Dale Tuggy, who I have listened to since 2013 on his over 200 podcast, who is also Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia, makes an interesting point on personhood in relation to the Trinity doctrine.
In his book, What is the Trinity, all he ask is to clearly define, unequivocally, The Trinity and all it's parts. "......Unable to pick, many theologians self-comfort with the falsehood that these differences about the number of divine selves are merely differences of emphasis. While there are differences of emphasis between various Trinitarian theologians, there are also substantial disagreements........Tuggy goes on to say: another device used to put these disagreements out of one's mind is to talk loudly and often about "the" doctrine of the Trinity, as something agreed on by all Christians, or nearly so. But the reality is more complex. The Trinity is either a self or not. It's a matter of logic that these can't both be true; there's exactly one divine self and there are exactly three divine selves."
"Until we decide what is meant by "Person" in the statement that "God is three Persons" we'll be unable to even search for reasons for or against, or to decide whether the claim (wich claim?) fits or misfits the Bible. One can't agree or disagree with an uninterpreted sentence. You may find such a sentence in your church's or denomination's creed, something like: The eternal triune God reveals Himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with distinct personal attributes, but without division of nature, essence or being." See the Southern Baptist Faith and Message, Section II
"Himself"."So, the triune God is a single self, not a "they." But also, each of these has his own "personal attributes." Are there then four divine selves here-God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit? Or do the three turn out to be ways the one divine self is? Or despite the capitalized pronoun, is the triune god really not a self, but rather a group community, or collective of selves? Are we to flee here to contradictions or to obfuscation? The statement is indeterminate; it's vague enough to generate an unruly mob of clashing interpretations."
So will the true God stand up. Is it the trinity? Father? Son? Holy Spirit? Do we have a Quaternity?
When praying do you pray to the Trinity? Who did Jesus say was the True God? And who was Jesus' God? John 17.3: And John 5.44 where Jesus refers to his father as the only God. Monou Theou.
Where does the Bible clearly articulate the doctrine of the Trinity? Where does the Bible say that Jesus has two natures but is only one "person," even though each nature has conflicting sets of attributes with the other? And where does the Bible articulate the trinitarian distinction between "person" and "being"?
Your author leans on Dale Tuggy’s dilemma—either the Trinity is “a self” or there are “three selves,” and since both can’t be true, the doctrine collapses. That framing assumes, without argument, that the only intelligible notion of “person” is the modern, psychological “self”—a center of consciousness numerically sealed off from any other. But the catholic doctrine never began with that definition and does not need it. “Person” in the classical, Nicene–Chalcedonian and Thomistic usage translates hypostasis: a subsistent relation within the one, simple, undivided divine essence (ousia). The Father is the unbegotten source, the Son is eternally begotten, the Spirit eternally proceeds; the relations are really distinct, the nature is really one. If you demand that “person” must mean “three independent psychological egos,” you will produce the very contradiction you then triumphantly refute—but it won’t be the Church’s teaching you have refuted; it will be your own caricature.
ReplyDeleteTuggy’s repeated question—“Is the triune God a single self or three selves?”—thus equivocates. When Christians say “God…Himself,” we are not smuggling in a fourth “divine self,” as if “Trinity” named one subject alongside Father, Son, and Spirit. “God” there denotes the one nature under which the three persons are co-equal and co-eternal; grammar follows usage: Scripture and liturgy ordinarily speak of God with singular pronouns because there is one essence, not because there is only one person. The same tradition that prays “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit” can also confess “He is God” without inventing a quaternity. The “He” tracks the unity of being; the threefold doxology tracks the distinction of persons. Refusing that semantic nuance is not philosophy; it is a category mistake.
You ask where Scripture “clearly articulates” the Trinity and the person–nature distinction, as if only a conciliar paragraph dropped verbatim into the New Testament would suffice. By that standard you would also have to discard “incarnation,” “original sin,” and even “monotheism” as unbiblical, since Scripture gives the realities and patterns before the Church forges technical terms. The apostolic data are not coy. There is one God by nature and worship (Deut 6:4; Isa 45:5). The Father is God. The Son is called God and does what only God does: He is “the Word” who “was with God and was God,” through whom “all things were made” (John 1:1–3); He bears the divine Name “I AM” (John 8:58), receives Thomas’s confession “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28), is “in the form of God” and equal with God (Phil 2:6), is the very “radiance of [God’s] glory” whom the Father addresses as “God” (Heb 1:3, 8), and is before and above creation as its maker and end (Col 1:15–17). The Spirit is not a mere force but personal and divine: He speaks and sends (Acts 13:2, 4), can be lied to and in that lying God is lied to (Acts 5:3–4), searches the depths of God and indwells as God (1 Cor 2:10–11; 3:16). Yet the three are distinguished without collapse: the Father sends the Son; the Son prays to the Father; the Spirit is “another Paraclete” (John 14–16). The baptismal and doxological formulas bind the three as one object of the Church’s life: “in the name [singular] of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19); “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ… the love of God… the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor 13:13). This is exactly the pattern the Fathers distilled: one nature, three persons.
DeleteJohn 17:3 and 5:44 are pressed as if they overturned the rest. In John 17:3 Jesus addresses the Father as “the only true God,” and in the same breath asks to be glorified “with the glory I had with you before the world existed” (17:5). A unitarian reading isolates verse 3 from verse 5 and from John’s prologue; a catholic reading takes all Johannine data together. To confess the Father as “the only true God” is not to exclude the consubstantial Son; it is to name the one God under the idiom of addressing the Father, the personal fount of deity. John himself calls the Son “the only-begotten God” (1:18, aweighty reading attested in the best manuscripts) and concludes, “This is the true God and eternal life”—immediately after speaking of the Son (1 John 5:20). The Church did not juggle contradictions; she refused to pit Scripture against itself. Likewise John 5:44’s “the only God” functions to deny rival glories, not to teach that the Son is a creature. The New Testament’s consistent monotheism includes the Son and Spirit within the identity of the one God, not outside it.
The complaint that the Bible “never says” Jesus has two natures united in one person mistakes later precision for invention. Scripture gives us one and the same Christ performing divine works and suffering human weakness. He stills storms by command and receives worship; He also hungers, grows, learns, and dies. He forgives sins by His own authority, yet He grows in wisdom and stature; He is “in the form of God,” yet “empties” Himself to take a servant’s form (Phil 2:6–7). Either you bifurcate Jesus into two subjects (a Nestorian move the New Testament will not let you make—note the one “I” who speaks), or you deny either His true deity or His true humanity. The catholic solution, hammered out precisely to avoid contradiction, is the hypostatic union: one divine person, the eternal Son, subsisting in two complete natures, divine and human. Apparent “conflicts” vanish once you respect the rule of non-contradiction under the Thomistic maxim secundum quid et simpliciter: a predicate can be truly affirmed of the one person according to one nature without denying its contrary according to the other nature. “God cannot die” simpliciter; “the Son of God died” according to the assumed passible human nature. Scripture itself practices this communicatio idiomatum: it is “the Lord of glory” who is crucified (1 Cor 2:8).
DeleteThe jab about prayer betrays unfamiliarity with Christian practice and texts. Christians ordinarily pray to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit because that is the economy revealed by Christ. But the New Testament itself shows address to the Son: Stephen prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59), the churches “call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:2), the cry “Maranatha—Come, Lord!” is addressed to Christ (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20). To address the Son is not to introduce a second god; it is to honor the Father who wills that “all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father” (John 5:23). Nor does catholic liturgy pray to a fourth thing called “the Trinity.” When the Church prays “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit” or “Most Holy Trinity,” she is addressing the one God in His tri-personal life, not positing a super-person above the three.
Finally, Tuggy’s insistence that Christians must first stipulate a univocal, analytic definition of “person” before we can even understand or evaluate the doctrine begs the question against the data we are trying to interpret. Scripture forced the Church to confess three who are each called and act as God, and yet God is one. The Cappadocians refined language to avoid both tritheism and modalism; Augustine and Aquinas showed why the divine “persons” are subsistent relations of origin, not parts of God or masks of one actor. This is not obfuscation; it is metaphysical hygiene in service of revelation. If you swap in a modern “self” theory and then declare the doctrine incoherent, you have merely changed the subject.
DeleteSo let the “true God stand up,” as you say. He has. He stands up in the baptismal waters of the Jordan where the Father speaks, the Son descends, and the Spirit rests; on the mountain where the Son shines with uncreated light while the Father’s voice is heard; in the apostolic benediction that binds the Church’s life to the threefold Name; at the empty tomb where the Lord of glory, crucified and risen, pours out the Spirit of God. The catholic doctrine does not add a fourth to these three, nor divide the one God into three gods, nor collapse the three into one role-playing actor. It renders, with philosophical care and fidelity to Scripture, what the apostles handed on: one God in three persons—without confusion, without separation, equal in glory, co-eternal in majesty.