Justified True Belief

(●) The Trinity stands on either doctrine of divine simplicity, the strong and the thin. + Christians have always said that God is not assembled out of anything, and they have not always meant the same thing by it. The strong version, standard since Augustine and Aquinas, allows no distinction in God whatever: his knowledge, his power, his essence, and his existence are one undivided reality. The thin version says only that God has no parts and leans on nothing outside himself, which leaves room for real distinctions within him. The strong version and the three persons are hard to hold together, since three who are each identical with one essence ought to be identical with each other. The strong version carries the weight of the tradition, and the thin version is held by a good many Christian philosophers today. Neither is a test of orthodoxy, and the Trinity comes through on either one, which means the doctrine was never waiting on the answer. Who holds what, on the strong doctrine: - Support: Thomas Aquinas, its greatest medieval defender, and James Dolezal, its best known today. - Oppose: Alvin Plantinga mounted the classic modern challenge, and William Lane Craig presses it here. - From outside the faith: Maimonides held the strong doctrine and concluded that it ruled the Trinity out. The argument that follows defends neither side.

(P1) The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct persons who are each fully God. + The doctrine of the Trinity, in the form Scripture gives it, is settled ground for this dispute rather than something to be proved over again. (1) Scripture names three who act toward one another. - Picture the scene at the Jordan. Jesus comes up out of the water, the Spirit comes down on him like a dove, and a voice out of heaven says, "This is my beloved Son" (Matthew 3:16-17; Luke 3:21-22). Three are present at once, and not one of them is playing two parts. - That pattern holds right across the New Testament. The Son prays to the Father (John 17). The Father sends the Son (John 3:17), and the Father and the Son together send the Spirit (John 14:26; 15:26). Nobody sends himself, and nobody answers his own prayers. - The three also get named together as a set. Baptism is "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19), and Paul signs off a letter with "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit" (2 Corinthians 13:14). (2) Each of the three is called God without qualification. - The Father is "the only true God" (John 17:3). The Word "was God" (John 1:1). The Son is addressed as "Your throne, O God" (Hebrews 1:8), and Thomas, looking at the risen Jesus, answers him with "my Lord and my God" (John 20:28). - The Spirit is not left out of it. Lying to the Holy Spirit is lying to God (Acts 5:3-4). And John closes his first letter by calling Jesus Christ "the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5:20). - "Fully" is in the premise to rule out a junior grade of deity. Scripture does speak of other gods, but they are idols, or creatures, or rulers holding an office from someone above them, and worship belongs to none of them. So either the Son is God in the way the Father is God, or Thomas committed idolatry in that room and nobody corrected him. - Each of these claims stands on evidence of its own, and every party to the quarrel with simplicity grants all of them. (3) The count of Gods never changed. - Israel's confession still stands: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Jesus quotes it as the first commandment (Mark 12:29). Paul then folds Jesus into it without raising the count: "and one Lord, Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 8:6). - So two different things are being counted, and it helps to see the difference in ordinary life first. Ask "who is that?" and "what is that?" about the man mowing his lawn across the street, and you get two different answers: "my neighbor Tom," and "a human being." The doctrine gives three answers to the first question about God and one answer to the second. - The two words for those two questions are worth learning, because the rest of the dispute is conducted in them. A person is a who: someone who can say "I" and be spoken to as "you." An essence is a what: the nature a thing has, what it is to be that kind of thing. The divine essence is what it is to be God, and the persons are the three who have it. • How much the word "person" carries is itself in dispute, and both readings are live (P4, P5). The classical tradition means a distinct someone subsisting in the one essence and differing from the others by relation alone. Others mean a center of self-consciousness and will. The quarrel with simplicity needs only what both readings affirm, that the three are really distinct rather than one someone under three names. (4) The doctrine is two sentences long. - There is exactly one God. There are exactly three distinct persons who are properly called God. That is the whole of it. - Everything else is the church's attempt to say how both sentences can be true at once: the vocabulary of substance and subsistence, the models, the formulations about how the persons relate to the essence. The Nicene Creed confesses the three and says nothing about simplicity in any strength. - Think of the difference between a fact and an explanation of the fact. The tide came in twice a day for every century before Newton, and it will keep coming in whether or not his account of why is the right one. The two sentences are the tide. Therefore, any account of God's inner life has to leave three really distinct persons standing, saying "I" and "you" to one another.

(P2) God is not composed of parts and depends on nothing for what he is. + Every Christian tradition confesses that God is simple, and the word needs handling with care, because it comes in more than one strength. (1) "Simple" means uncomposed, not easy. - Divine simplicity is the teaching that God is not put together out of anything. A wall is made of bricks, a body of organs, a committee of members, and every one of the three depends on whatever it is made of. God is not like that. - Take a watch apart and you have a pile of watch parts on the table, because the watch just was those parts arranged. There is no pile God could be reduced to, and there was no arrangement anyone had to make. - Scripture's side of this is plain enough. God is spirit (John 4:24). He names himself "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). He is not served by human hands "as though he needed anything" (Acts 17:25), and "from him and through him and to him are all things" (Romans 11:36). He was not assembled, and he leans on nothing. (2) The thin doctrine says God has no separable parts and no metaphysical constituents. - A separable part is a piece that could be taken away, the way a wheel comes off a cart. - A metaphysical constituent is a building block at the level of being rather than of matter. There is a philosophical picture, called constituent ontology, on which a thing's properties are the material it is built out of, so that a wise God would be God-plus-wisdom, two ingredients in one being. The thin doctrine denies that God has ingredients of either kind. - The confessions put it in exactly those words. The Westminster Confession calls God "without body, parts, or passions," the Augsburg Confession says he is "without parts," and the Belgic Confession calls him "one only simple and spiritual Being." • In fairness, the men who framed those lines held the stronger doctrine too, and they would not have recognized themselves in a reading that stopped at the thin one. What the words themselves require is the thin claim, and nobody in this dispute denies it. - "Thin," like its other name "weak," measures how much the doctrine claims. It says nothing about how well the doctrine holds up. (3) The strong doctrine says everything in God is identical with God. - On the strong doctrine, God's attributes are not distinct from one another or from him. His justice is his mercy is his knowledge is his existence, and each of them simply is God. Augustine's line is that God is called simple because he is what he has (City of God 11.10). - Aquinas built out the whole structure. God is his own essence and his own existence, since "every composite is posterior to its components and dependent on them" (Summa Theologiae 1a.3.3-4, 7). - Think of "the author of Hamlet" and "the author of Macbeth." Two descriptions, one man standing behind both of them. On the strong doctrine, "God's justice" and "God's mercy" work like that: two descriptions of one undivided reality, and the reality is God himself. - The family tree runs partly through pagan philosophy, and a reader should know where the family came from. Plotinus and his third-century followers held that the highest reality, which they called the One, admitted no distinction of any kind. Christians were calling God uncompounded before Augustine, and Augustine and the medievals gave the identity thesis its full form. The ancestry settles nothing by itself. (4) Both doctrines protect the same three things. - God was not built out of prior ingredients. He does not depend on anything for being what he is. He is not one instance of a kind, one god among the gods there might have been. - All three follow from aseity, God's existing from himself (from the Latin a se, "from himself"), which is the attribute that makes him the first thing rather than the latest thing. Every stone exists because of something before it. God exists because of nothing before him, since there is nothing before him. - The strong doctrine has the weight of the medieval and confessional tradition behind it, along with an account of why a first being has to be that way. The thin doctrine holds that Scripture asserts no more than uncomposedness, and a good many Christian philosophers today agree with it. Which of the two is right gets argued between Christians on other grounds, and the collision with the Trinity does not settle it. Therefore, God is uncomposed and depends on nothing for what he is, and Christians who agree about that still disagree about how much further the word "simple" should reach. See also: PT / Theology Proper: Divine Simplicity (Classical / Strong) PT / Theology Proper: Divine Simplicity (Weak)

(P3) Two things identical with a third are identical with each other. + The rule is older than Christianity, and every argument from simplicity against the Trinity runs on it. (1) Identity means one thing, not two things alike. - "The same" gets used two ways in ordinary speech, and the difference between them matters. Two cars in a parking lot can be "the same" model, which means that they are alike. The car in your driveway is "the same" car you bought last spring, which means that there is one car. - Identity is the second use: numerically one thing, however many names it goes by. Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain, so anything true of Clemens is true of Twain, right down to his height, his birthday, and the day he died. Logicians call that Leibniz's Law. If x is identical with y, whatever is true of x is true of y, because there is only one thing there to look at. • Identity does not come in degrees, and it does not come in respects. Either there is one thing here or there are two. So "identical in every respect" is a plain-English name for the strict relation, and a sameness that leaves a real difference standing needs some other name. (2) Every party grants the axiom for strict identity. - Euclid's first common notion reads, "Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another." Applied to identity, logicians call the rule transitivity, and it holds through one middle term or through ten. - A jury needs none of this explained to them. If the fingerprints belong to the man who signed the lease, and the man who signed the lease is the defendant, then the fingerprints are the defendant's. Nobody in the room asks for a second argument. - Aquinas accepts the rule outright for things that are the same "in reality and in idea," his example being a tunic and a garment (Summa Theologiae 1a.28.3 ad 1). What he adds is a restriction on where the rule applies, and that restriction is what the classical formulation turns on (P4). - One school does deny the axiom as it stands, holding that sameness is always sameness of some kind and never sameness flat (D14). (3) The argument against the Trinity is built from this axiom. - Laid out in full, it runs in six steps: • God is simple in the strong sense, so whatever is in God is identical with the divine essence. • The Father is God, so the Father is identical with the divine essence. • The Son is God, so the Son is identical with the divine essence too. • Two things identical with a third are identical with each other. • So the Father is the Son. • But the doctrine says the Father is not the Son, so the doctrine is false. - Its pedigree is impressive, and honesty requires saying so out loud. Eunomius ran a version of it in the fourth century against the Son's deity. Ibn Sina's God, the Necessary Existent, admitted no multiplicity of any kind (Metaphysics of the Healing I.6-7). Maimonides wrote of people who "declare the unity with their lips, and assume plurality in their thoughts," and he named the Christians, "who say that he is one and he is three, and that the three are one," as his example (Guide for the Perplexed I.50). - Those were the thinkers most devoted to strong simplicity, and they rejected the Trinity precisely because of it. Whether that counts as evidence against the Trinity or as evidence against the strong doctrine is exactly what has to be decided. (4) A valid argument runs in both directions. - Every deductive argument can be run forward or backward. Forward is modus ponens: the premises are true, so the conclusion is true. Backward is modus tollens: the conclusion is false, so one of the premises is false. If it rained last night the driveway is wet; the driveway is bone dry; so it did not rain. - Suppose the recipe calls for four eggs and the cake came out perfectly with three. Then the recipe is wrong somewhere. Nobody stands in the kitchen concluding that the cake does not exist. - So an argument that ends in "the Father is the Son" has shown that one of its own premises is false. The axiom is the last candidate for the chop, since giving it up means revising the logic of identity itself, and the worked-out attempts to do that still end with three persons (D14). The question is which of the others gives way. Therefore, if two things are each the divine essence in the strict sense, they are each other, and no party to this dispute denies it.

(C1) Therefore, no divine person is identical with the divine essence in every respect. + Put the three premises together and one thing follows. Whatever a divine person is, he is not the divine essence in the strict Clemens-and-Twain sense, the sense in which no difference can be found anywhere because there is only one thing to look at. (1) The Father would otherwise be the Son. - If each person were identical with the divine essence in every respect, then by the transitivity of identity the Father would be the Son (P3). But the Father is not the Son (P1). So the persons are not each identical with the divine essence in every respect. - The front half of that conditional is nobody's invention. It is the identity thesis the strong doctrine states in its own voice (P2), which is why the argument bites where it does and nowhere else. - "In every respect" is doing exact work. It means identity in the full sense the axiom governs, where no difference can be found because there is only one thing. A sameness that still leaves a difference standing somewhere is not what the axiom applies to, and it is not what the conclusion denies. - The bar each premise has to clear is modest. In a deductive argument the premises are links in a chain, so that if every link holds the conclusion cannot slip out, and a link only has to be more plausible than its denial. - Denying this conclusion costs a good deal more than that. It means saying either that a law of logic is false or that three persons who pray to one another are one person. (2) Every Christian formulation already agrees with this much. - The classical tradition says each person is the divine essence "in reality" and yet differs from it "in idea," and from the other persons "by relation" (Summa Theologiae 1a.39.1; 1a.40.2). Whatever that comes to in the end, it is not identity in every respect, because it leaves a difference standing. - The thin doctrine says the persons are not identical with the essence at all. The essence is what God is, the persons are who he is, and a who is not a what. - The only party who affirms identity in every respect is the anti-trinitarian, and he affirms it in order to deny P1. Every Christian party denies it, and what they differ about is what to say next. (3) The argument from simplicity has become an argument about simplicity. - That is a genuine change of subject and it is worth pausing over. Once no person is the essence in every respect, the strong doctrine has to say what the remainder is. A relation? A mode of subsisting? And it has to say whether a God carrying three of those is still simple in the strong sense. Call that the first road. - Or the strong doctrine is set aside, and the thin doctrine, which never claimed the persons were the essence, carries on with nothing left to explain. Call that the second road. - Either way, the conclusion is not that the strong doctrine is false. It is that the strong doctrine, if it is true, has to be read so that the persons differ from the essence in some respect, which is exactly how its own defenders have always read it. Therefore, the persons are not the essence under three names, and what remains to be settled is what the difference between a person and the essence amounts to.

(P4) If relation alone distinguishes the persons, God is simple in the strong sense and triune. + The classical formulation held simplicity and the Trinity together for fifteen centuries, and it deserves to be stated at full strength before anyone weighs it. (1) Relation is the one thing that can distinguish without adding. - Sit two friends down on a park bench. One of them is to the left of the other. "To the left of" is perfectly true of them, and it is not a third thing sitting on the bench. A relation can be entirely real without being an ingredient. - Augustine saw the key. "Father" is not said of God's substance but "relatively," toward the Son, and what is said relatively in God cannot be an accident, since God cannot lose it (On the Trinity 5.5.6). Gregory of Nazianzus had already said the same thing against the Eunomians: "Father" names neither an essence nor an action, but a relation (Oration 29.16). - These are relations of origin, meaning relations defined by where each person comes from within God. The Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds. The three are not told apart by what they are, which is common to all three, but by how each one stands toward the others. (2) Everything in God is one except where relation opposes. - An opposition of relation is a pair of relations that cannot swap places. Nobody can be his own father, so fatherhood and sonship are opposed, and the two of them cannot be the same. - Anselm stated the rule the whole formulation runs on: in God all is one where no opposition of relation stands in the way (On the Procession of the Holy Spirit 1). The Council of Florence wrote it into a decree in 1442. Everything else about the three is one and the same, and each of them is still the one essence. - Aquinas then answers the axiom head-on. It holds, he says, for things that are the same "in reality and in idea" (P3). Fatherhood and sonship are each really the divine essence, but they "in their own proper idea and definitions import opposite respects," and so are distinct from one another (Summa Theologiae 1a.28.3 ad 1). • His example comes from Aristotle, and it is easier than it sounds. A teacher teaching and a pupil being taught are one and the same event in the classroom, and yet teaching is not being taught (Physics III.3). - Lateran IV (1215) drew the line the same way. The divine essence "neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds"; the Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds; and yet each person is that one reality. (3) The Reformed scholastics kept the instinct in a different vocabulary. - Turretin puts it in his own idiom: the persons are "manifestly distinct from the essence because the essence is one only, while the persons are three." - The essence, on his account, is absolute and communicable. Absolute means that it is not defined by standing toward anything, and communicable means that the whole of it is had by each of the three. - The persons are the reverse, relative and incommunicable. Each is defined by how he stands toward the others, and each one's property belongs to him alone, so that fatherhood is the Father's and nobody else's. That is how Turretin can say each person "has indeed the whole divinity, but not adequately and totally," by which he means not to the exclusion of the other two (Institutes of Elenctic Theology 1:278). - His word for a person is a mode of subsisting, a manner of standing on one's own as a subject of the one essence. He was honest about what it cost him, granting that a mode of subsisting "superadds something positive" to the unity of the divine essence (1:280). The formulation is alive, with working defenders today in that same vocabulary. (4) The formulation carries a bill its own defenders acknowledge. - Can a relation be a person? Relations do not pray, or send, or love, and the Gospels are full of persons doing all three. The classical answer is that these are subsisting relations: relations that stand on their own as someone, rather than merely as a "toward." Whether that answer works is an argument of its own (D6). - Is "the same in reality but distinct by relation" still identity? Critics inside the church say the restriction lands exactly where the axiom was needed, and that a real sameness which is not transitive is not identity at all. The Thomist answers that the axiom was never unrestricted in the first place (P3, D4). - Is a God who subsists in three modes still simple? Turretin's own concession points straight at the difficulty. If a mode of subsisting superadds something positive, then the essence may be simple while God himself is not, since he carries three personal properties besides it. - Those are live questions rather than refutations, which is why the claim is a conditional one. If relation alone does the work, strong simplicity and three persons stand together, and an unpaid bill moves the case onto the other road rather than out of the Trinity (P5). Therefore, if relations of origin alone distinguish the persons, the classical formulation delivers what it promises: one simple essence, three persons, and no contradiction. See also: PT / The Trinity: Anti-Social Trinitarianism PT / Theology Proper: Divine Simplicity (Classical / Strong)

(P5) If relation alone cannot distinguish the persons, God is simple in the thin sense and triune. + The other road lets the strong doctrine go, and a good many Christian philosophers are standing on it. (1) Strong simplicity is the premise that gives way. - If relation cannot do the work, then strong simplicity plus three persons yields "the Father is the Son" (C1). Short of revising the logic of identity itself (D14), one of those two has to go. - The three persons are Scripture's. Strong simplicity is an inference from perfect-being reasoning, which means working out what God must be like from the claim that he is the greatest being there could be. A greatest being would depend on nothing, so God depends on nothing. When a philosophical inference of that sort collides with a revealed fact, it is the inference that gets rechecked first. - Suppose a tape measure and a photograph disagree about the width of a room. The tape was laid against the wall and read off; the photograph has to be interpreted, and the camera may have been standing at an angle. Nobody re-checks the tape first. Scripture is the tape. - The Cappadocian fathers had already seen where this leads. On their account the divine nature is common and the persons are particular, so the nature is simple while the persons are really distinct (Basil, Epistle 236.6). A God whose nature and persons are really distinct is not utterly simple. (2) The thin doctrine makes no identity claim for anything. - Here is the thin doctrine in a single sentence: as a spiritual substance, God has no separable parts and no metaphysical constituents. Read it twice, because what is missing from it is the point. Nothing there says the Father is the essence, so the premise the anti-trinitarian needed, "each person is identical with the divine essence," has nowhere to come from. - The essence is what God is, the persons are who he is, and a who is not a what (P1). God is simple in that nothing composes him, and complex in having diverse attributes and in being three persons. - The most developed model on this road pictures God as one immaterial substance, one soul, with three complete sets of rational faculties: one being who is three centers of self-consciousness and will, rather as a human soul with intellect and will is still one soul. A model is only a model, offered to show that the two sentences can hang together, and the road does not stand or fall with it. (3) What the thin doctrine keeps is everything Scripture asked for. - Every item on the list survives: not built out of prior ingredients, dependent on nothing for what he is, not one god of a kind (P2). "Without parts" survives right along with them. - The persons are not three pieces God was assembled out of. Hilary could write in the fourth century that each divine person is in the Unity, "yet no person is the one God" (On the Trinity 7.2), and the modern formula that fits him is that each person is wholly God without being the whole of God. - What is given up is one thing only: the claim that a person and the essence are the same in reality. That claim was never a line of Scripture. It was a formulation, and formulations answer to the text. (4) This road carries a bill too. - It stands at a distance from confessions that affirm more than "without parts." Lateran IV says each person is "that reality," the Athanasian Creed calls every person "by himself" God and Lord, and the Eleventh Council of Toledo says each is "wholly God in himself." Those lines were written under the strong doctrine's influence, and a Christian on this road weighs them by Scripture rather than signing them as they stand. • For a Christian whose communion holds those councils binding, that cost is decisive, and this dispute does not fall out the same way in every tradition. - It owes answers on three fronts: whether a God of three persons and many attributes depends on them, which is the argument from aseity at full strength (D1); whether what it calls simplicity is composition with a nicer name (D5); and what makes three persons one God, now that simplicity is not supplying the answer (D13). - A newcomer, meeting the strong doctrine's tangles for the first time, is reported to have come out of them saying, "If this is divine simplicity, I don't want to know about divine complexity." There is a point buried in the joke, and the thin doctrine is that point taken seriously. Therefore, if relations of origin cannot distinguish the persons, the strong doctrine is what falls, and what remains is a God without parts who is three persons. See also: PT / Theology Proper: Divine Simplicity (Weak) PT / The Trinity: Relative Identity and Constitution

(C2) Therefore, God is triune on either doctrine of simplicity. + Whichever doctrine of simplicity turns out to be the right one, the same God is standing at the end of it: one God, three persons, each of them fully God. (1) Two roads lead to the same town. - If the first road is taken, you reach the town (P4). If the second road is taken, you reach the town (P5). One of the two has to be taken, since either relation alone distinguishes the persons or it does not, and there is no third answer to that question. So you reach the town. - A traveler who has not yet decided which fork is the right one still knows where he will be sleeping tonight. That is what this form of argument buys: the conclusion does not have to wait on the choice. - Each of the two branches, called the horns of the dilemma, is a conditional: if this road is taken, then that result follows. Neither road is asserted flat, and neither one needs to be. - The town is not built by the dilemma, and that matters. Three persons in one God enters as a premise (P1), on evidence of its own, and travels down both roads. What the form shows is only that no answer to the simplicity question takes the town away. (2) The argument from simplicity reaches a fork, not a refutation. - If the premises hold, the argument from simplicity cannot reach "the Trinity is false." Run to the end, it reaches "choose your doctrine of simplicity," and both choices keep three persons in one God. - What stays open is which road is the true one, and that dispute lives inside orthodoxy. Everyone on both roads confesses one God, three persons, each fully God, without parts. The two doctrines are argued against each other on other grounds, and the collision with the Trinity casts no vote in that argument. - One piece of evidence does belong on the table, and it cuts. The thinkers most rigorous about the strong doctrine, Eunomius, ibn Sina, and Maimonides, concluded that the Trinity was impossible, and most contemporary models of the Trinity are not built with the strong version in mind, though a living Thomist school defends the older combination directly. That is evidence about the strong doctrine's price, not about the Trinity. (3) The Trinity is the fixed point and simplicity is the variable. - The doctrine's two sentences are the deliverance of Scripture, and the persons praying to one another are on every page of the Gospels. The strong doctrine is a philosophical formulation with a Neo-Platonic ancestry and a real Christian pedigree. When the two are made to collide, it is the formulation that goes back to the bench, on either road. - The same rule governs the doctrine of God as a whole. The substance the church confesses, one God, three persons, the full deity of each, is not up for revision, while the formulations built to protect that substance may be weighed by the text they were built to serve. - Both roads keep "without parts." The aseity that simplicity was framed to guard is not in danger on either one. (4) What would defeat this. - Show that the strong doctrine is itself a deliverance of Scripture, with the identity of each person and the essence written into the text, and the second road closes. Everything would then ride on the first. - Show both that "the same in reality but distinct by relation" is incoherent and that a God of three persons is composite in the sense that generates dependence, and both roads close at once. Neither half of that has been made good (D1, D4, D5). Therefore, the argument from simplicity is not an argument against the Trinity but a question about how much the word "simple" should be made to carry, and the God who is three persons stands at the end of every honest answer to it. See also: PT / The Trinity: The Logical Problem of the Trinity PT / The Trinity: Anti-Social Trinitarianism PT / Theology Proper: Divine Simplicity (Classical / Strong) PT / Theology Proper: Divine Simplicity (Weak)