Dale Tuggy's Da Vinci Code

Anti-Trinitrian apostate Dale Tuggy left a number of comments on my Rom 9:5 post. Most of his remarks were directed at someone other than me. In some cases I'd frame the issue differently. But I'll comment on some of his remarks, even if they weren't in response to me. 

i) I'd note in passing that even liberal scholars can take the position that Rom 9:5 refers to Jesus as God. Joseph Fitzmyer argues for that identification in his commentary on Romans, even though the modern church of Rome doesn't require its Bible scholars to defend the traditional interpretation of stock prooftexts. 

And for interested parties, here's an exhaustive analysis of the text, defending Jesus as the referent:

http://digital.library.sbts.edu/bitstream/handle/10392/3953/Carraway_sbts_0207D_10066.pdf

ii) If someone is going to reject orthodox Christology, then critical Christology is a more logical alternative than unitarian Christology. Liberal critics take the position that the NT reflects theological diversity. Low Christology and high Christology. Supposedly, Mark has low Christology, Matthew and Luke have a higher Christology than Mark, while John has a higher Christology than Matthew and Luke. Likewise, the so-called Deutero-Paulines supposedly have a higher Christology than James. That sort of thing.

I don't agree. But a liberal doesn't have to explain away high Christological texts the way Dale must. In that respect it's more consistent. 

Taking Steve as your authority in matters of logic and philosophy is a huge mistake. 

I never offer myself as an authority figure. 

Do you think a guy who had a handle on those things would so consistently feel the need to abuse rather than argue? You will notice that people trained in philosophy generally don't get aggressive like he does. This is because they know how to argue, and how to understand their opponent. Steve, as soon as he doesn't understand something I'm saying, resorts to abuse. 

i) Dale makes no attempt to show that I failed understood his position. 

ii) As a philosophy prof., Dale ought to know what a false dichotomy is. I don't "abuse rather than argue." I've presented copious counterarguments to Dale's positions. 

iii) A friend of mine shared an anecdote about the late Dallas Willard. He was a presenter at a UCLA conference on "the Bible and Philosophy," organized by Robert Adams. But as my friend observed:

Dallas Willard was the first example to me of an academic who was willing to go against majority opinion in a public context for the sake of Christian truth. Incredibly, none of the presenters at a UCLA conference was willing to defend the proposition that Christ is central to Christianity, except Dallas Willard.

Many "Christian philosophers" have no commitment to the Christian faith, or to Jesus in particular. For them, it's just intellectual play with religious ideas. That's why they don't "get aggressive." 

iv) Dale is a very unethical disputant. For instance, I've repeatedly corrected Dale on his bad arguments, but his response is to recycle the same bad arguments. He just hopes readers will forget that his argument was debunked. That's not the practice of an honest philosopher. An honest philosopher doesn't keep repeating the same refuted arguments. 

Likewise, an honest philosopher will assume the opposing viewpoint for the sake of argument. By contrast, Dale acts as if certain Biblical phenomena are inconsistent with Trinitarian, Incarnational theology, when he knows perfectly well that the phenomena in question are perfectly consistent with the theological paradigm. His behavior is a breach of personal and professional ethics alike, and it gets in the way of honest debate. I'll give specific examples as well proceed. 

[quoting Porter] "functions as one with God, and is, in fact, the God"

Cooperates with God (so not identical, but rather someone else) but is God (so is identical, God himself). At least, that's how many will read this. Sad that standards of clarity are so low. A good editor should have hammered that sentence.
This passage deserves a full arguing through, but here's a quick way to rule out that Paul is in 9:5 identifying Jesus with his God: note that all through ch. 8 he distinguishes between them. Same in 1:1-7. Charity prevents us from attributing this contradiction to Paul.
Whether Jesus is in some lesser way "divine" is another issue, of course.

I realized that you're perennially intellectually challenged, but Porter isn't substituting philosophical jargon to draw theological distinctions. Rather, he's simply reusing the language that's used in the text, where "God" is generally a synonym for the "Father" in Romans. A way of naming a referent. Goes back to your persistent inability to distinguish between proper nouns and common nouns.

In Rom 9:5, however, Paul breaks with customary usage to apply that preeminent designation to Jesus. And that's all the more dramatic, given the backdrop of his customary usage.

Paul isn't saying Jesus is divine in some lesser sense. To the contrary, he's saying Jesus is divine in the same way as the Father, given the precedential terminology of the descriptors.

"Many, many unitarian scholars have dealt with this too."

You mean, like the "scholars" at the Watch Tower?

"Is Paul (RSV) just piously punctuating an aside here, praising God? Or is he (NRSV) dropping a theological bomb, asserting that the human Messiah is as divine as God, aka the Father, is? And then he just says 'Amen' and moves on??! This would be a big deal in the 1st c. I know which I think is more likely."

There are many occasions when Paul affirms the deity of the Messiah.

Yes, it's a big deal–and as Porter explains, this is not just a parenthetical aside, but the climactic point of his argument (in this section).

"Also, notice that on the RSV reading…"

Yes, Dale, I'm aware of the fact that different versions give different renderings. That's why we need to sift the arguments. That's why I began by noting Metzger's classic article. And that's why I quoted Porter's exegetical argument.

"But if 'all' is unrestricted here, we recall that Paul says that God is over Christ. http://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/11-3.htm Compare also with http://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/15-24.htm."

In that context, Paul is framing the issue in terms of his ideal Adam typology/Christology. That's discussed by Greg Beale in his A New Testament Biblical Theology.

"But hey, if you want to stake your christology on some fine and disputed points of grammar instead of explicit NT teaching, you're free to do that."

The deity of Christ is explicit NT teaching.

And in the immediate context, he distinguishes them - God raised Jesus from the dead, but not vice-versa.

Notice that Dale acts as if distinguishing them is inconsistent with Trinitarian theology. But not only is that distinction consistent with Trinitarian theology, Trinitarian theology requires that distinction. Trinitarian theology wouldn't be Trinitarian in the first place absent personal distinctions between the Father and the Son. 

Dale is operating at the level of little old ladies who stand on the street corner passing out copies of Awake! magazine. These are village unitarian objections to Trinitarian, Incarnational theology. 

You can find a million passages that associate the two, e.g. assigning some of the same roles, titles, actions, properties. But then people infer, mistakenly, that the two are being identified as one, the opposite of being distinguished. But of course, they're constantly distinguished. That's why they are given different names and titles: God vs. Son of God, God vs. Jesus, the one God vs. the one Lord, the Father vs. the Son, the Almighty vs the Messiah, etc.

See the same tactic? He pretends that distinctions between Father and Son are inconsistent with Trinitarian theology. Yet Trinitarian theology necessarily distinguishes the person of the Father from the person of the Son (or the person of the Spirit). Not only is that not at odds with Trinitarian theology, but that's an implication of Trinitarian theology.

Although Dale rejects the Trinitarian paradigm, he has an intellectual duty to adopt that perspective for the sake of argument when testing the consistency of the paradigm with the Biblical data. But because he's an apparatchik for the cause of unitarianism, Dale is routinely derelict in his philosophical responsibilities.

I don't know what to say to someone who is willing to ignore the indiscernibility of identicals, to to state if differently, the non-identity of differents. Once you have this in mind, and that Father / Yahweh and Son qualitatively differ in the NT, in many ways, then in every case, you're going to settle on an interpretation where the writer doesn't *identify* the two, as that writer is always thinking differently about them, and it's uncharitable to read him as saying something obviously impossible, confusing together as one two whom he also knows to differ. It's as if you have a giant list of passages showing that 2 + 2 = 5. But that's plainly impossible, so (given that those passages are asserting only truths), you must be misreading them. We can't read authors we respect as if they're idiots, or royally confused about the central subject-matter.  

In Revelation, Jesus *has a god* over him, God, the same one who is over you and me. (Rev 1:6, 3:12) http://trinities.org/blog/in-the-new-testament-jesus-has-a-god-same-as-ours/ Yes, both are called Alpha and Omega - the origin and the destination in some sense(s), but the book throughout distinguishes between Jesus and his God. If you try to read this author is implying that they're the same, you're being uncharitable to him, reading him as confused about his central subject-matter. You ought to have more respect for him. It's a perverse interpretive tradition that foists contradictions on an author and then congratulates him for being so profound as to express mysteries. On any other topic, we weed out the contradictions as we settle upon an overall good interpretation. But here, catholic tradition misleads us.

i) Two of Dale's oft-refuted arguments. Take his "charitable reading" schtick. As I've often pointed out, the nature of God is independent of NT writers. Bible writers aren't fiction writers. Fiction writers have nearly absolute control over the subject matter. They can invent a character and make him like whatever they want him to be. 

By contrast, Bible writers are biographers, historians, and interpreters. They lack a fiction writer's creative control over the subject matter. God is whatever he is like irrespective of NT writers. They are receptive, not creative. Their job is to report the truth, interpret events. 

ii) Likewise, As I've often documented, Dale doesn't operate with strict identity. His theory of numerical identity makes allowance for non-identity when it comes to counterfactual identity and diachronic identity.

The NT perspective is that God is working through Jesus; thus, prophecies about what YHWH will do can be fulfilled by things Jesus does. It's just a fallacy to infer that if Y fulfills a prophecy about what X will do, then X = Y.

i) But what if Yahweh did intend to become incarnate in the 1C, and inspired OT prophets to forecast the literal coming of Yahweh in the flesh? Dale propounds an unfalsifiable hermeneutic by which a prophet can never be taken predict the Incarnation even if, in fact, that is the fulfillment. 

ii) By Dale's logic, the coming of Yahweh is really the coming of Yahweh's agent. But if Yahweh is functionally equivalent to an agent of Yahweh, then Yahweh already came in the person of a past or present-day agent of Yahweh. There is no future coming of Yahweh, for Yahweh came whenever an agent of Yahweh arrives on the scene. It's just another king, priest, or prophet. 

The material is there, waiting for you to read it. You can of course choose to see only what fits with the catholic narrative that it was always part of Christian belief that Jesus had the same ousia as the Father - it was just the terminology that needed a little developing. This is not true, and anyone who honestly digs into the history will see this. And it makes you realize that the NT simply doesn't clearly assert the "fully deity" of Jesus. If it did, then early Christians c. 100-300 would have understood and believed that. 

You place a lot of weight on divine providence. In short, my view is better off there. Your view seems to require the gospel to be lost c. 100 - 381. In my view, based on the NT, the essence of the message is very simple, and has always been preserved, even through the clogging of our theological arteries with various speculations.

It's crucial for Dale to endorse a conspiratorial theory according to which Christians were originally unitarians until the the big shift came with Nicea. The Dan Brown/Bart Ehrman theory of church history.

i) By contrast, I, as an evangelical Trinitarian, don't need to resort to Dale's all-or-nothing argument. To begin with, notice how he skews the evidence by framing the issue in terms of whether ante-Nicene theologians assert the "full deity" of Christ, rather than whether they assert that Jesus was merely human (or just a creature). 

ii) Likewise, I don't consider Nicene theology to be the gold standard of Christology or Trinitarian theology. Ante-Nicene, Nicene, and post-Nicene theologians continued to struggle with formulating the Incarnation and the Trinity. Indeed, that continues into the 21C. 

Dale would say that's because it's contradictory, but no. It's a challenge for formulate philosophically, because God is so much greater than the human mind. 

This isn't confined to the Trinity or the Incarnation. Philosophical theologians continue to wrestle with how to conceptualize divine omnipotence, or God's relation to time and space.
John has always been beloved by various unitarians. Granted, they've disagreed about whether John teaches a literal, personal pre-existence for Jesus as "the Logos". But the book is crystal clear that the one God is the Father, and that Jesus is a real man, who depended on the Father for all he did and taught. 

Notice the deceptive contrast. That Jesus is a "real man" is a presupposition of Incarnational theology. That's hardly at variance with Trinitarian, Incarnational theology. 

The NT clearly and repeatedly says that the Father is the god of / over Jesus. (Of course, as the one true God, he's over all others.) It won't do to make a gesture at traditional two-natures speculations. How could those help?

Of course the two-natures of Christ are relevant. God is "over" human creatures in a way that God is not over God.  

In brief, John never says that the eternal Logos is Jesus, and 1:14 doesn't say or imply that they are the same person. The Word is something like God's plan or wisdom, by which, the OT says in a couple of places, God created. It was "with" him then.

In Jn 1, the Logos is a personal agent, not a plan. And it says the same Logos in 1:1-4 becomes flesh in 1:14. That refers to Jesus. It doesn't merely say the Logos was "with" God. It goes onto say the Logos was God (not to mention the Son's preexistence in 17:5). And this line of argument is capped in 1:18, where there are two divine subjects: Father and Son. And the Son reveals the Father because like reveals like. They are two of a kind. 

You also have Dale Tuggy's repeated reference to Jesus as an "exalted man." Both the OT and NT arose in a world that promoted "exalted men." Kings and mythological heroes who were said to be sons of a god or goddess. Kings and mythological heroes who were elevated to the pantheon upon death. 

Scripture takes a very dim view of "exalted men."  That's the kind of idolatry that Scripture opposes. Scripture frequently talks about the downfall of exalted men. 

We're at an impasse, with this inconsistent triad 

Only God can rightly be called X.
Jesus is rightly called X.
Jesus and God are non-identical.

This is Dale's perpetual shell game, based on his equivocations. Father, Son, and Spirit can be one in one respect, but different in a different respect. Dale disregards elementary qualifications.