Justified True Belief

(●) Two models that keep three divine selves and one God, Functional Monotheism and Group Mind Monotheism, both fail. + Grant that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three selves, and a Jewish or a Muslim neighbor will want to know why that is not three Gods. Two modern answers were built for exactly that question. One makes the three one God by origin and unbreakable cooperation, with the Father everlastingly producing the other two. The other makes them three minds inside a single larger divine mind. Both fail, and neither for lack of ingenuity. The first buys its unity at the cost of the Son's and the Spirit's deity, since whatever holds its existence from another is a creature. The second has the three arising inside something prior to them, and Scripture has all three there at the beginning already. What is left standing is one God, one being, three selves who have always been three. Who holds what, on the two models: - Support: Richard Swinburne, Functional Monotheism's one major defender. Group Mind Monotheism, which Brian Leftow set out as an option, has been taken up by almost nobody, and both models rework Gregory of Nyssa's fourth-century answers. - Oppose: William Lane Craig, who refuses both. Leftow, no social trinitarian himself, supplies the criticisms of Swinburne that Craig judges decisive. The argument that follows refutes both.

(P1) There is exactly one God. + A Christian who says the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three selves, three who each say "I" and mean it, will sooner or later be asked by a Jewish or a Muslim neighbor why that is not simply three Gods. Two modern answers, Functional Monotheism and Group Mind Monotheism, try to keep the three selves and the one God at the same time, and both are answerable to the line Israel has recited every morning for more than two thousand years. (1) Israel's confession is a count. - "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Jews call that line the Shema, after the Hebrew word for "hear" that opens it. A Jewish child learns it before learning to read, and an observant Jew says it morning and evening for the rest of his life. - It is not a remark about God's mood or his manners, and it is not praise for his consistency. It is a count. Say of a room that it holds one person and you have said how many there are, not how well they get along. - The prophets treat the number as the whole point. "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god" (Isaiah 44:6). "I am the LORD, and there is no other" (Isaiah 45:5). - What gets counted is beings: the things that exist and act. The confession does not say that God is harmonious or of one policy. It says there is one of him. (2) The line runs between the one Creator and everything else. - Israel's neighbors stacked their gods in tiers, and Israel's own texts speak freely of angels, spirits, and a heavenly council. What set the LORD apart was never that he had no company. It was that he alone made all things and he alone rules all things, and everything else, angels included, was made and is ruled. - Think of a fence with exactly one being on the far side of it. Sole Creator, sole Ruler, sole recipient of worship: those three marks pick out that one, and nothing else in heaven or on earth carries any of them. Michael does not create. The seraphim are not worshipped. - That is the standard any account of "one God" has to meet. Three divine beings who shared the work of creating and ruling would put three on the far side of the fence, however well they got along. (3) The first Christians kept the count without adjustment. - Paul wrote to a city with a temple on every corner that "there is no God but one" (1 Corinthians 8:4). James wrote that "God is one" (James 2:19). Jesus, offered the kingdoms of the world for a single act of worship, answered that the Lord God alone is to be worshipped (Matthew 4:10). - These are the same writers who baptized into the threefold name and blessed whole congregations in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14). Whatever they meant by the three, they plainly did not think it changed the count. - The Shema stayed common property. Jews and Christians recite it to this day, and Christians have never treated it as a text they had outgrown. Therefore, there is exactly one God, and an account of the Trinity that ends with three beings creating and ruling has stopped confessing what Israel confessed.

(P2) The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three persons, each fully God. + Each of the three is a someone who says "I" and means it, and each is God without qualification. That rules out the two easy escapes, one self wearing three masks and a Son who is a lesser god, before the hard question is even asked. (1) A person is a center of self-consciousness, intentionality, and will. - Think of a smoke alarm and the neighbor who hears it go off. Both respond to the fire. Only one of them knows that he is the one responding, wants the children out of the house, and decides to kick in the door. - That difference is what the word "person" picks out in this doctrine. It means a self: whoever can say "I" and mean it. Philosophers spell it out in three parts. Self-consciousness is being aware of yourself as yourself. Intentionality is the aboutness of a mind, the fact that you never merely believe but believe that the milk has gone off. Will is the power to settle on something and then do it. - Social Trinitarianism is the name for every view on which there are three of those in God, three centers of self-consciousness, each with its own mind and will. The alternative is a single center of consciousness in God, and it has to read the baptism at the Jordan as one self playing all three parts at once. (2) The New Testament shows three who send, pray, and address one another. - Picture the scene at the Jordan. Jesus is standing in the water praying, the Spirit comes down on him in bodily form, and a voice out of heaven says "You are my beloved Son" (Luke 3:21-22). Three at the same moment, doing three different things, and one of them speaking to another. - The pattern holds right through. The Father sends the Son (John 3:17). The Son prays to the Father and is heard (Hebrews 5:7). The Spirit says "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them" (Acts 13:2), which is the way a someone talks. - Nobody sends himself on an errand, prays to himself, or forsakes himself at Golgotha. One self under three names has no one to send and no one to pray to. (3) Each of the three is God without remainder. - The Word "was God" and made all things (John 1:1-3). Thomas, seeing the risen Jesus, calls him "my Lord and my God" (John 20:28). To lie to the Holy Spirit, Peter tells Ananias, is to lie to God (Acts 5:3-4). When the bishops met at Nicaea in 325 to settle whether the Son is God in the full sense, they answered in five words: "true God from true God." - A demoted Son would be the worst of both worlds. He would be a creature, and Christians would be commanded to worship a creature (Hebrews 1:6; Philippians 2:10-11), which is exactly the idolatry the Shema forbids (P1). - Think about what "fully" rules out. Not a junior deity. Not a mode or a phase. Not a committee member with a smaller portfolio. Whatever the three turn out to be, each of them is everything God is. Therefore, any answer to "why not three Gods" has to keep three selves who address one another and keep each of them fully God, or it has answered the question by giving up the doctrine.

(P3) Three divine beings are three Gods. + Everything turns on what a being is, because what the Shema counts is beings (P1). The fourth century tried three ways of making three divine beings add up to one God: a shared nature, unanimous action, and having no bodies to tell them apart. (1) Being and person are two different counts. - Stand at your own front door and ask two questions of whoever is knocking. What is it? A human being. Who is it? Peter. For every creature you will ever meet, the two questions come back with the same number: one being, one self. - A being, or in the older word a substance, is an individual thing that exists in its own right and carries its own properties: a horse, a stone, a human soul. A nature is the kind a being belongs to, what it is: horse, mineral, human. A person is a self, the one who says "I" (P2). - The fourth-century fathers reached for exactly this picture. Peter, James, and John are three individuals sharing one nature, humanity; the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were said to be three individuals sharing one nature, deity. The comparison is honest, and it is why the question will not go away, because Peter, James, and John are three men. (2) A shared nature does not make three beings one being. - Gregory of Nyssa's first answer was that strictly we ought to say "one man," since "man" names the nature, the nature is one, and the nature is what is most real. "Three men," on that view, is a loose way of talking. - It solves nothing. Peter can die while James and John go on living, which is all it takes to show there are three of them. Three brothers with the family nose are still three brothers. - Run the answer on Olympus and watch what it lets through. Zeus and Apollo share the nature "god" as fully as Peter and James share "man." If sharing a nature made beings one, Greek religion would have been monotheism, and nobody has ever thought so. (3) Acting as one is what a good committee does. - Gregory's second answer is the one the church has kept as a rule ever since: the three never act separately. Every work of God toward the world begins from the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is completed in the Spirit, so that there is one work and not three. - Grant all of it. Three who never disagree are still three who agree. A string trio that has played together for forty years and never misses an entrance is one ensemble and three musicians, and a jury that votes twelve to nothing is still twelve jurors. Unanimity is a fact about wills, not about how many beings there are. - There is a worse problem underneath. Three beings who were each all-powerful and perfectly good would agree about everything as a matter of course, so agreement cannot be what makes them one: three separate Gods would have it too. And the order the answer leans on, from the Father through the Son in the Spirit, describes three who work inseparably rather than one who works alone. (4) Having no body is not what makes God one. - Gregory's third answer was that men are told apart by bodily features, size and place and color, and God has none of those, so the divine nature cannot be multiplied the way "man" is. - Think of a census taker whose only rule is "count the bodies." Send him into a room full of spirits and he does not come back with "one." He comes back with no number at all. - If bodies are the reason, the rule proves too much. A method that counts by telling instances apart cannot return the answer "one" where there is nothing to tell apart. And angels have no bodies, yet Scripture counts them by the thousand (Daniel 7:10). Therefore, three divine beings would be three Gods no matter how alike, how unanimous, or how bodiless they were.

(C1) Therefore, the three persons are not three beings. + The reasoning takes the form logicians call modus tollens, "the way of denying": if it had rained, the driveway would be wet; the driveway is dry; so it did not rain. Now run the same form on the Trinity. If the three were three beings, they would be three divine beings, since each of them is fully God (P2); three divine beings are three Gods (P3); there is exactly one God (P1); so the three are not three beings. (1) The chain has no slack. - In a deductive argument the premises are links in a chain, and if every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. The standard for a link is not certainty. A premise need only be more plausible than its denial, and each of these three is. - Each of the three is a self (P2). So the number that comes out at three is a number of selves, and the number that must come out at one is a number of beings. Whatever the Trinity is, it is three selves who are not three beings. - Think of the front door one more time. For the one who made the door and the visitor and the street, the two questions come back with different numbers, and nothing in the meaning of the words says they have to match. (2) What is fixed is a specification, not a model. - Before an engineer draws anything, somebody writes a specification: the bridge must carry forty tons, span two hundred feet, and stand for a century. It says what the finished thing has to do. It does not say how to build it, and it is not itself a design. - What the three are is still open. What they are not is now settled: not three beings sharing a kind, not three beings acting in concert, not three beings with nothing to tell them apart. - That is a great deal to have settled, because the hardest question a three-self account of the Trinity faces is why, on its own terms, there are not three Gods, and an answer that leaves three beings standing has not answered it. - Two modern accounts try to keep three beings and one God anyway. Functional Monotheism makes them one by a chain of causes; Group Mind Monotheism makes them one by a shared mind (P4, P5). From (P1), (P2), and (P3) it follows that the three persons are three selves and not three beings, and that is the mark every account of the Trinity has to hit.

(P4) A being that owes its existence to another being is a creature. + Functional Monotheism keeps three divine beings and makes them one God by a chain of causes: the Father everlastingly brings the Son and the Spirit into being, and the three act as one. The chain does not make them one, and it costs the Son and the Spirit their deity. (1) God holds his existence from nothing outside himself. - A creature exists the way a lamp is lit. It shines only while something else keeps supplying the current, and the moment the supply stops it goes dark. - Theologians have a word for the opposite. Aseity, from the Latin a se, "from himself," means depending on nothing whatever for your existence, and God alone has it. "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14) is the name of a being who is not on loan from anyone. - Functional Monotheism makes the Son and the Spirit separate beings held in being by the Father and not ended by him. That is the lamp, not the current. (2) Bringing a separate being into existence is creation, however long it lasts. - If the Son is a separate being, he is not made out of the Father, because separate beings do not share their stuff, and there is nothing else to make him from. He is brought into existence from nothing, which is what "create" means. - "Everlasting" does not change the verdict. A world that had always existed would still be a created world, because being created is a matter of depending on a maker rather than of starting on a date (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.46.2). A debt that has always been owed is still a debt. - Arius saw the same structure from the other side. He called the Son begotten before all ages and unlike any other creature, and he still called him a creature, because a being another brings into existence is one. The chain does not avoid Arius. It repeats him. - John had already shut that door. All things were made through the Word, "and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3). A Word who was himself made would be a thing made without himself. (3) Nicaea excluded a second divine being in so many words. - The creed of 325 says the Son is "begotten, not made," "from the substance of the Father," "true God from true God," and its closing curse falls on anyone who says the Son is "of another substance" than the Father. That is not a council fumbling for philosophy. It is a council refusing to let the Son be a second being. - A Son who is of the Father's own being is not a product, since nothing was brought into existence. A Son who is a separate being is a product, whatever verb is chosen for the producing. Functional Monotheism keeps the Nicene verbs and drops what they were guarding. (4) Order among persons within one being is a different question. - Christians disagree among themselves about whether the Son's being Son is eternally from the Father, the eternal generation the creed of 381 confesses in "begotten of the Father before all ages," or whether "Son" names the one who took flesh. Both sides confess the Son fully God, eternal, and no creature, and P4 leaves that disagreement exactly where it found it. - The disagreement is about persons inside one being. P4 is about beings. A person who is from another person within one substance is not a thing brought into existence from nothing. A separate substance is. Therefore, a being that another being brings into existence is a creature, and a Son and Spirit of that kind would be the ones Arius described rather than the ones Nicaea confessed.

(P5) The three persons have always been three. + Group Mind Monotheism keeps one God by making the three persons three minds inside one larger mind. Either the three have always been three or they became three, and Scripture rules out the second. (1) The Word was with God in the beginning. - John opens where Genesis opens. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God" (John 1:1-2). The Son is not introduced partway through the story. He is already there, already with the Father, when the story starts. - Jesus prays for the glory he had with the Father "before the world existed," and speaks of the Father's love for him "before the world" (John 17:5, 24). The Spirit is over the waters in the Bible's second verse (Genesis 1:2) and is called "the eternal Spirit" (Hebrews 9:14). - No verse has the Son or the Spirit arriving, and none has the Father giving way to them. The three are three from before there was a world. (2) Subminds that never wake up cannot love one another. - The idea starts with real patients. To control severe epilepsy, surgeons in the 1960s cut the thick bundle of fibers joining the brain's two halves, and afterward each half could answer questions the other could not, as though two streams of awareness were running in one head. Those are the split-brain cases. - Some philosophers took the next step. Perhaps an ordinary mind is already a team of subminds, smaller centers of thought cooperating so smoothly that the seams never show. Apply that to God and the three persons become subminds of one divine mind. - A submind, though, is a part of a mind rather than a mind in its own right, which is the work the "sub" is doing. So the three either share one consciousness or never reach a self-consciousness of their own, and either way they cannot say "I" and "Thou" to one another (P2). A split-brain patient does not pray to his other half. The Son prays to the Father. - The model has to be run the other way, then, with the subminds emerging into selves of their own, three where there was one. Only that version keeps the three the text shows. (3) A self that becomes three selves is gone. - Think of a cell dividing under a microscope. When it is finished there is not one cell with two sub-cells inside it. There are two cells, and the original is not among them. - On the emergence version there was first a single divine self-consciousness, and the three arose out of it and took its place. If that first self was the Father, the Father ceased to be when the Son and the Spirit woke. If it was not the Father, it was a fourth self, now departed. Either way the three were not always three. - The idea is old and only the dress is modern. The second-century Apologists, the Christian writers who explained the faith to outsiders, pictured the Word as a thought inside God's mind, later put forth for creation, "fire kindled from fire" (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 61), and Tertullian could still write that there was a time when there was no Son (Against Hermogenes 3). - The church moved past that, because the Word of John 1 was never merely a thought waiting to be spoken. When the picture came back in the fourth century as a divine unit unfolding into a triad, the reply was that a God who unfolds is a God who changes (Discourses against the Arians 4.3, handed down under Athanasius's name). (4) After the emergence, three minds are three beings. - Once the three subminds have each become a self, the mind they were parts of is no longer there to hold them together, the way a partnership dissolves into three firms and a name on an old sign. - If every full mind is a being in its own right, three full minds are three beings, and nothing is left to say why there are not now three Gods. - The one version that escapes this is the version on which the emergence never happened: three selves eternally in one undivided being. That is not a group of minds. It is the specification under another name (C1, C2). Therefore, the three persons have always been three, and a God who became three selves would be a God who changed and a Father who ceased to be, which is not the God of John 1.

(C2) Therefore, God is one being who has always been three selves. + The three are not three beings (C1), each of the three is fully God (P2), and there is exactly one God (P1). So the three are three selves of the one divine being, none of them brought into existence by another (P4) and none of them a self that emerged out of an earlier one (P5). (1) The specification has five lines. - Four of them follow from the premises: • One being, not three (P1, P3). • Three selves who say I and Thou (P2). • Each fully God and none a creature (P2, P4). • The three eternal, none of them a stage in the being's history (P5). - The fifth is not an inference at all. It is a count the New Testament makes for itself: no fourth self stands behind the three, since the triadic blessings name three and never a fourth (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14). - Every failed answer bought its oneness by breaking one of the five. A shared nature leaves three beings. A chain of causes leaves three beings and two creatures. A mind that split leaves a Father who ceased and three beings behind him. (2) A model that meets all five lines exists. - Human beings meet the first two lines in the only way creatures can, one being with one self apiece. The question the doctrine puts is whether one being can bear three selves, and nothing in the meaning of "being" or of "self" says it cannot. - One proposal, the one-soul model, treats God as a single immaterial being, a soul, something real that is not made of matter. That one being carries three complete sets of the powers a self needs: enough intellect and enough will for a first-person point of view and for choosing. - Each of us is one such being with one set. God would be one such being with three: one substance, three centers of self-consciousness, and no fourth, since the being is not a self over and above its three. - The model is offered to show that the doctrine holds together, not as something Scripture reveals. If it failed, the doctrine would stand and the search would go on, because the doctrine is the two counts and the specification is what the two counts require. (3) The fourth century put this in its own words. - One ousia, three hypostaseis: one being, three subsisting individuals. That is the formula the Council of Alexandria allowed in 362, and the one taught by the Cappadocian fathers, Basil and the two Gregories, who came from Cappadocia in what is now central Turkey. - The specification does not compete with that formula. It says what the one ousia cannot be: not a kind that three beings share, not a committee, not a chain of maker and made, and not a mind that came apart. - What the fathers called ineffable, past all putting into words, is how one being bears three selves, and honest theology still says so. What is not ineffable is the count, and the count is one being and three who have loved one another from before the world. From (P1) through (P5) it follows that God is one being who has always been three selves, which is the one thing a chain of causes and a group of minds could not deliver. See also: PT / The Trinity: Tripersonal Monotheism