Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology

Thomas McCall, Thomas H. McCall

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780802862709
• eBook ISBN: 9781467463324
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book breaks new ground in bringing together the work of some significant systematic and philosophical theologians on the doctrine of the Trinity. Theologians and analytic philosophers of religion have both done substantive work on the Trinity -- but have done so in isolation from one another.
In  Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Thomas H. McCall creatively engages such philosophers of religion as Richard Swinburne and Brian Leftow and such influential theologians as Jürgen Moltmann, Robert Jenson, and John Zizioulas. Among all the currently available books on the doctrine of the Trinity, no other book brings analytic philosophers of religion into such direct conversation with mainstream theologians on this score.

SECTION ONE

Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism?

CHAPTER ONE

Which Trinity? The Doctrine of the Trinity in Contemporary Philosophical Theology

The “threeness-oneness problem” of the Trinity is well known.¹ And it is, as Jeffrey E. Brower and Michael C. Rea point out, “a deep and difficult problem.”² The problem is not simply that there is mystery here — if the doctrine of the Trinity is true, after all, we should hardly be surprised that it is mysterious. The problem is that the doctrine seems to be logically inconsistent and thus necessarily false.

Furthermore, the conundrum arises at the very heart of the Christian faith. Christians, along with other monotheists, believe that there is exactly one God. Christians also believe that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. They believe further that the Father is not the Son, nor is the Son or the Father the Holy Spirit. As the venerable Athanasian Creed puts it, “So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; and yet they are not three Gods, but one God.” Belief in both the distinctness and divinity of the three persons, on one hand, and belief in the oneness or unity of God, on the other hand, are essential to orthodox Christian belief.

Systematic theology of recent vintage has done surprisingly little to address the dilemma. Given that many of these theologians criticize the traditional (especially Latin) formulations, it is both surprising and disappointing that they have not set themselves to the task of addressing the problem. Fortunately, however, philosophers of religion working in the so-called analytic tradition do address this issue, and in what follows I shall offer a descriptive overview of this work. What follows is far from exhaustive, but influential figures and important trends, as well as the major criticisms of the various proposals, are surveyed.

I. Social Trinitarianism

The work of Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., and Richard Swinburne has been especially influential in the advocacy of “Social Trinitarianism” (ST).³ It has also drawn serious and probing criticism, and this criticism has itself engendered further defenses of ST. We shall explore some of the more prominent of these in turn.

A. “Early ST”: Plantinga and Swinburne⁴

Usually drawing inspiration from the Cappadocian theologians of the fourth century, ST proponents conceive of the Holy Trinity according to the analogy of a society or family of three human persons; they are often said to “start from” plurality and then struggle to provide an adequate account of divine oneness or unity. As Plantinga describes it, ST is any theory of the Trinity that satisfies these conditions: “the theory must have Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct centers of consciousness … (and) Father, Son, and Spirit must be tightly enough related to each other so as to render plausible” claims to monotheism.⁵

Plantinga begins his argument for ST with materials drawn directly from the biblical sources. He argues that Paul and the other earliest Christians include Jesus in their prayers and even in the Shema (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:6). For Paul, Plantinga says, “Jesus Christ is claimed to be equal with God, to be a cosmic ruler and savior, a person in whom the fullness of the Godhead lodges. He is a person, indeed, to whom Paul and other Christians pray” (p. 24). Plantinga thinks that “through John’s Gospel runs an even richer vein for the church’s doctrine of the Trinity — a deep, wide, and subtle account of divine distinction within unity” (p. 25). For here in the Fourth Gospel we find the basis for what will later become known as a theory or doctrine of perichoresis (where each divine person is said to be “in” the other), and here we see that “the primal unity of Father, Son, and Paraclete is revealed, exemplified, and maybe partly constituted by common will, work, word, and knowledge among them, and by their reciprocal loving and glorifying” (p. 25).

Plantinga is convinced that reading the Fourth Gospel as a source of Trinitarian theology forces the theologian to rethink strong doctrines of divine simplicity. Rather than understanding the Athanasian Creed to be saying that the divine persons are each identical to the divine essence (but somehow not to one another), Plantinga suggests that a reading of the creed that maintains “some continuity with the Fourth Gospel presentation” will take the creed to be saying that the persons are “wholly divine” (p. 27). And since “simplicity theories are negotiable in ways that Pauline and Johannine statements are not,” then we should be willing to adjust (or even abandon) simplicity doctrine for the sake of Trinitarian theology that is grounded in and arises from Scripture (p. 39). And since such a robust doctrine of the Trinity is what arises from a natural reading of Hebrews, Paul, and John, then we are left with ST.

Plantinga’s ST proposal is then that

the Holy Trinity is a divine, transcendent society or community of three fully personal and fully divine entities: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit or Paraclete. These three are wonderfully united by their common divinity, that is, by the possession of each of the whole generic divine essence … the persons are also unified by their joint redemptive purpose, revelation, and work. Their knowledge and love are directed not only to their creatures, but also primordially and archetypally to each other. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father … the Trinity is thus a zestful community of divine light, love, joy, mutuality, and verve. (pp. 27-28)

Plantinga makes it plain that each divine person is a distinct center of consciousness and will, but he also is at pains to insist that while each person is genuinely (numerically) distinct, the divine persons are not separate or autonomous: “in the divine life there is no isolation, no insulation, no secretiveness, no fear of being transparent to another.” Thus he says that we should “resist every Congregational theory of trinity membership,” for the divine persons share much more than a generic substance and a decision to get along together. For in addition to the generic divine essence, each divine person bears “a much closer relation to each other as well — a derivation or origin relation that amounts, let us say, to a personal essence” (p. 28). This “mysterious in-ness or oneness relation in the divine life is short of personal identity, but much closer than mere membership in a class” (pp. 28-29). So each divine person possesses the whole generic divine essence, and each person possesses a personal essence as well. The personal essences distinguish each person from the others, but both the generic essence and the personal essences unify the persons. “The generic essence assures that each person is fully and equally divine. The personal essences, meanwhile, relate each person to the other two in unbreakable love and loyalty” (p. 29).

It should be clear that Plantinga conceives that the divine persons are persons who are really distinct; they are agents who are (or have) distinct centers of consciousness and will. But they are also still one God, and Plantinga points to three ways that proponents of ST “may cling to respectability as monotheists”: they may say that there is only one God in the sense that the New Testament often uses the term, that is, as the “peculiar designator of the Father … [there is] only one God in that sense of God” (p. 31). Or if we use the name God to refer to the generic divine essence, there is only one God in that sense of the term. Finally, “God is properly used as designator of the whole Trinity — three persons in their peculiar relations with each other.” Each of these ways, Plantinga concludes, is “perfectly standard and familiar in the Christian tradition. And in each case, social trinitarianism emerges as safely monotheistic” (p. 31).

But Plantinga worries further about charges of tritheism. He offers three lines of defense against such charges. The first is this: “to say that the Father, Son, and Spirit are the names of distinct persons in the full sense of person scarcely makes one a tritheist” (p. 34). Here Plantinga appears to rely upon both the recognition that such terms as “person” and “tritheism” are understood in particular contexts (rather than in a historical or intellectual vacuum) and his efforts at demonstrating that “such a claim makes oneself an ally with the best-developed biblical presentation on the issue and with three-quarters of the subsequent theological tradition.”

Plantinga next argues that the classical tritheist heresy is specifiable: it is Arianism. According to Arianism, the Son and Spirit are not homoousios with the Father; they do not share the divine essence (generic or otherwise). And since “what is heretical is belief in three ontologically graded distinct persons” rather than distinct persons simpliciter, ST can readily “affirm the standard trinitarian tradition” (p. 34).

But perhaps, a critic might aver, ST has only avoided one kind of tritheism to fall into another kind (albeit one less specifiable). Plantinga’s third line of defense then addresses the concern that he has escaped Arian tritheism only to run aground on the shoals of another version. Here he relies upon his account of the personal relations (that amount to personal essences) of interdependence and loyal love: “just as it is part of the generic divine nature to be everlasting, omnipotent, faithful, loving, and the like, so also it is part of the personal nature of each trinitarian person to be bound to the other two in permanent love and loyalty. Loving respect for the others is a personal essential characteristic of each member of the Trinity,” and although each divine person has generic aseity with respect to creation, “within the Trinity each essentially has interdependence, agapic regard for the other, bonded fellowship” (p. 36). So his third line of defense, he says, “comes, then, to this: If belief in three autonomous persons or three independent persons amounts to tritheism, the social analogy fails to qualify. For its trinitarian persons are essentially and reciprocally dependent” (p. 37).

In the original (1977) edition of The Coherence of Theism, Richard Swinburne mounted an argument that there could be only one divine individual. He later came to see that this argument was “unsound,” and endorsed a robust version of ST.⁶ Swinburne is well aware of the challenges posed to the doctrine, and he works hard to defend its coherence. He is critical of attempts to apply the logic of relative identity to the doctrine of the Trinity, for he worries both that the philosophical objections to relative identity are compelling and that such a strategy takes us to the place where “we deny any clear content to the doctrine of the Trinity at all” (p. 188). So Swinburne pursues an ST account, but he wants one that is able to repel charges of tritheism. He does not think that the assertions of theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann amount to “an adequate account of what binds the members of the Trinity together” (p. 189 n. 26). He wants to present a Trinitarian theory that allows for both intelligibility and consistency with the creeds. These desiderata lead him to conclude that any charitable reading of traditional, creedal orthodoxy will not take the creeds to be saying something as obviously outrageous as they would be if they were claiming both that there are three divine individuals and that there is only one divine individual. Swinburne reads the deus (theos) of the creeds differently where it refers to the divine persons than he does where it “is said that there are not three dei but one deus. Unless we do this, it seems to me that the traditional formulas are self-contradictory. If we read all occurrences of deus as occurrences of the same referring expression, the Athanasian Creed then asserts that Father, Son, and Spirit are each of them the same individual thing, and also that they have different properties, for example, the Father begets but is not begotten” (p. 186). And since this obviously violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals, then such an interpretation cannot possibly be correct: “this is not possible; if things are the same, they must have all the same properties” (p. 186). No charitable reading of the creeds will conclude that they are claiming something so palpably incoherent and obviously false, so Trinity doctrine must give up on either ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section One: Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism?
• Section Two: The Kingdom of the Trinity
• Section Three: The Future of Trinitarian Theology