Justified True Belief

(●) The one God is not a single self: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three someones. + Trinitarians agree that God is one and that he is Father, Son, and Spirit. Where they part company is on the count of selves. One party says three, three who each say "I" and mean it. The other says one, a single divine mind and a single divine will, with the persons being something thinner than three selves: subsisting relations on the older account, one self living three overlapping lives on the newest. The one-self answer is the one refused. Nothing in the case touches the count of Gods, which every side puts at one. What is at stake is whether the praying, the sending, and the forsaking in the New Testament are dealings between two parties or something a single self can carry out alone. Who holds what, on the one-self view: - Support: Thomas Aquinas gave it its most careful form, and Brian Leftow is its leading defender now. - Oppose: Tertullian and the Cappadocian fathers argued for three selves, and William Hasker and William Lane Craig press that case today. The argument that follows refutes it.

(P1) A person is a center of self-consciousness, intentionality, and will. + Christians who confess the Trinity divide over one question: how many someones there are in God. Social Trinitarianism answers three, and Anti-Social Trinitarianism answers one, meaning a single divine mind and a single divine will, with the three persons being something other than three someones. (1) A person is whoever can say "I" and mean it. - Think of a toddler around her second birthday. Put a smudge of lipstick on her forehead, stand her in front of a mirror, and instead of reaching for the glass she reaches for her own face. She has worked out that the girl in the mirror is her. - That is what the word "person" is reaching for, and it comes in three parts, each of them belonging to a who rather than a what. - Self-consciousness is the first: not merely being awake and aware, but being aware of yourself as yourself. A cat asleep on a windowsill is conscious. It does not lie there wondering whether it has been a good cat. - Intentionality is the second, and philosophers use the word in an odd way that simply has to be learned, because it has nothing to do with doing something on purpose. It means the aboutness of a mind. You never merely believe; you believe that the milk has gone off. - Will is the third, and the plainest of the three: the power to settle on something and then do it. The toddler's hand coming up to her own forehead is will, small and early. (2) The God of Scripture is a person in exactly that sense. - He says "I," and he says it as a name. "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14) is not a description of a force at work in the world. It is what someone says when someone else asks him who he is. - He knows his own mind and he carries it out. "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose," says the God who declares the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10). - This is why prayer is possible at all. You can ask a person for something and be told yes, or no, or not yet. Nobody petitions gravity. (3) The church refused the thinner meaning of the word. - The Latin persona began life as the mask an actor held up in front of his face, and behind three masks there is one actor. If that is all "person" means here, then God played Father, then Son, then Spirit, one part after another, and nobody ever met more than one of him. That view has a name, modalism, from "modes," and the church threw it out in the third century. - Writing against a modalist named Praxeas around AD 213, Tertullian shows what he thought was at stake. If you want me to believe the Father and the Son are the same someone, he says, then find me a passage that reads: the Lord said to himself, I am my own Son, today I have begotten myself (Against Praxeas 11). - That retort only bites if "person" means a someone. Aimed at a mask, it would have no force at all. (4) The Fathers' word was not thinner than ours. - You will often be told that the church Fathers, the Christian teachers of the first centuries, meant no more by "person" than a distinct individual, with nothing implied about anybody's inner life. The caution is greatly exaggerated, and the way to test it is to watch what those writers do with the word rather than what a dictionary does with it. - Tertullian argues the distinctness of Father and Son straight from the I and the Thou of the Psalms, and he points to his own silent conversation with himself as a faint picture of a second person within (Against Praxeas 5, 11). Holding a conversation in your own head takes self-consciousness. Bare awareness will not do it. - The Cappadocian fathers who fixed the church's trinitarian vocabulary in the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregories, credit the three with mutual knowledge, mutual love, and wills that act in concord. Masks do not know one another. Masks certainly do not love one another. Therefore, "person" in this doctrine names a someone: a center of self-consciousness, intentionality, and will.

(P2) The Father, the Son, and the Spirit address, send, and love one another. + The New Testament does not simply list three names and leave the reader to sort them out. It shows three parties dealing with one another, and it uses the plainest language it has. (1) Three are on the scene at once, each doing something different. - At the Jordan the Son comes up out of the water, the Spirit descends on him like a dove, and a voice out of heaven says, "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased" (Mark 1:9-11). - Count the parts. One is baptized. One descends. One speaks about the one being baptized, and speaks to him as "you." - Notice what the scene does not contain: a costume change. Whatever is happening at the Jordan, it is not one figure stepping offstage and coming back in a different hat. (2) The Son prays aloud to his Father. - A prayer is speech aimed at someone. "Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed" (John 17:5) is a request, made to someone, for something the speaker does not simply reach out and take. - In Gethsemane it is starker still. "Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will" (Mark 14:36). That is a petition followed by a submission to the decision of the one petitioned, and the cup is not removed. - Somebody heard those prayers. In the days of his flesh Jesus "offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence" (Hebrews 5:7). (3) One sends and the other goes. - "God sent forth his Son, born of woman" (Galatians 4:4). "The Father who sent me" (John 5:37). Sending is not the same act as going: it takes one party with the standing to commission and another who accepts the commission. - The Spirit is sent as well, by the Father in the Son's name (John 14:26) and by the Son from the Father (John 15:26). Three parties, and one pattern of traffic running between them. - He is not only on the receiving end of it, either. The Spirit intercedes for the saints, and "he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit" (Romans 8:26-27). One pleads and another reads the plea, which takes two. - Then there is the direction of the obedience, which runs one way and only one way. The Son is "obedient to the point of death" (Philippians 2:8) and says "I always do the things that are pleasing to him" (John 8:29). The Father is nowhere said to obey the Son. (4) The Father loved the Son before the world existed. - "You loved me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24). Before the world. Whatever that love is, it did not begin at Bethlehem, and it was not aimed at a creature. - Love wants somebody there to receive it, and here somebody is: "The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand" (John 3:35). - It runs back the other way too, and the Son says so on the last night of his life: "I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father" (John 14:31). - A man can be pleased with himself. He cannot hand himself everything he owns and call it a gift. (5) The cry from the cross is addressed to someone. - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). It is the opening line of Psalm 22, said aloud in Aramaic by a dying man. - The word "you" in that sentence is carrying the weight of the whole scene. It is a question put to another, and it waits on an answer from another. Therefore, the three do to one another what only distinct someones can do: address, send, obey, love, and forsake.

(P3) No one prays to himself, sends himself, or forsakes himself. + Praying, sending, obeying, forsaking: these are two-party verbs. A single self can certainly think out loud and can certainly be pleased with itself, but the rest of them take a second party or they do not happen at all. (1) Asking takes someone with the standing to answer. - You might be thinking: people talk to themselves constantly. They do, and rehearsing an argument in the shower is a real thing that really happens. It is not a request, though, and a request is a different kind of act. It goes to someone who can grant it or refuse it, and it is settled by that someone. - Gethsemane is not deliberation. It is a petition, "remove this cup from me," followed by a submission to a will named as the other party's, "not what I will, but what you will." And the petition is not granted. - A man can weigh a decision in his own head all night long. He cannot file a petition with himself and be turned down. (2) Commissioning takes two. - You can send yourself an email. Notice that nothing whatever happens when you do: no authority is exercised, no assignment is accepted, and nobody could have declined. - Sending in the Gospels is the other kind of sending. "I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me" (John 6:38). Authority on one side, obedience on the other, and the one obeying says in so many words that the will being done is not his own. (3) Loving and forsaking take someone who is there. - Self-regard is a real thing, and it is not what these texts describe. A man fond of himself is not thereby loving anybody else, and a God who knows everything would know exactly which of the two he was doing. - Forsaking is harder still for the one-self reading. To be forsaken is to be left by someone who was there and is not available to you any longer. A self cannot make itself unavailable to itself, however dark the hour gets. (4) Counting minds is not the same as counting beings. - Take the claim exactly as far as it goes and no further. A single center of self-consciousness cannot do these things to itself. Whether one being can hold more than one such center is a different question, and a harder one, and it stays open. The count is of whos, not of whats. - Christian teaching has already refused to run the two counts together. The church holds that Jesus Christ has a divine mind and a divine will, and a human mind and a human will, two of each, and it has never concluded from that arithmetic that he is two beings. - The parallel is imperfect and it should not be sold as anything better. The two in Christ belong to two natures, one divine and one human, which is not the situation inside God. What it establishes is smaller: a census of minds and a census of beings are two different operations, and you cannot read the one off the other. Therefore, if the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were one center of self-consciousness, the things Scripture reports of them could not have happened.

(C1) Therefore, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three centers of self-consciousness, intentionality, and will. + (1) The step is modus tollens, the plainest move in logic. - The name is Latin for "the way that denies," and the pattern runs like this: if the first thing were so, the second would follow; the second is not so; therefore the first is not so. If it rained last night the driveway is wet. The driveway is dry. So it did not rain. - Now fill it in. If the three were one self, none of the praying, sending, obeying, loving, or forsaking could have happened (P3). It happened (P2). So they are not one self. - That much is a denial, and the count comes from the same evidence. Three parties are named, and each of them stands at one end or the other of an act that takes two: the Father sends and loves, the Son prays and obeys, the Spirit is sent and intercedes with a Father who reads his mind (P2). P1 supplies the last piece, which is that whatever can do those things is a someone rather than a something. - The bar each premise has to clear is modest and fair. A premise need only be more plausible than its denial, not certain past all doubt. So weigh the denials. Would you sooner believe that "person" here means something other than a someone? That the Gospels do not report what they plainly report? That a self can commission itself and forsake itself? (2) A single intellect and a single will leave nobody to petition. - Anti-Social Trinitarianism, a name about the head count rather than about anybody's temperament, holds that there is one God whose intellect and will are not divided up among the three persons. One self, in other words, with the three being something else: relations, modes, manners of subsisting, aspects. • Subsisting is the technical word for standing on one's own as an individual thing rather than existing as a feature of something else. A man subsists. His height does not. - Whatever the three turn out to be, they cannot be that. One intellect and one will leave nobody to make the petition and nobody to receive it, and the garden had both. (3) The count is of selves, not of Gods. - Three centers of self-consciousness is not the same claim as three divine beings, and the difference matters. What P2 showed is narrower: the three do to one another what only distinct someones can do. - Israel's confession stands untouched. "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). How three selves are one God is the next question, and getting the count of selves right is what makes it the next question. Therefore, a God who is a single self cannot be the God whose dealings the Gospels record.

(P4) The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not relations. + The most careful one-self account in the tradition does not say that the three are things standing in relations to one another. It says they are the relations, subsisting. (1) A relation is how one thing stands to another, not a thing in its own right. - Being a father is not an extra object in the world. It is a way one man stands to a particular child, and take the child away and there is no fatherhood left lying about. - Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar whose work shaped Western theology ever after, holds that a divine person is a subsisting relation: a relation standing on its own as an individual (Summa Theologiae 1a.29.4). What tells the three apart are relations of origin (1a.40.2), namely fatherhood, sonship, and procession, which is the Spirit's coming forth from the Father. - The motive is divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no parts of any kind. If God has no parts, the three cannot be three pieces of him, and a relation is the one thing left that could tell them apart without dividing him up. (2) A relation does not pray, know, or love. - A person is a someone, and relations are not someones. Fatherhood does not sit down to dinner. Sonship does not sweat in a garden. The relation between a father and his boy is not a third party at the table. - Yet these three send one another, know one another, and love one another (P2). - Here is a test anyone can run. You can love your father, and you can be grateful for your relationship with him. You cannot ask the relationship for anything, and it has never once answered you. (3) A mind knowing itself gives you an I and a me, not two persons. - The engine of the model is God's inner life: God understanding himself and God loving himself, with God-as-understood and God-as-loved said to stand on their own, and so to count as persons. - Think what that would come to in your own case. The difference between yourself as the one thinking and yourself as the one being thought about is not a difference between two people. You are not two when you embarrass yourself, and no census counts a man twice for having a "me." - If that distinction were enough to make persons in God, the Son turns out to be a name for the Father's "me," and modalism is back in the room wearing a much better suit. (4) On this account the count would not stop at three. - If understanding and loving oneself yields distinct persons, then the Son understands and loves himself too, which yields two more, and each of those two yields two more, and so on without end. Trinities inside Trinities. - Aquinas saw it coming and answered it. The Word, which is his term for the Son, is no more a second intellect than he is a second God, so there is no second act of understanding available to produce a second word (Summa Contra Gentiles 4.13). - The answer does stop the multiplying. Look at the price on the tag, though: one intellect in God and one act of understanding is exactly what has to be denied if the Son is to have a mind of his own to pray with. (5) A person inside another person has no plain sense. - On this account the Son remains in the Father (Summa Contra Gentiles 4.11). A relation existing in a thing is ordinary talk, since a man's fatherhood is in him. One person existing inside another person is not ordinary talk at all. - The church's word for the three being in one another is perichoresis, from a Greek word for going around. Read as complete harmony of will, mutual love, and full knowledge of one another, it is clear and worth keeping. - Pressed into one someone literally lodged inside another, it stops carrying a meaning anyone can state. Therefore, whatever the three are, they are not relations, because relations do not do what the Gospels show them doing.

(P5) The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not one self living three lives. + The boldest attempt to keep one self and still honor the praying and the sending borrows its central image from time-travel stories. (1) This is the strongest model a one-self view has. - The proposal is that God lives his life in three separate, unending streams, as Father, as Son, and as Spirit, and that the streams overlap, so that God in one stream can address God in another. - Picture a time traveler who loops back and meets his younger self. Two men appear to be talking in the room, and there is one man, present twice over. Scale that up and the baptism at the Jordan is God speaking with himself three times over. - Give it its due before taking it apart. It is the only one-self model that tries to take the I-and-Thou language at face value, the scenes where one party says "you" to another, rather than explaining it away, and its author does not pretend the case is easy. (2) The analogy is carrying the whole weight. - Take the traveler away and nothing is left to make three overlapping streams credible, which is why the model's author accepts the burden that comes with leaning on an analogy. He states it himself: he has to show that travel into one's own past is metaphysically possible, meaning that it could really happen, and not merely that the idea has no contradiction hidden in it. - Einstein's General Relativity does permit closed time-like curves, which are paths through space and time that loop back around to their own starting point. They turn up in unusual solutions, such as the rotating universe the logician Kurt Gödel described in 1949. - Gödel's universe is not ours, and two ordinary observations settle that. His does not expand and ours does. And the sky we see looks the same in every direction, as far as measurement reaches, which leaves no room for the cosmic spin his model needs. - So what the model takes from physics, in the end, is an image rather than a mechanism. Nothing in it plays the part of space and time, nothing plays the part of the traveler's own elapsed hours, and nothing accounts for the overlap of the streams. (3) On this account there is still only one person. - That is not a hostile summary. It is what the model says: one self, living three lives, and what there are three of is streams rather than someones. - So when the Son prays, God is praying to God, which is to say that God is praying to himself, at another point in his own life. (4) That reading turns Gethsemane and the cross into a soliloquy. - A soliloquy is the speech an actor gives alone on a stage, with nobody there to answer him. On this reading, "not what I will, but what you will" becomes God informing himself that he will do the thing he has already decided to do. - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" becomes God asking why he, as Father, has forsaken himself, as Son. Say that one out loud and you can hear that something has gone wrong. - There is a trick in film where a single actor plays both brothers and the conversation is spliced together in an editing room. It is a lovely effect, and everybody in the theater knows the terms. If the cross is that, the Gospel is a special effect and the grief in the garden is staged. - The Father's love thins out to nothing as well. A God who knows everything and loves the Son would know that he was loving himself, and being fond of oneself is not what "love" means anywhere else the word appears. Therefore, three life-streams of one self are still one self, and one self cannot be forsaken by itself on a Roman cross.

(C2) Therefore, the one God is three persons who stand to one another as I and Thou. + (1) Everyone in this dispute confesses one God. - Aquinas confesses one God. The modern one-self theologians confess one God. Nothing in P1 through P3 questions it for a moment. The whole quarrel is among trinitarians about how many someones there are, and not about how many Gods. - The two halves of the conclusion come from two different places, and it is worth being plain about which is which. The threeness is what P1 through P3 drew out of the texts. The oneness is Israel's confession, held in common with every position being argued against, and it enters the conclusion unproved because it was never in question. - That fixes what this argument carries and what it does not. Against a critic who denies that there is one God, or who denies that the Son and the Spirit are God at all, a count of selves is not the thing that answers him. What the count establishes, whichever way those questions go, is that the scenes are not one self talking to itself. (2) I and Thou names the shape of the relation. - Philosophers use "I-Thou" for a relation in which two parties address each other as "you." Its opposite is the I-It relation, where one party inspects the other the way you inspect a chair. - The Father and the Son say "you" to each other, and they mean it. That is the evidence on the table, and any account of God has to be built around it rather than trimmed to fit it. (3) How three selves are one God is the next question. - P1 through P3 never counted beings. They counted selves. Saying what makes three selves one God is the hardest work in the subject, and serious trinitarians disagree with one another about how to do it. - Three Gods would be no answer at all. An argument that ended there would have traded one failure for a worse one. (4) No model is part of the faith. - The doctrine is two sentences long: there is exactly one God, and there are exactly three distinct persons properly called God. A model is an attempt to show how both sentences can be true at once, and models are proposals rather than revelation. - So when a one-self model is set down, nothing has been subtracted from the creed. What has been set down is a family of explanations, and the thing being explained is still standing. - That cuts both ways, and it should. Any positive account of how three selves are one God is a model too, and it answers to exactly the same standard. (5) Two findings would sink the case. - If the I-Thou passages could be shown to be a convention of religious speech rather than a report of what happened, the case would collapse, and so it should. It rests on taking the Gospel narratives as narratives. - If someone gave a coherent sense to a single center of consciousness commissioning itself, obeying itself, and forsaking itself, P3 would fall, and everything resting on it would fall with it. No account on offer does, and the two most developed attempts (P4, P5) are the closest anyone has come. Therefore, the God who is one is three whos, and the conversations recorded in the Gospels are what they appear to be. See also: PT / The Trinity: One God in Three Persons