaries for detailed exegesis. It’s not incumbent on me to reinvent the wheel or do your research for you. I have 24 hours in a day, just like you. And since you’re probably about half my age, you actually have a lot more time to play with than me. Far more grains of sand in the hourglass. If you don’t choose to study the Bible at a scholarly level, that’s your prerogative.
“That God is Father, He is Father to us in an adoptive way…”
Once more, you miss the point. By your own admission, adoption is a forensic category. Therefore, you commit a category mistake when you extrapolate from a forensic relationship to a metaphysical relationship. To say the Father causes the existence of the Son is hardly analogous to a forensic relationship.
Likewise, “grace in paternity” is hardly analogous to your claim that the Father “necessarily” causes the Son. Grace is the antonym of necessity.
Throughout this discussion you never grasp what is required of you to establish your position. It’s not just that you miss the target–you don’t even see the target.
Drake Shelton said...
ReplyDelete"You like Plotinus deny thoughts to God, or at least that’s the logical implication if not the outright assertion, that God is a monad which tolerates no distinction between subject and predicate and can therefore have no mind with thoughts. Plotinus was consistent enough to posit the nous-divine mind as the first production of his One. Maybe you should just be consistent and leave Christianity like Jay Dyer did for this exact reason. Your system falls right into plotinus’ hands."
Ironically, it's your own position that's Plotinian. The monarchy of the Father is just a variant on Neoplatonic emanationism. The chain of being. Degrees of divinityh. The unifying principle is the fact that the many share a common source of origin in the One. A abstract universal/concrete particular relation.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteSteve,
“i) So you’re a unitarian.”
>>>No, I’m a Nicene Monarchist.
“That’s an assertion, not an argument. ”
>>>Sure Steve. You are making logical contradictions mysteries. This leaves the door open for everyone else to do the same thing.
“ Not a general disquisition on adoption.”
>>>I was not referring to a general expo on adoption but the nature of Christian sonship.
“ii) Why should I need to read Girardeau to know his position? Given Clarkian ontologism, why don’t I enjoy a direct apprehension of the propositions contained in that book? ”
>>>Because as an Augustinian Occasionalist God has decreed the occasion of “physical sensation” to get the direct revelation. The occasion is a decree ad extra not a necessity of nature.
“Yes. Pantheistic idealism.”
>>>Let’s try to keep the 9th commandment here Steve. It’s Panentheistic Idealism. There is a difference. I just gave multiple Clark quotes to prove it to david.
“In that case, you deny the Incarnation and Resurrection. Reality is a set of timeless divine ideas. No time, no space, no matter, no energy, no birth, no death; hence, no Incarnation or Resurrection.”
>>>9th command steve.
“For you, there is nothing objective to God. All that exists is God thinking thoughts. Timeless thoughts. ”
>>>9th command steve.
“ your pantheistic idealism renders time illusory. ”
>>>I’l wait for you to prove that from Clark’s article : http://www.trinityfoundation.org/PDF/020a-TimeandEternity.pdf
Until you do you are still under the pain of the 9th commandment.
“Feel free to document your imputation with supporting material from my writings. I await the quotes”
>>>You are a follower of the Van Tillian-Neo Scholastic tradition that asserts absolute divine simplicity. I have proved this is plotinian in videos and articles that I cataloged here:
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/what-i-require-before-i-debate-with-someone-regarding-the-neoplatonismorigendivine-simplicityfilioquehyper-determinist-package/
“On your view, God didn’t make us–he thinks us. ”
>>>You keep going into this when I answered this stuff in detail in my answers to David. Why even post here if you are not going to read what I write?
Steve,
ReplyDelete“Your ontology is monistic rather than dualistic.”
>>>That is the exact thing that Clark denies. LOL! Clark says,
“The Christian view of things also seems to resemble a dualism: At least the world and God may be called two ‘substances’ ; neither one is the substance of the other. But actually Christianity is more successfully monistic than Neoplatonism was. God alone is the eternal substance, the independent principle’ apart from creation of the world nothing exists besides him. This underlines the essential and controversial elements of the Hebrew-Christian doctrine. First, as Creator, God is viewed, not as an undifferentiated One that produces a world by necessity, but as a living mind who with foreknowledge created voluntarily. Plotinus explicitly denied will to his One; but will is one of the most prominent aspects of the Biblical Deity. Second, precisely because God is Creator, the world is called into being by divine fiat alone: There is no pre-existing matter to be formed or organized; there is not even a Darkness or Void out of which or into which the universe is created. And third, this implies that the world had a first moment and that its past history is finite…the Stoics indeed gave the present world a finite history, but they made it one of an infinite series of worlds, a view strangely adopted by Origen also; and of course the emanation of the world from the Neoplatonic One is a necessary and eternal process. [Because on this view will, nature and activity are all one ] The view that the world began has its only source in Biblical Revelation. A standard objection to the Christian view is that creation implies a change in God, who has already been declared immutable…Why did not God create the world sooner, or later? (pg. 186-187 )…Was the creation a new act of will, not an eternal act? And if this is inconceivable, if, that is, God’s will is eternal why is not the world eternal also? These questions rest upon a misunderstanding of God’s Being. God is eternal, and eternity is not perpetual motion. Eternity is motionless; it permits no succession; everything is present at once; there is no past or future….What was God doing before he made the Heavens and the Earth?…he was doing nothing. For if he had done anything that thing would have been a creature…It is not true that untold centuries passed before God created, for centuries could not exist before God created them…Time is not an independent principle, or a Neoplatonic Darkness into which God projected the Universe.” (pg. 189)
Thales to Dewey, The Patristic Period-Augustine-Creation, pg. 186-189
““Wow”? Yes, language is created. God created human language-users. God also created the secondary-causes that providentially generate human languages. ”
>>>This then supplies my support from your own “mouth” that God is a monad. On our view language is not merely human. It is uncreated. Plotinus denied that the monad had propositional thoughts because that would require distinctions between subject and predicate. Your assertion that Language is created is an admission that God suffers no distinctions.
“I assume that I’m not an imbecile. But I can’t vouch for my interlocutor.”
>>>I will receive your anti-christian insulting insolence with patience that I may participate in Christ.
“ii) God is ontologically “outside” of his creation.”
>>>That’s Deism.
“i) That’s yet another bare assertion bereft of argument. Do you even know how to reason for your position, or is it multilayered assertions all the way down?”
>>>So how do you then predicate without language Steve?
“iii) What makes you think that eliminates the category of “being”? It makes God a different kind of being. A being with a difference mode of subsistence.”
>>>Which is incapable of any metaphysical connection with humanity. Yes this has been said before Steve, by Theodore the nestorian.
“iv) How does that eliminate predication?”
>>>because you have to use language to predicate.
Steve,
ReplyDelete"Do you think a description must ontologically resemble what it describes?”
>>>Yes because your analogy of proportionality (not analogy of proportion because we scripturalists believe that) leaves no room for real connection between humanity and divinity.
“Must a verbal description ontologically resemble what it describes?”
>>> Yes. Otherwise its equivocation. http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/analogy-of-proportionality-refuted-univocal-predication-defended/
“Must a visual description ontologically resemble what it describes?”
>>>Don’t know I’ll have to think about that.
“You keep mouthing these formulaic statements which you impute to me without ever bothering to quote me to that effect.”
>>>Why don’t you just answer the argument or admit you are wrong. You have avoided answering many arguments I have made here and its getting exasperating.
BTW, if you deny the eternal generation of the Son, you are not a Christian Steve and you will go to hell when you die. This is another reason I don’t attend Van Tillian and Scholastic Reformed Churches (Which is all of them from what I can tell) anymore. This insanity is being widespread in those churches. I exhort you to receive Jesus Christ the eternally begotten Son of God who assumed a generic particular instance of humanity in the fullness of time and was raised again from the dead according to the Scriptures.
Drake,
ReplyDeleteYou've gone too far. And not just a little too far but FAR to far.
At what point did belief in the eternal generation of the Son get on the official list of doctrines that must be affirmed to be saved? I don't affirm the eternal generation of the Son... am I going to hell? My wife has never heard of the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son... is she going to hell? What about all those people who lived before the whole debate got under way? Are they going to hell?
So you've stopped going to church? How telling. It must be hard being the only one who's right.
I barely know you but your arrogance is seeping through your comments. You need to repent and I sincerely hope that you will.
God bless.
David,
ReplyDelete“It’s understandable that you aren’t an expert in the philosophical issues. Few are! However, you’ve been making some rather bold accusations about Steve’s philosophical theology for someone who admits their limitations in this area.”
>>>You misunderstood me. When it comes to the Philosophical issues that deal with reality, the universe and its relation to God, I have read thousands of pages on the issue and I am fully confident to speak to those issues. When we are speaking about more academic areas of philosophy I am not as strong. That was my point. My accusations against steve have hundreds of pages of information to support them that I have either written or made into a video: http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/what-i-require-before-i-debate-with-someone-regarding-the-neoplatonismorigendivine-simplicityfilioquehyper-determinist-package/
“People are generally better people than they are logicians. ”
>>>Was this the attitude that paul gave to the Corinthians in 1 Cor 15? No. Rutherford says, “When Stephen Acts 7. and Paul Acts 26. were accused of heresy and speaking against Moses and the temple, they made a confession of their faith not in words of Scripture, but in deductions and necessary consequences drawn from Scripture and applied to themselves, and those in Nehemiah’s time who wrote and sealed or subscribed a Covenant, did not write and seal the express Decalogue and ten Commandments, nor the words of the Covenant of Grace”. Free Disputation Chapter 2.
“With this in mind we may certainly bring the implications to their attention but let’s do so with some respect.”
>>>I don’t remember saying anything disrespectful to Steve.
David,
ReplyDeleteWith a general reply to your accusations against any kind of eternal creation I provide my video: http://www.youtube.com/user/drakeshelton?feature=mhee#p/u/3/CEYThb2Fp3M
“As I’m sure you find that as ridiculous as I do, I’m sure you’ll explain what you actually meant.”
>>>Not until I get some definition on what you mean by abstract object in distinction to abstract concept.
“So far you seem to believe that abstract objects are not divine ideas”
>>>Depends on what you mean by abstract object.
“You have to make some kind of separation between propositions and the objects that propositions are about since, as it stands, you’ve a priori ruled out the possibility of crea”
>>>As you have ignored my statement about the consciousness that thinks those propositions coming into time I’ll wait for you to actually deal with what I have said along with the many clark quotes that you are ignoring in your so called critique.
Not to mention that if you take absolute divine simplicity you have no basis for distinction in nature and will and you have no basis for a creation, but have fallen right into Plotinus’ emanationism.
“on your view, his entire creation is made up of abstract objects his creation is spiritual, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable”
>>>Again depends on how you are using abstract objects. Second, I do not believe that any person including God is infinite.
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/divine-infinity-by-drake/
Creation is also no eternal and I proved it here:
“You punt to Clark a fair bit (which, again, I understand since you’re not a philosopher) but it might be more helpful for those reading our discussion (all three of them! >.<) if you could reproduce his arguments in your own words since I agree with Steve that so far you’ve done little more than assert your conclusions and appeal to authority. I think you’ll need to bone up on metaphysics before we can have a meaningful discussion. ”
>>>I quote Clark because he is the one who’s philosophy I’m operating on. If I just asserted my opinion it would be drakism and I don’t like that.
“I agree with Steve that so far you’ve done little more than assert your conclusions and appeal to authority… I think you’ll need to bone up on metaphysics before we can have a meaningful discussion. ”
>>>LOL. I guess 51 articles and a 747 page book on all this stuff isn’t enough. Give me a break. I have systematically dissected Scholasticism to the last corpuscle. You are kicking against the pricks.
Steve,
ReplyDelete"Ironically, it's your own position that's Plotinian. The monarchy of the Father is just a variant on Neoplatonic emanationism. The chain of being. Degrees of divinity. The unifying principle is the fact that the many share a common source of origin in the One. A abstract universal/concrete particular relation."
>>>I deny it and I dealt with this in detail here:
Emanation, Eternal Generation and Creation: What’s the Difference? by Drake
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/emanation-eternal-generation-and-creation-what%E2%80%99s-the-difference-by-drake/
"The chain of being. Degrees of divinity."
>>There is no degrees of divinty. The divine nature shared among all three persons is exactly the same. There is subordination at the level of person, NOT NATURE.
"The unifying principle is the fact that the many share a common source of origin in the One."
>>>Wrong. The unifying principle is the person of the Father. You are a child Steve and that is why i rarely deal with you r articles. I have recently to this because I was requested to by a friend of mine.
David,
ReplyDelete"At what point did belief in the eternal generation of the Son get on the official list of doctrines that must be affirmed to be saved?"
The Council of Nicea 325 A.D.
"I don't affirm the eternal generation of the Son... am I going to hell?"
>>Yes
"My wife has never heard of the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son... is she going to hell?"
>>One cannot believe what one does not understand. But since she doesn't deny what she has previously understood I will remain silent. You and Steve on the other hand have understood and denied what the holy scriptures teach, so I will say adamantly that you are not christians.
"What about all those people who lived before the whole debate got under way? Are they going to hell?"
>>>If they denied it yes. If they were ignorant I will remain silent.
"So you've stopped going to church? How telling. It must be hard being the only one who's right."
>>>Actually I am separating because I believe I am not the only one who is right but I am holding to the lawfulness of certain courts in Nicea in the 4th century and courts in Scotland in the 17th.
"I barely know you but your arrogance is seeping through your comments. You need to repent and I sincerely hope that you will."
>>>I repent of my wicked sins everyday, but error on the Trinity I have been delivered at great personal cost.
DRAKE SHELTON SAID:
ReplyDelete“No, I’m a Nicene Monarchist.”
No, you said the “there is but one God, the Father.” If the Father is the one God, then that’s unitarian.
“You are making logical contradictions mysteries.”
I didn’t say the Trinity was logically contradictory. Rather, I said, “There’s no antecedent reason to imagine we could even grasp what constitutes the unity of the Godhead.”
“I was not referring to a general expo on adoption but the nature of Christian sonship.”
The specific question at issue is the meaning of Eph 3:14.
“Because as an Augustinian Occasionalist God has decreed the occasion of ‘physical sensation’ to get the direct revelation. The occasion is a decree ad extra not a necessity of nature.”
So you’re borrowing a page from Cheung. Pity, since I (and others) dismantled his occasionalism years ago.
“Let’s try to keep the 9th commandment here Steve. It’s Panentheistic Idealism. There is a difference. I just gave multiple Clark quotes to prove it to david.”
Since you lack the ability think through an issue, let’s walk you through the process:
i) You collapsed a distinction between the order of being and the order of knowing. You also said “all things are sets of propositions.”
Therefore, to know is to be, and vice versa. You are what you know.
ii) Likewise, Clark said persons are “collections of thoughts” or “sets of propositions” (in his books on The Trinity and The Incarnation).
For him, a person doesn’t merely think propositions. A person is the propositions he thinks. So that’s an idealistic definition of personhood.
iii) In Language and Theology (p29), Clark denies the subject/object distinction (i.e. denies the distinction between the subject of knowledge and the object of knowledge). So, according to him, you are what you know.
iv) During the Clark Controversy, Clark took the position that if we know something and God knows something, then we share the same proposition in common.
Yet that wouldn’t just be a case of believing the same proposition, but being the same proposition. If we are whatever we think, if God is whatever he thinks, then we are what God thinks when God thinks of us and vice versa. We are divine ideas. Divine concepts. Nothing less and nothing more.
Perhaps a subset of God’s ideas, but metaphysically identical with that subset of divine ideas, thoughts, concepts.
So that’s full-blown pantheistic idealism.
v) Finally, Clark taught the timeless eternality of God. If, therefore, we are divine ideas, then we are timeless divine ideas. Both time and space are illusory.
Now, if you wish to admit that your position (or Clark’s) is inconstant, then state in what direction you relieve the inconsistency. What do you give up to restore consistency?
Cont. “You are a follower of the Van Tillian-Neo Scholastic tradition that asserts absolute divine simplicity.”
ReplyDeleteObviously you haven’t bothered to consult my old debates with Perry Robinson.
“Why even post here if you are not going to read what I write?”
To begin with, no one was asked you to post here. You invited yourself to the party.
Second, you lack the capacity to connect the dots. So I have to do it for you.
“That is the exact thing that Clark denies. LOL!”
Which illustrates your inability to reason. When you say “all things are sets of propositions,” that’s monism, not dualism. According to your own statement, all things are the same kind of thing. The same constituent property. And you yourself just classified your position as a version of idealism. Well, idealism is monistic, not dualistic.
“This then supplies my support from your own “mouth” that God is a monad.”
Actually, your statement that the Father is the one God is monadic.
“Plotinus denied that the monad had propositional thoughts because that would require distinctions between subject and predicate. Your assertion that Language is created is an admission that God suffers no distinctions.”
You’re a study in illogicality.
i) I never denied that God has propositional thoughts.
ii) You seem to be equating language with propositions, which is jejune. Propositions are abstract, words are concrete. The same proposition can be expressed in different languages. Even Clark made that point.
“I will receive your anti-christian insulting insolence with patience that I may participate in Christ.”
I’d suggest you put your humility badge in a drawer. Wearing it so prominently on your chest sends mixed signals.
Cont. “That’s Deism.”
ReplyDeleteYou need to master basic concepts. Deism isn’t dualism. The divine mode of subsistence is timeless and immaterial. By contrast, creatures are exemplified in time as well as space.
Deism is a thesis about God’s action.
“So how do you then predicate without language Steve?”
i) You act as if God has to form mental sentences. Do you think there’s a literal interior monologue in the mind of God? What language does he speak when he’s talking to himself? Esperanto? Conversational Klingon?
“Which is incapable of any metaphysical connection with humanity.”
God has a causal connection with humanity. Causality is a metaphysical category.
“Because you have to use language to predicate.”
We can use language to affirm truths about God. So what’s your problem?
“Yes. Otherwise its equivocation.”
I see. Here’s a verbal description:
“And you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen” (Exod 26:31).
By your criterion, that’s equivocal. After all, a sentence about blue linen is not blue sentence or linen sentence. So it doesn’t ontologically resemble the thing it describes.
Here’s another verbal description:
“And out came another horse, bright red” (Rev 6:4).
By your criterion, that’s equivocal. After all, a sentence about a red horse is not itself a red horse. A sentence about a red horse doesn’t even resemble a red horse. A sentence about a red horse doesn’t have hooves, a tail, a digestive tract, &c.
“Why don’t you just answer the argument or admit you are wrong. You have avoided answering many arguments I have made here and its getting exasperating.”
You have an ethical obligation to find out what I believe before you impute beliefs to me.
“BTW, if you deny the eternal generation of the Son, you are not a Christian Steve and you will go to hell when you die.”
I quiver under my bed at your oracular anathema. It’s all the more convincing coming from the lips of a pantheistic idealist who implicitly denies creation, the fall, the Exodus, Biblical miracles, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the return of Christ, &c.
“This is another reason I don’t attend Van Tillian and Scholastic Reformed Churches (Which is all of them from what I can tell) anymore. This insanity is being widespread in those churches.”
Indeed, no church is pure enough for you. Not only that, even your fellow Clarkians (e.g. Sean Gerety, Gary Crampton, Vincent Cheung) are no longer pure enough for you. You’ve become a theological solipsist.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteyou may be making good arguments...but honestly, it's mostly inexplicable. You just keep telling me what I have to prove, and what I'm supposed to prove just happens to be what you think I should be discussing.
The discussion doesn't even resemble where it started...with some simple observations I made and simple questions I asked that weren't answered.
STEVE SAID: "I have 24 hours in a day, just like you. And since you’re probably about half my age, you actually have a lot more time to play with than me."
I dunno. For a man twice my age (I guess you're in your sixties), you spend a lot of time writing endlessly. I waste time, sure, yet I am too busy to carry on with this. If you're married, have children, a job, and are involved in the Church, I can't imagine where you find the time to do what you do. I choose my battles, and lately...I stay away from internet debates...when I get involved, I regret it every time. Discussion, sure. Explanation. Sure. Elaborate wrangling over words? Not so much.
Drake -
ReplyDeleteDRAKE SAID:
You misunderstood me. When it comes to the Philosophical issues that deal with reality, the universe and its relation to God, I have read thousands of pages on the issue and I am fully confident to speak to those issues. When we are speaking about more academic areas of philosophy I am not as strong. That was my point. My accusations against steve have hundreds of pages of information to support them that I have either written or made into a video:
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/what-i-require-before-i-debate-with-someone-regarding-the-neoplatonismorigendivine-simplicityfilioquehyper-determinist-package/
All of philosophy is academic so if you want to content yourself with pseudo-philosophy (i.e sophistry) that’s your prerogative.
You continually draw the conclusion that if you are well read than you are intelligent but, although probable, the conclusion does not follow of necessity. You also seem to think that if you write a lot you are right a lot. But you’ve written copious amounts of crap.
In response to my statement that people are generally better people than they are logicians,
DRAKE SAID:
“Was this the attitude that paul gave to the Corinthians in 1 Cor 15? No.”
Explain.
“Rutherford says, “When Stephen Acts 7. and Paul Acts 26. were accused of heresy and speaking against Moses and the temple, they made a confession of their faith not in words of Scripture, but in deductions and necessary consequences drawn from Scripture and applied to themselves, and those in Nehemiah’s time who wrote and sealed or subscribed a Covenant, did not write and seal the express Decalogue and ten Commandments, nor the words of the Covenant of Grace”. Free Disputation Chapter 2.”
Rutherford is not denying my statement. He’s simply telling us that Stephan and Paul argued from the Scriptures. How this has anything to do with what we’re talking about is beyond me.
DRAKE SAID:
I don’t remember saying anything disrespectful to Steve.
Either you’re kidding me or you’re kidding yourself.
DRAKE SAID:
“With a general reply to your accusations against any kind of eternal creation I provide my video: http://www.youtube.com/user/drakeshelton?feature=mhee#p/u/3/CEYThb2Fp3M”
I don’t have time watch your video. I have responsibilities at one of those apostate Reformed churches you mentioned to take care of.
DRAKE SAID:
“Not until I get some definition on what you mean by abstract object in distinction to abstract concept.”
You were the one who introduced the notion of an ‘abstract concept’ and since it’s unclear what you mean by that I reminded you of what I actually said. Nonetheless, I’ll fill you in on elementary metaphysics. Divine concepts (universals) are a species of abstract object. Other species of abstract objects would include sets, propositions, etc.
DRAKE SAID:
“As you have ignored my statement about the consciousness that thinks those propositions coming into time I’ll wait for you to actually deal with what I have said along with the many clark quotes that you are ignoring in your so called critique.”
I’ve been dealing with what you’ve said. The problem is that what you said is ridiculous. And you can quote Clark all day but it doesn’t mean I agree with him. Steve has sufficiently dealt with Clarkian ontology.
Not to mention that if you take absolute divine simplicity you have no basis for distinction in nature and will and you have no basis for a creation, but have fallen right into Plotinus’ emanationism.
I’ve got news for you, neither Steve nor I have placed our cards on the table concerning our views on DDS. You’re playing psychic and failing miserably.
I also find it ironic, as Steve pointed out, that the guy who believes in Neoplatonic emanationism (i.e eternal generation of the Son) is accusing those who don’t believe in eternal generation of Neoplatonism!
Continued -
ReplyDeleteDRAKE SAID:
“Again depends on how you are using abstract objects.”
Go get yourself a cope of Metaphysics for Dummies.
DRAKE SAID:
Second, I do not believe that any person including God is infinite.
Sigh. Of course you do. You’ve been wrong about every other topic so why not this one?
DRAKE SAID:
“I quote Clark because he is the one who’s philosophy I’m operating on.”
You should be able to put it into your own words but so far you haven’t demonstrated any ability to get by without extensive quotations.
DRAKE SAID:
“If I just asserted my opinion it would be drakism and I don’t like that.”
No, I ‘m quite sure you do like that.
DRAKE SAID:
LOL. I guess 51 articles and a 747 page book on all this stuff isn’t enough. Give me a break. I have systematically dissected Scholasticism to the last corpuscle. You are kicking against the pricks.
I cite this as evidence for my earlier claim that you think by writing a lot of garbage it turns into gold.
So belief in the eternal generation of the Son is necessary to be saved (or at least you can’t deny it) since The Council of Nicea 325 A.D. Funny, I thought we were all protestants here. You’ve provided precious little Bible to support your claims. One wonders why you bring up a church council at all when clearly you’ve got the inside track on truth.
My wife’s glad that she’s not going to Hell but she seems to think that I’ll be there with her despite your proclamation.
You’re separating from your church because you’re arrogant, unteachable, and refuse to submit to the authority of wiser and godlier men.
And by the way, how do you know that these courts, which you attempt to bind my conscience to, were lawful? Did you deduce it from Scripture? Where do the Scriptures refer to Nicaea or Scotland? I’m interested because I’m of Scottish descent and would love to inform my grandparents that God’s word makes reference to their homeland.
DRAKE SAID:
I repent of my wicked sins everyday, but error on the Trinity I have been delivered at great personal cost.
Mmmhmmmm… great personal cost, eh? Cost you – what? – a hundred bucks or so to purchase the books that make you feel wise enough to assault Christ’s church?
I’ve got a question for you. You seem to think of yourself as a leader, correct? Someone who people should listen to. That’s the only reason anyone writes as much as you do. But is anyone following you?
I know guys like you. Single. Opinionated. Immature. You’re going to die lonely or, worse, you’ll drive some poor woman crazy unless you repent.
Grow up. For the love of God, grow up.
If some of you wouldn't mind returning to the original post and Social Trinitarianism for a minute, which was why I asked Drake to comment here, let me see if I understand it correctly:
ReplyDelete"Generic unity" refers to the idea that definition of "God" is genus of which the Father, Son, and Spirit are [allegedly] particulars. Social Trinitarians would then, in order to defend monotheism, also defend monoanthropism, monoangelism, etc. Is that right?
Steve,
ReplyDelete“No, you said the “there is but one God, the Father.” If the Father is the one God, then that’s unitarian. ”
>>>>Wrong steve. Unitarians do not believe that the Son and the Spirit are same in essence with the father, eternal, uncreated, omniscience omnipresent.
This is basic Nicene Triadology.
"I didn’t say the Trinity was logically contradictory. Rather, I said, “There’s no antecedent reason to imagine we could even grasp what constitutes the unity of the Godhead.”
>>>You said that as a response to my statement: “Why One God when the Godhead is three persons?” You’re not getting out of this Steve. I’m holding your nose to it as much as you want to twist out of it.
“So you’re borrowing a page from Cheung. Pity, since I (and others) dismantled his occasionalism years ago.”
>>>Cheung has some decent stuff but it’s just what Augustine said in Concerning the Teacher so maybe you can give us an answer to the Pre-Socratic era and Zeno of Elea. If not occasionalism, you’re still stuck under the boots of Zeno and Protagoras along with the rest of the world.
“Since you lack the ability think through an issue, let’s walk you through the process:”
>>>You are so insolent Steve. You are not a Christian. Your insolence keeps rooting me deeper and deeper in my separation from American Churches.
“ii) In Language and Theology (p29), Clark denies the subject/object distinction (i.e. denies the distinction between the subject of knowledge and the object of knowledge). So, according to him, you are what you know”
>>>I am amused to see how quick you guys changed the subject of this conversation from Theology Proper to an apologetics debate. You’re just convincing me more that my accusations are correct.
“Yet that wouldn’t just be a case of believing the same proposition, but being the same proposition. If we are whatever we think, if God is whatever he thinks, then we are what God thinks when God thinks of us and vice versa. We are divine ideas. Divine concepts. Nothing less and nothing more. ”
>>>Here’s your problem Steve. In order to get your Pantheism objection through, you are going to have to prove that God affirms my propositions OF HIMSELF. If you remember in Clark’s book on the Trinity, he explained divine attributes as the thought affirmations of the divine persons. He talked about how the Holy Spirit was individuated from the Father because he thought to himself, “I proceed from the Father” or “I spirate”. No-where in Clark’s writings does he say or imply that God thinks to himself, “I am Drake’s set of propositions.” My set of propositions in God’s mind are contents that are eternally there according to the eternity of will not of nature as I explained to Ryan a couple weeks ago:
http://unapologetica.blogspot.com/2011/09/impossible-worlds-absolute-necessity.html
Steve,
ReplyDelete“Which illustrates your inability to reason. When you say “all things are sets of propositions,” that’s monism, not dualism. ”
>>>I just explained how the ides in God’s mind can be divided qualitatively and as a side note, I argue to any scripturalist reading this that my athanasian-florovskian distinction between nature and will is requisite to avoid the Pantheist accusation, which would topple the later hyper-calvinist leanings of Clark and bring the reader back to the orthodox construction he gave on page 189 of Thales to Dewey which is at the basis for the Reformed doctrine of common grace and free offer.
“According to your own statement, all things are the same kind of thing.”
>>That does not mean that they have the same attributes and as I proved to Ryan all things do not extend from the same “place” in God.
“Actually, your statement that the Father is the one God is monadic. ”
>>>Sure steve. The doctrine of the monarchy is a defense of the Father’s sole auto-theos-ness not a monadism. It simply affirms that the Father is the source of the other two
Trinitarian hypostases. Though they all share the same nature the other two persons are subordinated at the level of hypostases. Didn’t I already say this?
“ii) You seem to be equating language with propositions, which is jejune. Propositions are abstract, words are concrete.”
>>>You are confusing language per se, subject-predicate with the form of language, German-Italian etc.
“Propositions are abstract, words are concrete.”
>>>Hold on, are you trying to say that Plotinus was denying the form of language: German, Italian etc. to his One but the One could think abstract propositions?
“I’d suggest you put your humility badge in a drawer. Wearing it so prominently on your chest sends mixed signals.”
Fools make a mock at sin.
“You act as if God has to form mental sentences.”
>>>Mental sentences? As opposed to what Steve?
“Do you think there’s a literal interior monologue in the mind of God?”
>>>No temporal sequence but logical.
“What language does he speak when he’s talking to himself?”
>>>Don’t know and now I really think you are starting to admit my accusation. Does your God’s thinking distinguish between subject and predicate Steve? That’s all I want to know from you. You’re not twisting out of this one either.
“God has a causal connection with humanity. Causality is a metaphysical category.”
>>>Hold on Steve. Are you saying that the union between divine and human in Christ is a causal relation?
“By your criterion, that’s equivocal. After all, a sentence about a red horse is not itself a red horse. A sentence about a red horse doesn’t even resemble a red horse. A sentence about a red horse doesn’t have hooves, a tail, a digestive tract, &c. ”
>>>The context of our conversation is God not horses or created objects in general. If that is what you originally implied I missed it because crazy me I thought you would stick to the subject of the conversation.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteWith reference to your dismissal of my accusation of you going to hell, I must repeat that the doctrine of eternal generation in the nicene creed was not written by me. It was written by the First Ecumenical council in 325 A.D. . I feel like I'm living in the twilight zone when I have to defend the nicene creed against so-called christians.
David,
ReplyDelete“But you’ve written copious amounts of crap.”
>>>Nice assertion. I will wait for your refutations of my material. You guys just don’t get it. The more you avoid my arguments and personally attack me, the more convinced I am that you are wrong. Thanks!
“Rutherford is not denying my statement. He’s simply telling us that Stephan and Paul argued from the Scriptures. How this has anything to do with what we’re talking about is beyond me.”
>>>The point is, one does not have to be aware of the logical implications of their theology to receive a lawful accusation of heresy.
“Divine concepts (universals) are a species of abstract object.”
So you’re just talking about rational principles. Ideas. Ok. Yes all reality is intellectual. I thought that was too obvious to even clarify.
“I’ve got news for you, neither Steve nor I have placed our cards on the table concerning our views on DDS. You’re playing psychic and failing miserably.”
>>>Talk about theological solipsism. I spent hundreds of hours making my way through Aquinas’, Muller’s and Turretin’s views of divine simplicity so I know exactly what I’m rejecting and my conversations with Pastors from classic Scottish Reformed Denominations go quite smoothly because I know exactly what they believe and were both on the same page because when I quote Turretin to them, it’s authoritative and the cards are on the table so to speak, so you guys are coming out saying that you are not committed to the ultimate principle that governs classic reformed theology proper, but supposedly you are Reformed Apologists. This is just getting too goofy for me. Wow. James Anderson, whom I have read on this blog many times, strongly and clearly affirms the classic doctrine of ADS because he knows the system involved and he knows if he backs off of this doctrine his whole diatribe against Clark is over. So you guys are just in denial.
“I also find it ironic, as Steve pointed out, that the guy who believes in Neoplatonic emanationism (i.e eternal generation of the Son) is accusing those who don’t believe in eternal generation of Neoplatonism!”
>>>This is hilarious and any of my readers remotely familiar with me are getting a good laugh at this one. 9th Command David. I wrote 51 articles attacking emanationism and have spent months defending the athanasian distinction between nature and will in opposition to emanationism.
“ One wonders why you bring up a church council at all when clearly you’ve got the inside track on truth.”
>>>Dude I could give you multiple examples from Turretin, Matthew Poole, Luther Calvin, etc. where the Ecumenical councils are given great respect and Rutherford even wrote a whole section on how Lawful councils are binding on the conscience in Free Disputation.
David,
ReplyDeleteSo seriously guys if you back off of ADS, and reject the Eastern view and reject Clark’s view, you have no major Christian writer to turn to and personally I would love to read any professional theologian at all who comes even remotely close to what you’re advocating. And if you back off of ADS you are admitting that my writings are not crap, they are actually quite correct.
“And by the way, how do you know that these courts, which you attempt to bind my conscience to, were lawful? Did you deduce it from Scripture”
>>>The anti-clarkian’s last resort. I do not have to be able to demonstrate the historic even to understand the significance of what they said.
“Mmmhmmmm… great personal cost, eh? Cost you – what? – a hundred bucks or so to purchase the books that make you feel wise enough to assault Christ’s church?”
>>>No you insolent snake. It has cost me my church in south Carolina that I loved dearly and my Pastor that I love dearly. It has cost me Christian fellowship that I value greatly. Participation in the sacraments, a free ride through seminary (The Free Church of Scotland [cont.] pays for the education of their ministers) I could go on and on.
“I’ve got a question for you. You seem to think of yourself as a leader, correct?”
>>>No. I have had numerous people tell me I should start my own church and I have refused numerous times because I need to finish seminary. Maybe in the future but not now.
“I know guys like you. Single. Opinionated. Immature. You’re going to die lonely or, worse, you’ll drive some poor woman crazy unless you repent. ”
>>>The nail in the coffin. You got me Dave. Actually you know nothing about me and that final personal attack has rooted me even deeper in my opposition to you.
Drake -
ReplyDeleteDRAKE SAID:
“Nice assertion. I will wait for your refutations of my material.
I’m using inductive reasoning. Unlike you, I don’t believe that I have to be omniscient to know something.
DRAKE SAID:
“The point is, one does not have to be aware of the logical implications of their theology to receive a lawful accusation of heresy.”
But it should certainly affect the judgment.
DRAKE SAID:
“Talk about theological solipsism. I spent hundreds of hours making my way through Aquinas’, Muller’s and Turretin’s views of divine simplicity so I know exactly what I’m rejecting and my conversations with Pastors from classic Scottish Reformed Denominations go quite smoothly because I know exactly what they believe and were both on the same page because when I quote Turretin to them, it’s authoritative and the cards are on the table so to speak, so you guys are coming out saying that you are not committed to the ultimate principle that governs classic reformed theology proper, but supposedly you are Reformed Apologists. This is just getting too goofy for me. Wow. James Anderson, whom I have read on this blog many times, strongly and clearly affirms the classic doctrine of ADS because he knows the system involved and he knows if he backs off of this doctrine his whole diatribe against Clark is over. So you guys are just in denial.”
You’ll notice, on close inspection, that Steve and I are not Aquinas, nor Muller, nor Turretin, nor even Anderson. You may infer all you want about our beliefs but we haven’t played our cards so for all you know I’m a Social Trinitarian.
There’s more than two metaphysical systems to choose from.
DRAKE SAID:
“This is hilarious and any of my readers remotely familiar with me are getting a good laugh at this one. 9th Command David. I wrote 51 articles attacking emanationism and have spent months defending the athanasian distinction between nature and will in opposition to emanationism.”
51 articles and you still end up closer to emanationism than I do.
DRAKE SAID:
“Dude I could give you multiple examples from Turretin, Matthew Poole, Luther Calvin, etc. where the Ecumenical councils are given great respect and Rutherford even wrote a whole section on how Lawful councils are binding on the conscience in Free Disputation.”
That’s fantastic. I agree that council have authority. However, they’re authority goes only so far as they reflect Biblical truth. As WCF Ch. 31.3 puts it,
“All synods or councils, since the Apostles' times, whether general or particular, may err; and many have erred. Therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith, or practice; but to be used as a help in both.”
DRAKE SAID:
“So seriously guys if you back off of ADS, and reject the Eastern view and reject Clark’s view, you have no major Christian writer to turn to and personally I would love to read any professional theologian at all who comes even remotely close to what you’re advocating. And if you back off of ADS you are admitting that my writings are not crap, they are actually quite correct.”
Again, you don’t know what we’re ‘advocating’ because we haven’t been ‘advocating’ anything other than that God the Son cannot find his origination in the Father unless he is a creature.
DRAKE SAID:
“The anti-clarkian’s last resort. I do not have to be able to demonstrate the historic even to understand the significance of what they said.”
It remains a classic because it remains unanswered. I never said that you have to be able to show by way of historical evidence that the councils took place. My question was directed to you, as a Scripturalist, concerning how you can know something that cannot be deduced from the Scriptures.
Your Scripturalism is pertinent to the issues that have been raised.
DRAKE SAID:
ReplyDelete“No you insolent snake. It has cost me my church in south Carolina that I loved dearly and my Pastor that I love dearly. It has cost me Christian fellowship that I value greatly. Participation in the sacraments, a free ride through seminary (The Free Church of Scotland [cont.] pays for the education of their ministers) I could go on and on.”
LOL! That’s got to be the first time I’ve been called an ‘insolent snake’!
Your views on the Trinity didn’t hurt you. Your attitude did. You’ve been extremely foolish on giving all those things up. Better to submit to godly authority.
DRAKE SAID:
“No. I have had numerous people tell me I should start my own church and I have refused numerous times because I need to finish seminary. Maybe in the future but not now. “
So you don’t think of yourself as a leader but you need to finish seminary and maybe after that you’ll start a church… that tells me that you think you’re a leader but you need credentials first. And you will have to start your own church if you plan on being a minister ‘cause I’ll tell you right now that NO denomination will ordain you if you keep heading down this road.
I suppose that the people who told you should start your own church were people on the internet? Let’s see what happens when you encounter real people in real life.
DRAKE SAID:
“The nail in the coffin. You got me Dave. Actually you know nothing about me and that final personal attack has rooted me even deeper in my opposition to you.”
The personal attacks are meant to deflate the puffed up balloon that is your head at the moment. A reality check. I know enough about you from your behaviour to know that if you don’t change you will be a miserable, lonely, and angry man ranting on the internet for the rest of your life with the occasional follower whose impressed with your quotations of authors whose names they’ve never heard of and your posture of extreme self-confidence.
I don’t want that for anybody. Not even you.
DRAKE SHELTON SAID:
ReplyDelete“Wrong steve. Unitarians do not believe that the Son and the Spirit are same in essence with the father, eternal, uncreated, omniscience omnipresent.”
Ahem. You said the *Father* is the one God. You didn’t say the Trinity is the one God. You didn’t say the Father, Son, and Spirit constitute the one God. So your formulation is explicitly unitarian.
“You’re not getting out of this Steve. I’m holding your nose to it as much as you want to twist out of it.”
Since you lack elementary reasoning ability, let me try to explain it to you: you can’t logically infer from the statement that “there’s no antecedent reason to imagine we could even grasp what constitutes the unity of the Godhead” that what constitutes the unity of the Godhead is beyond our grasp because the Trinity is contradictory.
Many things can be beyond our grasp without being (or seeming to be) contradictory. They can simply be too complex for the human mind to fully fathom.
The decimal expansion of Pi is beyond our ken, not because it’s contradictory, but because our finite minds can’t encompass an actual infinite. They can’t even encompass a potential infinite, beyond a certain point. Our minds peter out beyond a certain point. That’s one of the limitations of being a creature.
“Cheung has some decent stuff but it’s just what Augustine said in Concerning the Teacher so maybe you can give us an answer to the Pre-Socratic era and Zeno of Elea. If not occasionalism, you’re still stuck under the boots of Zeno and Protagoras along with the rest of the world.”
i) So you reject theological paradox while you appeal to the paradoxes of Zeno. How very droll.
ii) You need to explain how you think occasionalism gets around Zeno’s paradoxes.
iii) If you think Zeno’s paradoxes regarding the infinite divisibility of time, space, and motion are cogent, then you render the historical narratives of Scripture illusory.
“I am amused to see how quick you guys changed the subject of this conversation from Theology Proper to an apologetics debate. You’re just convincing me more that my accusations are correct.”
You’re the one who responded to me by claiming that you’re a Clarkian. I’m simply expounding Clark’s position.
Cont. “In order to get your Pantheism objection through, you are going to have to prove that God affirms my propositions OF HIMSELF.”
ReplyDeletei) No, it’s not just a question of affirming or denying propositions. For as you and Clark suppose, propositions aren’t merely something we believe or disbelieve, but something we are.
ii) As long as some of the propositions you affirm about God are true (which you grant), then by converse reasoning, God will affirm the same propositions. If you hold a true belief about God, then God will believe the same thing about himself.
If, however, you and God are what you and he believe, then if you affirm a true proposition about God, that makes you a divine proposition. You and God are the same proposition.
“I just explained how the ides in God’s mind can be divided qualitatively…”
That’s just a set/subset distinction, where one subset of ideas is not identical with another subset of ideas. But they all belong to the common superset of divine ideas.
“That does not mean that they have the same attributes.”
Irrelevant. The claim is not that one divine proposition is interchangeable with another divine proposition. Rather, this is your dilemma:
i) If reality is reducible to propositions;
ii) If to know is to be, and vice versa;
iii) If God is a superset of propositions;
iv) If we believe some true propositions about God;
v) Then we are divine.
The fact that God’s idea of Drake Shelton is different from God’s idea of Gordon Clark is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
“The doctrine of the monarchy is a defense of the Father’s sole auto-theos-ness not a monadism.”
You keep doing this bait-n-switch. Perhaps it goes back to your inability to reason. To say the Father is the one God is not equivalent to saying the Father is the fons deitas. Even if the latter were true, that’s not semantically equivalent to the former.
“You are confusing language per se, subject-predicate with the form of language, German-Italian etc.”
There is no “language per se” over and above different languages. Different languages may share a common depth grammar, but that’s abstracted from actual languages. It doesn’t exist apart from actual languages.
“Hold on, are you trying to say that Plotinus was denying the form of language: German, Italian etc. to his One but the One could think abstract propositions.”
I’m not the one who’s hung up on Plotinus. That’s your hobbyhorse, not mine.
“Mental sentences? As opposed to what Steve?”
Thoughts. Beliefs. Propositional attitudes.
“No temporal sequence but logical.”
You have a very anthropomorphic conception of God, as if God is literally speaking to himself.
Cont. “Don’t know and now I really think you are starting to admit my accusation. Does your God’s thinking distinguish between subject and predicate Steve? That’s all I want to know from you. You’re not twisting out of this one either.”
ReplyDeleteSubject and predicate are grammatical terms. You confuse whether God can distinguish propositions from whether God thinks in sentences.
“Hold on Steve. Are you saying that the union between divine and human in Christ is a causal relation?”
You made a general claim about God’s “metaphysical connection with humanity”–in response to whether God is a different kind of being with a different mode of subsistence from his creatures. I merely presented a general counterexample. Try to keep up with the argument.
“The context of our conversation is God not horses or created objects in general.”
Here’s a verbal description of God:
“Thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool” (Dan 7:9).
By your criterion, that sentence is equivocal. After all, the sentence is not, itself, wooly or white as snow. The words aren’t soft and furry to the touch. The sentence is not, itself, seated on a throne. So the sentence doesn’t ontologically resemble the thing it verbally describes.
“With reference to your dismissal of my accusation of you going to hell, I must repeat that the doctrine of eternal generation in the nicene creed was not written by me. It was written by the First Ecumenical council in 325 A.D. . I feel like I'm living in the twilight zone when I have to defend the nicene creed against so-called christians.”
i) The Nicene Fathers aren’t the gatekeepers of heaven. They are just some fallible 4C bishops, acting under imperial pressure.
You want me to artificially forget who they really were. Just a bunch of men, like you and me. Not prophets or apostles.
I’m not answerable to the Nicene Fathers. I’m answerable to God, as he has spoken in Scripture.
ii) Your appeal to an ecumenical council is hypocritical. You’re not Eastern Orthodox, Drake. You don’t get to cherry pick things from ecumenical councils, as if that’s authoritative, while disregarding the ecclesiology which underwrites those pronouncements.
If you want to argue for the Nicene creed on the merits, fine. But don’t pretend that you bow to the authority of Eastern Orthodox bishops.
Your problem, Drake, is that you’re a frustrated actor. You enjoy role-playing. And you get so caught up in whatever part you’re playing at the time that you forget it’s play-acting. At one time you were playing your Braveheart role, as the intrepid Covenanter.
Then you started reading crackpot alternate historian Joe Farrell, and so you began to practice an exciting new role. You also play the Clarkian from time to time.
You need to drop the posturing, the play-acting, and get real before it’s too late.
Drake Shelton said...
ReplyDelete"Steve, You are not a Christian. Your insolence keeps rooting me deeper and deeper in my separation from American Churches."
This coming from a dude who reads the historical narratives of Scripture with the same hermeneutic as Mary Baker Eddy.
Ryan said...
ReplyDelete"Social Trinitarians would then, in order to defend monotheism, also defend monoanthropism, monoangelism, etc. Is that right?"
Generic identity is characteristic of natural kinds. So angels would exemplify that common property. That would be a unifying property for angels. If that's what you're getting at.
I'd also note in passing that generic identity and numerical identity aren't contradictories. Numerical identity is something above and beyond generic identity. A more stringent type of unity. But not incompatible with generic unity. That's a necessary condition.
DRAKE SHELTON SAID:
ReplyDelete"So seriously guys if you back off of ADS, and reject the Eastern view and reject Clark’s view, you have no major Christian writer to turn to and personally I would love to read any professional theologian at all who comes even remotely close to what you’re advocating."
This coming from a guy who's belief-system is a hodgepodge of Gordon Clark, Gregory Palamas, and the Scottish Covenanters (among other disparate influences).
Drake Shelton said...
ReplyDelete"Steve, You are not a Christian. Your insolence keeps rooting me deeper and deeper in my separation from American Churches."
Once again, this is from a guy who says all things are sets of propositions. Well, a proposition can't die on the cross. A proposition can't be raised from the dead.
CRAIG SAID:
ReplyDelete"you may be making good arguments...but honestly, it's mostly inexplicable."
To you, perhaps.
"You just keep telling me what I have to prove..."
And I carefully explain why that's the case.
"The discussion doesn't even resemble where it started..."
I've responded to you point-by-point.
"...with some simple observations I made and simple questions I asked that weren't answered."
Your simple questions and simple observations frequently make false assumptions that need to be unpacked.
DRAKE SHELTON SAID:
ReplyDelete"BTW, if you deny the eternal generation of the Son, you are not a Christian Steve and you will go to hell when you die."
But I'm just a proposition, or set thereof. How can a proposition go to hell? For that matter, how can a proposition even die?
Drake Shelton said...
ReplyDelete"There is no degrees of divinty. The divine nature shared among all three persons is exactly the same. There is subordination at the level of person, NOT NATURE."
There are degrees of divinity when you subscribe to a model of the Trinity that's modeled on Neoplatonic emanationism.
Wrong. The unifying principle is the person of the Father. You are a child Steve and that is why i rarely deal with you r articles."
Poor Drake. Having a hard time keeping pace with the argument–as usual.
I was referring to the unifying principle in Neoplatonism, which, in turn, supplies the template for the monarchy of the Father in Nicene subordination. The Father assumes the role of the Plotinian One, who unifies the many, as the source of the many.
I admit that if all reality is intellectual explaining how eternal thoughts come into time, even thoughts that are different in quality is difficult if not impossible. Scripturalism may need to take a view where the physical world are forms that participate in the sets in God's mind or something like that but aside from that point I admit, you guys have not even touched my arguments and this has been just one big personal diatribe against me while all the while I'm telling you exactly what i believe and laying my cards all out on the table to be criticized while you guys play smoke and mirrors with readers guessing what you believe even though James Anderson believes something completely different than you. This is just comedy now and all you guys can do is personally attack me.
ReplyDeleteRyan I tried my best to get a substantial dialogue with these men but in the end they have done little else than vindicate all my accusations against the American "Deformed" Church.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteIn my recent exchange with Steve Hays he criticized me for not knowing his view of simplicity which in his view he has given great detail.
Cont. “You are a follower of the Van Tillian-Neo Scholastic tradition that asserts absolute divine simplicity.”
Obviously you haven’t bothered to consult my old debates with Perry Robinson.”
Well today I consulted his debates with Perry Robinson and to no surprise to me I am further convinced that the Van Tilian “Reformed” Apologists have all but catechized countless ex-calvinistic people into Eastern Orthodoxy. His responses to Robinson are so pathetic and so dismissive if I were Steve I would be embarrassed to refer people to those debates. Steve’s blog is terribly organized so most of my searches had to come from reply-links from Perry’s Energetic Procession blog. So here we go:
In Steve’s Article: The Ugly Duckling of Orthodoxy he says,
“1.Divine simplicity
i) I think one can establish on exegetical grounds that God subsists outside of space and time. That, of itself, would make him ontologically simple since there would be no spatial or temporal subdivisions in the life of God.”
Wrong. Being outside of space and time simply proves God’s spirituality, transcendence, and eternality. I remember bringing this up to my Pastor in the Free Church of Scotland (cont). Robert Shaw in The Reformed Faith only mentioned that God is without the metaphysical constitution of matter and form and he mentions nothing about the scholastic doctrine of divine simplicity. I told my Pastor that this what I believed as well, however, I had done too much reading up to that point to be deceived into thinking that was all there was to it. We shall get into more here in a moment. Steve continues,
“ii) Beyond this we’re transitioning from exegetical theology to philosophical theology. There’s nothing inherently wrong with philosophical theology. We can arrive at reasonable judgments on the basis of philosophical theology. But it doesn’t enjoy the same authority as exegetical theology.”
Really Steve? We’ll see if you will remain consistent with that because other premises have historically been used to support the doctrine of epistemic analogy of proportionality, i.e. the crux of the debate between Clark and Van Til. Dr. Clark explains,
“Thomas developed the theory of analogy far beyond the simple observation of Aristotle, and it took on major proportions when the subject was God. Thomas held that ****** the simplicity of the divine being required God’s existence to be identical with his essence.******* This is not the case with a book or pencil. That a book is and what a book is are two different matters. But with God existence and essence are identical. For this reason an adjective predicated of God and the same adjective predicated of man are not univocal in meaning. One may say, God is good, and one may say, This man is good; but the predicate has two different meanings. There is no term, not a single one, that can be predicated univocally of God and of anything else.” (Three Types of Religious Philosophy by Gordon Clark [The Trinity Foundation: Jefferson, Maryland, 1989], pg. 63)
Steve’s whole Van Tilian view of analogy of proportionality currently referred to as archetypal ectypal is based on a premise that he admits is in philosophical theology and therefore not dogma. Thanks Steve. You have just vindicated years of my own study and personal sacrifice.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteIn Steve’s article, Ecumenical Cartomancy, we read the following exchange between Robinson and Hays,
“I for one would really like to see the doctrine of Platonic simplicity derived exegetically from the text using the grammatical-historical method. Wow, that sounds like a lot of fun to watch. Could you show me?”
This assumes that we’re committed to the doctrine of Platonic simplicity.”
But Steve, that is what Divine Simplicity is. Remember, in Neoplatonism, the One is the Good. Movement toward the One is movement toward perfection and movement away from the one into metaphysical distinction is movement toward imperfection. Francis Turretin, the most authoritative of the Scholastic Puritan writers says in Institutes, Volume 1. 3rd Topic. Q 7
“Proof that God is perfectly simple.
IV. This proved to be a property of God: (1) from his independence, because composition is of the formal reason of a being originated and dependent (since nothing can be composed by itself , but whatever is composed must necessarily be composed by another; now God is the first and independent being, recognizing no other prior to himself) ; (2) from his unity, because he who is absolutely one, is also absolutely simple and therefore can neither be dived nor composed; (3) from his perfection, ********because composition implies imperfection inasmuch as it supposes passive power, dependency and mutability.******** ”
Institutes of Elenctic Theology Volume 1 (P & R Publishing: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1992), pg. 191
That is the Platonic dialectic. Movement towards distinction is movement towards imperfection. After reading through this section of Turretin’s Institutes, my jaw dropped and this is when I separated from Reformed Churches.
Finally, Steve has this section of Triablogue where I found nothing worthy of consideration.
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2005/05/divine-simplicity.html
So thanks Steve for obliging me to read your work on Simplicity I have been encouraged by it.
BTW, in case people don't already know, Steve has responded to Drake Shelton here and here.
ReplyDelete