The Evangelical Universalist Forum

JRP addresses recent metaphysical crits of trinitarianism

•• Why could the portion of Christ that was YHWH not be the Father in distinction from Christ the Son? ••

Well, among other reasons, then this would not be “the portion of Christ”! If Christ is not YHWH, then stick with the notion that Christ is not YHWH.

That being said, there is nothing logically incoherent about the Father cooperating with a human internally, either; or maybe even dwelling in a human (as the tabernacle did not become God by virtue of God’s dwelling in the tabernacle, leaving aside the question of what was happening otherwise with God dwelling in the tabernacle.)

This proposition is not really an argument against trinitarian theism, though; it is only a different propositional option. Whether scriptural testimony is giving evidence of it, in exclusion of other options, and whether metaphysically this kind of thing is what we ought to be expecting instead, are further questions for analysis. But if the answers either way turn out to be something else, then there isn’t any point coming back to this as an option.

(Although in any case I would recommend against identifying any portion “of Christ” as YHWH if there is also supposed to be a hard “the Father not the Son” distinction concerning YHWH and if “the Son” is supposed to refer to Christ. Notably, this particular critic usually tries to have “the Son” actually mean “the Father” instead!–which at least has the novelty value of avoiding this counter-criticism. But it also voids this critical attempt–the critic cannot have it both ways.)

•• God is admittedly His own Word. Jesus is admittedly the Word of God. Jesus is not Himself God Himself. ••

The relation of these propositions, if all three are trying to be affirmed (as one recent critic does), bears no further comment, I think.

Trying to get around this by elsewhere identifying the Word as not being Jesus, but as being the Father instead (or the power of the Father or anyway not Jesus) is at best self-refuting. It would be better to be consistent and deny that God is His own Word, and/or that Jesus is the Word of God. (But even some non-trinitarians agree that one or, along with trinitarians, even both these concepts are scripturally testified.)

•• Multiple titles or descriptions of God do not of themselves mean that God is multiple persons. ••

Trinitarians agree with that, actually. But this goes back to a scriptural-exegetical argument, concerning whether there are instances where multiple descriptions of God also involve multiple persons, not merely modalistic descriptions (which trinitarians as well as practically all other Christians also affirm are found in scripture).

•• The offspring of a cat is the same as a cat; the offspring of a fly is the same as a fly. Jesus was the offspring of God, therefore Jesus…••

…is the same kind of thing as God the Father, by this argument! But this critic was trying to say that Jesus was only like us, in being sons of God, i.e. not really the same kind of thing that God is. To be “just like God in every detail” would be to be self-existent as only God is, to have honor due only to God and not to any creature, to be the creator of all not-God creation as only God is, to be unchangingly God as only God is. But this critic denies any of this is or was true of Jesus, ascribing those characteristics properly to the Father instead (and then calling the Father “the Son of God” in order to make that synch up somehow with the Son obviously having those qualities in scripture).

•• God could not act in Nature, as an incarnated human for example, without ceasing to be fully God. ••

This objection is often put a little differently; but when the underlying gist is spelled out like this, it becomes obvious that this kind of principle argument would prove far too much: it would mean that God cannot act in regard to Nature at all! An atheist or a cosmological dualist or maybe a minimal deist could try this argument, but not any supernaturalistic theist who affirms that God continually sustains the existence of Nature and so Who can act in regard to Nature–in other words, a God Who can do miracles.

The simple answer to this objection, then, is that if God can do miracles in Nature (including sustaining Nature’s existence at all) without ceasing to be fully God, then God can act within Nature as an incarnated human without ceasing to be fully God. The more complex answer to this question involves going back much further metaphysically than any question of God incarnating Himself, though.

(Indeed, it goes back to the question of God’s relationship to the evident system of Nature at all, specifically God’s creation of Nature and what God would have to do to accomplish this. But while this is a very worthwhile discussion, and one with vast relevance to what we could principally expect afterward of an incarnation of God, it’s far too lengthy for me to summarize in a comment.)

••The Father was causally prior to the Son, but not temporally prior. The early Christians taught that the Father begat His Son “as the first of His acts of old”, and that He begat Him “before all ages”. Consequently, the Son cannot be eternally begotten but was begotten at a particular natural time, specifically as the first event of natural time.••

Over in the complaints based on scriptural data, I have noted that the scriptural data does not indicate that the Son is only begotten at any one particular point in natural time. Be that as it may.

From a metaphysical perspective, this complaint would be answered after a consideration of the existence of God: does God merely exist statically, not even dependent upon His own action for existence? Or does God depend upon His own action for existence, being thus actively self-generating, self-begetting and self-begotten? If the latter is true, and if this involves a personal distinction between God self-begetting and God self-begotten, then the answer is made in a fashion consonant with trinitarian (or at least binitarian) theism. If the former is true, then something else other than trinitarian (or at least binitarian) theism might be true. (In fact I would argue that an intrinsically ‘static’ God would not only be tantamount to atheism but would not be intrinsically capable of being the ground of the behavioral existence around us, especially including our own action capabilities.)

The issue would have to be carefully hashed out at length over a number of connected and progressing topics; which I don’t know how to summarize here for a comment, other than to give an inkling of how the logical resolution ends up running.

•• How can the Son be eternally begotten “today” and also have this begetting be specially associated with the Resurrection and/or the Ascension? ••

This was something I never understood myself, until I spent several months meticulously working my way forward through a progressing metaphysical argument arriving at trinitarian theism (though this element doesn’t require reference to a 3rd Person of God). This leaves me at something of a disadvantage: trying to give people who haven’t gone through the same exercise with the same results, an idea of how I found the topics to link together.

The most I can say for now, is that I found that the submission of God self-begotten to God self-begetting completes the circuit of God’s self-existence; while the Father isn’t begotten from the Son, the unity of God’s own self-existence does depend on the choice of the Son to submit to the Father in love. As Jesus says in the scriptures (especially in GosJohn), the Son goes forth from the Father and returns to the Father. Analogically, the raising of the Son by the Father becomes linked to the Son being the very power of God the Father, seated analogically (on a single throne, notice) at God’s right hand. The Ascension of the risen Christ fulfills in a ‘minor key’ what the Father is always doing for the faithful Son in the faithfulness of the Son.

The same is true of the Resurrection, but here we begin delving into the mystery of creation itself. No system exists beside God (ontologically speaking, at the same level of ultimate existence) for God to create into, and God cannot even create a not-God system of that sort without there being a shared overarching system on which they both must be dependent. Whatever not-God entity or system that God generates must be wholly dependent upon God; and in the absence of any field of endeavor already existing in some independent fashion, the field must be made by God through God’s own self-sacrifice.

Putting it another way, any action of God at all apart from the generation of Himself, God, must necessarily involve the generation of that which is not-God: creation, distinct from begetting. And this will necessarily involve the willing self-sacrifice of the action of God. The Son’s eternal sacrifice to the Father for the sake of the unity of God’s own self-existence, obtains its first variation in the Son’s sacrifice as the foundation of the world, the natural not-God system of reality. It is a different descent into death; and from death, into life, not for God (that eternal action hasn’t ceased and still continues) but for that-which-is-not-God.

The circuit of this action must be fulfilled, not so that the not-God creation may become God: for that would be to undo the creation altogether! But it must be fulfilled so that God may be all in all; as fundamentally God already is, immanently as well as transcendently. But the raising and imbuing of non-sentient created material into derivative sentience is the first major step in this direction; and, where the derivative sentiences may rebel, their restitution and reconciliation must be acted toward as well (without merely un-creating them). Whether there is rebellion or not, however, it makes intrinsic sense for the Son, the self-begotten action of God, to participate even more intimately in this process than, as joint creator with the Father, the Son is already doing. The incarnation, the sacrificial death, and the resurrection of the Son Incarnate, fits into this larger thematic action of the Son. Where the sin of derivative children of God is a reality, this sacrifice of the Son will not only be submitted to be an occasion, the chief enactment, of such sin (for in sinning we abuse the grace of God in any case, which He permits for sake of His love for us); but the sacrifice and raising of the Son will be the cardinal point, the turning point, the deepest action of God, of His total action toward the fulfillment of creation: that God will be all in all (without the all simply un-creating back into God).

Once I realized this, then I suddenly understood why St. Paul could be inspired to say that the Resurrection and/or Ascension of the Son could be considered specially as the begetting of the Son “today” by the Father.

(The mythopoeic part of me also recognized the propriety of the Son being placed in the heart of the earth and then rising, as a completion of the “begetting” of the Son. For just the same had been done, in principle, in the womb of His mother. Even the descent of the sun beneath the land as the start of the Jewish day, in apparent contravention to all visual logic, fits this theme. The Day of the Lord has begun, even though we still have all the darkness of death yet to live and die through. But God Himself goes before us. God Himself goes down into the dust, dying as far as any person can die, not first so that we will not die, but so that our deaths may be like His.)

•• The notion of three persons as one God is logically impossible unless at least two of the divine persons possess personal attributes that are not divine. ••

Which would hardly be a solution! (If two of the divine persons are not in fact divine then the notion of three persons as one God would be logically possible??)

It would be better to believe that God exists as a person with two other non-divine persons who are not one God with God, than to believe that two non-divine persons can be one God together with God.

The notion of three persons as one God might be (I expect is) mathematically impossible; but the relation is not a mathematical one, any more than the relation of various 2D planes as a 3D prism is a mathematical one. 3D objects are not comprised by adding up or multiplying together any number of 2D planes. The joint relationship of the planes is not illogical, though. (This reply is not in itself an argument that the trinitarian joint relationship is logical, of course.)

•• Trinitarians commit idolatry by worshiping someone, Jesus Christ, who was and is not God. ••

Actually I would agree that if the latter part of this sentence is true, then so is the first part, and so we should stop doing that.

What I find both surprising and disturbing, speaking precisely as a devout monotheist, is how often I find Christians who deny the full divinity of Jesus Christ himself, personally, nevertheless agreeing (and even insisting) that we should worship him, personally, with the worship due to the one true God alone!

But then, this level of worship unique to God alone is routinely required of Jesus in the New Testament; as well as required of the Angel of the Presence Who is Himself YHWH in the Jewish canon. So I can understand why scripturally they believe they ought to be doing so anyway. To me, however, this is a key identity clue about Who Jesus is supposed to be, scripturally speaking.

That topic is a scriptural analysis issue. My point here, metaphysically, is that worshiping someone less than God with the worship due to God alone is, I completely agree, mistaken idolatry at best. Whereas worshiping multiple Gods as worthy of ultimate worship would be an affirmation of bi or tri or anyway some kind of multi-theism not monotheism.

Trinitarian theists, by contast, are not tri-theists: we resolutely disaffirm worship of three distinct Gods; although (unlike modalists) we do resolutely affirm the proper worship of three distinct Persons Who are One God.

Jason, thank you for addressing my question!

However, you misunderstood my question. Let me clarify.

If all three persons of the Godhead are God, then this neccessarily means that each of the three persons possesses all characteristics of God. What then could possibly distinguish one person of the Godhead from the other(s)?

My apologies for misunderstanding the question.

But I did write at some length above about the multipersonal distinction of a self-begetting and self-begotten singular ultimate entity. (Mostly setting aside the topic of the 3rd Person as requiring further discussion.)

The difference is perhaps in the direction of the logical approach. When I go through the metaphysical analysis, I discover first that I should believe in one ultimate Independent Fact (whether naturalistic or supernaturalist, theistic or atheistic) upon which all reality must depend for existence.

Then I discover that I should believe this IF to be rationally active (or actively rational, to put it the other way around). I thus accept theism to be true and reject atheism. But naturalism or supernaturalism might still be true.

The next issue I come to doesn’t solve for naturalism or supernaturalism either way (that comes later), but involves how a rationally active ultimate existence ultimately exists: by rationally acting. (The alternative, that this Independent Fact exists merely statically, not even self-causingly, runs into conflict with prior portions of my analysis, for reasons I cannot easily summarize here.) Put a little overbriefly, though, this self-generating action of God results in a paradoxical distinction that would be unique to the finally active cause of all existence: there is a conceptual action of cause and effect which, at this ultimate and finally irreducible level of existence, are effectively the same thing. God is both self-begetting and self-begotten. But this doesn’t mean that God, being self-begotten, is not God!–anymore than God, being self-begetting, would somehow thus not be God.

Consequently, since God, as an active sentience, is a personal entity (though not in the limited way that I am a personal entity, but upon which, or upon Whom, rather my own rational characteristics ultimately depend for existence), I thus am led to simultaneously affirm that God Self-begetting is a Person, and God Self-begotten is a Person.

(Note: at this point I’m working from some unpublished material that would otherwise fit into Section Three of SttH, the free postings of which are linked to in all my signatures.)

So far this might only be a modalistic doctrine. What God most fundamentally acts to do, in self-generational existence, must be fully and completely Himself; but this might only mean that we should treat this characteristic of God (a Person is self-begetting, a Person is self-begotten) as something of a useful legal fiction, the way we might consider a self-existent equation to be two distinct formulas because the formulas (though they are ultimately the same) ‘look’ different. Thus for certain purposes we might use or refer to the formula on the left side of the equal sign, while for other purposes we might be better served by referring to the formula on the right. The statement of principle would in either case be ultimately the same, but we might find different valid uses for different expressions of the statement. To this extent, enriching my perception of God by recognizing a ‘unity in multiplicity’ might be quite useful to me (the subjective observer); but by itself this doesn’t make it necessarily more than a convenient description.

However, now we come to the philosophical problem of consciousness. We have discovered that it is inconsistent to claim that a person is ‘conscious’ without some existent distinction for the person to be perceptive of for purposes of self-identification.

The problem then becomes this: if I take my own rationality seriously (according to a previous analysis which I have not summarized here), then I will fetch up sooner or later at the necessary existence of a sentient Independent Fact: God. It would be inconsistent (I agree with the atheists here) to say that God has these properties and yet is not conscious at that state of His existence where nothing else has been created. And I further agree (again with the atheists) that without a distinctive difference of states, it is nonsensical to say that God could be ‘conscious’. If I deduct that God exists, however, (with an inference such that I cannot feasibly believe God doesn’t exist without undermining any argument I might make on any topic), then I should be expecting some kind of real Personal distinction to obtain in the self-existence of God.

And the begettor/begotten distinction satisfies this requirement in the most basic manner possible; for differentiation requires some type of action by the IF, and there can be no more basic action than self-generation.

Thus I conclude that the most fundamental action of God, God’s self-generation, eternally introduces into His own most basic level of reality a true distinction of some sort; one which is intimately connected to the relationship between God’s action of self-generation and the result of self-generation which is He Himself God.

The simplest possible way of stating this would be: God the Begettor is in some true sense one distinctive Person, and God the Begotten is in some true sense another distinctive Person. The Father/Son imagery turns out to be increasingly more accurate. God, at His most fundamental level of reality, is first and foremost a Unity of Persons–one distinctively Begetting and one distinctively Begotten, both of them constituting a common ‘substance’ (so to speak) of existence.

Can I mentally picture this? No, and I doubt there is any properly full analogy for it either. But (just as in quantum physics, for example) I am not worried about a lack of totally accurate mental imagery, as long as the underlying precepts (the “logical math”, so to speak) remain self-consistent. The Father/Son imagery, as far as I can tell, is adequate: God the Father eternally begets God the Son, Who eternally submits in self-consistency back to the Father. The Son is of one mind with the Father and does the Father’s will, and indeed does nothing except what the Father does, being the very action of God Himself. The Son may be said to be dependent upon the Father, as God is dependent upon Himself for His very existence. The active sentience of God, however, requires for God’s own self-consciousness, that this unity of Persons be true not only modally (it would be at least that), but as a real distinction of Persons, at the level of God’s eternal self-sufficient existence.

(I’ve had to skip over a few important topics, such as why distinction-of-an-other-for-self-consciousness would also be true of God and not only a limitation of derivative sentience such as my own. Consider such things to be topics for further discussion. :sunglasses: )

The second to fourth century understanding of the begetting of the Son, was that the Father begat Him before all ages as His first act. This was understood to be a single act not an “eternal begetting”. Even the original Nicene Creed of 325 A.D. states that Jesus, the Son of God was “begotten before all ages”. It identifies the Father as the “one God” and His only begotten Son as the “one Lord”. There is not a hint of Trinitarianism in that creed. Yet the creed affirms that Jesus was “Very God of Very God”. This is consistent with second century Christian belief. Dogs beget dogs and the offspring is canine. Man begets man, and the offspring is human. God begets God, and the offspring is divine.

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages,
only begotten, that is, of the substance of the Father; God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father,
Through whom all things were made; both things in heaven and things on earth;
Who for us people, and for our salvation, came down, and was incarnate,
and was made man;
He suffered, and was raised again the third day,
And ascended into heaven
And he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead,
And we believe in the Holy Spirit,
And in one baptism of repentance for deliverance from sins,
And in one holy universal Church,
And in the resurrection of the flesh,
And in everlasting life.

I believe that single act of begetting marked the beginning of time. Though Arius, in one of his letters, referred to Jesus as “fully God”, he was mistaken in his statement, “There was a time at which the Son did not exist.” There wasn’t such a time, for there was no time before the beginning of time. The true concept of the beginning of time implies no “before”. Yet the Father caused the begetting of the Son.

One wise man put it quite succinctly, "The Father was causally, but not temporally prior to the Son.

According to Jerome, “The world groaned and marvelled at finding itself Arian.”

Jerome thought anyone who disagreed with his “eternal begetting” concept was an “Arian”. Jerome used this appellation for Eusebius of Caesarea (the church historian who was with the universal church of his day) and for even Origen (who died before Arius was born).

Fine, but if the Father possesses an attribute that the Son does not, and vice versa, then does this mean that both the Father and the Son lack the fullness of divine attributes?

Paidion,

My comments to your remarks about the history of “orthodoxy” are found back in the thread “Just what IS ‘orthodox Christian theism’?”, at this entry. I didn’t address them here, in order to keep the thread topic on track.

The comment about “one God, one Lord” is best addressed by reference to my analytical digest, which can be found as an attached doc file here. A much briefer general discussion of a common scriptural complaint on this topic can be found here in the scriptural crit thread.

The kind-from-kind comment was briefly addressed here in the metaphysical crit thread (though from another critic); also here.

A strong concern of mine regarding the religious application of these two topics was given here in the metaphysical crit thread.

The “begotten today” comment was addressed here in the metaphysical crit thread; and here in the scriptural crit thread.

Incidentally, it wasn’t Eusebius the famous church historian who was an Arian; that was a different Eusebius from another district. (I’ve mixed them up, too, before; an easy mistake to make. I assure you, I would actually be kind of amused for the guy who hagiologized and later baptized Constantine on his deathbed, and who wrote the first church history, to have been an Arian. {wry g} For one thing it would add a bit more explanation to why Constantine’s successors were universally Arian out through Julian the Apostate.)

JRP, did you see my last post?

Huh… yeah, and I wrote a rather in-depth reply about how it depends on what is meant by divine characteristics. Weird… I could have sworn I posted it, but it isn’t here in the thread or in my saved drafts either. (Or in the tempfile docs that I often use for composition offline.)

Great; now I’ll have to recreate whatever the heck it was I said! :laughing: I’ll try to post up a new version of it later, but first I’m going to look around and try to figure out if I somehow sent it elsewhere on the forum by accident… (is that even possible??)

Gabe,

Well I never did find the thing (I suspect I erased it from my saved drafts, thinking it was an extra of my link-pointing reply to Paidion), so I hope this recreation will be as good as the first one I did. :laughing:

This would be a problem if God was supposed to be constituted of parts, but the relationship isn’t like that. God’s self-existence (if positive aseity trinitarianism is true) involves being self-generationally existent, self-begetting and self-begotten. The self-begotten God still is God; the self-begetting God still is God. (The God proceeding from this self-generation still is God, too.) There is only one “substance” (in later philosophical parlance), not multiple substances, comprising the relationship.

The characteristics unique to ultimate divinity are ontological ones: all reality exists (and so depends upon) the action of this ultimate entity. (This would still be true if atheism, whether naturalistic or supernaturalistic, was true, by the way; although the term “action” would then have to mean merely generic “behavior” at best.) The Father and the Son and the Spirit all share in that ontological superiority in regard to the rest of reality. The relative hierarchy among themselves not only doesn’t compromise the ultimate ontological finality of God, their hierarchical interactions (at least between the 1st and 2nd Persons, God Self-begetting and God Self-begotten) actually constitute the fundamental reality of God (considered as a singularly final entity, the Independent Fact as I tend to put it). Without that interaction, eternally acting to fulfill fair-togetherness among the Persons, God Himself (substantially speaking) would not exist, and neither would the rest of reality.

Which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, has massively huge ramifications about what we can expect from God toward derivative persons, including in regard to salvation from sin. When nominal trinitarians have to start denying doctrines of orthodox trinitarianism (and even of supernaturalistic theism more basically), in order to keep a doctrine of non-universalism, then I for one am not remotely surprised.

(That probably wasn’t put as well as I did the first time I wrote it out, but… :wink: )

The scriptural digest I posted up (see first comment in this thread for a link now) demonstrates that the scriptures testify to the Father and the Son (and the Spirit, though with a few interesting omissions–the Spirit is never shown on the single throne of the Father and the Son for example) each not only doing the deeds archetypically unique to YHWH in scripture, but also having the honor and the authority and the names and (as a metaphor of the ontology) the seat uniquely due to God and to God alone; while nevertheless being distinct Persons in relation to one another. Which is exactly what my metaphysical rationale leads me to expect. (Aside from never being shown on the throne of God, so far as I can find, the Spirit doesn’t have much to do with the creation of Creation, either; but on the other hand has a lot to do with the creation of persons within Creation. Which is something my metaphysical rationale also leads me to expect.)

Hmmmm…

If I am following your logic (and I sense that I may not be!), it seems that you are proposing that none of the divine Persons is fully God. What am I missing?

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this. Today is my day to manfully attempt catching up on back-posts. :laughing:

No, each of the divine Persons, by the description I gave above, is still ultimately God. “The Father and the Son and the Spirit all share in that ontological superiority in regard to the rest of reality.”

I was stressing the unity of the singular “substance” (as philosophers tend to call it). It isn’t supposed to be three Persons with three instances of a type of substance; that would be cosmological tri-theism at best. (Maybe mere polytheism!) Instead I wrote, “their hierarchical interactions actually constitute the fundamental reality of God (considered as a singularly final entity).” Without the active cooperative interaction of at least two of the Persons (God self-begetting and God self-begotten), God’s own ‘nature’ (to put it a little differently than I was doing before) would not itself exist.

This concept also has to be distinguished from the concept of God being composed of multiple parts, none of them fully God in themselves.

The doctrine of divine simplicity (which is technically held by any naturalistic or supernaturalistic theist per se) can mean several things. But it’s always going to mean that there are not multiple Independent Facts (for example three Gods Who are all three IFs, i.e. cosmological tri-theism); and it’s also always going to mean that the IF isn’t composed of particulate entities less than It Itself (which among other problems would mean that the so-called ‘IF’ actually exists within a field of superordinate reality, and thus cannot be the true IF. This would also be a chief problem for cosmological tri-theism, in a slightly different way.)

The composition of the “orthodox Trinity” isn’t that of either of those concepts. And, personally, I have found that the concept of self-generation helps me avoid thinking in terms of composite particular structure. It isn’t three Ultimate Gods being put together as one Team of three Ultimate Gods; and it isn’t three lesser gods being put together to form one Ultimate God. (VOLTRON!!! :mrgreen: ) It’s “very God of very God”, as one creedal translation puts it.

That’s a nicely succinct phrase, because it gets in the generative begetting (“of”), and the identity of both begettor and begotten (“very God”) while also getting in a distinction (not merely “very God” but “very God of very God”). The ultimate God is ultimately of God: active self-existence.