Knowing more than we can prove

A reponse I left on Facebook

1. Most Christians aren't intellectuals (like most humans generally–including most atheists). They are not able to make a philosophically rigorous case for Christianity.

So if Christianity is true, God must have a way of making known to garden-variety Christians that this is something they are supposed to believe. And this typically involves certain kinds of religious experience. Growing up in Christian communities (e.g. church, Christian family). God cultivates faith in Christianity through sociological means (among other factors).

They may just find the Bible compelling. And the Bible does contain evidence for its own veracity, even if they lack the sophistication to tease that out.

There may be other aspects of religious experience like a recognizable answer to prayer, an uncanny auspicious providence, an overwhelming (albeit temporary) sense of God's presence, or in some cases a miracle, that undergirds their faith.

We need to distinguish between raw evidence and formal argument. In addition, the "internal witness of the Spirit" can be a label or placeholder for variations on religious experience, some of which are probative. Having good reasons for what you believe, and the ability to articulate your reasons, are not to be confused.

2. I assume that you are in part alluding to this post:

http://www.craigkeener.com/epistemology-and-historical-arguments-a-few-thoughts/

I generally agree with what Keener says in that post.

3. There's the question of what the "inner testimony of the Holy Spirit" meant in historical theology. 

4. Speaking for myself, I'm not equipped with an internal detector that clues me into which reported biblical incidents are fictional or factual. I don't appeal to the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit in that sense. 

5. I agree with the principle that one way to evaluate the historicity of particular reports is not based on direct evidence for each report, but corroborative evidence for the source. The cliche argument is that if the source is reliable in cases where we have corroborative evidence, then there's a presumption that it's reliable in cases where we don't have corroborative evidence. Especially for ancient documents where only a random sample of confirmatory evidence survives. We don't require corroboration for every individual report. We only require enough corroboration to demonstrate the document is generally trustworthy. As think that's a valid principle as far as it goes. 

But while that provides warranted belief, it's weaker than what NT faith obligates. So it needs to be supplemented. Or perhaps that's a supplement to other things. 

6. As you know, there are multiple lines of evidence for the Gospels. There's the kind of archeological evidence recently marshaled by Peter Williams. There's the argument from undesigned coincidences which the McGrews have refined and expanded. There's Lydia's more recent argument from unnecessary details. There's the argument from prophecy.

7. I also think the argument from religious experience is germane to the credibility of the Gospels. My personal experience and experience of other Christians I know. In other words, evidence that we live in the same kind of world as the world depicted in the Bible. Not just public evidence. 

8. How do you understand and integrate passages like Rom 8:16, Gal 4:6, Jn 10:27, & 1 Jn 2:20,27 into your evidentialist epistemology?

Cruz on impeachment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEQ1mahW3uQ&t=7s

Timothy McGrew on historicity of the Gospels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjjiW2DrbGw&app=desktop

Divorce and remarriage

My answer to a question on Facebook:

A valid divorce means the spouse is no longer married. They are single again. So valid divorce implies the legitimacy of remarriage. The only obstacle to remarriage is if one is already married. That would be adulterous. If, however, one is no longer married in the eyes of God, then there's no impediment to remarriage. It's a fresh start, like getting married the first time since divorce resets your marital status to single.

By valid divorce, I mean cases where there are biblical grounds for divorce (e.g. desertion, infidelity). The effect of a valid divorce is to cause the divorcé/divorcée to revert to their premarital status. They revert to the condition they were in before they got married in the first place.

This is partly an issue of theological method. Do we expect the Bible to spell out all the implications. Do we just act on what the Bible says, and if it doesn't say certain things, we don't act on that? Jesus makes some pithy statements about divorce. There's a lot he leaves unstated. Are we supposed to stop with what he explicitly teaches, or consider the logical implications? Do we expect a trail of bread crumbs? Jesus frequently criticizes the religious leaders for failing to consider the rationale for certain biblical laws. By robotically obeying the law, they sometime subvert the original purpose of the law. So we do need to think about the logical implications of Biblical ethics. Likewise, the commands and prohibitions of Scripture usually deal with typical situations, not extreme or exceptional situations. They don't address every conceivable circumstance.

The inner testimony of the Spirit

1. Appeal to the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit (hereafter the "witness of the Spirit," to simplify) figures in some apologetic encounters or schools of thought. It was important in early Protestant theology. It's a fixture of Reformed theology. It's clearly a big deal in charismatic theology. It's an element of folk theology, often abused, but there are philosophical theologians like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig who also champion the principle. 

For Catholic theologians, this might seem to be an ad hoc appeal, concocted out of thin air to short-circuit debate. However, the principle has some basis in Scripture. The classic passages are Rom 8:16 & Gal 4:6. At least the wording of the phrase is based on the Pauline prooftexts. And these have a counterpart in Jn 10:27 & 1 Jn 2:20,27.

2. The witness of the Spirit is an aspect of defensive apologetics rather than offensive apologetics. It appeals to the experience of insiders, Christians, rather than outsiders, unbelievers. In my observation, the witness of the Spirit is invoked in three or four distinct, but related contexts, to prove:

• Christianity

• the Bible

• the canon

• salvation

3. In terms of the Pauline prooftexts, these have immediate reference to personal consciousness of salvation. A supernatural self-awareness that the individual is saved. As such, the claim is narrower than the truth of Christianity in general, or the Bible in general.

At this same time, it has logical implications for larger claims. Christian salvation is only meaningful in a larger Christian paradigm of sin, the condition of the lost, damnation, forgiveness, and redemption. So the witness of the Spirit does have implications for the truth of the Gospel and Christianity in general. But can that be extended to adjudicate every theological dispute? No.

3. Then we have the related, but somewhat enigmatic passages in Jn 10:27 & 1 Jn 2:20,27. The scope of these passages seems to be broader than the Pauline prooftexts. 

How do the sheep recognize the voice of Jesus? It doesn't say. 

1 Jn 2:20,27 posit an anointing. Anointing with olive oil was a religious rite that became a picturesque metaphor for a "charism" of the Holy Spirit. In 1 John, the point of contrast are heretic who rebel against John's apostolic teaching and disfellowship the churches he pastored or supervised. 

The anointing is not an alternative to apostolic teaching. To treat the anointing as a substitute for apostolic teaching would moot John writing in the first place! Rather, John seems to attribute to the anointing a supernatural ability to discern the truth of apostolic teaching, in contrast to the heretics. Not a revelation in terms of propositional information, but a revelation in the sense of the spiritual perception that apostolic teaching is true. And related to that, an ability to discriminate between the truth of apostolic teaching and the false teaching of the heretics. 

The heretics may well have included false prophets who said the Spirit spoke to them and gave them the true message. If so, John is countering that. 

It's unclear how far we can take this appeal because these are tersely worded promises. I think these are open to different models. So we might explore different models, consistent with, but underdetermined by the text. 

4. Apropos (3), the witness of the Spirit might be classified under the argument from religious experience. Most Christians lack the aptitude and training to make a philosophically rigorous case for Christianity. In addition, you have Christians in closed countries where Christianity is illegal, who lack access to the apologetic resources available to American Christians. They do well just to have a Bible. So if Christianity is true, God must have a way of making known to garden-variety Christians that this is something they are supposed to believe. And this typically involves certain kinds of religious experience. That can takes many forms. A recognizable answer to prayer. An arresting special providence. A miracle. 

Those are external signs. But Paul and John are referring to a psychological experience. Let's approach this from the opposite end of the spectrum. Suppose God tells me to lay hands on someone in a wheelchair and pray for their healing. I hear an audible voice. Sentences. And this message carries with it the conviction that if I do so, God will hear my prayer. I do so and the invalid is miraculously healed. 

That scenario involves private revelation in the form of explicit information in addition to conviction. Let's vary the hypothetical. Suppose I see someone in a wheelchair. I suddenly feel that I should go over and pray for them. An overwhelming sense that I'm supposed to do this. And it carries the conviction that if I do so, they will be healed. 

Not just the sense that I should go over and introduce myself and ask permission to pray for them, as a matter of Christian charity. But a sense of compulsion, as if God is commanding me to do it, even though there is no audible verbal command. I do it, and they are miraculously healed. 

In that scenario, I wasn't given any information. It wasn't a propositional revelation. I felt compelled to do it. Something I was supposed to do. I was convinced that if I did so, the invalid would be miraculously healed. And that's what happened.

So my conviction turned out to be true. And not accidentally true. Not a stroke of luck. Rather, God impelled me to take that action. 

Did my conviction amount to knowledge? Did I know the invalid was going to be healed? It was a nonpropositional revelation. There was no promise or prediction. Yet the outcome corresponded to the conviction. And did so by divine design.

So that might be analogous to supernatural discernment that Christianity is true, even though it doesn't involve any new or additional information. Rather, a supernatural recognition that the information you already have is true.

Take another illustration. I'm booked to fly out of town tomorrow. The night before, God tells me not to board that plane. An audible voice. A verbal prohibition. So I cancel my flight and reschedule.

Now let's vary the illustration. I have a very vivid dream the night before that after I'm aboard and the plane takes off, it catches fire in midair. 

After I wake up I ponder whether that's a premonition. Maybe it's just a dream. Maybe I should take my chances. I shrug it off. But the next day, as I'm walking through the terminal to my gate, it looks exactly like my dream, even though I've never been to this airport before. So I skip my flight. And the plane explodes in midair. 

Now that's revelatory, but it's a visionary rather than a verbal revelation. I don't receive any information in the propositional sense. There's no explicit warning or prohibition. But it does provide evidence about the future. And the revelation corresponds to what happens. So there's a match between my conviction and reality. Moreover, that's not just a coincidence. 

Let's vary the illustration one more time. I have the dream. This time I don't see the airport terminal in my dream. I just see myself inside the plane when it catches on fire, passengers screaming. 

I go to the airport, but change my mind at the last minute. I'm spooked by the dream. I have nothing of consequence to lose if I miss my flight but everything to lose if it's a premonition. I take this to be a possible divine warning. And, in fact, the plane explodes. 

This is a case of something I was shown rather than told. And it didn't rise to the level of a strong conviction. Instead, it gave me a sense of foreboding. And as I got closer to the gate, the sense of dread intensified. As it turned out, my apprehension was justified. A divine-induced, future-oriented attitude. 

Now the prooftexts suggest certitude or something close to certitude. This example is weaker. It is, however, a hypothetical example of nonpropositional revelatory discernment. A mental state warranted both by the supernatural cause and the corresponding circumstances.  

Hall of fame

So Kobe Bryant is dead. A sports legend. A future hall of famer. The media is obsessed with analyzing every aspect of his death. The world honors his memory.

Meanwhile few if any major news outlets pay attention to Christians dying such as the recently beheaded African pastor or the African college student who was kidnapped and murdered by Muslim terrorists a couple of days ago. Few people noticed these Christians. Save for their fellow Christians and their loved ones.

That's because they're nobodies. Nobodies in the eyes of the world. But God remembers them. God remembers his people. God remembers their pain, tears, sufferings, deaths. Psa 56:8. In the world to come, when the first shall be last and the last shall be first, when eschatological judgment shall reveal all and turn the world right-side up again (cf. the book of Esther and Purim), these Christian nobodies will stand out in God's hall of fame faith. Right alongside those in Hebrews 11. Those of whom the world was not worthy.

"Books that were left out of the NT"

This is one of the worst arguments I've ever seen for the Catholic canon, and/or worst objections to the Protestant canon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0wYXP9X6ic

He begins with an extremely deceptive overview:

The Bible did not descend from heaven fully formed and complete…no divine table of contents but rather the guidance of the Holy Spirit in determining what was authentically the word of God and what was not. 

Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, and John were determined to be divinely inspired, but the early church also had more than 40 other Gospels to contend with: Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Protevangelium of James…The Acts of Andrew, and the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

Between St. Paul and the other apostolic authors our canon includes 21 epistles, but there were dozens of other letters in circulation at the time; works like 1 Clement, the Epistle of Pseudo-Barnabas, Ignatius to the Romans, Polycarp to the Philippians were all used in churches for worship and revered at least regionally as divinely inspired. 

And finally our canon includes the book of Revelation–an apocalyptic work of the late 1C, but as you can imagine it was not the only one in existence. Early Christians would have known the Apocalypse of Paul, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Shepherd of Hermas as well. 

All told, we're dealing with over a 100 distinct works here. As strange as some of these names may sound to us to day, the fact of the matter is that the church was a blank slate at the time. 

The Gospel of Matthew seemed strange to some in the 2C with many preferring other works. When we look at the canon developed by Marcion in 130, Matthew, Mark, John, and Acts are all missing–as well as 1-2 Timothy and all of the Catholic letters. 

Other canons like Codex Vaticanus included all of the canonical Gospels but did not include 1-2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Revelation–

while the Codex Sinaiticus included all the normal books, but also included Shepherd of Hermans, Epistle of Barnabas.

There's the Didache

In reality, the NT as we have it today did not appear completely intact until the 367 letter of St. Athanasius, and was not officially listed in a church synod until Hippo in 393. Before that there were investigations, opinions, and local customs, but no uniform teaching.

So how did we get from multiple canons with multiple books down to just one that appears in 367. 

Nonoverlapping magisteria

Casey Cole is a Franciscan priest and popular Catholic apologist. A YouTuber with 50K subscribers. I believe he's a cradle Catholic who's studied at Furman, the Catholic University of America, and the Chicago Theological Union.

I've watched a number of his videos. Because Catholic apologists usually recycle the same arguments, I'm not going to remark on most of his stuff. But I will comment on his position in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7M9vgUCinY

Non-overlapping magisteria…independent ways of knowing truth that do not speak about the same things in the same ways. Science uses sense perception and rationality to come to better understanding of what is around us [whereas] religion uses revelation and faith to come to a better understanding of why something is and what we're supposed to with it. 

Of course, he's adapting that from Stephen Jay Gould, the secular Jewish evolutionary paleontologist from Harvard. This dichotomy is a familiar apologetic strategy. By compartmentalizing science and religion, it shields religion from falsification. But it comes at a cost, and is grossly simplistic.

If it was just a generalization, the distinction would have a grain of truth, but to succeed as an apologetic strategy, these have to be separate domains with nothing in common, and that's where it rapidly breaks down:

1. Science operates with some philosophical presuppositions. Can these be justified apart from religion? Take induction, the intelligibility of the natural world, the general reliability of the senses and the general reliability of human reason. According to naturalistic evolution, human beings are the byproduct of an error-ridden process. Most of the time, evolution churns out mistakes. On rare occasion it hits on something beneficial. Given that scenario, wouldn't we expect human reason to be very limited and highly fallible? Why suppose nature would be generally accessible to human reason?

2. If secular science defines what human beings are, then religion only gets to comment on what's left over after science tells us what we amount to. What if science says there is no afterlife. The brain produces the mind. There is no immortal soul. Necrosis is irreversible. There is no resurrection of the body.

Likewise, evolution has no directionality. Humans don't exist because the process was aiming for humans. There's nothing special about humans from a cosmic standpoint. 

Of course, like most Catholic intellectuals, Casey is a theistic evolutionist, but how does theistic evolution mesh with nonoverlapping magisteria? You can't combine naturalistic evolution with guided evolution. Methodological naturalism banishes teleological explanations from natural science. 

Perhaps Casey will appeal to natural theology as a mediating structure. If so, is natural theology a scientific conclusion or a framework within which science operates? Doesn't natural theology make use of unaided reason? If so, don't science and religion overlap in that regard? 

3. Is religion separate from reason and sense knowledge? What about empirical and testimonial evidence for religion? What about philosophical and scientific arguments for religion? If so, that transgresses nonoverlapping magisteria.

Does religion not use sense perception to tell us what the world is like? What about miracles? Those are signs. Visible events. Some miracles are empirically verifiable, are they not? What about theophanies, Christophanies, and angelophanies. Aren't those objects of sensory perception? Or take something more mundane like answered prayer. Isn't there empirical evidence when God grants a petitionary or intercessory prayer request? 

As a Roman Catholic, I assume Casey believes in Marian apparitions. Doesn't that fall between the cracks of nonoverlapping magisterial? If they happen, they're essentially religious, yet objects of sense perception. 

What revelatory dreams, like prophetic dreams. They tell the dreamer something about the future. Something about the world. 

What about history? Doesn't the Christian faith makes claims about God's active involvement in history, including Bible history and church history? Are there not eyewitnesses to God's activity in sacred history? To have an understanding of the world around us includes observation regarding divine intervention in human experience. 

So far from being separate domains that don't speak to the same things, science and religion are often coreferential in scope. And that creates a potential for conflicting claims. 

4. Finally, is it really advantageous that religion in general be immune to empirical and rational scrutiny? What about false prophets? What about charlatan faith-healers? 

5. I don't see how nonoverlapping magisteria can be consistently applied. There are too many counterexamples. And these aren't just special exceptions, but often go to the centrality of religious experience and understanding. Casey has taken refuge in a facile but intellectually unsustainable false dichotomy. Although there's often a difference between the methods of science and religion, that's hardly universal. 

For instance, medical science makes assumptions about what will happen if nature takes its course. The physical world generally operates like a machine, with robotic regularity and predictability. That's the default setting. That's what it's programed to do. 

But sometimes a prayer for healing circumvents natural processes, resulting in miraculous recovery. That provides insight into the kind of world we inhabit. A reality in which spiritual agents can and sometimes do interact with matter to bypass physical cause and effect, resulting in outcomes that are not traceable to an antecedent conditions. Yet these are empirically detectable outcomes.  

The provincial universal church

A revealing window into how provincial a denomination which claims to be the universal church has been for nearly its entire history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbGDmKt-KbY&t=14s

Authentic Catholicism

1. I've often said that most Catholic apologists present an inauthentic version of Catholicism because most of them are evangelical converts to Catholicism. In general, they have a far more conservative view of Scripture, which is a carryover from their evangelical past. By contrast, here's an example of a Catholic apologist who's the real deal. This is what a standard Catholic college and seminary education will get you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh902gtjFU0

2. Evidently, Casey was only exposed to one side of the argument: mainstream Catholic Bible scholarship. Many of his examples could be resolved by consulting evangelical commentaries on the Bible, as well as standard monographs on the inerrancy and historicity of the Bible, viz. Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament (B&H Academic 2016); D. A. Carson, ed. The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures (Eerdmans 2016); James Hoffmeier & Dennis MaGary, eds., Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? (Crossway 2012); Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2003); Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels (Crossway 2012); Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul: A Biblical Chronology (Concordia 2011).

3. Unfortunately, when he talks about "smoothing over stories and performing tremendous mental gymnastics," he shields his own position from correction by preemptively discrediting attempts to harmonize Scripture or defuse allegations of error. He's not open to that possibility. He's convinced himself that even making the effort is an exercise in special pleading. 

4. A basic problem with his mind is that once you adopt that view of Scripture, you begin to see mistakes and contradictions everywhere. There's no longer any presumption that what the Bible say is true. No distinction is drawn between differences and contradictions. Critics of inerrancy sometimes allege that inerrancy fosters a house-of-cards mentality, yet the denial of inerrancy becomes a mania to compulsively presume error. 

5. In addition, Casey's view of Scripture is a universal acid that dissolves historical theology. For the same reflexive skepticism can be extended with even greater ease and plausibility to the so-called development of doctrine. 

Impeachment legalities

https://reason.com/2020/01/23/op-ed-in-new-york-times-on-trumps-impeachment-trial-brief/

How amazing is Randi?

https://billdembski.com/theology-and-religion/faces-of-miracles-chapter-6/

A few of quick observations:

1. Scientist Rupert Sheldrake is less enthusiastic about Randi's debunking bona fides:

https://www.sheldrake.org/reactions/james-randi-a-conjurer-attempts-to-debunk-research-on-animals

2. While a magician has a useful skill set for exposing certain types of charlatans, there's a lot of evidence for the paranormal that's not easily reducible to parlor tricks. For instance, has Dembski studied the research of Stephen Braude? 

https://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/index.htm

3. Finally: 

Randi is an equal opportunity skeptic. He has no specific animus toward Christianity. To him, Christian belief is no more realistic or defensible than any other supernatural claim. 

While I'm sure Randi is hostile to religion in general, there's a difference between generic theism and Christianity. The Christian faith includes sexual ethics. Randi is an active sodomite. So I expect he does harbor personal animus towards Christianity. It's not an abstract philosophical construct like perfect being theology, but a living religion with personal ethics, social ethics, and social policies for the church and culture.

Is the Trinity brute fact?

1. I suspect many Christians affirm and defend the Trinity because they're supposed to, but not because they find any intrinsic value in the doctrine. The Trinity is often presented as an impenetrable paradox. You have a pious duty to check that box, but it it wasn't a revealed truth, how many Christians would miss it, or even breathe a sign of relief that they no longer had to defend it. Is the Trinity a chore, a nuisance, and intellectual embarrassment? In this post I'll offer a few philosophical musings. 

2. In historical theology there are different models of the Trinity:

i) In Greek Orthodox theology, the Trinity is like a tree trunk with two branches. The Father is the trunk, while the Son and Spirit are offshoots. The Father directly causes the Son and Spirit to exist (albeit eternally and necessarily).

ii) In Latin theology, the Father causes the Son directly and the Spirit indirectly via the Son (the Filioque). So that's a linear conception. Greek Orthodox theologians complain that the Filioque destroys the unity of the Trinity by positing two causes for the Spirit rather than a unified cause for Son and Spirit alike. 

iii) Those are pre-Reformation paradigms. A more recent position repudiates the hierarchical model. Instead it posits that each person is autotheos or God in himself. In Latin and Greek Orthodoxy theology, by contrast, only the Father is autotheos. 

3. Proponents of the Nicene paradigm claim it protects the unity of the Godhead. The Son and Spirit share a common essence with the Father. However, that by itself doesn't have much explanatory value:

i) At best it amounts to generic unity rather than numerical unity. Human beings share a common nature, yet they are separate entities. 

ii) In addition, if the Father can generate at least one divine person, additional to himself, why is there any upper limit on how many he can generate? How does that select for a total of three persons rather than two or four or forty?

4. To contend that each person is autotheos doesn't mean the persons exist independent of each other. Just that one doesn't cause the other two. These don't represent three different points of origin. On this model, they have no causal origin. So they aren't separate in that regard. 

5. Is it a brute fact that God is three persons, no more and no less? It might be an epistemological brute fact. Perhaps the explanation for why there are just three persons is way over our heads. 

Even if that's the case, it doesn't imply that the Trinity is a metaphysical brute fact, in the sense that it's arbitrary. Rather, it's a brute fact in the qualified sense that nothing outside of God explains what God is like. Indeed, we could argue that God is not a brute fact:

i) The existence of a creature is arbitrary because creatures are contingent. A creature could exist or not exist. There could be one more creature or one less creature. In that respect, creatures have a brute factuality that God does not. God's nonexistence is impossible. Moreover, one thing must exist necessarily for anything else to exist. 

ii) Another angle is the perfection of God. God is the way he is because God is perfect, so anything different would be less perfect or imperfect. That's not arbitrary, but represents the culmination of an axiological principle.  

6. These (admittedly) sketchy explanations operate at a higher, more generic level. But do they explain why God is a trinity rather than a binity or quadrinity? Again, this may be out of reach of human reason, but it's worth exploring the question to see how far we can take it. 

7. In physics and ancient philosophy, there's a strong bias towards reductionism. Where the most fundamental component of reality is one. Monadic units. You get down to something ultimately simple and discrete. Absolute unicity is the philosophical ideal.

The Trinity challenges that prejudice. According to the Trinity, relations are more fundamental than units. According to the Trinity, ultimate reality already has structure. It's not organizing isolated units into structures. Rather, reality has structure at rock bottom. So one is not the most fundamental reality. Three is fundamental. 

8. Considered strictly as a number, 3 has some striking properties: 

3 is the only integer which is the sum of the preceding positive integers (1+2=3) and the only number which is the sum of the factorials of the preceding positive integers (1!+2!=3). It is also the first odd prime. A quantity taken to the power 3 is said to be cubed.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/3.html

To be sure, that's a pure number rather than a numbed object,  but it's still interesting to consider. 

9. A relation is conceptually richer than a unit. And a trinary relation is richer than a binary relation. A binary relation is more elementary. 

10. Thus far the analysis is rather abstract, but suppose we try to visualize it. A reflection is a relation. It takes at least two elements to generate a mirror-image. 

Consider three mirrors arranged in a triangle. They reflect each other. They contain each other.  You couldn't tell which is a reflection of which without a frame of reference. And the mirror images are self-enclosed within the triangle. Internal to that configuration. 

Compare that to arranging four mirrors in a square. In one respect that's more complex because it has an added element, a fourth element. Yet the reflection pattern is simpler because the mirrors stand at right angles to each other, so the reflections are only generated by mirrors directly facing each other. Even though there are four mirrors, they only generate paired reflections, wheres three mirrors capture all three, in a circular reflection. Three mirrors can reflect each other in a way that four mirrors can't. 

So the trinary relation is more ontologically parsimonious, yet more conceptually fecund. Which constitutes a more elegant pattern because it combines superior economy with superior complexity. Hence, there is a containment principle for why more is less and less is more. The binary relation is both ontologically and conceptually simpler. The trinary relation gives you more with less while the quaternarian relation gives you less with more. In that respect the trinary relation is more perfect than a fewer or greater number of constituents. 

How strange is the Trinity?

Is the Trinity an apparent contradiction? Let's take a comparison. It's natural for humans to reason counterfactually. Indeed, the ability to contemplate hypothetical scenarios is part of what makes human intelligence human.

That includes self-referential counterfactuals. I can say I'd turn out differently if I grew up on a ranch rather than the big city. Or if I grew up in France or Italy instead of the USA. Or if my mother or father died when I was ten. Or if I was an only child instead of having two brothers. Or if my brother committed suicide when we were teenagers. And so on and so forth.

Changing key variables in my past changes the kind of person I will be come. But that in turn raises questions of personal identity and numerical identity. Am I the same individual under these counterfactual scenarios? Do the same individual experience these alternate past scenarios? Is it one of me or two of me or three of me? Are these variations on what a given individual could be? Alternate versions of me? It doesn't seem reducible to yes or no. 

This, of course, is the stuff of science fiction. I travel through a wormhole and meet the other me in a parallel universe. Which is the real me? Are we one and the same individual? Are there two of us? 

On the one hand, as we spend more time together, we find out how much alike we are. How much we have in common. On the other hand, we also find out how unalike we are. 

It's not just a case of me taking one fork in the road, then taking the other fork in the road. For which fork in the road is taken changes the traveler. Not just the road traveled but what it does to the traveler. I'm the same when I begin at the fork in the road. But am I the same at the end of the journey if I go left rather than right? Do I come out the other end the same individual who went in, compared to taking the road not taken? 

My immediate point is that when you think about counterfactuals and parallel universe scenarios, the Trinity no longer seems so alien to reason. I'm not saying the Trinity is directly parallel to transworld identity. Rather, I'm saying they raise similar issues regarding the complexities of personal and numerical identity. 

Why is the Spirit the "Spirit"?

Why is the Spirit of God called the "Spirit"? I've discussed this before, but I'd like to be a bit more discriminating this time. Seems to me that "ruach/pneuma" trades on several connotations, all of which are germane to this member of the Trinity:

1. In Biblical usage, a spirit is:

i) A personal agent

ii) A discarnate agent

So one reason for the designation is to indicate both the personality and incorporeity of the Spirit. The Spirit is not a power or force. And the Spirit is not a physical being like the humanoid gods of the heathen pantheon. Put another way, Yahweh is incorporeal. 

In this regard, the designation connotes the essential identity Spirit. The name has a metaphysical or ontological connotation. 

2. It has life-giving connotations. The breath of life. So the name indicates that the Spirit is the source of biological life.

3. Apropos (2), by extension, it also connotes the Spirit as the source of inner renewal or regeneration. Figurative life as well as  biological life.

4. Finally, it has connotations of divine speech. The spoken word is breath. So it signifies the role of the Spirit as the source of inspiration, revelation, and agency of Scripture. 

In that regard, the designation connotes the economic identity of the Spirit. The name connotes his creative and recreative activity in the world, as well as his revelatory role. 

Tooting his own Horn

Catholic apologist Trent Horn has a running commentary on Mike Winger's critique of Catholic authority:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23hl_fkhiCQ&t=66s

Horn is one of the best younger-generation Catholic apologists, so he's a good foil. I'm going to selectively comment on Horn's responses. For several reasons I won't comment on everything Trent says. The arguments of Catholic apologists are repetitious. I've been over this ground many times before. I wrote a partial review of Horn's book (The Case for Catholicism). Winger sometimes frames issues in ways I don't. 

1. Like Catholic apologists and theologians generally, Horn commits the fallacy of casting the fundamental issue in terms of authority. But it just isn't possible, in principle or practice, always to begin with authority for what you believe, because the logic is regressive. Horn is a convert to Catholicism. Catholic authority wasn't and couldn't be the starting-point at that stage of the argument, because that is what needed to be established. Given Catholic authority, he can say this is my authority for what I believe, but that only pushes the question back step: by what authority does he believe in Catholic authority? If you always require some authority to justify what you believe, then the requirement extends backwards ad infinitum. It's self-refuting for Catholic apologists to insist that every interpretation of Scripture, or the case for the canon of Scripture, must be backed up by authority. That's a condition which the Catholic apologist will be unable to consistently meet. It's necessary that we be able to establish some positions independent of authority to make any progress at all. The warrant for these positions isn't authority but reason and evidence. Positions based on argument rather than authority. That can include an argument for authority, but you can't always fall back on authority and argue from authority, because what you take to be your authority is in itself a key issue in dispute. 

2. Apropos (1), he says the special divine guidance which Rome enjoys is negative rather than positive protection (53-54 min.). God doesn't inform the Magisterium to interpret the whole Bible but to shield it from disastrous misinterpretations. In his response to Winger, Horn frequently corrects what he takes to be Winger's misinterpretations or invalid inferences from Scripture. But by his own admission, Horn has no authority for his own interpretations. His alternative interpretations of Winger's prooftexts aren't superior because they are authoritative interpretations. Rather, Horn appeals to the wording of the text, and the context–as he understands it. In addition, he accuses Winger of inconsistency. So most of this debate falls outside the framework of authority. 

As such, it's confused for Horn to accuse Winger of making himself his own authority when he interprets the Bible. That accusation backfires. Protestants aren't guilty of doing the same thing they accuse Rome of doing. If you're going to act like every time a reader interprets the Bible, he is making himself an authority, then that will sabotage any attempt by the Catholic apologist to correct a perceived misinterpretation or make his own case for Catholicism. Interpretation is not inherently an exercise of authority, and authority isn't necessary to validate the interpretation.

3. Apropos (2), the demand for authority is bound up with the demand for certainty. But even if that's ideal, it's unobtainable by falling back on authority all the time, since that reflex just relocates the same demand: what makes you certain of your authority source?  So the whole strategy is self-stultifying. That doesn't mean certainty is necessarily unattainable, but not by acting like you must invariably start with authority. 

4. "historical pedigree in connection with apostles"

That's a Catholic criterion. It's understandable that a Catholic apologist will appeal to a Catholic criterion, but it begs the question when debating Protestants inasmuch as we operate with a different theological paradigm. We don't need to have historical pedigree in connection with the apostles. Historical pedigree is irrelevant. We just need to be faithful to apostolic teaching. 

In fairness, I'm not suggesting a Catholic apologist shoulders the sole burden of proof. It begs the question if a Protestant simply asserts his alternative paradigm when debating Catholics. Both sides have a burden of proof. It's incumbent on both sides to argue for their respective positions. 

4. "When did sola scriptura come into effect? Give me a date. The doctrine has never been in effect."

i) That's loaded question. A fallacious way to frame the issue because it runs afoul of the sorites paradox. It's unreasonable and unrealistic to demand dates for many historical developments. History is a continuum with transitional phases. 

Indeed, Horn's demand is self-destructive given the doctrine of development. Many of these doctrinal innovations evolved over time. They gradually went into effect. The process was incremental.

ii) Horn fails to appreciate the underlying principle of sola scriptura, which is the supremacy of divine revelation. Scripture is the mode or medium of divine revelation. During the era of public revelation, divine revelation had an oral as well as written mode, but that stage of redemptive history is behind us. 

In response to Winger, Horn raises stock objections to sola Scriptura which, among other places, I recently addressed:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/01/oral-and-memorial-tradition.html

5. 2 Thes 2:15

Horn accuse Winger of construing this passage too narrowly:

i) To begin with, if you're going to use this as a prooftext, then you ought to restrict yourself to what Paul actually says. Now, what he says here may be consistent with other things he doesn't say. But you can't use it to prooftext things he doesn't say. 

ii) It's possible to derive more general principle from what Paul says, but that will have to operate at the same level. If you sat under the feet of St. John, the same principle would apply. You can't expand what Paul says to a different principle. 

iii) Paul isn't appealing to apostolic tradition, in the customary sense of tradition. The concept of tradition connotes a chain of transmission with links in the chain. But that's not what Paul is describing. He's explicitly referring to direct oral teaching, from Paul to his immediate audience. There are no intervening links. Not what Paul taught a second person who passed it along to a third person who passed it along to a fourth person. That's not what Paul has in view. Rather, hold fast to what Paul taught you in person. Face-to-face transmission from an apostle to a Christian. The principle is restricted to Christians with firsthand knowledge of Paul's oral teaching. 

iv) That doesn't necessarily invalidate a chain of custody. Some historical traditions are reliable. But 2 Thes 2:15 isn't making that claim. 

6. Mt 18:15-18

Where does the Bible say that the church is just all the people who love Jesus? That is the church in one sense, but when you read through Scripture it is very clear that the church has an authoritative hierarchy composed of a three-tiered system of deacons, presbyters–from which we get the word priests–and bishops, the overseers, the episcopate. So when you look for example in Mt 18:15-18…then he says to the apostles whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Bring it to the church, not to your church, because it's not like oh okay well if that church disagrees with me and condemns me I'm going to join this other church over here. No, rather, when you look in the NT it's very clear that it talks about the church in Rome, the church in Antioch, the church in Jerusalem…It refers to the fact that there is one church and that church has to have authority, and you're going up the chain of authority–especially if you bring two or three with you, what does it mean to take it to the church? Do you just get every other Christian around and you're like a mob of thousands of people? No, you're going to something authoritative that has apostolic succession behind it in order to resolve the dispute. That's the highest level for you to do to (27-29 min).

1. It's a semantic fallacy to suggest that because the word priest derives from presbyter, therefore 1C church presbyters were priests in the sacerdotal sense. In Catholicism, it acquires a technical sense according to Catholic ecclesiology. But it's anachronistic to read that back into NT polity and usage. 

2. He assumes that "bishop" and "presbyter" are separate church offices, with the episcopate as the higher office. Which disregards the arguments of Bible scholars that NT usage is fluid and interchangeable. These are variant designations for the same church office. NT polity hadn't hardened into the more specialized usage and hierarchical structure of Roman Catholic eccesiology.

3. Horn acts as though Mt 18:15-18 envisions an appellate process like the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. But in context the setting is a local church, and a judgment of excommunication is rendered by the congregation, not higher clergy in particular. 

John – The Man Who Saw

https://ratiochristi.org/blog/john-the-man-who-saw/

Abusing Peter's Weaknesses To Establish A Papacy

I want to expand on Steve's recent discussion of Luke 22:32 and the papacy.

The passage is addressing Peter's restoration after a fall, not some sort of strength he had as a Pope. The work Peter is described as doing, in strengthening his brethren, not only is common to all of the apostles (Acts 18:23), but is common to individuals of a lower rank in the church as well (Acts 15:32). It's not something unique to Peter, much less is it papal.

Much the same can be said of John 21:15-17, another passage often abused to argue for a papacy. John 21, like Luke 22, is addressing Peter's need for restoration, as reflected in the parallel between the three affirmations of love for Christ and Peter's previous three denials of Christ. And, as with Luke 22, what Peter is called to do in John 21 is not only common to the other apostles, but also to individuals of a lesser rank (Acts 20:28, 1 Peter 5:2).

Neither Luke 22 nor John 21 suggests that Peter had papal authority, much less that he would pass on such authority exclusively to a succession of bishops in Rome. It's perverse to take these passages about Peter's weakness and need for restoration and use them to claim that he was being given papal authority.

The Catholic abuse of Isaiah 22 is of a somewhat similar nature. I won't repeat everything I've said in past discussions about the passage. See the comments section of the thread here. As I explain there, if Catholics were consistent in their appeal to Isaiah 22, they would have to conclude that neither Peter nor his supposed successors have the attributes Catholics allege. So, whereas seeing a papacy in Luke 22 and John 21 involves unverifiable speculation, seeing a papacy in Matthew 16's use of Isaiah 22 is even worse, since papal authority isn't just absent from Isaiah 22, but is even contradicted.

What we have with these three passages is a couple that refer to Peter's need for restoration after a fall (Luke 22, John 21) and another that would give Peter and his successors sub-papal authority if the passage were applied consistently (Isaiah 22). In that sense, all three passages are about the weaknesses of Peter, but are being abused to argue that he has the strength of a Pope. The common thread is that some of the terminology and concepts used in each of these passages can be made to sound papal if taken out of context. But none of the passages imply a papacy when interpreted as we'd normally interpret a document.